On Literary Attachment in South Africa

Tough Love

Michael Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032064475
• eBook ISBN: 9781000431797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book reflects on the "literary" in literature. Less ideologically construed, more affirmative of literary attachment, the study adopts a style of intimacy – its "tough love" – in a correlation between the creative work and the critical act. Instead of configuring literary works to "state-of-the-nation" issues – the usual approach to literature from South Africa – the chapters keep alive a space for conversation, whether accented inwards to locality or outwards to the Anglophone world: the world to which literature in South Africa continues to belong, albeit as a "problem child".

A postcolony that is not quite a postcolony, South Africa is richly but frustratingly textured between Africa and the West, or the South and the North. Its literature – hovering on the cusp of its locality and its global reach – raises peculiar questions of reader reception, epistemological and aesthetic frame, and archival use. Are the Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee local writers or global writers? Is the novel or the short story the more appropriate form at the edges of metropolitan cultures? Given language, race, and culture contestation, how do we recover Bushman expression for contemporary use? How to consider the aesthetic appeal of two contemporaneous works, one in English the other in isiXhosa, the one indebted to Bloomsbury modernism the other to African custom? How does Douglas Livingstone attach the Third World to the First World in both science and poetry? What has a "born free" novelist, Kopano Matlwa, got to do with the Bard of Avon? In a time of theorisation, is it permissible for Lewis Nkosi to embody literary criticism in an autobiographical journey? How to read the rupturing event – the statue of Rhodes must fall – through a literary sensibility?

Alert to the influence of critique, the study is equally alert to the "limits of critique". Reflecting on several writers, works, and events that do not feature in current publications, On Literary Attachment in South Africa releases literature to speak to us today, within the contours of its originating energy.

1 André Brink, Mevrou Sadie, and Me

Our Crooked-Line Stories

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176237-2

I went to school in the rough and ready mining town of Kimberley. As I ‘excavated’ South African literature years later, I realised that Kimberley had a rich literary history: digger ballads; memoirs; big names like Olive Schreiner, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Sol T. Plaatje, and Dan Jacobson. With the discovery of diamonds in the 1860s, Kimberley became the ‘hub’ of South Africa’s transition from a backwater to a pawn in global power politics. British imperialism imposed its military and commercial might on the diamond fields and, in the 1870s, on the goldfields of the Witwatersrand.

No local literature entered my education at school. That is, until March 1962 when my Afrikaans teacher drank himself to death. (Perhaps our unruly behaviour in the classroom had contributed to his unhappiness.) He was replaced for the remainder of the year by Mevrou [Mrs] Sadie. Although she held a position of sorts in the Kimberley branch of the Afrikaner National Party – dour in its Calvinism – Mev. Sadie was a free spirit, or seen to be by us at our all-boys’ high school. She would have agreed with André Brink’s own reflections on what motivated his early novel, Lobola vir die lewe (1962) [Bride price for life]: an Afrikaans literature which, at the time, was ‘really in the doldrums. It was still carrying on with the old 19th-century naturalistic approach. It was all about droughts and locusts and poor whites’ (Brink, qtd in Burger and Szczurek 2013, p. 31).¹

This, we thought, was a fair description of our Afrikaans set books, which included stories about clever ‘seuntjies’ who played pranks on adult African ‘boys’. Anyway, the matric year allowed the choice of a book for oral discussion and Mev. Sadie chose Lobola. Brink’s suggestions of sex struck us louts as pretty daring. We learnt about the ‘Sestigers’ in Paris – a new wave of Afrikaans writers of the sixties – and guffawed at the reaction of certain Dutch Reformed churchmen who condemned Brink and his Paris-based contemporaries for showing too much interest in the ‘territory beneath the girth’ (Brink, qtd in Burger and Szczurek 2013, p. 32). Suddenly, our English (first language) set books seemed even more tedious and alien than we had already judged them to be: a mad old king ranting on the heath. What did we know, or care, about the vulnerabilities of power or age! What was a heath? And who were these coy rustics courting under the greenwood tree? Kimberley had only thorn trees!

Then there was the attraction of Mev. Sadie’s hot, sixteen-year-old daughter, Krista. As Mev. Sadie, Krista, and her younger daughter, Marta, lived next door to my father, mother, and me – Mr Sadie had ‘run away’ – I was envied by my classmates for having access to Krista’s attentions. But Krista wasn’t interested in any of us schoolboys. She had a boyfriend with Elvis sideburns, who rode a motorbike, and worked at the De Beers mine. We weren’t interested in the mouse-like, twelve-year-old Marta.

As I attended a school with the Union Jack in its badge and fought the Anglo-Boer War, again and again, in cricket and rugby matches against Diamantveld Hoërskool (across from the war memorial), I felt obliged to check whether there was a literature in English on South Africa. At the Kimberley Library, I found Alan Paton, Laurens van der Post, and Nadine Gordimer. But it was through André Brink (and Mev. Sadie) that I was introduced to the literature of this country.

I was pleased, therefore, to be invited to respond to Contrary, a 537-page anthology of articles (in English and Afrikaans) on Brink’s prolific career as a writer of fiction.² So prolific – more than twenty novels translated into over thirty languages – that, during Brink’s lifetime (he died in 2015), academics shied away from embarking on a monograph of his achievement. It is disconcerting to have one’s tome overtaken by the publication, along the way, of yet another novel. Or perhaps there are other reasons why, to date, there is no extended study of this author’s work. (It is a point to which I shall return.)

Neither the editors of nor the contributors to Contrary pursue the reasons for a relative academic neglect of Brink’s output. To summarise from the editors’ Introduction (Burger and Szczurek 2013, pp. 9–11), Brink is seen, positively, as a rogue experimentalist who questioned Calvinist Afrikanerdom’s sexual and religious mores; as an anti-apartheid activist; an opponent of censorship; and a writer with a ‘feminist’ perspective. But he is seen, negatively, by others as an opportunist, a misogynist, and even a racist. He is a ‘consummate storyteller’ (this is the editors’ conclusion), whose characters hold stubbornly to their beliefs in the face of conventional obduracy. In acts of defiance, his characters re-examine the past in creating a different, more liberated future. If a fine knowledge of great European traditions lends his novels (and his critical writing) a stamp of authority, then Brink’s meeting point of Europe and Africa grants more attention to the First People (San/Bushmen and Khoi) and to the descendants of Malay slaves at the Cape than to the majority population of black Africans. There is concern, also, at Brink’s portraiture of women which, despite his ‘feminist’ avowals, too often sacrifice flesh and blood to mysterious Venus-like, or ghost-like, shapes and shadows.³

As postcolonial issues and tropes entered the literary sphere in the 1990s, Brink’s ‘realism’ admitted plot patterns and character-types reminiscent of folklore, dubbed internationally as the ‘magical realism’ of periphery cultures. In Duiwelskloof (Devil’s valley, both pub. 1998) Flip Lochner, a failed journalist and erstwhile history teacher, visits an isolated settlement in the interior of the country. Here he encounters a phantasmagorical world which, among its denizens, include a child with goat’s feet and a girl with four breasts. To some, this represents a serious use of the caricatural mode: to question, by reductio ad absurdism, the reliability of the historical record; more specifically, to question Afrikaner-volk obsessions with racial purity. To others, Brink loses his own plot in invoking if not a freak show, then a cartoon strip.⁴

Whatever the disagreements, Brink’s protean imagination ensures his appeal not only to a wide reading public but also, despite the missing monograph, to institutions that grant literary awards. Of his treatment of the silenced ‘Others’ of colonial history – in Anderkant die stilte/The other side of silence (both pub. 2002) – the female body carries the destructive imprint of macho plunder and pillage. Willie Burger (2002) and Hennie van Coller (2002) both express reservations about what they regard as Brink’s exaggerations, stereotypes, hyperbole, and an indulgence in the carnivalesque. At the centre of the narrative Hanna X, in German South West Africa, has her tongue severed in a fracas with a drunken army officer. In contrast to Burger and Van Coller, however, Louise Viljoen (2002) identifies Brink’s deft utilisation of the gothic-tale convention to accentuate, in ironic contrast, the ugly realities of male-centred power. Joan Hambidge (2002), for her part, acknowledges this novel as Brink’s first radically feminist work. Hanna X, she observes, can be unattractive and maimed even as she enacts her own agency free of any predetermined design by the male focaliser of the story, or by an implied (male) author. As Brink describes his intention: ‘The leap of the imagination towards grasping the larger implication of our silence’ (1998a, p. 24).

In Contrary, Godfrey Meintjes’s 58-page contribution, ‘André Brink’s prose oeuvre: an overview’ (2013, pp. 37–95), offers a valuable frame of reference for those of us who have not kept pace with the author’s output. If Meintjes is inclined to rest his case on whether a novel can be classified as this or that, the classifications are a useful guide to Brink’s novelistic trajectory:

• a modernist existential phase (the early influence on the Sestigers of Camus and Sartre);
• littérature engagée (the years of the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa, in which Camus’s idea of universal revolt and Sartre’s conception of individual freedom are attached, in Brink’s work, to the violent end of apartheid);
• a postmodernist phase, in which the discursive influence of French poststructuralism begins to modify the mimetic text of political action; and
• a post-apartheid phase, in which Brink seeks to respond to his own question of what, in the so-called new South Africa, writers should choose after Scheherazade’s ‘one thousand-and-first night’ (2000a, p. 67; original in Afrikaans).

The answer, Brink suggests, is to be found in the fact that the problems of racism, injustice, corruption, the abuse of power, and a lack of freedom continue to affect the world at large (Die meul teen die hang, 1984; The wall of the plague, 1985); that the ‘little voice of the individual conscience’ still has a duty to tell stories (2000a, p. 71).

Prior to Brink’s ‘post-apartheid phase’, which occupies most of Contrary, I had attempted to pursue my own niggling concern: why, particularly among Afrikaans academics, was Brink’s acknowledgement not more unalloyed? Uneven, unsophisticated, and overwritten are common charges. A discussion with a former head of an Afrikaans department proved to be illuminating. Although a compelling storyteller – the author of potboilers Wilbur Smith is also a compelling storyteller! – Brink, according to Professor X, lacks the sustained, satirical vision of Etienne Leroux; he lacks the gravitas of Jan Rabie and Nadine Gordimer; he lacks the speculative acuteness of J.M. Coetzee; and he lacks the nuanced historical consciousness of Karel Schoeman. But there is something else. ‘Brink may get the nod from more progressive elements both in and beyond the Afrikaans literary community,’ continued Professor X,

but he still riles many in the establishment. To lead the charge, in Afrikaans, of new ideas and actions against the Afrikaner government, as Brink did with Kennis van die aand is not to endear himself to pillars like my old colleagues Professor H. van der Merwe Scholtz, Professor T.T. Cloete and Professor A.P. Grové, all of whom collaborated with the state censorship machinery. I remember André, like an enfant terrible, lampooning them as Oom [Uncle] Merwe, Oom Theuns, and Oom Apie! To be seen as a verraaier [traitor] to the volk is not easily forgiven. Look at the over-reaction to Breyten Breytenbach’s adventure, or misadventure, in black politics – a 9-year prison sentence!

At the start of Brink’s ‘post-apartheid phase’, I was invited by the Kimberley Historical Society to talk on stories of the diamond fields. I would use the visit to contact Mev. Sadie. But first, let me turn to my own response to Brink’s littérature engagée: a significant phase of his career which, in Contrary, is abbreviated.

As the novelist who, graphically, challenged Afrikaner power, Brink moved from the surrealistic, metaphysical dramas of his Paris years (as in Die ambassadeur, 1963) to the political directness of Kennis van die aand which, a year after it appeared in 1973, would be the first Afrikaans novel to be banned under the Publications Control [Censorship] Act. (This reaction of the state began Brink’s practice of reaching out to a wider audience by writing his novels in both Afrikaans and English.) Kennis (Looking on darkness, 1974) held state action to censure: racial persecution, police torture, and the damaging effects of apartheid, including its prohibition of sex across the colour line.

There is an element of political and literary opportunism. The device of a writer-narrator hints...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. André Brink, Mevrou Sadie, and Me: Our Crooked-Line Stories
• 2. Bushman Letters/Bushman Literature: Usable And Unusable Pasts
• 3. Schreiner’s Karoo, Blackburn’s Jo’burg: A Literary Journey, Then And Now
• 4. A School Person in a Red Blanket: The Case Of S.E.K. Mqhayi
• 5. Lewis Nkosi: Ambiguities of Home and Exile
• 6. The Potential and Limitations of Symptomatic Criticism: Ruth Miller’s Poetry
• 7. Who Wins a Nobel Prize?: Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee
• 8. Who Doesn’t Win a Nobel Prize?: Gordimer, Coetzee, Bosman, Head
• 9. The Power of …: Nelson Mandela: A Literary Consideration
• 10. The Science of Poetry and the Poetry of Science: Douglas Livingstone’s Uncommon Humanity
• 11. To Be a Coconut: Kopano Matlwa to the Bard of Avon
• 12. #RhodesMustFall!: On Literary Attachment and the Rupturing Event
• Index