The Time of the Writer festival in Durban offered a range of writers known and unknown
Merle Colborne
The writer from Iceland – the chap with the pale spiky hair – has his back to me. He is taking a leak; who cares that the ice- cream-stick figure on the lavatory door is wearing a skirt?
The next time I see him he has his front to me. This time, he is taking the piss. On stage at the Sneddon Theatre, on a hot Durban night, he holds the 300-strong audience at the opening of the week-long Time of the Writer festival with a taut, artfully timed silence. “You expect that I’ll tell you something about snow,” he says at last. The audience falls about.
Einar Mar Gudmundsson is not the only surprise at this, the third international writers’ festival presented by the University of Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts and the French Institute of South Africa.
The writer from Holland, who wears pink gingham shirts and red leather shoes, breaks into an aria on stage. Because the half-Indonesian half-sisters of kaaskop Adriaan van Dis stole the limelight when he was young, he decided to join the opera where he could die a lot and take several hours over it. And with people watching. But as an understudy he didn’t quite get the attention he craved so turned to writing. “A pink person too has something to say.”
British writer Joanna (“In my next life I want to be Smith”) Trollope usually declines invitations to literary festivals, which she says have largely “degenerated into festivals of celebrity”. One reason she accepted this invitation was because of the opportunity to visit schools. Though few pupils would have heard of her, she speaks with passion, inspiring them to dream and work towards fulfilling those dreams.
I hear of one township girl, suffering from the acute boredom brightness can bring, whose life may well have changed course in the few minutes Trollope was in it. This girl could take inspiration too from the writer from Uganda, Goretti Kyomuhendo, who says, “I write because I am dissatisfied with the world I live in. I want to create another.”
Among them, the writers visit 23 schools. At an Islamic institution the question of Salman Rushdie is raised (and skirted); at a school in Wentworth the pupils discuss Robert McBride, whose biography is being written by our own Dr Gomolemo Mokae.
One or two of the writers visit a shelter where 80 street kids aged 6 to 16 gather and, after a while, respond with enthusiasm about expressing themselves creatively in words.
The new writers’ session at the Bat Centre attracts some 60 people. Some are budding entrepreneurs. One young man wants a definitive 10-point plan on how to write a book. The writer from Guadeloupe, whose voice could make a laundry list sound seductive, tells how, as an eight-year-old, she wrote a piece for her rather formidable mother, who, to her astonishment, broke down and cried. Maryse Cond had found her vocation.
A young girl wants to know about marketing one’s books. The writer from Zambia tells her that a R60 book earns the writer around R6. “Yo!” she exclaims, outraged and looking for a new career option. Professor Lazarus Miti, now at the University of Venda, started writing while hiding out in the school dormitory for several days because he didn’t have the requisite fountain pen and “Black Quink Ink” (he pronounces the words harpsichord- like, plinkety plink). To pass the time he picked up his disgraced ball-point and began writing. “I decided I was going to write poems. Eventually I went to university and discovered poetry and discovered that what I had written was not poetry.”
The writer from Switzerland speaks with tortured radiance. Ruth Schweikert reads with such intensity that her collar-bones buckle. Sitting beside her at the NSA Gallery coffee shop session on The Difficulty of Writing, South African writer Ivan Vladislavic, who is also an editor and translator, allows a tiny smile of recognition.
(I note that the writer from Iceland who on some nights wore shoes and no socks, and on others socks and no shoes, is wearing sandals.)
The British Council, one of the sponsors, hosts a full-house discussion with Mokae and British writer Margaret Drabble. Since my personal ownership of books is governed by second-hand supply, I ask Quaker- educated Drabble whether signing a library copy would be considered defacing. It would not, apparently. I hope future borrowers of The Witch of Exmoor from Durban Metropolitan Libraries will find pleasure in “Margaret Drabble, Durban 2000” written in green ink in accession no A275080988, classification DRAB (she does wear a lot of brown) and that the library will not scold.
That Drabble, whose gleaming book-jacket face is so familiar, is here at the festival astounds me. But to one African writer Drabble is just a word, one vowel away from dribble.
All the writers are variously known and unknown, even to each other. Some are awed by the attendance of French writer and philosopher Sylvie Germain. That many have never heard of Ivorian Ahmadou Kourouma astounds Liewe Joris, the feisty and fascinating writer from Belgium, who exhorts the audience to recognise the immense stature of the man.
Each night the set on the Sneddon’s stage is more or less the same: a peach couch, two pink easy chairs, a coffee table with a maroon cloth, glasses, water jugs and several microphones standing like wading birds on single three-toed claws. It is the people who occupy the stage who give it character.
On one night it feels like a station waiting room (a book kiosk is just outside), on another like a don’s cosy sitting room, then like a rehearsal room – the authors being reduced with effusive eloquence to bit parts. On the last night it becomes a stoep in Central Africa. There is music and the chat – facilitated by Professor Kole Omotoso, famous in Nigeria for his poetry, famous in South Africa for his knowing “Yebo Gogo!” smile – is warm and stimulating.
Generous sponsorship was gratefully acknowledged by Peter Rorvik of the Centre for Creative Arts and his mentor Adriaan Donker. (Does Donker wear those colour- splashed khurtas, I wonder, to offset his name?) There was a lot of publicity. There was a schools writing competition. There was an excellent programme (in print and reality) incorporating maskanda, isicathymia, kwaito, pennywhistles, gum- boot dancers and, on the first night, a dance epilogue by Siwela Sonke.
The campus venue right on campus was easily accessible. The entrance fee was just R15. And yet largely missing from the events at the university, which founded the Centre for Creative Arts in 1996, were academic staff and students, engaging in debate. It doesn’t say much for their manners.
The writer from Iceland offered a fragment about two people watching pigeons in a park. “They have such small heads, do you think they have any brains?” asks one. “No. But they have wings,” says the other. “What would you rather we had – brains or wings?” … “Wings on our brains.”
It’s for this that Time of the Writer gives such stimulating pleasure.