African Road: New writing from southern africa 2006
edited by Robin Malan
(Spearhead)
Tell our own stories.” Whether uttered as request, command or mantra, those four words are widespread in the South African arts world; indeed, they’ve been common parlance since the 1980s.
There was, and continues to be, a belief in the power of the local. Arguably, the film version of Tsotsi is the instance that saves such true believers. All around, however, there are examples of narratives dealing in the local and the national that would not so easily have been published before 1994. The proliferation of fiction and poetry by South Africans, for South African and other readers, is remarkable.
In this brave new writing and publishing world, it’s cheering to see that short stories, invariably given short shrift, are asserting themselves. Some have argued, compellingly, that the short story is the most appropriate genre for South Africa circa 2006. It has, of course, always been an apt, even a characteristic, mode of our literary expression. Herman Charles Bosman’s famous essay on the South African short story is as cogent as it was 60odd years ago. Pauline Smith’s short story The Pain remains a masterclass in the form.
Given all this, the HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award is among the most significant projects in encouraging new creative writing. Set up last year as a three-year series, the award offers $10 000 annually for the three best short stories submitted. But it’s not only the winners who benefit; a selection of the best entries is given life in the best possible form: a collection published by Spearhead. This year’s, African Road, features 29 stories chosen from 231 entries.
The competition is open to writers in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), though this year’s crop of published stories includes only a handful of contributions from beyond South Africa’s borders — work by Zimbabweans, a Malawian and a Mauritian.
South African writers swept the awards: Sean O’Toole for The Road to Rephile ($5 000); last year’s winner Elizabeth Ann Pienaar for Breaking Down the House ($3 000) and Justin Fox for Big Game ($2 000). Lee Olivier won an honourable mention for A Death Too Soon.
What adds weight and luster to the winners’ achievements is that JM Coetzee made the final selection. In a pithy but illuminating one-and-a-bit pages in African Road, Coetzee outlines the virtues and flaws of the winning works, as well as the pre-occupations of many of the writers with child’s world views.
Coetzee says O’Toole’s story “is a moving exploration of the mind of an ageing man, his thoughts deftly interwoven with other voices of the new South Africa. It is a positive contribution (some readers might say too earnestly positive) to a new national literature.”
There is substantial encouragement for Olivier, whose story, says Coetzee, “is the work of a highly promising writer. It is too unfinished to win a prize, but it is to be commended for the liveliness of its language.”
What is also telling about Olivier is that he has none of the writerly biographical tics that manifest themselves in a number of the self-penned writers’ thumbnail sketches at the back of the book. His compressed life story is unvarnished, tracing an arc from dropping out of tertiary-level civil engineering through construction and a coal-mining apprenticeship, to his current employment as “a technician in the forklift business”. The sense of life thoroughly lived is very evident in his story.
Coetzee makes a broader point about the submissions, noting the large number that presented a child’s point of view. “Some of this year’s authors seem to choose child narrators not because these narrators will allow a fresh new look at the world, but because a simplified world promises to be an easier world to handle. In contrast, the best of the stories are commendably undaunted by the complexity and contradictoriness of life, and seek fresh ways in which to bring variety to the page.”
This preponderance of a young narrative standpoint might also be ascribed to the cycle in which the country’s literary psyche finds itself. Memory and its articulation are seemingly key to moving forward: “closure” in other terminology. African Road is an indication of how far on that larger journey we are, and a tantalising hint of what we might expect over the horizon.