We write what we like

‘I write for myself,” Niq Mhlongo says with the iconoclastic abandon that reminds me of the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo’s statement that he writes poetry only for other poets.

We’re at Capello’s restaurant in Newtown, Johannesburg. Mhlongo and fellow writers Zukiswa Wanner and Siphiwo Mahala are leafing through scores of short stories written for a competition for an anthology to be published later this year in honour of Steve Biko.

The clean-shaven and boyish looking Mahala, author of When a Man Cries, a novel about the challenges of manhood in contemporary South Africa, agrees. ‘I like writing the kind of stuff I would want to read,” he says.

Still, you get the sense that he doesn’t mean writers aren’t accountable to their past and the present.

In an earlier email exchange Mahala had mentioned the responsibilities writers carry ‘to heal the land through their pens, and part of that is to revisit old themes to correct [the] misrepresentations of the past and at times to give account of the present condition”.

This follows, he argued, from the simple fact that ‘it is impossible” for a people who have suffered under colonialism and apartheid ‘to have total amnesia of the past injustices after only 14 years of freedom”.

Though the post-1994 literary boom has seen a burst of new black authors, the audience for their work remains largely white. Wanner, whose debut novel The Madams subverts the notion of white madam, black maid, says ‘when I started writing I was told the audience out there is predominantly white” and that ‘a lot of people in the middle class with a lot of disposable income don’t buy books at all.”

‘A book is the price of a meal without the alcohol,” says Mhlongo in between bites of lamb chops. Mhlongo, the author of Dog Eat Dog and After Tears, playfully remonstrates with me when he notices the photographer: ‘Why didn’t you tell me there would be photographer? I would have worn a suit,” he says.

Wanner, in the playful spirit that has descended on our table, quips that Mahala ‘is not a writer because he lives in Pretoria”. I take out her emailed reponse on the role of the writer. ‘As a writer the post-1994 years have given me much more to write [about] and, whereas a lot of the writers in the past seemed to be tied down to revolutionary writing, I can write on so many different subjects because more worlds have been opened up to me,” she says.

Wanner, who lived in Zimbabwe until 1994, says ‘freedom to me means largely being able to come into South Africa and knowing the South African side of the family that I never knew growing up.” Her father was one of the soldiers who left South Africa as part of the Albert Luthuli detachment — a revered Umkhonto we Sizwe unit — and her mother is Zimbabwean.

Picking up the thread, Mhlongo says back then there were things South African writers couldn’t write about. The freedom that came with 1994 means that ‘I can write the way I speak English”. Mhlongo says he is conscious of the way South Africans speak, of the various sub-cultures. ‘Once I write in standard English it won’t be South African. It’s like writing beyond yourself.”

Taking issue with my working title for our discussion, ‘post-1994 literary voices”, Mahala argues it implies the existence of a uniform movement. He suggests the scene is much more than that.

He says the Angolan-born writer Simao Kikamba, looks at displacement and the status of the émigré, while the late Sello K Duiker grappled with urban spaces and sexuality; Phaswane Mphe tackles life in the urban spaces, while the fresh-faced Kopano Matlwa looks at identity in a land still coming to terms with itself.

‘This diversity adds to the rich fabric of our literature,” Mahala says. Wanner says these differences are crucial to the flowering of new voices and stories. ‘It’s necessary to keep the different cultures writing.”

Wanner argues that, in many ways, being described as a post-1994 writer is limiting. ‘It’s like being described as an African woman writer,” she says.

It is perhaps as the late Dambudzo Marechera put it when he said he ‘would question anyone calling me an African writer. If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you.”

However, says Mhlongo more reasonably, race remains a preoccupation, though it’s no longer the only ‘legitimate” lens. ‘The context may have changed but the issues remain the same,” he says and adds that the apartheid we have now is ‘faceless and non- racial” and will remain in place until issues like poverty, HIV/Aids, corruption and xenophobia are addressed.

But all this doesn’t mean colour has been made obsolete, as Wanner observes when she says ‘there is this notion that we have to get over race”, part of what she calls the ‘forgive and forget paradigm”.

Even with the advent of freedom Wanner finds she is expected to write with a particular worldview. ‘When I am writing essays I do find that I am expected to write with a certain political slant,” she says.

‘I think that’s why I prefer fiction as my medium of writing. I can afford to be as politically incorrect as I want and, instead of claiming the words as my own, give them as the voices of my characters,” she says.

Mahala, whose day job is at the literature and publishing desk of the department of arts and culture, says politics will continue to be a preoccupation ‘as long as you write about the human condition”.

Carnage on the roads is one such issue. A few days after our lunch conversation, I receive an email from Wanner to say that Mhlongo has been involved in an accident and was briefly admitted to Baragwanath Hospital.

Wanner’s mail says he (Mhlongo) ‘pissed me off because I had already written a eulogy and everything. I hoped I’d start all my readings for my next book with ‘can we have a moment of silence for my brother and late good friend Niq … ,’ then pour some wine and say ‘this one’s for you Njomane’, but he gone and messed it up again just like a man.” She ends, seriously, by saying ‘we [are] all relieved that the little upstart is alive”.

It says a lot about a society when our writers can jest about the serious. And get away with it.