Despite censorship and persecutions against the opponents of apartheid rule, including the writers who were forced into silence, exile, or seclusion at home or in prison cells, their voices rose above the heavy exactions. Throughout the 1980s, South African writers were being heard and read all over the world. Among them are novelists André Brink; Nadine Gordimer (Nobel Prize 1991); Es’kia Mphahlele (nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1984); and J. M. Coetzee (Nobel Prize 2003); poet and essayist Breyten Breytenbach; the playwright Athol Fugard; and many more. Their gift to the writing generations that came after them is an extraordinary legacy of courage and original literary bravura.
In 1994, the year Nelson Mandela was democratically elected to lead the country, Denis Hirson, a young South African author living in Paris, celebrated the end of apartheid with the publication of The Heinemann Book of South African Short Stories,1 which was launched at the Village Voice on July 8 of that year.
To open his reading, he imagined the different paths now being cleared for the emerging and impressive array of South African writers: “The high dam-walls of apartheid have contained and given shape to much South African writing up to now. As these walls crack and alter, which new currents will flow through? What of the all too neglected sources of memory and ancestry? Will the power of traditional tales and praise poetry enter contemporary prose? Will new hybrid forms emerge out of what Nelson Mandela has termed ‘a rainbow nation’? Perhaps these are some of the questions to ask of writers working in South Africa today.”
Denis Hirson
Born in the UK and raised in South Africa, Denis Hirson followed his family into exile in London before moving to Paris in 1975, where he settled permanently. A prolific author of essays, poetry, one novel, and several memoirs, he came to play a vital role in the life of the Village Voice, introducing authors and organizing various literary events, among them our tributes to Ted Hughes and Grace Paley. Perhaps his greatest contribution to our bookstore was allowing us to discover the up-and-coming South African voices he knew, showcasing these fiction writers, essayists, and poets, including himself, whose works reveal the multiple facets of a country in the throes of dramatic change.
Hirson gave his debut reading at the Village Voice on April 24, 1988, with the launch of The House Next Door to Africa,2 a memoir of his early childhood and family life that embraced his grandparents, who had left their native Tsarist Russia for exile in South Africa.
Two more reminiscences of his youth followed: I Remember King Kong (The Boxer)3 and We Walk Straight So You Better Get Out the Way,4 completing the triptych of his early life in Johannesburg, all written in the form of prose poems. A friend of mine who had also spent her own girlhood in South Africa described these two memoirs as “little jewels of books of memories written in unconnected sentences, like little bits of poems, deliciously humorous, sad, and silly, bringing back to me things I had completely forgotten.”5 In them are flashbacks of Denis as a boy, his keen observations of the world around him, and his hidden thoughts trying to penetrate the resounding silence of a father jailed for his opposition to the apartheid regime.
An evening with Denis Hirson (Denis on far right), October 8, 2011.
© Flavio Toma.
Then again, there are also typical boyhood memories and, like any other boy in the world, he was going to school, playing with friends, listening to the latest hits, locking himself in his room, and diving into his own fantasy world, he fondly remembered, stressing that “under apartheid, as in all parts of the world, people were living their lives as best they could under circumstances which were getting worse and worse in the townships while the whites lived in a kind of a bubble of security.”6
His first “life-shaping memory” was the Sharpeville massacre on March 21, 1960, that the photos in a book on his father’s shelves revealed to him: “I was eight at the time, and like all children, I absorbed what was going on, not knowing exactly what it was. The shock of bodies fallen, clothes blotting up blood, a litter of shoes, bags, hats, bicycles . . .”7 was soon followed by a police search in the family house, leading to the arrest of “the person I felt closest to in the world.”8
The two incidents were to become one and the same in the mind of the child. “How many events in one’s life are there really that are utterly unavoidable in our memories, those we always think back to . . . In my mind I constantly return to the moment my father was arrested, before our relationship was arrested, before he came to sit at the center of gravity of my life, locked in a prison cell.9
The following exchanges between Denis Hirson and his audience come from several of his book presentations over the years at the Village Voice Bookshop.
Q: “Had you written your childhood memories soon after leaving South Africa, would they have been the same?”
Hirson: “Memory is the primary material for many of us writers, and while I was writing this book We Walk Straight . . . , my father was right there, very much present. Now, about thirty years later, something else is at work: a letting go which involves multilayered images, the way you get the waves coming in and going out, and in between, all those layers of water. So, there are those layers of past and present entering each other, and this is wonderful to me in terms of emotions.”10
Q: “The reader feels those emotions in your writing. Is there a difference in intensity between recalling your memories and seeing them now on the page?”
Hirson: “A poet, whose name I don’t remember, explained that if ‘you want to see clearly, your eyes have to be dry.’ There is a constant interplay between the emotions you want to keep and the emotions you work out.”11
Q: “Philip Roth said that all exiles tend to go back to their native countries after a while. You’ve been back to South Africa. How did it feel revisiting a country that had radically changed since your childhood?”
Hirson: “In my case, my childhood memory is just one of the aspects of South African reality. When I wrote my first book, The House Next Door to Africa, it was an experience familiar to many people around me, including my grandparents: they wait seven, eight years and want to go back and repossess their country. Past and present are crossing each other. Yet I wonder if it is possible to go back to the past when it was not possible to write, as if the past could be awoken and be present?”12
Q: “Reading your memories, one is astonished at the amount of minute details remembered. What is your secret?”
Hirson: “I have no idea, but being by myself in our garden was a constant treasure for me, with insects and all the other things. Yet there was something else. When I was twelve, I knew I was going to leave South Africa once my father would come out of jail. I wonder if there was not something inside myself that made me take in everything around a tiny bit stronger. But also, memory, the minute something happens, you transform it; memory is doing its work all the time.”13
Q: “When you now visit your country and having survived, do you feel some kind of guilt?”
Hirson: “I know that many whites in South Africa feel guilty; In fact, all of us have reasons to feel guilty, but this is a position from which I cannot write. One of my mentors is Athol Fugard, the greatest playwright South Africa has had. He really had his hand in the guts of the place, working with it. He had been denied a passport and therefore couldn’t leave the country. He invited me to his home when I was seventeen, and years later, when I went back to South Africa, I visited him. I remember we were sitting at the dining room table, just after coming out of his garden shed, and looking at me, he announced, ‘Today, I’ve found something to celebrate.’”14
Q: “If you do not feel guilty, did you ever feel you were a victim?”
Hirson: “For South African writers there are two traps: the one of feeling guilty for the white writers and the one of feeling victims for the Black writers. These two traps have infested South African writing to death. For any writer, in any time and place, to acknowledge that there is darkness is to acknowledge that you can go beyond. I want something to take me beyond these feelings of guilt or victimization. And that’s what my father gave me. He went to jail, and as incredible as it may sound, I feel that it’s his gift to me. Of course, I would have much rather had him bringing me up, but he didn’t; he was there in prison, absent to us. At the same time, as the Egyptian Jewish French poet Edmond Jabès said, ‘Chaque blessure est une source.’ You let go, you transform the wound into something else.”15
Q: “Mandela’s release from prison was a historical moment. Would such major writers as Brink, Gordimer, or Coetzee have written their masterpieces outside the inhuman circumstances of apartheid?”
Hirson: “After Mandela was released from prison, it was, I thought, a turning point for South Africans living in South Africa, a wake-up call. Mandela was out, he was going to come to power, and the people went out on the streets to support him. If this was going to be the future, where had we been in the past? Because, when we grew up, Blacks were only laborers—that’s what they were. They were not recognized as full people at all: every single Black was a body and a soul demeaned, not only in political, but also in personal terms.
“So much was wrapped in silence; so much was unspoken. One major problem for an author writing a novel about South Africa, particularly one taking place under apartheid, is how to deal with Blacks and whites on the same page. The question for me now, as a writer, is not to write only from a child’s perspective. Trying to juxtapose the innocence of a fine childhood and this darkness of political negation is something to be wondered about, to be pondered over for a lifetime. This is why in my novel The Dancing and the Death on Lemon Street, introducing the character of Rosy, the Black maid of a white employer under apartheid, is a major switch for me.”16
At each of his readings, Denis had friends from South Africa in the audience, those living in Paris and others passing through the city. At the close of events, they would often sing South African songs accompanied on the guitar or evoke personal memories. At one such moment, he concluded, “I don’t feel that my books are my own only, they are filled with memories of other people.”17
Breyten Breytenbach
In 1975, the South African poet and painter, essayist, and activist Breyten Breytenbach was living in Paris. On an illegal visit to South Africa, he was arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison for his political views. It was also about that time that Denis Hirson discovered this poet’s writings, “a turning point in my own life,” and translated his collection of Afrikaans poems In Africa Even the Flies Are Happy, published in London in 1978.18 “The high dam-walls of apartheid,” quoted earlier, were those of the prisons where Hirson’s father spent nine years, and the poet Breyten Breytenbach, seven, as he was released in 1982 due to the impact of massive international protests.
On July 1, 2008, Breytenbach came to the Village Voice for the launch of his latest book of poetry, Windcatcher: New and Selected Poems 1964-2006.19 He focused his talk on his writer’s experience in prison, one shared by a multitude of other authors, but varying with each passing tyrant. In fact, the conditions of his solitary confinement were especially horrendous as he was not allowed to write. Yet writing was “the only way to keep sense and some kind of sanity, but it could be done only in my mind, recreating the world I knew before, and particularly Paris, trying to hold on to it.”20
After his second trial and more intense international pressure on the government, Breytenbach was now allowed to write, but under very strict conditions: “I was given a certain number of sheets in the morning, and in the evening, they were taken away from me, and I wouldn’t see them again. In other words, if I were to write a story which I couldn’t complete in the given time, I couldn’t go back to where I had left it the day before, so I had to keep it in mind . . . which, by the way, is an interesting way of writing and has to do with stream of consciousness. You had to hang on to the mood you were in the day before in order to continue the story the next day. Plot and characters were secondary; more important was to keep the feel of the story.”
Those sheets of paper were, of course, scrutinized by the prison’s security officials and the psychologist as well, “and this,” Breytenbach said with an ironic grin, “was a small, bright upbeat to the situation. I had an audience.” [laughter] “These people were reading my sheets because it was their job to read them. And so, I was absolutely sure that there would be people to read me.” [more laughter]
Mandla Langa
Mandla Langa is the South African author who was assigned the honorable task of editing and completing the sequel to Nelson Mandela’s first volume of memoirs, A Long Walk to Freedom. This second volume was to stress the urgency of Mandela’s mission as president of the country, but was interrupted by his death in 2013. Thanks to Langa, these completed memoirs were published under the title Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years.21
On March 17, 2011, Denis Hirson introduced Mandla Langa at the Village Voice. Sentenced to prison for his political activities within the African National Congress (ANC)22 during his student years, Langa fled the country and lived twenty years in exile as his party’s delegate in Africa and Europe.
In 1994, the year of Mandela’s election, Langa returned home, but not to the promised land he had envisaged. In the preface to his reading, Hirson had rightly identified Langa as “one of today’s South African writers who do not flinch before the new difficulties and unpleasant truths of their fledging country, able to grasp in their writings such issues as exile, betrayal, and power.”
A poised and austere presence, Mandla Langa opened the presentation of his novel The Lost Colours of the Chameleon23 by speaking of the lasting effects of political banishment: “We are all now feeling the pain that comes almost thirty years after being away in exile, something vicious on the part of the power of the time, something that left us stunned for life. Exile was not so much a geographic dislocation as something that consumed and branded one for life. People coming back from exile had to face how to deal with whites, something that had never been approached in South Africa before. While we were in exile, small communities were created in the country, and the political situation was characterized by infighting, splits, and betrayals.”24
Betrayal is, in fact, one the themes of his work. In the passage the author chose, the protagonist suffers from a loss of speech or “mute hysteria” as the result of the betrayal that led to the death of someone dear to him. “This book,” he explained in further detail, “is an act of exorcism to come to terms with my brother shot dead in 1994, and how to change, say, what has taken place instead of the promised land. It’s all the more problematical as we are all very intimate, knowing each other, killing each other.”
The title of his The Lost Colours of the Chameleon is an allusion to Mandela’s vision of his country as the ‘Rainbow Nation,’ but also to the speed with which power can change people. “The political reality, like quicksilver, is rapidly changeable,” Langa told us, adding that “anyone who thinks a nanosecond that a person in politics is there for altruistic reasons and ideals is deluded. Beyond the chameleon,” he went on, “I will opt for Baldwin’s ‘The Price of the Ticket,’ by which he meant ‘opting’ for human life rather than power.”* On this somber note Langa concluded his reading, stressing that “these things needed to be said.”
Damon Galgut
Damon Galgut was the youngest of the South African authors to read at the Village Voice and part of the rising generation of writers for whom the central question was to become free from the literature of protest and embrace the complex issues of history and identity. He was not quite twenty years old when he published his first novel and thirty when Nelson Mandela was elected President of their country newly freed from apartheid.
Galgut was invited to our bookstore on April 4, 2005, to talk about his fifth book The Good Doctor,25 a novel representative of its time as it wavers between the dark apartheid mood that continued to linger, invisibly haunting people’s lives, and the hope of a newly united world, albeit pervaded by uncertainties, ambivalences, and betrayals.
This work summons up these two worlds through the characters of two doctors posted to a small provincial hospital in post-apartheid South Africa. One represents the old guard while the younger doctor contemplates setting up some kind of ideal community. The story unfolds against the backdrop of an overhanging mansion, a kind of fort perched on a hill high above the town, formerly the place of the “brigadier,” the local official known for his brutally cruel rule over its inhabitants. Believed to have been abandoned at the end of apartheid, in reality, it is still inhabited by this officer, biding his time before a return to power.
Denis Hirson in conversation with Damon Galgut, April 4, 2005. © Flavio Toma
Introducing Damon Galgut, Denis Hirson recalled this uneasy climate of growing up “in deafened silence at a time when the political opposition was gagged and buried underground, and the artists and churchmen were called to take sides. What Galgut set to do in his writings was precisely not that,” he claimed.
Referring to a conference at which our author had taken unorthodox positions opposed to the ideologies of the moment, Denis asked him where he stood in his novel on the question of hope.
Galgut: [a long pause] “You seem to make a connection between ideology and hope. I’m not sure such a connection exists, and, as time goes on, I tend to think that disavowing any kind of ideology is ideology itself. You’re kind of never free from that. . . . As far as hope regarding South Africa, I’m very hopeful, to be honest. Where we are, what we’ve achieved in a very short time is remarkable. I don’t like the term ‘miracle’ often used when speaking about South Africa since it somehow would imply God’s intervention. I certainly don’t believe that. The arrangement we’ve come to in South Africa is very pragmatic, and though very imperfect, my personal feeling is that we’re right now [2005] in a period of grace.”
Hirson: “My question was not about hope in South Africa, but about writing. It seems to me that many South African writers under apartheid drew their central energy from the hope of some sort of human survival. Even in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, there is a touch of hope. However, this doesn’t seem to be where you’re drawing your energy from as a writer. Where would you say is your center of energy?”
Galgut: [thinking] . . . “The fact that this little hospital exists, continues to function, no matter what the desperation of the people is, speaks of hope. This quality of endurance, doggedness, and insistence is in itself a form of hope. There is also in human situations something kind of amusing, nutty, ridiculous which makes you laugh and this also contains hope.”
“Your characters are interesting and complex; they try to make sense of a reality they don’t always understand, the new reality of the country. Could you talk about their ambivalence?” someone in the audience asked.
Galgut: “The South African literature most of us know is one clearly centered morally, and the situation was such in the novels under apartheid that there was always a character, an individual that stood against the system. By the time you finished the book, you were feeling okay. It comforted you on your moral status because you identified with the right person. The moral issue clicked. My feeling is that South Africa today is in a complete different place, and all those clear issues are not clear anymore.”
Q: “How could it be worse than under apartheid?”
Galgut: “We have all those head figures from the times of the struggle who are now in government, and they behave like ordinary politicians, which is to say that, at times, they are quite morally compromised, given the corruption, scandals, and money. There is a character in my book, a nurse partly damaged by his past, who behaves badly, stealing things from the hospital. It’s very hard to know what attitude to take towards a character like that. Is he a victim or is he a villain? The feeling of ambivalence is something new for South African literature, I think. I wanted the reader to be morally disturbed.”
Q: “Under apartheid, the majority of South African writers were white liberals. What about Black South African literature today?”
Galgut: “I don’t think that many Black writers are taking up the issue of corruption yet. There is a kind of searching for new themes and beyond politics, social ones. What does it mean to be poor in South Africa as opposed to being politically dispossessed? We’re in a kind of a searching period. I don’t think that anyone in South Africa knows what the themes really are. Authors like Denis here are writing about memory and how this works. There is a feeling that South African literature is an opened territory, but what exactly the defining themes of the new South African literature are have still to be found, and it is quite hard. I should add that for white South African writers to write anything about corruption is immediately seen as criticism of the fledgling government and read as a kind of implicit nostalgia for the old one, which nobody likes to have hanging around the neck.”
Hirson: “There are Black poets today who do not hesitate to be critical, yet without reducing their writings to slogans. They are able to weave their present-day critical glance into very powerful lyrics.”
This informative and stirring back and forth between our two authors concluded with a statement from yet another South African writer who was at the reading. “In this novel,” he said, “the author has managed to convey at once the despair and hopelessness of a country in the grip of resentment and crime and the determination and singlemindedness of a nation on the verge of its existence.”26