Opening Statement to the roundtable on Battlefield Representation. How to
write/speak/discuss Africa? at the TURN Meeting#1. On Perspectives, Facts and
Fictions, 26 – 28 June 2014, Berlin
By Sean O’Toole
Some notes on being a writer from Africa
On a rainy weekend in June, Ndjabulo Ndebele, a luminous South African author and
critic, rode three escalators up to a high-ceilinged room in the Cape Town
International Convention Centre to engage an apparently rote literary question: “How
to write about Africa”. While waiting for Ndebele, whose session was titled after that
famously cranky 2005 essay by Binyavanga Wainana, I remembered Georges Perec,
more pointedly, what this big-haired French author did on a cloudy October weekend
in 1974. Perec, a playfully obsessive writer whose legacy partly hinges on the unique
intellectual athleticism he demonstrated in relation to the letter “e”, visited Place
Saint-Sulpice, a well-known public space in the Latin Quarter of Paris, with a simple
question in mind. “What happens when nothing happens other than the weather,
people, cars, and clouds?” wondered Perec. His findings: not much, just a routine
appearance of tour busses and pigeons.
Perec is an intellectual stranger here. Alongside Wainana, Chimamanda Adichie and
Akin Adesokan are some of the writers who – whether by calculation, luck or chance
– have come to be regarded as seers and oracles uniquely gifted with answering how
the African cosmos is imagined in words. Not Perec. I want to start with Perec. He
was, as Erik Morse has written, a scientist of the quotidian, an amateur philosopher
whose core theory as a writer was, as I read him, the “rediscovery of the ordinary”, a
phrase intimately associated with Ndebele and his 1986 book of essays by the same
name. “What we need to question,” wrote Perec in a 1973 homage to the infraordinary, “is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way
we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever
to astonish us.”
There are many things that apparently don’t astonish us anymore. Francis Bebey’s
attempts to rewrite his frustrations into a strange electronic funk. Billowing
cumulonimbus clouds. Lance Spearman. Sol Plaatje’s bicycle ride through the Free
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State in 1914, or thereabouts. We are no longer astonished by Joseph Murumbi’s
catholic tastes in books. Eugene Marais’s insolence. The xylophone-like sounds of
rocks being trampled by high-altitude tourists on a mountain whose name I should not
say. Ali Hassan Kuban’s gap-toothed smile. Ngugi’s attempts, through writing, to
decolonize the mind. The late afternoon lull before prayers in Kayes, where singer
Boubacar Traoré’s was born. That pedestrian bridge on the outskirts of Dakar, the one
that routinely appeared in Djibril Diop Mambety’s films. Can Themba’s churchgoing
activism, which prefigured Pussy Riot’s ecstatic revolution by a half century. These
things, and other things I don’t remember right now - they no longer astonish.
But some things continue to astonish, in particular the literary defence of otherness
and difference. It repeatedly astonishes. So here I am. And there I was, killing time at
the South African Book Fair, waiting to hear Ndebele, Winnie Mandela’s unreliable
biographer, speak about how to write about home. While waiting, I attempted, in the
spirit of Perec, to exhaust a place in Cape Town. I counted the audience: 25 when I
arrived, and slowly growing. I stopped counting at 39, which is not a bad number for
a Cape Town literary event. Contextually, Teju Cole, that intellectually gifted and
dextrous Lagosian writer who is allowed to hum that Prince song ‘All The Critics
Love U In New York’, drew roughly double that figure on his first visit to Cape Town
in 2013. Then again, Alexander McCall Smith – the Zimbabwe-born English author
of wildly popular The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series – drew more, much more,
when he visited a few years ago. The vagaries of literary celebrity. Or was it the topic
that dampened enthusiasm for Ndebele’s talk?
Numbers are not people. Three rows in front of me, a middle-aged woman wearing a
crocheted beanie and black-rimmed glasses spoke loudly about her Master’s degree to
a middle-aged white American man in a grey sweater. Two young women in their late
twenties, both black, both wearing head-wraps, arrived late and made a beeline for the
front row. A white publisher with expensive hair and a scarf placed a pile of books on
the empty table at the front. I counted seven black men, excluding the two speakers.
Before they sat down and faced their audience I saw that Harry Garuba, a professor of
African Studies at the University of Cape Town, is much taller than Ndebele. “How
has writing about Africa changed?” kicked-off Garuba.
When he smiles, which is often, Ndebele sometimes clenches his jaw. It is clearer in
photos than during the rough-and-tumble of events we call the everyday. When he
does this, clenches his jaw, he reminds me of Brenda Fassie, that exuberant pop icon
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who Ndebele has also written about. But what does it matter whether Ndebele smiles,
or the associations that radiate from this simple human gesture? I don’t know. In
person, Ndebele comes across as a pragmatic and unpretentious man. “Do Africans
feel free in the world today?” he wondered out loud. “I suspect they don’t. We have
not asserted the sense of being free inside. It is a very delicate existential thing.”
During a question and answer sessions afterwards, the woman in crocheted beanie
asked Ndebele why he writes in English, not his native Zulu. “I am fully aware of the
importance of African languages,” responded Ndebele warmly, “but equally giving up
English means giving up a certain power that has consequences.” I asked my question
in private. Did he, Ndebele, not feel a twinge of awkwardness having to engage an
intractable question, one that blithely maps a space and action? “Yes, a little,” smiled
Ndebele from behind a modest stack of copies of The Cry of Winnie Mandela,
originally published in 2003 and recently updated. Yes, a little.
Two things struck me: the books and Ndebele’s smile. Publishing is an exercise in
realpolitik: book sales and big ideas are coeval – even in Africa. Smiles are less easily
approached, something observed by both Lafcadio Hearn and Roland Barthes. Of
course, Ndebele would be the first to point out that Hearn and Barthes were, at root,
trying to explain otherness. The pleasure of watching Adichie’s cautionary speech
against buying into the “single story of catastrophe”, or reading Wainana’s invective
against cliché – be it rhetorically overcooked, or not – is based on a simple,
irrevocable fact: ownership. They own their story. “They don’t need to be explained,”
as Ndebele put it during his talk with Garuba. But here I am. Explaining.
Like Perec, I am an intellectual stranger here. I admire Ryszard Kapuściński, not
unequivocally, but enough to make Wainana snort. Which is fine. I am an African of
a particular provenance, a “South African Wannabe Kenya Cowboy” as Wainana
once put it. I prefer JM Coetzee’s analysis. In a 2003 interview, Coetzee, my cycling
hero, told David Attwell: “Seen from the outside as an historical specimen, I am a late
representative of the vast movement of European expansion that took place from the
sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century of the Christian era, a movement that
more or less achieved its purpose of conquest and settlement in the Americas and
Australasia, but failed totally in Asia and almost totally in Africa.” As a writer I am
interested in what it means to live and see and imagine and write in the aftermath of
the failure alluded to by Coetzee. It is a difficult space to occupy, “a place of
negatives, difference and darkness” to misquote Adichie from her TED Talk. Which
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sounds fatal. It needn’t be. Thinking through failure, imagining oneself past its
limitations is central to contemporary African creativity. I realised this again listening
to Faustin Linyekula.
Linyekula is a lithe Congolese dancer and choreographer who during his Zairian
youth dreamt that he would rewrite African literature. He first dabbled in
choreography while living in exile, in Nairobi, during his early 20s. It was a profitable
diversion. In September 2011, Linyekula visited Johannesburg with his Kisanganibased dance company, Studios Kabako, to present More, more, more … future, a
shambolic and celebratory piece of agitprop physical theatre. The work melds
Western punk attitude with Congo’s driving rumba rhythms and features poetry by
Linyekula’s childhood friend, Antoine Muhindo, a political prisoner accused of
murdering the Democratic Republic of Congo’s former president, Laurent-Désiré
Kabila, in 2001. During his Johannesburg visit Linyekula gave a presentation at a
Goethe Institute event. It included a public exchange with Emmanuel Jal, a former
Sudanese child soldier who now rhymes about his life in often-stilted hip hop verse
and places social activism at the core of his agenda.
“I went back to school and completed my degree because I want to change the world,”
said Jal, who believes that by constantly retelling his story of loss, wandering,
cannibalism, and, finally, grace, he will shift consciousness. “Do I really want to be a
voice to others?” responded Linyekula. “Maybe not. When will I be able to talk about
beauty without having to feel guilty about all these other things? One of the dramas of
my generation is that we haven’t really learnt to be individuals. We are never totally
individuals, we always part of a mass, always statistics. I hate this thing.” Linyekula’s
outburst, which like Adichie’s wildly popular TED Talk is available on YouTube,
was compelling: it is urgent, passionate, uncompromising. “My life is in front of me,
and I want it to be better,” he said. “I want the life of those around me to be better.”
His statement perfectly distils a continent-wide aspiration. My life is in front of me,
and I want it to be better. But how to achieve this?
It is here that Ndebele’s 1984 essay ‘Turkish Tales and Some Thoughts on South
African Fiction’ strikes me as an important contribution to the ersatz canon of texts
we’re composing as much as debating here today. Originally published in the cultural
magazine Staffrider, Ndebele’s essay is grounded in literary criticism – it begins with
a review of Yashar Kemal’s collection Anatolian Tales – but is principally about
larger contextual issues confronting South African fiction during late-apartheid, in
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particular the stark urban rural divide in fiction. The essay rehearses, at least in my
view, many of the dilemmas raised by Wainana, albeit in far more nuanced prose,
without any of the Kenyan humourist’s snarky shtick.
In a recent essay published in The Chronic, Akin Adesokan, a Nigerian literary
essayist and novelist, describes Wainana’s rhetorical style in his famous essay as
“self-congratulatory”. That’s one way of putting it. Ndebele is more incisive. “[T]he
writer of indictment,” he offers in his famous essay, “soon gives himself up to dealing
with oppressive negation on its own terms.” Wainana tends to do allot of that.
“Basically, the demands of the craft of fiction,” writes Ndebele, “are that a writer has
to have a more than casual view of the relationship between fiction and society, or
between artistic information and social information.” In other words, “broad
brushstrokes”, that favoured device of humourists like Wainana, just doesn’t cut it. I
seem to be unfairly targeting Wainana here. Let me be clear. World literature is richer
because of writers like Jonathan Swift, Nikolai Gogol, Sergei Dovlatov, David
Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and Binyavanga Wainana. Laughter, after all, is seditious. It
punctures seriousness. It can also be transformative. But this is hardly controversial, is
well known.
I have been asked to provoke, to goad, to bait you. Here is a thought. The question
under consideration is bankrupt. It is not a high-stakes question. It lacks urgency and
specificity. It is what Hitchcock called a McGuffin, a prop for triggering the plot. This
is why the question invites rhetorical showmanship (such as this) and mockery (as
Wainana opted for). Farce and parody are deeply entrenched cosmopolitan values.
Which prompts a second thought, or provocation. What is it about irony? Why is
irony that is so attractive to metropolitan artists?
Irony, I would venture, is not particular to city life, but it is a great marker of being a
metropolitan. Another way to think about irony, particularly as African writers deploy
it – I think of N’gone Fall’s essay on Dakar’s new African Renaissance Monument –
is as tactical tool. Irony, a key ingredient of comedy, offers a synthetic tool for
negotiating authenticity, a way to speak inauthentically about serious things. Whether
used strategically as a method, or tactically for short-term gain, irony can be a helpful
tool when poking around proscribed spaces where the cipher of power lurks. But
irony is also a way to cultivate radiance and light, something I’ve noticed in Imraan
Coovadia’s wonderful prose, especially in his essays. Which takes us back to irony as
style, this in a context where the word Africa (especially when sandwiched into a
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book title) cultivates writing that is stylistically dead, tonally deaf and imaginatively
bereft. I’m not being ironic here.
A final thought, or provocation if you must, which I prefer to frame as a question:
How do we retrieve home in words? By paying close attention to the contours and
textures of the everyday. By rediscovering the apparently ordinary and seemingly
unexceptional. By revisiting Santu Mofokeng’s immanent photographs of peasant life
in Bloemhof, by relooking that final scene of Yasujiro Ozu’s film Late Spring, or
reimagining that poised moment near the end of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful
Ones Are Not Yet Born, where the only means of escape is a toilet. The ordinary is
texture and tone; but it is also more than that, it is a form of heightened consciousness.
It represents the ability to compose and reconcile what Ndebele called artistic and
social information. Teju Cole is celebrated for it, although I prefer to single out the
exiled Libyan writer Hisham Matar for consideration and praise.
Speaking with Hari Kunzru in 2011, Matar, an author of two novels marked by their
autobiographical disquiet, remarked on the betrayal he feels not writing in Arabic. A
recurring continental theme, Matar – who has lived in Nairobi, Cairo, London and
New York, and is trained as an architect – bookended his remark with a series of
incisive questions: “How do you create art under this situation? How to be an artist
from a place like Libya? What do you do? How do you approach this? … How do you
remain incredibly eloquent and incredibly calm?” How?
By acknowledging, firstly, I believe, that there is an enduring craft to producing the
difficult simplicity Matar speaks of, no matter what identity one assumes as a writer.
Furthermore, by recognising that few writers ever achieve this combination of
eloquence and outrage and critical distance, not in Maputo, not in Brooklyn, not in
Cairo, not in Berlin, not in Cape Town. Not achieving this difficult simplicity, of
being incredibly eloquent and calm under conditions of constraint, should not be
construed as failure. For a writer, any writer, it is simply ambition deferred.
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