SA Lit Beyond 2000, Edited by Michael Chapman and Margaret Lenta. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011.

How to “delineate a field, ‘South African Literature’”, given the range of terms applied to literary production in the country in the last fifteen years, amongst others “post-apartheid literature; South African literature in/after the transition, or after the […] TRC” (1) – this is the challenge Michael Chapman, co-editor Margaret Lenta, and the authors of essays collected in SA Lit Beyond 2000, suggest they have set themselves.

What is “South African literary culture now as distinct from then”, Chapman asks in his introduction. What might provide definitional clarity to a field that has, as might have been expected (in fact, perhaps more than one might have hoped), grown in directions that writers in the midst of the struggle might have been little able to imagine?

In his introduction, Chapman invokes a number of tropes that have been particularly influential in literary debate, or rather in literary critical discussion of some South African cultural production, in the last several decades: Leon de Kock on the “seam” (a term borrowed with great success from Noël Mostert’s Frontiers), something that marks the point at which difference is brought together, “sutured” in De Kock’s terms, in a manner that always marks the site of trauma, of scar tissue; David Attwell and Barbara Harlow on the space between stasis and change; Breyten Breytenbach on “cultural bastardisation”; and, more recently, in work by Isabel Hofmeyr, Mark Sanders, Michael Titlestad, and Sarah Nuttall, attention to transnationalism, complicities, jazz-like syncretism (theme and variation), and "entanglement" (Chapman 2-3). How, Chapman wonders, have we moved beyond these conceptualisations? Is such movement possible? What does writing look like now – expressly, since, or “beyond”, 2000.

Here we might ask: why this marker (“beyond 2000”)? (The title of the volume doesn’t translate well outside of South Africa. “SA Lit”? Is this computer software? It put me in mind of a curriculum policy document.) The book’s preface suggests this is “rhetorically, beyond J M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999)”, but the editors could have been clearer about what precisely they mean to suggest by invoking Coetzee in this way. I understand them to suggest a desire to move beyond a text taken, implicitly in this construction, by an international readership (again, implicitly), as a key assessment of the post-apartheid nation, or as so widely fêted as to constitute a high-water mark in global interest in the country’s writing (that it was also locally controversial might be taken as providing a continuation, rather than a break, with the overdetermination of literature as always already politically partisan in local discussions of culture). This is a reasonable rhetorical gesture, but I wonder whether life under the post-Mandela presidency, the age of Mbeki and after, would have been a more productive way of framing the period canvassed in expressly political terms – and allowed for an engagement with an assessment of various competing strands in public culture in the period (including the “African Renaissance”, africanisation, afro-pessimism, and, latterly, macho-nationalism).

What the choice of Disgrace’s publication date also marks is the span of a decade to 2009, when most of the essays collected here first appeared in a double issue of the academic journal Current Writing. This volume largely replicates that issue. There are some changes from the original line-up: Marius Crous’s essay on new voices in Afrikaans poetry has been replaced with an excellent survey piece by Louise Viljoen; Wendy Woodward’s essay on “The Nonhuman Animal and Levinasian Otherness” has made way for a usefully provocative essay on the challenges of ecocriticism “of the ‘bioregion’” (360) by Dan Wylie. Some pieces have been substantially edited: Sally-Ann Murray’s essay on Vladislaviċ has become a more general one about the city in the works of a number of writers; Eva Hunter’s essay on white women’s writing has become a jointly authored survey of “Black and White Women’s Writing” (with Siphokazi Jonas).

There are two new pieces: Miki Flockemann’s on theatre (one of the highlights of the collection for me); and Russell Kaschula’s account of recent developments in oral cultures in the region, especially their imbrication with new media and in new mediascapes (he calls this “technauriture” [244]). While engaging and very interesting, parts of Kaschula’s essay paraphrase similar sections in his contribution – on iimbongi in isiXhosa, and their izibongo – to the Cambridge History of South African Literature, edited by David Attwell and Derek Attridge, recently launched in South Africa.¹

The overlap points to some of the challenges facing Chapman and Lenta’s volume. Journal issues do not always make good books, and although there is much to laud in this collection, its inevitable juxtaposition with the Cambridge History points up some of its flaws. One is an unclear overall intention – which is to say: it is all very well suggesting that the question is “what does the field look like now, and how do we make sense of it?”, but being clear about what sort of intervention a volume actually makes is a different matter entirely. Is this book a collection of survey essays whose bibliographies might be the real contribution for scholars? Is it attempting an authoritative account of the field since 2000? Or is it offering a series of provocative interventions? (The answer is: it tries to do all of this. More on this shortly.) The second problem is an unevenness of writing.

Approached as a volume of distinct parts, there is much to welcome: some useful surveys and some extremely helpful bibliographies. There are also productive polemics and provocations to think differently (Wylie’s essay comes to mind here, as does Murray’s). And there are engaging, focused assessments of the work of individual authors, though readers might inevitably question who has been included and who excluded here. The survey essays include Margaret Lenta’s assessment of debut novels by the likes of Imraan Coovadia, Zoë Wicomb (David’s Story; this suggests a clear reading of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town as expressly, and only, “short stories”), Yvette Christiansë, Michiel Heyns, K. Sello Duiker, Kopano Matlwa, Sally-Anne Murray, David Medalie, and so on.

Likewise, we have Hunter and Jonas’s survey of new writing by women in the post-apartheid period, but especially since 2000, attending to some of the hurdles writers, and especially black women writers, continue to face (institutional, language of composition, access to training), and paying attention to important voices in the country, including those of Sindiwe Magona, Lesego Kagiso Molope, Zukiswa Wanner, Angela Makholwa, Angelina N. Sithebe, Lesego Malepe, Nokuthula Maziboko and Matlwa.

I appreciated the glance at genre fiction here (Margie Orford), but more might have been said about the crime novel and gender, and also about new developments aimed at promoting romance fiction for (particularly black) South African women. Marcia Blumberg’s essay on theatre after the TRC is also in the nature of a survey, though it makes a useful distinction between plays that take the Commission as their subject or theme, and the “national drama” of the TRC itself (137) – rather as Catherine Cole has done in her recently published monograph.² Blumberg offers accounts of work by Yael Farber, Nadia Davids, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Lara Foot Newton, and Athol Fugard, amongst others. It is admirably up-to-date, too, offering thoughts on Peter Hayes’s recent work at the National Arts Festival, including Ncamisa! The Women (2009) and I Am Here (2010). I would have appreciated greater consideration of the politics of staging and of venues, however, and infrastructure more generally. Blumberg also dodges the difficult question of how recent work either engages with or disavows spectacle, essentialism, Afro-pessimism, and so on (and how, in the global mediascape, such contexts are inevitable, and inevitably complicating).

Other good surveys include Annie Gagiano on autobiographical writing published in the decade before 2009, and Devarakshanam Betty Govinden on South African Indian writing (dealing with such writers as, inter alia, Aziz Hassim, Ronnie Govender, Pat Poovalingam, Rubendra Govender, Neelan Govender, and Coovadia), which demonstrates the usefulness of the transnational turn in South African studies (and the blindness of any approach that is ignorant of it): “Given the history of Empire, South African Indian writing inevitably intersects with literatures and writings in the rest of Africa, with India and with postcolonies elsewhere”, she observes (284), adding that study of such writing “can help to reconfigure literary studies in South Africa in terms of its links with countries other than Europe” (285).

Nhlanhla Mathonsi and Gugu Mazibuko reflect on the enormous growth in writing in isiZulu since 1994, and in particular between 1999 and 2008. Their survey is fascinating, if only because this reader was shamefully ignorant that popular themes in such writing deal with mixed marriages and the kidnapping of children, homosexuality and xenophobia. Here admirable attention is paid, too, to the institutional frameworks that have enabled the growth of writing in this language: chiefly, competitions run by publishers including Kagiso, Maskew Miller Longman, Heinemann, and Naspers, and collaborations between publishers and the Department of Arts and Culture. The provincial administration has also promoted reading and writing clubs at libraries and community centres – a model that other provinces could profitably follow.

Mathonsi and Mazibuko do not hold back from making evaluative comments: “We do not feel that the poetry of the last decade has measured up to the standard of the new novels and stories. Neither has it reached the standard of the poetry in the 1980s and 1990s” (308), they write. The “problem”, they speculate, is that “many would-be poets” fail “to understand the difference between prose narratives and poems” (310). This is a moment at which comparison with work in other languages might have been useful; Louise Viljoen spends some time in her survey of poetry in Afrikaans in the same period musing on the “narrative turn” (Viljoen describes it as a “move towards a more accessible style of poetry making use of narrative elements” [204]). Michael Chapman’s essay on poetry in English and its engagement with politics in the period engages, too, with similar issues. Chapman provides a useful survey of a number of new poetic voices.³ Viljoen helpfully provides headers and groups poets by thematic concerns, rather than listing, and although the headings are not always adequately contextualised (are “identity”, “language”, “socio-political commentary” particularly Afrikaans? The section on “indigenous cultural material” is fascinating), the range of work canvassed is intriguing.⁴

Amongst the essays that are less surveys than engagements directed towards a polemic, or a theoretical intervention, those by Leon de Kock, Miki Flockemann, Sally-Ann Murray, and Dan Wylie deserve particular attention. De Kock poses the playfully polemical question “‘Does South African Literature Still Exist?’”, which he spends a chapter answering – or the ramifications of which he spends a chapter examining, in typically forthright and erudite De Kock fashion, while discussing the various pressures at play in the judging of literary prizes in the country in recent years (he has been involved in several of these). Flockemann puts recent South African theatre in the context of an arc drawn from Grotowskian “poor theatre” to theatres of excess, focusing on how recent works by the likes of Mandla Mbothwe and Mark Fleishman (and Magnet Theatre), Mpulelelo Paul Grootboom, Brett Bailey and Third World Bunfight, Lara Foot Newton and her Masambe company, have looked for “alternative ways of speaking” that draw on the aesthetic legacies of Artaud, Grotowski, Brecht, and Brook, but in search for “an ‘effect’ rather than a replication” (160). Some attention to where one draws the line between theatre and performance art (and mention of artists like Peter van Heerden, Steven Cohen, and even Nicholas Hlobo), would have been welcome. Nonetheless, Flockemann’s is a stellar essay.

Murray’s contribution – punchy, polemical, even colloquial in moments – offers real vigour of analysis in addressing representations of urban life in work by Ivan Vladislaviċ, Niq Mhlongo, Kgebetli Moele, Zukiswa Wanner, and others. Wylie’s essay poses substantial challenges to the scholarly community, suggesting fruitful ways in which we might consider how recent South African cultural production has engaged with the “global ecological climacteric and its local manifestations” (365). J U Jacobs traces a concern with diaspora and migration in selected work by J M Coetzee, Breytenbach, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, and Patricia Shonstein Pinnock. The analysis is mildly eccentric, but engaging and occasionally illuminating (I had not noticed, for instance, that all of the women interviewees in Coetzee’s Summertime have a large measure of displacement in their life stories).⁵ Cheryl Stobie’s “Postcolonial Pomosexuality”, flippant and mildly dismissive title notwithstanding, offers a not unengaging discussion of recent trends in writing we might finally – after her unconvincing disavowal of the term in her 2007 monograph, with which I took issue⁶ – agree to call “queer”.⁷

There are, however, a number of essays that fall short of the standard set by those mentioned above. Ileana Dimitriu’s assessment of Nadine Gordimer’s post-apartheid work I found disappointing: perhaps there were clearer grounds to venture the claim that Gordimer was not quite sure how to deal with the politics of the new nation after her old adversaries (apartheid, apartheid ideologues) disappeared (or seemed to) in 1994. Clearer grounds perhaps, but still very shaky ones. However, in the wake of Gordimer’s outspoken stance against the Protection of Information Bill and other proposed restrictions on the press and on public speech in the country, it is simply not true that she is no longer a brave voice in public life. I would also want to question the suggestion that “[l]ike None to Accompany Me, The House Gun presents a juxtaposition of two apparently ill-fitting stories: the parents’ story and their son’s story do not interact with any illumination” (124). It is arguable that in fact the tension (rather than lack of interaction) is part of Gordimer’s point.

I was also puzzled by Helize van Vuuren’s essay on Antjie Krog, “Towards a Syncretic Identity”. It is undoubtedly useful in offering an account of works that readers who know only Country of My Skull or A Change of Tongue may not know, and in reiterating Krog’s very real significance as a poet for Afrikaans letters. But the essay is marred by imprecise writing – like the claim that Country has been “translated into most of the world’s languages” (225). Factually speaking, this cannot possibly be so.⁸ Is it appropriate to refer to “the extinct /Xam culture” (237)? Is the Bleek/Lloyd archive really (still) “rather obscure” (ibid.)? Might something more interesting be said of orature than that “[t]he oral tradition is essentially pre-modern […]. However, arguably, there is space for modernisation and renewal, as there is in all traditions” (239)? Ought an editor to have asked for a rephrasing of the formulation describing Mrs Konile as “this illiterate, uneducated and practically destitute rural Xhosa [woman]” (237), or Kopano Ratele as a specialist in “African psychology” (238)? Statements (about Country of My Skull) like “the book encapsulates the essence of the apartheid experience”, and that it is a “dense mosaic of microcosmic life stories” (225) seem at best inadequate ways of describing that rich, provocative, problematic text. The chapter is too hagiographic, too ready to dismiss real anxieties scholars have voiced about some of Krog’s work. (I am also disinclined to consider favourably an essay on Krog that bears no mark of having read what Mark Sanders, Carli Coetzee, or Laura Moss have had to say, in print, about it.)

De Kock’s essay on prize judging ends with a suggestion, repeated by Louise Viljoen in her chapter (203), that, with the sheer volume of material being produced in South Africa (despite it being a country with a small active readership and active book-buying public), we should investigate the usefulness of Franco Moretti’s claim that “distant reading” might be more appropriate than “close reading” (34). This would be a form of reading “where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems” (quoted by De Kock, 35). In many ways, this is the task that the editors of the volume as a whole have set: in part at least to provide a snapshot of what is happening now. Inevitably, however, such a task is outdated even as it is published. It is also prone to critical faddism: De Kock turns his eye on trends in South African criticism during the course of his chapter, noting drily that “[w]hat was once a critical industry which prided itself on the recovery of ‘lost’ or neglected work, and which often resorted to large-scale and detailed histories, now tends to draw out themes and append individual works to such themes (cities, metropolitanisms and oceanic themes being particularly prevalent currently)” (21). Any “distant reading” needs to be bold and inventive in order to make an intervention that might be sustained beyond the usefulness of its lists of titles. If it pretends to be expansive, but at the same time does not concede to the genre of the historical engagement, it is bound to run onto the rocks. There is always also the risk of being parochial: De Kock considers some work by South Africans who do not write about South Africa, as does Cheryl Stobie, in a more limited way, in her engagement with Barbara Adair, but what about non-South African writers who write about the place?

De Kock’s essay is a laudable attempt to engage with the institutions of the literary in South Africa, and his candid exposition of the kinds of assumptions that prize judges use is fascinating. I would have liked greater self-consciousness about the pressures of these institutions – and of the constitution of the field of cultural production and consumption in the country in general – throughout the volume as a whole. Chapman’s introduction welcomes the transnational turn in South African studies, situating my own work on publication and reception histories and the transnational production of the idea of a “South African” literature in this vein. He wonders, however, whether such book-historical projects might inevitably “lead us to a situation – familiar to the postcolonies – in which the ‘locality’ is once again subsumed by a global imperative or, to revert to an older discourse, by an ongoing ‘colonisation’” (7). One could ask the same question at infinite levels of regress about any equivalent of the local, and any variant of the idea of a “national” literature, of “literature”, of literature “of” South Africa (or “in” it). Chapman continues:

It is to be cautious, however, of Van der Vlies’s attendant conclusion that an ever-growing body of the writing will be published both in South Africa and abroad. This will not be the case. Only those writers whose work meets an internationally acknowledged horizon of expectation – novelists in English, the novel being the most accessibly travelling form – are likely to be read worldwide. If my argument has avoided reducing a passage of debate to a narrow lane of global travelers, then the category, South African Literature, continues to have value in its persistence. (8)

There is little to disagree with in this final claim, but the statement (my “attendant conclusion”) was more in the way of a bland statement of fact – writing set or produced in the country will continue to be published; factors outside the author’s control will continue to exercise influences on the afterlives of texts – than a claim about value. Chapman’s idea of an “internationally acknowledged horizon of expectation” seems more value-laden and, frankly, less cognizant of the influence of, for example, literary agents and publishers’ editors, than is in fact the case outside of South Africa, where, unfortunately, the romantic myth of the author as creative genius, still, in large measure, holds (and is allowed to hold) sway.

Endnotes

1. Other authors appearing in both volumes are Louise Viljoen (writing on Afrikaans literature after 1976 in the Cambridge History) and Leon de Kock (on translation). The Cambridge History has 39 chapters by 43 authors, and covers the full chronological range of writing in and from the country, to Chapman and Lenta’s 17 chapters by 19 authors. Full disclosure: I authored a chapter in the Attwell and Attridge volume.

2. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Indiana University Prtess, 2010).

3. He names, amongst others, Rustum Kozain, Mzi Mahola, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Lebogang Mashile, Megan Hall, Colleen Higgs, Helen Moffett, Fiona Zerbst, Makhosazana Xaba, Gabeba Baderoon, Finuala Dowling, Aryan Kaganof, and Lisa Combrinck.

4. Authors discussed include Danie Marais, Carina Stander, Bernard Odendaal, Ronelda Kamfer, Loftus Marais, Charl-Pierre Naudé, Gilbert Gibson, Marius Crous, Peter Snyders, Loit Sôls, Antjie Krog, Breyten Breytenbach, Daniel Hugo, Leon Rousseau, Phil du Plessis, Hans du Plessis, Thomas Deacon, Hennie Aucamp, Johann de Lange, and Joan Hambidge.

5. Julia Frankl has a Hungarian Jewish refugee parent, and is living in Ontario; Adriana Nascimento is Brazilian, and came to South Africa via Angola; Sophie Denoël lived in Madagascar, and is interviewed in Paris; John’s cousin, Margot Jonker, lives away from the family farm in the Roggeveld (318).

6. I reviewed her Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels (UKZN Press, 2009) critically in Social Dynamics; see v.35.1 (2009), 198-20

7. Stobie discusses work by writers including Mark Behr, Michiel Heyns, Craig Higginson, André Carl van der Merwe, Gerald Kraak, K. Sello Duiker, Shamim Sarif, Anne Schuster, Barbara Adair, Lauren Beukes.

8. There are, most experts agree, more than 6,500 languages in the world, though about 2,000 have fewer than 1,000 speakers.