We are all migrants now — willing and unwilling, driven by choice or need. In a transnational world, mobility of capital creates vast movement of people, sharpening questions of identity and place.
It was such topics that the eighth Time of the Writer festival discussed in Durban last week. A gathering of 26 writers from four continents, the festival offered six days of panel discussions and workshops at which visiting writers and the public exchanged opinions.
Notions of home proved particularly elusive. Where and what is home? For some writers it remained the motherland; for others it was a limbo, a tantalising suspension between place of birth, a notional or mythical sense of home and the reality of their place of domicile.
As central as sense of place was the position of language. Presenting the “Writing, Place and Identity” panel, Alan Swerdlow asked Togo novelist Sami Tchak why he had chosen to write in the coloniser’s language, French. It was precisely this question, replied Tchak, that had made him realise that it was the coloniser’s language!
In an earlier session, “Writing, Resistance and Reconstruction”, the Angolan poet Manuel Rui Monteiro delivered another contemplation on the effects of the coloniser’s denial of the indigenous oral. Rui noted: “The spoken text … was a text not only from speech, but because there were trees, breathing sounds of boughs in the forest. And it was a text because there was a gesture. A text because there was dance. A text because there was rhythm. The spoken text, heard and seen. Certainly you could have asked to hear it and see it. The stories that the elder narrated when you arrived! But no! You chose to shoot the cannons.”
The plight of South African indigenous languages was addressed in several sessions. Publishers needed to market books in these languages more effectively, urged DBZ Ntuli, the doyen of isiZulu literature, and his peers writing in other languages. That followed a wonderful performance in which Ntuli read from his translation into isiZulu of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom: a tour de force that impressed on non-indigenous language speakers what they are missing.
Quietly, but as impressively, isiZulu poet Ncamisile Makhambeni read Whitebeard, a paean of remembrance for her late father. Later, in private, she told me it was essential that the government buy literature in indigenous languages and stock libraries; if not, she feared for their propagation in book form.
As regards the South African literary scene, André Brink imbued it with massive potential, describing it as “a Vesuvius of creativity about to erupt”. Three writers whose novels have already cascaded down the slopes — Niq Mhlongo, Martin Koboekae and Henrietta Rose-Innes — offered insights into the dynamism of and focus on creating characters and telling stories that seems to characterise our new wave of national writers.
And then there was Egyptian activist and writer, Nawal El Saadawi. Her solo session, “Writing, Creativity and Dissidence”, saw her speaking with the fervour of a politician. The usual suspects – George W Bush, Mohamed Hosni Mubarak and the oppression of Islamic women – dominated, with Saadawi affording a glimpse of the writer as activist and Egyptian presidential candidate. (Unsurprisingly, she dismisses her chances in this endeavour.)
The festival showed that it is not only food that makes mother-tongue speakers of us all. Through the word, we converse with other cultures in dialogues both fundamental and profound. The Frankish Emperor Charlemagne famously said that to possess another language is to possess another soul. To be allowed to glimpse into another experience and perspective, presented by a committed and careful writer, is also to possess another soul.
Darryl Accone was one of the invited writers at Time of the Writer