Research

Anybody Can

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Anybody Can

When Louis Armstrong met August Musarurwa.

Anybody Can, in Your History with Me: The Films of Penny Siopis, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Duke University Press, 2024).

“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’s music.” — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.

1.

The African Dance Band of the Cold Storage Commission of Southern Rhodesia – it was the band with the longest name in the world. The words appear as faded images flicker across the screen: tobacco auctions, tourist cruises on the Zambezi river. A languorous saxophone plays.

So begins Penny Siopis’s ‘Welcome Visitors!’, a filmic reimagining of the life and music of August Musarurwa. Musarurwa was a bandleader and saxophonist who learned the instrument while working as a police interpreter in Bulawayo in the 1940s. The torrents and cataracts of the Zambezi keep unspooling as we hear the tune that made him famous: ‘Skokiaan’. The crackle of old vinyl joins the mottled footage – of farm labour, dance performances and colonial officials with awkward body language – and the original begins to play. Some quick-strumming banjos mark out a carnival rhythm, then comes a long, bending note on Musarurwa’s sax, sliding down to a riff that everyone knows.

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Becoming Visible

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Becoming Visible

Seismic surveys, oceanic noise and submarine listening.

Excerpt from Sounding Environments (with Aragorn Eloff) in The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. Edited by Emily O'Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart. December 2023. Outtakes.

‘I am not prepared to mourn my coastline’ – in her director’s statement for the 2018 sound and video work Becoming Visible, Janet Solomon discusses her attempt to represent the acoustic violence unleashed by seismic surveys off the southern African coastline. Launched by the South African government in 2014, Operation Phakisa (to ‘hurry up’ in Sesotho) aims to ‘unlock the economic potential’ of the country’s maritime territories (more than double its terrestrial size) and to develop the ‘blue economy’. With this comes, Solomon writes, ‘an escalating and unrelenting push for oil and gas development along the east coast of South Africa’ (2018). The KwaZulu-Natal coastline, she goes on, experienced its highest ever recording of whale strandings during and after a 2016 marine seismic survey looking for oil and gas reserves, a survey granted an extension into the whale migration season.

Working via multi-channel video and sound, Becoming Visible seeks to bring home the effects of the multi-beam bathymetric sonar used to establish the topography of the sea floor. This is a method involving towed arrays of air guns, which issue pulses of over 200 decibels every ten seconds, for 24 hours a day (human eardrums typically burst at 160 decibels). The challenge presented by the work is its invitation for human listeners (with hearing evolved in the medium of air) to comprehend the very different sonic environment of a watery, submarine space. Soundwaves behave differently below the ocean surface (where hydrophones pick up the same level of sound 12 kilometres away from sources as from two kilometres away). They are faster, more far-reaching and less avoidable for marine organisms (who ‘hear’ with their whole body) even while going (to human ears) largely unheard. How then can regulatory frameworks and environmental impact assessments be extended into worlds set apart from or beyond the human sensorium? Who is listening for, or to, our companion species in the oceans?

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Ambiguous Utopias

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Ambiguous Utopias

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace.
I started by reading a whole mess of utopias… — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, compiled by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, is styled as kind of tourist’s guide to outlandish literary worlds. It comes in at over 2000 entries and 700 pages: a mock scholarly reference work, a tribute to the deep human urge to dream up other worlds (and draw maps of them).

Paging through, you might recognise names from childhood: Middle-Earth, Earthsea and Narnia. There is Oz, Brigadoon, Kor, Lilliput and Brobdingnag, the Island of the Roc. Some of the more extensive imaginary worlds, like Tolkien’s, are broken down into sub-entries – Minas Tirith, Cirith Ungol, Pelennor Fields – syllables that are strange but comfortingly familiar to me, names bringing back the paradise of childhood reading.

Then there are worlds encountered later in life: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s jungle village Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its plagues of insomnia and amnesia and butterflies. The Pacific island of Gondal, dreamed up by the Brontë sisters. Many islands of course: Thomas More’s Utopia and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon are there; so are Lotus-Eaters Island and Caliban’s Island (see Prospero’s Island).

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Matching Shadows

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Matching Shadows

Landscape, photography, environmental memory.

Remembering the Plant Conservation Unit. Business Day, 14 September 2021.
Safundi 22 (2022). Roundtable on University of Cape Town fire of April 2021.

A photo within a photo within a photo: the Mirabib inselberg in the Namib Desert. The innermost image is from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured this landscape during the opening sequences (Kubrick's team also cut down several ancient kokerbooms, illegally, since he was fascinated by the tree and had plastic models made for the film).

I wrote about the repeat photography project run by Timm Hoffman and the University of Cape Town’s Plant Conservation Unit, which burned down earlier this year. (It wasn't the first conflagration they've had to endure. In 2016, the PCU's Mazda bakkie was set alight during protests, a vehicle that had taken students all around the country, and linked the university to a remote Namaqualand town for over 20 years. But that, as they say, is another story.)

The physical pictures, plates and negatives may have burned, but over 30 000 images exist on the digital database. And so the invitation to be part of the project, to find these sites and re-take the photos, lives on in virtual space.

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What the World Has Lost

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What the World Has Lost

The Sixth Extinction as elegy, tragedy, comedy.

In Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying, edited by Bongani Kona. Jonathan Ball, 2021. Photograph by Tommaso Fiscaletti and Nic Grobler from Hemelliggaam or The Attempt to Be Here Now.

1.
The first was caused, some say, by plants: primitive mosses and liverworts that moved from ocean to land, absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing phosphates from the soil and rocks they grew on. These previously locked-up elements washed into rivers and seas, fertilising vast algal blooms: red and green tides that rotted and sank, the bacteria turning the oceans hypoxic (too little oxygen), then anoxic (no oxygen). Marine animals died off and global CO2 levels dropped further, since there was no more O2 to bind with C in the water. Instead this singular element at the heart of all life was interred on the seabed as shale, in a process known as carbon burial. Half-a-billion-year-old black shales mark the End Ordovician, a 44 million-year cold snap now understood as the first of six mass extinctions in earth history.

You can say them like a litany: End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian – the third, the biggest of them all, sometimes called The Great Dying. 250 million years ago, colossal volcanic eruptions and lava flows form country-sized ‘flood basalts’ and ‘igneous provinces’: stepped mountain ranges now called the Siberian Traps (from the Swedish for steps: trappa). Pyroclastic explosions ignite coal beds and release vast sinks of methane into the atmosphere. It’s even worse in the oceans, where anaerobic bacteria take over, emitting hydrogen sulphide and even changing the planet’s colouration to a world of glassy, purple seas and pale green, sulphurous skies.

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Nineteen Eighty-Six

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Nineteen Eighty-Six

William Dicey’s 1986 (and other ‘year-books’).

Business Day , 4 May 2021.

In 1986, Halley’s Comet reached perihelion, its point closest to the sun, for the first time since 1910. The Challenger Space Shuttle exploded, and so did a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Mozambiquan President Samora Machel died in a suspicious air crash and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in Stockholm. Diego Maradona scored his ‘Hand of God’ goal against England in the 1986 football World Cup.

At the 27th Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the keywords of his mandate: ‘Glasnost’ and ‘Perestroika’. The African National Congress in exile could no longer count on the same level of Soviet support – in 1985, the shopping list had run to 60 cars, 6 buses, 240 tons of soap, 16 000 tubes of toothpaste and 4000 brassieres.

Winnie Mandela gave her infamous necklacing speech, and apartheid spy Craig Williamson ensured the footage was shown wherever Oliver Tambo held a press conference. ‘When the Going Gets Tough’ by Billy Ocean topped the international charts; on the local billboard it was Sipho Hotstix Mabuse with ‘Let’s Get it On’. Shaka Zulu and Knight Rider screened on TV. Paul Simon violated the cultural boycott by recording Graceland. Musician-activist Steven van Zandt (later Tony Soprano’s right-hand man) stepped up his ‘I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City’ campaign, but advised the Azanian People’s Organisation to take Simon off their hit list: ‘The war I’m about to fight it a tricky one in the media…It’s not going to help if you assassinate Paul Simon, okay?’ Eugene Terre-Blanche, leader of the white supremacist AWB, told reporters that his open-handed salute was an old German greeting meaning ‘I come in peace’: ‘How can I help it if Hitler also used it?’

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As Others Feel Pain in their Lungs

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As Others Feel Pain in their Lungs

On Albert Camus’s The Plague: Part Two.

Part One.
Condensed version in The Plague Years: Reflecting on Pandemics. Routledge: 2022.
Podcast with Bongani Kona, The Empty Chair, for SA PEN.

Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at this moment, as others feel pain in their lungs. — Albert Camus, ‘Letter to an Algerian Militant’.

for D.B. (1981-2020)

1.
In March 1900, a ship called the SS Kilburn arrived in Cape Town from the grain-exporting port of Rosario, Argentina. It was carrying fodder for the horses of the British army, then fighting against the Boer republics in the South African War: the late imperial catastrophe that would incubate Afrikaner nationalism in the 20th century.

Five crew members were ill and the captain had died a day before docking. A quarantine camp was set up in Saldanha Bay and the crew taken there under armed guard. But by September 1900 large numbers of rats were dying in the Cape Town docks. ‘The stench was unendurable’, an officer reported to the Plague Advisory Board: ‘they had to have the floors up to remove the dead rats. He himself had seen numbers of sick rats coming out to the open in daylight, in a dazed state so that you could catch them with your hand’ (cited in Phillips 42-3).

In early 1901, a number of cases were reported among dockworkers who had been unloading the grain and fodder that harboured rats (and their fleas carrying the plague bacillus.) Tented camps were set up: first on the beach, then at Uitvlugt Forest Station, a few kilometres away from the city centre. Using a Public Health Act introduced in 1883 after a smallpox epidemic, the city’s Medical Officer ordered that over 6000 black Africans living in the city centre were to be forcibly removed from their homes and marched there.

Untouched by the sixth-century Plague of Justinian and medieval Europe’s Black Death, southern Africa was now part of the so-called Third Pandemic. It began in Chinese ports in 1894 and encircled the globe for the next decade, a seaborne epidemic carried along the global shipping routes established by European colonialism. Burgeoning trade, growing ports, bigger ships and cargos – all these made it easier for rats and their fleas to cross oceans. The medical and official response was also ‘uniquely imperial’, write Beinart and Hughes in their history of environment and empire (169). Plague outbreaks were met with segregationist controls ‘which had less to do with epidemiological requirements than socio-political ones. Everywhere it went, plague triggered a crisis in both state medicine and relations between rulers and subjects’ (169).

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We Are All in the Plague

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We Are All in the Plague

On Albert Camus’s The Plague: Part One.

Summer School, University of Cape Town, 2021.
Condensed version in English Studies in Africa 64:1-2 (2021).
Podcast with Bongani Kona, The Empty Chair, for SA PEN.

She taught me to read the book in a certain way, tilting it sideways as though to make invisible details fall out. — Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation.

for D.B. (1981-2020)

1.
In 1947, Albert Camus published La peste, the story of a town struck by bubonic plague. He judged the book a failure, but The Plague is probably his most successful and widely-read work.

In one sense it is a simple story. Rats come out of cellars and sewers, spitting blood, and begin to die in the streets. Then people begin to die. The town is sealed off and we follow the experiences of a small band of characters as they battle the epidemic. Like a classical tragedy, the book is divided into five acts. In parts one and two, the death toll is rising; in part three it is at its height: ‘the plague had covered everything’. In parts four and five, the disease slowly retreats, and the town is liberated again. Amid the celebrations, the narrator strikes a note of foreboding, and the famous ending reads as follows:

Indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy that rose above the town, Rieux recalled that this joy was always under threat. He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely; it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing; it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city. (237-38)

If you type ‘camus the plague’ into an image search, the huge archive of different book covers gives an idea of how many times this 20th-century classic has been read, translated, reprinted and repackaged. The more literal approaches go for rats and scythes; the more abstract show empty seascapes or dotted geometric patterns that could be microbes or epidemiologists’ models.

There is the photogenic Camus himself, in a famous Henri Cartier-Bresson portrait with cigarette and turned up collar. On one cover he has the eerie, beak-shaped mask of the Plague Doctor graffitied over his face. Used by physicians in Italian cities where the mortality rates reached up to 60% (in 1656, some 150 000 died in Naples alone), these 17th-century respirators had glass discs in front of the eyes and two openings just below each nostril. The ‘beak’ was filled with dried flowers like roses and carnations, herbs like mint, spices, camphor, juniper and ambergris, laudanum, myrrh, straw, perhaps a sponge of vinegar – anything to ward of the ‘miasma’ or bad air (Italian: mal aria) that was thought to spread contagion prior to the germ theory of modern medicine. ‘The inhabitants accused the wind of carrying the seeds of infection’ (130), we hear at one point in The Plague, a residue of the superstition that warm southerlies like the sirocco wafted plague particles across the Mediterranean from the deserts of Egypt.

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Memory and Forgetting

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Robin-Rhodes-nghệ-thuật-đương-đại-đường-phố-Restless-Mind-elle-việt-nam1.jpg

Literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s and lost memories.

“Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties and embedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature and Memory: Public lecture series on life-writing, autobiography, personal narrative (UCT Summer & Winter School: January & August 2020).
Artwork above by Robin Rhode.

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First Light, False Colour

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First Light, False Colour

Stories from the end of representation.

Business Day, 14 January 2020. Image gallery.

‘Of course, you know the universe isn’t really that colour?’

While finishing my doctorate, I lived in a flat full of engineers and scientists. An astrophysicist called Giorgos and I would sit at opposite ends of a long dining room table, writing up our respective PhDs: mine on literature, his on black holes. Giorgos took great pleasure in pointing out basic scientific truths and generally revealing how ignorant know-all humanities types are about life, the universe and just about everything. I had been marvelling at some of the images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST): the vast dust spires of M16, the Eagle Nebula; the Ring Nebula M57 in Lyra, dubbed ‘The Eye of God’; the ultra-long exposure of the Hubble Deep Field, stretching the instrument to its limits, the blackness speckled with a riot of colourful galaxies.

‘Most of it isn’t any colour at all’, Giorgos went on, ‘Strictly speaking.’

It came as a bit of a shock to me: that the Hubble pictures which adorn so many calendars and desktop backgrounds are actually ‘false colour’ images, regarded by many scientists as a necessary but rather kitsch public relations exercise. Their palettes, cropping, orientations, even the ‘lens flare’ of cross-shaped diffraction spokes that one can see on especially bright galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field – all of these are aesthetic decisions and additions made by those processing the grayscale digital images actually captured by the Hubble cameras (these can be accessed online and are in some ways more austerely beautiful than the gaudy, colourised versions).

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Experiments with Truth

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Reading non-fiction across South Africa’s unfinished transition.

Published in the African Articulations series from James Currey / Boydell & Brewer, 2019.
Launch 17:30 Wednesday 5 June, Book Lounge, Cape Town.

I began working on this project in 2007, a time I remember very clearly since I was starting my PhD and living in Johannesburg during the first great era of ‘load shedding’. Load shedding, then Polokwane and the downfall of Thabo Mbeki, then outbreaks of xenophobic violence against African nationals in 2008: it was a moment when the story of post-apartheid South Africa modulated into a more dissonant, diminished key. For some it was the onset of a more fractious and difficult ‘second transition’, as it became clear that the truths and reconciliations of the Mandela years were in some ways illusory, and that the 1990s project of social reckoning and reconstruction had not been nearly deep, honest or durable enough.

At the time, I was reading across a wide range of non-fiction from or about South Africa: dense and passionately researched biographies, memoirs, essays, narrative journalism, social history and more. I was overwhelmed by the ambition and richness of non-fictional forms across 20th-century and contemporary South Africa, particularly since this is a place where the most important intellectual work has often taken place outside of formal institutions: in marginalised, covert, non-academic or exile spaces.

This book is an attempt to give more critical attention to all those kinds of writing that get classed under the dull and inadequate term ‘non-fiction’. It is drawn to those works which are not carriers of pre-existing information but creative treatments of actuality: restless, unstable and even experimental mixtures of the found and the imagined, the received and the wrought.

My alternate title for the book was ‘Unusable Pasts’, which is meant to signal all those stories that don’t fit easy templates of nationalist or public history-making. I am intrigued by those works that can in some way honour the strangeness and resistance that past lives and events should offer to our current desires and projections; that resist the crushingly predictable narrative shapes, orthodox vocabularies and punctual timescales of much public discussion; that seek to reveal human lives as complexly symptomatic of the past, not as simply emblematic of it.

At the heart of the project is Njabulo Ndebele’s insight that the death of apartheid (and the coming of democracy) should be imagined not as an event but a social process: on-going and uneven, happening in different ways and at different tempos, split across institutions and individuals, ranging from the most public languages to the finest tissues of subjectivity, and one that will reach across generations.

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“Historical knowledge streams in unceasingly from inexhaustible wells... The strange and incoherent forces its way forward, memory opens all its gates and yet is not open wide enough, nature struggles to receive, arrange and honour these strange guests.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

From the edge of representation

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From the edge of representation

Astronomy, postcolonial memory and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

Impossible Images: Radio Astronomy, the SKA and the Art of Seeing. Journal of Southern African Studies 45:2 (2019).

In the arid landscape of South Africa’s northern Karoo, astronomers and engineers are slowly building the biggest scientific instrument in the world. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will one day link radio telescopes across the African continent and the Southern Hemisphere, turning much of the planet into a vast ear for picking up the faintest echoes from the early universe. I am interested in exploring the conceptual and representational challenges posed by radio astronomy in general, and the Square Kilometre Array in particular. What kinds of cultural artefacts and images are likely to be produced by the SKA, and what kind of relationship will a non-specialist audience be able to have with them? And how can the Karoo array’s unprecedented power to look (or listen) back in time be related to the deep human past that has left traces all through this landscape?

In addressing the SKA as a writer, the challenge is to recognise both the fascination of outer space and specificity of earthly place. Doing so has revealed to me a major difference of intellectual impetus between the sciences and the critical humanities, one that is perhaps suggestive of why they so often ‘miss’ each other in public conversation. The first seeks to isolate and decontextualise its object of knowledge: to filter out earthly noise; to minimise the signal of its own instruments; to avoid seeing its own structures in a distant, even unimaginable mathematical space. The second always feels the urgency of introducing contingency and context: to bring into frame the desperately poor environs of the northern Cape; to remember the British imperial project that carries astronomy to the tip of Africa; and to look for the history that hides in its brilliant and unearthly images.

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Re: Visions of Tsafendas

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Re: Visions of Tsafendas

Reading Harris Dousemetzis's The Man Who Killed Apartheid.


Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. — Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’.

I am composing Tsafendas’s Diary, dredging it up from my dreams, bringing it back in a bottle. I line up the words one behind the other. — Ivan Vladislavic, Missing Persons.


Ahead of a talk on writing lives, I have finally finished Harris Dousemetzis's life of Dimitri Tsafendas, The Man Who Killed Apartheid. Not a great title, and not without its problems, but nonetheless an enormous, passionate, often astonishing biography, and one accompanied by a report submitted to the office of the Minister of Justice in South Africa that runs to three hardback volumes and 861 803 words.

From all this we learn the following...

1. During the Greek Revolution of 1821-32, the Ottoman Empire declared that ‘akis’, a suffix indicating smallness, should be added to the family names of all those Cretans rebelling against their authority. The surname Tsafendas thus became Tsafantakis.

2. Dimitri, born Tsafantakis (14 January 1918), changed his name back to Tsafendas when learning of this history from his Cretan father, Michalis Tsafantakis, who had a large collection of anarchist literature in his house in Lourenco Marques.

3. Dimitri was a compulsive reader from a very young age, and was described as ‘a lending library’ by those who knew him as a child.

4. He mainly liked to read in bed.

5. His favourite books included Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885), about exploitation of miners in 19th-century France, and Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916), the story of a political awakening in colonial India.

6. He also loved Dostoevsky, and would quote a line from Demons when discussing his killing of Verwoerd in his old age: ‘It’s easy to condemn the offender, the difficulty is to understand him.’

7. He idolised the African American leader, actor, trade unionist and singer Paul Robeson, who would become a leading voice in the civil rights movement.

8. His favourite song was Robeson’s deep baritone version of ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’.

9. Another of his favourite songs was ‘Zot Nit Keymol’ (Song of Warsaw Ghetto), which he would sing in Yiddish, having memorised the lyrics.

10. He also loved Brecht.

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A Literary Con

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A Literary Con

Rereading Dugmore Boetie’s Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost

Excerpt from Experiments with Truth in the Johannesburg Review of Books. 1 April 2019.
(With thanks to Jen Malec and JRB for image / montage of book covers.)


‘Is this Long Street?’

Everybody knows Long Street, so why was I being asked this by a large man who came out of a side alley?

As I began to give a cautious yes, the large man was shooed away by a smaller man in a high-vis jacket that read CCID (City Centre Improvement District).

‘They know you like to talk, Nigerians’, he said: ‘Be aware’.

Further down, the CCID had set up some large screens on which you could watch CCTV footage (taken by cameras on Long Street) of people being mugged, pickpocketed and scammed. The jerky black and white clips had been edited into a range of informative segments. The dangers of the open bag or the visible iPhone; lightning fast card swaps by people offering help at cash machines. A more elaborate version of this is the ‘false pop up’. Fraudsters tell tourists that they need a special permit to walk down a street, since it is closed for a film shoot, but that that this can easily be obtained from the nearest ATM, and let me help you with that.

There was also footage of the Shoe Scam – a ‘man particular’ con – which a friend of mine had just recently been a victim of. Staggering along drunk at night, he suddenly had someone beside him saying ‘Hey brother, we’ve got the same shoes!’, grabbing him by the shin, pulling up his trouser leg and comparing sneakers. This, the video explained, was a textbook diversion and desensitisation technique. It draws attention to the shoes with one hand while the other snakes round to remove a wallet, which is then swiftly passed it to an accomplice walking in the opposite direction. 

Long Street was closed to traffic for the evening, and a crowd had gathered. People were mesmerised: to see something so furtive and fast captured in the grainy footage. To see the obliviousness, the ease, the skill of it, the way pickpockets moved when in the act, so that even the rest of their bodies seemed unaware of what the one frantic hand was doing. The woozy surprise and confusions of the marks, then the sudden realisations – it was all there in archival black and white, ‘Recorded at 00:43 a.m. on Long Street’. The footage was so transfixing that a rumour, or a joke, began to run through the crowd: people were being so drawn in by these on-screen cons that they were being pickpocketed, again, in real life.

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A Very Strange Relationship

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A Very Strange Relationship

Life writing, overwriting and the scandal of biography.

Reflecting on the Gordimer-Roberts affair: Biography, 41:1 (2018). Abstract.

Letter from Nadine Gordimer to an ‘importuning friend - or at least acquaintance’ (1973):

About our longstanding but tenuous relationship. You know, Ben, we have never been intimate friends. My intimates are very few indeed, and as time goes by and life gets shorter and art runs tantalisingly ahead and can't ever be firmly grasped, I see even my intimates more and more infrequently. And I don't make new ones. As for coming out to lunch with you, I can tell you again quite honestly that I never go out to lunch with anyone. It upsets my whole day. In the morning, I am conscious that at 12:30 I must go and change and paint my face; and in the afternoon, I'm drowsy from the luncheon wine or distracted by the talk. I've had to fight to keep myself to myself - after all, I've lived for more than twenty years in a family surrounded by husbands, children, and the need to consider and feed and listen to them. I've had, perforce, to create a self-discipline. And now I can't live any other way. That's how it is. You seem to have some sort of social inferiority complex (God knows why) that makes you believe that I snub you or don't like you. This is not the case at all, but I am embarrassed by your persistence in wanting to claim more from me than I am prepared to give. I don't want heart-to-heart talks, I don't want to be analysed and assessed, even though some might find that sort of close interest flattering. I don't want to enlarge the very small circle of friends for whom, once in a long while, I must take the trouble to cook dinner. So forgive me and accept our old, friendly acquaintance for what it is.

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Teaching / Writing

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Creative and otherwise.

Thirteen Ways in At the Foot of the Volcano: Reflections on Teaching at a South African University. ed. Susan Levine. HSRC Press, 2018.

... Showing examples of Cubism alongside such a poem is effective, of course, since students of the twenty-first century have visual literacy skills that are immensely advanced: the challenge is to get them to ‘translate’ such analytic techniques from the visual to the textual. Which is not always easy: ‘One can accept a Picasso woman with two noses,’ John Ashbery remarks in The Paris Review, ‘but an equivalent attempt in poetry baffles the same audience’.

Without mentioning structuralism or De Saussure or using the word ‘signifier’, I also tried to broach the idea that ‘blackbird’ could in one sense be seen as an entirely arbitrary choice, easily replaceable with another word in this verbal algorithm. An ex-colleague of mine (now at Wits University) had been compulsively working up variations of the poem on his Facebook wall, and I shared one of them:

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of J.M. Coetzee.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three J.M. Coetzees.

[…]

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That J.M. Coetzee is involved
In what I know.

N2

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Reading, writing, walking the South African highway.

Social Dynamics 43:1 (2017).
Less academic version appears as 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at the N2' in Firepool.

N2. Curled up in that tiny alphanumeric are thousands of kilometres, hundreds of service stations, millions of tons of concrete. N2 can mean a London bus route; an intelligence officer in the US Navy; an anti-nuclear song by the Japanese indie group Asian Kung-Fu Generation. But for my purposes it is the longest highway in South Africa, which starts at an unfinished flyover near the docks in Cape Town, follows the eastern seaboard of the country (roughly) for over 2 000 kilometres, then bends north and west below Swaziland to end at the town of Ermelo in the province of Mpumalanga.

Major highways are not thought about much. They are pieces of infrastructure that (if working as intended) efface themselves, receding from view in the mirror. In his hidden history of the UK’s motorway system, Joe Moran suggests that this bland corporate terrain of tarmac, underpasses and thermoplastic road markings is ‘the most commonly viewed and least contemplated landscape’ in Britain: ‘The road is almost a separate country, one that remains under-explored not because it is remote and inaccessible but because it is so ubiquitous and familiar.’

Perhaps because of the late age at which I (after many failed attempts) got my driver’s licence, piloting vehicles along strips of tarmac has never quite lost its strangeness for me, and the psychology and social behaviours associated with driving are, I believe, complex and neglected domains. With the passing of the era of cheap oil, future humanity will look back on our cities with wonder, disbelief and disgust at how totally urban spaces were shaped around the velocities and demands of the private vehicle. So, an important strategy for environmental writing in the 21st century might be to estrange the practice of everyday life, to conduct an anthropology not of the distant and exotic, but rather of the near, the mundane, the everyday.

‘What speaks to us, seemingly,’ wrote Georges Perec in 1973, ‘is always the big event, the untoward, the extraordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motorcars is to drive into plane trees.’ But, he goes on, in our haste to measure ‘the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coalmines. “Social problems” aren’t “a matter of concern” when there’s a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.’

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Kingdom of Rain

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An interview with Rustum Kozain.

The following conversation took place on 31 July 2015 at Rustum Kozain’s flat in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town. Prior to my arrival, Rustum had prepared a chicken balti with cabbage according to a recipe from Birmingham, and also a cauliflower and potato curry. During our discussion (lasting one and a half hours, condensed and lightly edited here) he occasionally got up to check on the dishes — which we ate afterwards with freshly prepared sambals...

Wasafiri, 31:2 | 2016 | 76-80

RK [...] The idea of sonority — I have to agree with you. I do have a thing for the sound of words. So the sound of a word often plays a large part in its choice in a line or a poem. Why don’t I sound like Linton Kwesi Johnson? That’s one of my greatest frustrations in life [laughs] — that I can’t write like LKJ in any believable way. Part of that is because I don’t have a Caribbean background. A large part of Johnson’s charm has got to do with the language he is using, which is tied so closely to drum rhythms in the Caribbean. He has a gift but he also has that legacy or that inheritance that he can work with. I’ve tried writing parodic poems in [my reggae-sourced] Jamaican Creole, but it’s rubbish. I’ve tried writing hip hop as well, but there is a particular skill in composing for oral performance that I don’t have.
HT I was raising the question of slowness, but certainly not as a lack. Because, in a sense, what I find when reading poetry nowadays is the need to remind myself to slow down. I think we’re all programmed to read so fast now – online and on screens – to read instrumentally and for content. So I sense the kind of syntactical mechanisms you put in place to ensure a certain productive slowness...

Dagga (An Extract) | African Cities Reader 1

The shame of being a man – is there any better reason to write?
– Gilles Deleuze

Literatures of Betrayal

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Literatures of Betrayal

Risk, collaboration and collapse in post-TRC narrative.

The Eleventh International Conference for Literary Journalism Studies
‘Literary Journalism: Telling the Untold Stories’. Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande so Sul. Porto Alegre, Brazil, 19-21 May 2016.

While the first decade of post-apartheid South African literary production saw a range of works which responded with journalistic and impressionistic immediacy to the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the second decade of democracy has been marked by a wave of what might be called post-TRC texts: more distant and recessed forms of accounting for the ‘unfinished business’ of the transition. This piece explores a series of texts that grapple with questions of betrayal and collaboration in the varied and complex senses of those words.

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The True Confessions of a First Year Convenor

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The True Confessions of a First Year Convenor

Curriculum change: problems and possibilities. 

Third Space Symposium: Decolonisation and the Creative Arts. 
ICA, University of Cape Town | 13-14 May 2016.

Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? | New York Review of Books | 9 October 1986:

Let us begin with a few suggested definitions...The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading…”

If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love. Except at school. And school should enable you to know, either well or badly, a certain number of classics among which—or in reference to which—you can then choose your classics. School is obliged to give you the instruments needed to make a choice, but the choices that count are those that occur outside and after school.

It is only by reading without bias that you might possibly come across the book that becomes your book.

What is this thing called ‘literature’, and how does it work? What does it mean to read the classics from where we are – Shakespeare and 19th-century novels transplanted to southern Africa like those street signs, DICKENS, COLERIDGE, KIPLING, set down incongruously in the suburbs of Woodstock, Observatory and Salt River? Are we dealing with ‘English literature’ or ‘literature in English’? What is the purpose of it all anyway, when others in the university are working on solar panels or vaccines for drug-resistant TB? What will be in the exam?

These are questions that all of us teaching in the big undergraduate courses must field and grapple with each year. We have to think hard about how to broach the core ideas of literary studies over thirteen weeks. How to do this in a way that is engaging and critically astute, but also so that it will not exclude any members of the student body? It is all very well to talk about how the literary work might ‘estrange’ what we think we know, and make the familiar unfamiliar. But how can theoretical ideas of productive artistic difficulty be explored in a way that does not estrange members of the student body – many of whom, at least in first year, do not have English as a first language.

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