Penguin brought out a book on Johannesburg (From Jo’burg to Jozi) at the time of the World Summit on Sustainable Development a few years ago, and followed it up with a book on Soweto. Each was an anthology of pieces by a wide range of writers; the Johannesburg book, particularly, contained great variety because the texts were short and many different writers contributed. A City Imagined (Penguin) is a similar anthology on Cape Town, but the individual pieces are longer and more substantial in their consideration of that city.
It is edited by Stephen Watson, whose poetic work has already done much to limn the meanings of that place — his 1986 collection was called In This City. As in those poems, where “a peninsula of light” offers also “a very clear idea of hell”, the pieces in A City Imagined range across the varieties of experience Cape Town holds. Through personal and communal memories, narratives, essays and topographies, the writers investigate this complex place and how it has shaped them. They see the quotidian grit in the tourist-dazzling natural beauty, trace personal histories across public landscapes.
There are excellent pieces here by some of South Africa’s best writers. Jeremy Cronin celebrates a creole Cape Town, while wondering what it would have meant had President Thabo Mbeki said, in his famous speech, “I am a coloured” instead of “I am an African”. Like him, André Brink and Mike Nicol muse on the ghosts of slavery in the city’s history. For Mark Behr, the horrific Sizzlers murders are an occasion for thoughts on love and death. Henrietta Rose-Innes explores the city’s interstices in Five Sites, while Michiel Heyns traces an alternative geography of Cape Town through the public toilets where gay cruising used to happen.
In his piece in A City Imagined, Nkululeko Mabandla says, “It feels good to stand tall like my father did on Table Mountain in that old black and white photo of my childhood memories. It feels good to own it and belong to it.” Watson writes in his introduction: “The place of one’s life is one’s life,” and many of the pieces he has collected can be read as dealing with similar concerns to those Duncan Brown explores in To Speak This Land: Identity and Belonging in South African and Beyond (UKZN Press).
He shows how different cultural productions (ranging from Bushman storytelling to 20th-century poetry to rap music) allow the speaking subject to insert himself of herself into a landscape, a history, a world — and thereby produce a sense of identity and/or belonging, riven though these might be by inner contradiction or alienation.
For instance, Brown describes the way Nontsizi Mgqwetho, in the 1920s, used in her poetry an indigenised Christian voice “to speak of this land” — of its people and the moral issues she saw them facing, their “political and social aspirations … and their bitter frustrations” (quoting Jeff Opland). In a different way, Brown shows how Douglas Livingstone produced an identity for himself as poet through a detailed, closely lived engagement with his environment: his “day job” as a biologist gave him a sense of ecological life that offered an alternative to the racial and political identifications that, for so many years in South Africa, provided the official straitjackets of identity.
Brown’s is an academic work, with all the required citational brackets interrupting the flow of the text (whatever happened to good old footnotes?), but it reads very easily for the non-specialist.
Globalisation and New Identities: A View from the Middle (Jacana) is also an academic work (sociological rather than literary-cultural), and the non-specialist will find it denser and less fluently written than Brown’s, but it deals fascinatingly with similar issues. It could carry as its epigraph something Brown says with regard to the late Zulu poet Mazisi Kunene: “Modern identity politics, particularly in South Africa, involve layers and webs of competing and often conflicting allegiance and identification.”
The theorist Judith Butler recently described gender as “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint”, which seems to me a good way to speak of the process of constructing identities and finding belonging in general. The constraints are the larger economic, political and technological processes, here referred to as “globalisation”, but shown as it is enacted on a specific, local level. The improvisations are the behaviours by which people find group-belonging, and hence “new identities”, within that frame.
The old racial and political identities conferred by the state, usually coercively, are breaking down — and people have found creative ways to replace them. In a series of “ethnographies”, the researchers and writers in Globalisation and New Identities investigate how this happens, studying the everyday practices of particular groups in something like the way the old ethnographers detailed the behaviours of tribal cultures.
There is the way Jewish women use the global communications boom to form transnational psalm-reciting groups; this “traditional ritual form of prayer” aims to bring about “physical, spiritual, political and emotional healing”. Here an ancient practice has found new life through contemporary technology. The same technology also allows the birth of “virtual identities”: in internet chatrooms (another piece here shows), participants use anonymity and fantasy to float free of constraining identities and material conditions and, within this virtual community, to play with the boundaries of their “authentic selves”.
Other pieces in this wide-ranging book look at the multifarious ways people improvise identities within that “scene of constraint”: work is very important, but so are parenthood, religion, language, tradition, shopping, activism, location and health. Such concrete determinants seem more powerful, in many ways, than the obviously ideological project (espoused by the SABC and delineated in another essay here) of creating a post-apartheid “national identity”.
Brown’s To Speak of This Land begins with a consideration of how the Bushman narratives collected in the 1870s by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd “speak powerfully to the questions of aboriginality, modernity and belonging in both local and global contexts”. These narratives have long formed the basis for works of retelling in prose (such as David Lewis-Williams’s Stories that Float from Afar) and reworkings in poetry (Watson, Antjie Krog and others). There is something in the words of Kabbo and Bleek and Lloyd’s other informants, in what is presumably the very oldest South African folklore, that offers South African writers a link back to a valued source, some kind of sacred origin perhaps — something Edenic. They are the most ancient, most aboriginal voices available; going back to them appears to leapfrog the painful history of the last century.
But of course the Bushman tales contain their own painful history. Andrew Bank’s Bushmen in a Victorian World tells, in the fullest possible way, the story of how Bleek and Lloyd came to collect these testimonies from informants who were prisoners, and who were also subjected to demeaning naked photographs in a parallel ethnographic project. Against the wider historical events of the time, Bank relates the interesting (and sometimes very dramatic) personal histories of Bleek and Lloyd, his sister-in-law, showing how their different approaches elicited different kinds of responses from the Bushman informants, whose life histories Bank also reconstructs.
The detail is considerable — Bank even examines the layout of the Bleek home and what that reveals about the relationships of those living there. He sees in Bleek’s linguistic queries, in his attempt to decode the grammar of the Bushman tongue, what could be “the first self-conscious expressions of a sense of collective identity” on the part of his informant. After all, what Bleek gets from A!kunta is this: “I am a Bushman, they are Bushman … you are Bushman … we are Bushmen”. From such rudiments opens a world.
This is “micro-history”, a past reconstructed from small things, in which the very texture of such lives, projects, events and places allows the writer and the reader to form connections that say something about us, and who we are, today — to continue to ask the questions that all these books, in their different ways, raise and ponder.