From September 17-19 the third African Women Writers Symposium took place in Johannesburg. It was the first to take place without Nadine Gordimer delivering the keynote address, a fact that made the experience bittersweet. The event ran under the theme of: Looking Back, Looking Forward: Heritage, Turmoil and Transformation: Asserting African Women in the World. The objective was to create a space wherein African women writers could discuss their writing, their challenges and offer up ways to strengthen women’s role in literary arts and the economy.
The symposium this year featured an impressive array of award-winning writers, storytellers and poets from across the country. The names on the list included Aminatta Forna, who delivered the keynote, Sapphire (aka Ramona Lofton), Yvonne Adhiambo-Owuor, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Murillo, Kadija Sesay, Myesha Jenkins and Keorapetse Kgositsile, among oth- ers. The event started with Forna highlighting the importance of people who remember the value of freedom, and she paid full tribute to Nadine Gordimer.
“I teach an undergraduate class called Witness Literature and in the first week they read and discuss Nadine Gordimer’s essay Witness: The Inward Testimony,” said Forna. “The essay was first delivered by Gordimer to the Swedish Academy in 2001, just a few months after 9/11. To act as a witness to world events, to bestow upon these events understanding and meaning was, in Gordimer’s view, the greatest responsibility of a writer.”
Gordimer bore witness to the injustices of apartheid and documented it, and she played a role in enabling the transformation of, in her words, “events, motives, reactions, from the immediacy into the enduring significance that is meaning”. She looked beyond the surface to the truth that lay beneath. Forna highlighted this concept as she relayed the story of Helon Habila Ngalabak, a Nigerian writer who now lives in the United States.
“When Helon told his mother that he wanted to be a writer his mother burst into tears,” said Forna. “Why would a mother cry? Is she worried he will never make money? Perhaps the mother thought her son was going to become a drunk or a drug addict, spending his days smoking cigarettes and his evenings in cheap bars. But writers today hold univer- sity posts and are as respectable as any member of the community. The answer is one that shocks. Helon’s mother weeps at the thought of her son becoming a writer because, to her, it means he is bound for prison.”
As it was in Nigeria then and as it is now in many places across the world, the price of telling the truth is freedom, and the person who pays that price is the writer. Habila Ngalabak fled from Abacha’s regime, taking with him his first novel, Waiting for an Angel, in which he details the lives of a group of young writers living under the yoke of a dictator.
“Gordimer and her cohorts, the South African writers of the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s — Can Temba, Miriam Tlali, Andre? Brink, Wally Serote, Alan Paton and many others — paid the price of truth with their own freedom,” added Forna. “Many were exiled, imprisoned, had their texts banned or became banned people, forced to live in exile in their own society.”
For Forna, having grown up in Sierra Leone and Britain, everything she knew about apartheid South Africa was provided through the works written by these great names.
“As a school girl I wept over Cry, The Beloved Country,” she said. “At university I marched against apartheid in Trafalgar Square. My boyfriend at the time had a father who had been born and raised in South Africa and who challenged my convictions. I remember he used a popular argument among conservatives at the time, that apartheid and its laws stood for nothing more than the separation of the races. I knew differently. I knew what was really going on because writers like Nadine Gordimer had painted me a detailed picture of what the truth looked like.”
“The freedom of the writer, both literal and their ideas, the freedom of expression, both to write and to read the stories of choice, this needs to remain an inalienable human right. According to PEN International there are today around 900 writers who are in prison, censored by states who do not wish to see their authority challenged. In Saudi Arabia, blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1 000 lashes and 10 years’ imprisonment for insulting Islam.
“The flogging was to be carried out at the rate of 50 per week and we do not know, there are no news reports to tell us, how much of the sentence has been carried out so far,” said Forna. “Increasingly censorship comes under the guise of religious extremists who do not want their beliefs challenged.
“The year started with the massacre at Charlie Hebdo magazine in France and this has been followed by one tragedy after another. In Bangladesh four bloggers were hacked to death — Ananta Bijoy was killed in broad daylight on her way to work, Washiqur Rahman Babu was stabbed to death, Avijit Roy was murdered on his way home and Niloy Neel had his hands hacked off and died.
“I am amazed at the risks writers will take and the inventive ways in which writers and readers pursue the imperative of truth, ways around the constraints placed upon us,” said Forna. “On a Boston flight a few years ago I sat beside a Romanian-American truck driver who had grown up under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu and books were heavily censored. The driver spent his teen years reading science fiction. I had never been much of a sci-fi reader as I couldn’t see the point. The driver laughed — I was just like the censors who left the science fiction books untouched. To them, said the driver, they were silly, made-up stories, but they taught me everything I needed to know about how you control people.”
Thanks to writers, today we know much about modern Russia and the regime of Vladimir Putin, the absurdities and iniquities of the Cultural Revolution in China, the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 19th century, Victorian England. Each era and historical moment cap- tured, outlined and coloured in by writers and their indomitable quest for truth and freedom.
“I remember freedom; I remember freedom being taken away. I grew up in Sierra Leone,” said Forna. “For several years after attaining independence the country was heady with freedom, democracy was young, too young to know that freedom can be both given and taken away. In the 1970s we came under the rule of a despot and one by one our freedoms were removed. My father was a political activist and his life was taken away. When I wrote his memoir I asked myself — how does a country implode? How can we free ourselves from repeatedly committing the mistakes of the past?”
In Forna’s Witness Literature class the words of Nadine Gordimer inspired almost every student to ask what they could do, how they could help change the patterns of injustice around the world.
“I was taken aback. I had been expecting discussions of narrative, metaphor and meaning, but suddenly the class was one about activism,” she concluded. “What if every- one changed themselves, I asked the students, how about if a million, 10 million people did the same? One girl asked me, ‘What should I tell my detractors?’ I replied, ‘Tell her to read a novel. Tell her to read.’”
A tribute to Jayne Cortez
“I consider it a great honour to be able to participate in this tribute to Jayne Cortez on the African continent, having done so in London and New York, because she was not only one of my favorite poets, she was one my favourite people. She was a righteous African-American woman with an indomitable spirit and a big heart. I cherish the memories of the poetry reading we did together and the time we spent together socialising. I simply loved being in her company.
“Although Jane was a unique voice in African-American poetry, she belonged to a tradition that connects the pen to the drum; she shared an aesthetic that connects the music in language with the language of music.
“Jayne was one of those poets who understood that poetry is not merely the distillation of experience through language that on rare occasions can offer fleeting insight into the human condition. She understood the power of poetry to raise consciousness, inspire and uplift the spirit as a potent weapon in the struggle against all forms of oppression.
“I will always remember Jayne Cortez for her incendiary poems, her African consciousness, her commitment to our struggle for racial equality and social justice, her solidarity, her sense of humour and her kindness. I feel privileged to have known her and to have been able to call her elder, sister, comrade and friend.” — Linton Kwesi Johnson