Hedley Twidle

“In a Country where You couldn’t Make this Shit up”?: Literary Non‐Fiction in South Africa

In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes. The work of authors like Antony Altbeker, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavić ‘almost convinces one’, in the words of one acclaimed novelist, ‘that fiction has become redundant in this country’. This piece sets out to ask why such claims are being made now, and what they can tell us about the status of the literary in contemporary South Africa. From Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism (1973)to J. M. Coetzee’s ‘The Novel Today’ (1988) – and, more recently, David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010) – the relation between ambitious non-fiction and the serious novel has often been portrayed as one of antagonism and rivalry. Yet while not wanting to dismantle the different kinds of truth-claim made by fictive and documentary modes, I suggest that instances of fiction and non-fiction from South Africa have in fact for a long time been in an unusually intense, intimate and one might even say constitutive dialogue with each other. Offering a survey of how various critics have tried to conceptualise the space of the literary in South Africa – whether as ‘field’, ‘archipelago’, ‘dream topography’, ‘marketplace’ or ‘seam’ – the piece argues for the need to read novels, poems, plays and other traditionally ‘literary’ forms alongside more topical, documentary modes. I deepen these lines of enquiry by examining two encounters: the first a panel on non-fiction at the 2010 Cape Town International Book Fair (from which the chapter takes its name), and the second a revealing reading, or as I will argue, misreading, of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace by the acclaimed non-fiction writer Jonny Steinberg.

Writing the Company: From VOC Daghregister to Sleigh's Eilande

Abstract This piece explores recent literary re-creations of the early Dutch East India Company (VOC) years at the Cape of Good Hope, concentrating on Dan Sleighs Eilande (2002, trans. André Brink, 2005) to examine how an archivist turned novelist uses the textual ‘islands’ provided by official documentation to create a huge prose work that is remarkable for placing the seventeenth-century settlement in its properly global colonial context. Surely this regions most exhaustive rendering of the genre known problematically as ‘the historical novel’, it ranges from Germany and Holland via St Helena and the Cape to Madagascar, Mauritius and Batavia. And if for Brink ‘the lacunae in the archives are most usefully filled through magical realism, metaphor and fantasy’, (Coetzee and Nuttall, Negotiating the Past, 3), I suggest that Sleighs work forms an opposite pole, offering an example of a much slower, lonelier genesis and a more cautious recovery of historical specificity. I hope to discern the possibilities and constraints of these very different fictional modes as they engage a vast, trans-continental archive. ‘Writing the Company’, then, refers not only to contemporary literary re-presentations of the VOC period, but also to the massive project of trans-oceanic correspondence through which this early ‘multinational’ constituted itself: a mass of journals, company reports and judicial records that constitute a vast textual exchange not only with the Heeren XVII (Lords Seventeen) in Amsterdam and the Council of India in Batavia, but also between the buitenposte (outposts) of the VOC at the Cape, and the forgotten posvolk who inhabited them.

N2: reading, writing, walking the South African highway

Abstract This piece is drawn from a larger project that asks what it might mean to write a cultural history or “biography” of the longest highway in South Africa, the N2. Influenced by literature on the everyday, on infrastructures and the “infra-ordinary,” my approach pays attention to the highway as a material artefact. Who builds, maintains and manages it; who makes their life along it; what subcultures, lexicons and social behaviours can be read off it? Exploring the possibilities of creative non-fiction within the environmental humanities, the piece here unfolds as an exercise in psychogeography, or a deconstructed travelogue. While much travel writing about modern Cape Town describes a (motorised) journey from airport to city, here I reverse the gaze and proceed on foot from town to the airport along the hard shoulder of the N2. In doing so I try to understand the vexed relations between drivers and pedestrians in a divided city, and to conduct an “anthropology of the near” on the road reserve: perhaps the most visible but least contemplated part of the modern urban landscape.

An Interview with Rustum Kozain

Rustum Kozain was born in 1966 in Paarl, South Africa. He studied for several years at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and spent ten months (1994–1995) in the United States of America on a Fulbright Scholarship. He returned to South Africa and lectured in the Department of English at UCT from 1998 to 2004, teaching in the fields of literature, film and popular culture. Kozain has published his poetry in local and international journals; his debut volume, This Carting Life, was published in 2005 by Kwela/Snailpress. Kozain’s numerous awards include: being joint winner of the 1989 Nelson Mandela Poetry Prize administered by the University of Cape Town; the 1997 Philip Stein Poetry Award for a poem published in 1996 in New Contrast; the 2003 Thomas Pringle Award from the English Academy of Southern Africa for individual poems published in journals in South Africa; the 2006 Ingrid Jonker Prize for This Carting Life (awarded for debut work); and the 2007 Olive Schreiner Prize for This Carting Life (awarded by the English Academy of Southern Africa for debut work). 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.

First lives, first words: Camões, magical realism and the limits of invention

Abstract Beginning with André Brinks The first life of Adamastor (1988, trans. 1993) – a playful, postmodern “writing back” to the Portuguese epic Os Lusíadas – this article considers local experiments in that international strain of postcolonial literature known controversially but conveniently as “magical realism”. Surveying Brinks post-apartheid literary output, it traces the shifts from weighty national allegories to more irreverent and fantastic re-imaginings of the past, going on to ask how successfully the flamboyant narrative procedures which he helped to import can survive in a South African context. It is an account borne of admiration for the sheer ambition of his attempt at Reinventing a continent (as a 1996 essay collection has it), but also from an unease that this purveyor of a prose, which strays into the realms of the postcolonial exotic, is regarded as such a major writer on the international stage (one who must be classed, according to the Vintage edition dust jackets, with García Márquez and Solzhenitsyn). More broadly, this opens an enquiry into the insistence on newness and naming the land in these various types of “world literature”: what Derek Walcott has called the “elemental privilege of naming the New World” (1998: 41). It is a linguistic ambition and energy which informs both Camões’ exploratory cantos and the twentiethcentury classics of magical realism, yet which, I would argue, is uniquely tested in the case of southern Africa. Brinks rewritten Adamastor is one of several Cape Adams encountered as one begins to ask how such confidence to name the natural world might be earned and guaranteed, or else too easily assumed, and so forfeited, by the literary work.

Compromise and resistance in postcolonial writing: E.M. Forster’s legacy

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Rachel Carson and the Perils of Simplicity: Reading Silent Spring from the Global South

Carson’s work is often praised (and sometimes condemned) for its simplicity and lyricism, its “sensitive literary style.” My engagement with Silent Spring explores this idea of literariness, tracing the formal qualities and rhetorical strategies of her oeuvre: the ecology of allusion and quotation that it generates, the metaphors and genres that it draws on. In doing so, it argues that the celebrated accessibility of her writing is in fact a carefully worked-for effect. The simplicity of Silent Spring, in other words, is more complex than it first appears: a quality that lent the book much of its power yet also rendered it vulnerable in other ways. At the same time, I hope to read Carson’s public science writing alongside the anti-globalisation protest of Arundhati Roy, probing the relation between the simple and the complex in contemporary environmentalism. Both turned their attention to explicitly instrumental writing after winning fame for more “literary” texts, both questioned the credibility of the male expert, and both deployed the intimate address of the essay form for polemical effect. Roy’s work also allows us to see how Carson’s version of environmentalism looks from the developing world: how the ideas of ecology, toxicity, and “slow violence” that Silent Spring did much to introduce into public culture might play out in a postcolony like South Africa.