/ 16 March 2007

Connectivity in the time of the writer

Niren Tolsi speaks to Imraan Coovadia and Ronnie Govender about family politics and writing's road to nowhere.

Families are our point of entrance into society. They provide a lot of our starting capital as writers,” says Imraan Coovadia, whose first novel, The Wedding, drew on tales heard as a child growing up in Durban.

His second, Green-Eyed Thieves, is an audaciously funny account of Muslim twin brothers Firoze and Ashraf Peer, who grow up in a family of philosophers and thieves and scam their way from a childhood in 1970s Fordsburg through Pakistan and Monaco to post-9/11 New York.

Ronnie Govender, whose Song of the Atman marked his first foray from theatre to novel-writing, believes that “families behave in pretty much the same way, whether they are in Lapland or Sri Lanka”, which leads to an “instant connection” through the familiar for readers. Spanning several generations, Song of the Atman is loosely based on the life of an uncle, Chin. Estranged from his family, he embarked on a journey that included becoming the first black man to own a hotel — in Cape Town’s District Six.

“I guess it was my grandmother and my mother who evoked my love of stories through the masterful stories they told me, most of them from mythology,” says Govender. “These things didn’t escape us when we were kids, especially the rounds of gossip within the Govender households. There were whispers of a ‘madam’ — Uncle Chin’s white lover. I was hooked and I suppose over the years a story was taking shape without my even knowing it.”

Govender is a child of Durban’s Cato Mano, a multiracial area that suffered forced removals in the 1950s after being rezoned as white. Those experiences, set down in words, won him a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1997 for At the Edge and Other Cato Manor Stories. His career has been characterised by activism and political convictions. The political, he believes, is always necessary, but it is the basic fundamentals of writing that elevate work from ordinary “agitprop”.

“Let’s take Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Kiran Desai’s magnificent The Inheritance Lost, or any of Arthur Miller or Bertolt Brecht’s plays. These are towering wordsmiths, but what gives their writing instant connectivity is that it is informed by the impress of political philosophies on the broad canvas of life.

“Unimaginative critics in the past, and some even in the present, held hostage by a supremacist syndrome, have sought to dismiss my work as ‘protest theatre’. For sure there is protest in my work, but not the one-dimensional sloganeering of agitprop theatre. It lives through people made three-dimensional by all the experiences that shape their lives. What those pallid critics of yore couldn’t take was that the characters in my plays who were saying ‘Up Yours’ were real people, not one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs.”

For his part, Coovadia feels that “politics, in the limited sense of the word, is only going to be of limited interest in a non-political society”. He asks: “Why have a democracy, anyway, unless it’s a way of freeing people from politics?”

“But,” he adds, “politics — in the sense that it concerns divisions and struggles between people — is one of the basic concerns of writing.

“Recently I’ve been thinking about the ‘social question’: Hannah Arendt’s term for the moment when someone says, ‘Well how can you be doing X, Y or Z (writing, arguing, reading) when people are starving, dying, killing each other?’ But lives, and deaths, are always going on in parallel. Actually, Auden has a well-known poem about that, Musee des Beaux Arts, which makes the point that ‘even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/ Where the dogs go on with their doggy life.’ But I have a soft spot for untidiness and doggishness.”

Coovadia lectures in the University of Cape Town’s English department. Before that he spent time in Melbourne, London and Boston. He says of his time outside South Africa, and how it might have affected his “gaze”: “It’s probably worsened my tendency to generalise. To be honest I don’t know how it has affected how I see things. In some ways South Africa is just as interesting and perplexing to me as a foreign country, and it might not have been that way if I had lived here continuously.”

With South African literature’s almost neurotic and constant search for post-apartheid literary identities, and writers to define them, what do Govender and Coovadia believe is the role of writers in contemporary society.

“This is a crucial question. In the past so called ‘protest writing’ had its place. Remember ‘Total Onslaught’? The virus of racism moves into the very fibre of one’s being. A writer cannot but go beyond the obvious. It’s how much of the whole picture you see that determines the power and strength of your writing,” says Govender.

“Take for instance the reaction to the unacceptably high levels of crime and the unspeakable violence that often accompanies it from two of South Africa’s most acclaimed writers. JM Coetzee took the chicken-run and his characters in his later novels are suffused with unrelenting pessimism. Nadine Gordimer, on the other hand, having experienced the trauma of crime, at first-hand, didn’t resort to ranting indignation. She focused rather on why there was so much crime and thus immediately became part of the solution. Her characters would be the last to chuck to Adelaide or some place that has been sanitised through genocide.

“How does one become part of the solution? Not by writing propaganda or by being politically correct. If you can’t see the whole picture, how can the characters you create be expected to do so?”

“I’m not sure what the role of writers is,” says Coovadia. “We’re here, so people have to put up with us. I know that intellectual privacy, autonomy and freedom are key aspects of writing. I suppose our role is to write books, and then to dream up unlikely reasons for having written them. As for my role, I’m receptive to suggestions.

“Writing, like life I suppose, is an experiment we carry out without knowing what’s going to count as success. I would say that the idea of improving society through fiction seems improbable to me, otherwise Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be the best piece of American fiction, when it’s obviously Huck Finn. Joseph Brodsky’s argument for poetry — that it accelerates consciousness — appeals to me. Of course, we don’t know where we’re going.”

Coovadia and Govender are among 18 writers taking part in the 10th annual Time of the Writer festival in Durban from March 19 to 24. Others include Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Doreen Baingana, Mary Watson and Zukiswa Wanner. For more information, call 031 260 2506

Reimagining the past in the present

Political change in the early 1990s, writes Michael Chapman, provoked a question, more in anxiety than challenge: What, at the end of apartheid, would South African writers write about?

We had been conditioned by the anti-apartheid novel (Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink), the deconstruction of colonial myth-making (JM Coetzee), the epic of revolutionary romanticism (Mongane Wally Serote), black protest theatre, tales of community suffering and community solidarity.

Identities were painted black or white and located in rural or urban space. Gender roles were fixed: black man fighter; black woman home preserver. The gradations of a civil society were eclipsed by what Njabulo Ndebele designated not as ordinary living, but as spectacular representation.

With change came cries from the art cognoscenti to consign the political mindset to the dustbin of history: to restore the individual life over and above the type, or stereotype; to value nuance, irony, the image, as defining the work of art. But how to give content — after apartheid — to a new, variegated landscape or cityscape?

Literature of the past decade has succeeded not in ignoring the past — the ghosts of apartheid haunt the contemporary scene — but in reimagining the past in the present. Marlene van Niekerk’s massive Triomf and Agaat return to a tradition of farm novel (Olive Schreiner, the plaasroman of the 1930s) to challenge the divisions of the society.

In her collection of stories, Loot, Nadine Gordimer challenges an anti-apartheid duty to be politically correct. Identity yields to identities as her stories ask, implicitly, whether South Africa is Africa, the West or somewhere in between.

Identity in contemporary South African literature has begun to escape the racial categories of the past.

Not necessarily in interracial mixing — Imraan Coovadia’s Green-Eyed Thieves, for example, derives its story from Indian South Africa — but in experiences that span the world.

And perhaps even more significantly for artistic representation, in forms of expression that break beyond the traditional genres of novel, poem and play.

The 10th Time of the Writer Festival in Durban sees a miscellany of genre challenges: stories transformed into films, journalism and literary criticism pushing boundaries of art and high art sharing the stage with the copywriting genius of the “Laugh It Off” T-shirt.

Embodied in a variety of forms are an increasing variety of identities. As Bhengu says to Egan in Ivan Vladislavic’s The Exploded View: “‘The Afritude Sauce is the flavour of the New South Africa, an exhilarating blend of earthy goodness and spicy sophistication.’

“Bhengu looked at Egan and said, ‘To the Hani View Sewage System.’ He pronounced it ‘see-wage’.

“They raised their mugs and drank.”

Michael Chapman is professor of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His work includes South African Literatures (1996) and Art Talk, Politics Talk (2006)