Aftermaths

Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

AftermathsAuthor(s): Rob NixonSource: Transition, No. 72 (1996), pp. 64-78Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the Hutchins Center for African and AfricanAmerican Research at Harvard UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935361 .

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( Position

AFTERMATHS

South African literature today

Rob Nixon

Bertrand Russell once argued that ideal-

ists are fated to achieve what they have

struggled for in guises that destroy their

ideals. This ironic maxim may overstate

the dilemmas now facing South African

writers, but post-apartheid literature

does bear the marks of a difficult transi-

tion, as they struggle to redefine their

role now that old ideals have been over-

taken by epochal events. They have

gained key freedoms but lost, in the

process, the very stresses that fueled their

creativity. How will writers adjust to the loss of

those dependable obstacles, which had

become their signal themes and even, for

some, their creative mainstays? In recent

years, South African writers have faced the end of censorship, of political deten-

tion, and of exile, not to mention the

waning of ecriture engagee and resistance culture. These epic shifts have cast doubt on the writer's social status, public role,

motivation, and imaginative focus. These shifts have also revealed some

unlikely affinities. The concerns that

South African writers have voiced echo well beyond their shores, particularly to the former Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact, where democratic victories have also brought uncer- tain returns. In many of these countries,

expanded social freedoms have done lit-

tle to ease poverty; in some of them it

has worsened, as has joblessness. And, as in South Africa, the advance of democ-

racy has typically been accompanied by surging lawlessness and the rise of syn- dicated crime. The old pestilential cer- titudes have been defeated, but in a man- ner that has left many-not least many writers-feeling somewhat subvictori- ous. Russian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and East German authors have all spoken of a splitting of the personality, now common among South African writers, between the freed citizen who celebrates the advent of a

post-totalitarian order and the anxious

writer for whom liberation feels like a

kind of desertion. Invited to join a convocation of Hun-

64 TRANSITION ISSUE 72

Clive Van den Berg (Zambian, 1956-), The Mine Dump

Project (Detail). 1995. From Art in South

Africa The Future

Present, edited by Sue Williamson and

AshrafJamal (Capetown: David

Philip)



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garian writers soon after the overthrow of their regime, Nadine Gordimer instantly understood what she called their "fear of

freedom-fear, for a writer, meaning not

knowing how you are possibly going to write next." Elsewhere, Gordimer has observed how bewildered many of those

ex-Soviet bloc writers appear now that

they have been "released from the con-

straints of censorship and the allegorical modes invented to circumvent it." The

old conventions-not least the conventions of refusal-no longer serve.

There is more to this affinity than

roughly analogous circumstances. De-

spite their geographical and ideological distance, many writers from these two

regions developed a powerful imaginative kinship during the Cold War. As a new wave of state censorship gathered force in the early sixties, South Africa

joined the Soviet Union as a primary

target of international anti-censorship

campaigns. (The first hundred issues of

Index on Censorship devoted far more ar- ticles to South Africa and the Soviet

Union than any other countries.)

On the surface, it seems an improbable pairing, this intuitive empathy between South African writers, casualties of the world's most draconian anti-communist

regime, and anti-Soviet dissidents, casualties of communism in practice. But anti-

apartheid and anti-communist writers became bracketed as emissaries of ex-

tremity. These odd couples-Gordimer and Kundera, Brutus and Brodsky, Brink and Havel-grew accustomed to bump- ing into each other in anthologies, on PEN panels, in the media-indeed wherever there was talk of literary heroism and literary resistance.

For Western audiences, the South Africans, Soviets, and Eastern Europeans served a dependable if ambiguous pur- pose. Their presence was, by turns, reas-

suring and unsettling. On the one hand, they were visceral reminders of the pre- cious freedoms that Western writers have

long enjoyed-above all, the freedom of

expression.Yet they were also heroes, the kind of heroes that Western, democratic cultures could no longer sustain. There was, you might say, an "adversity-envy,"


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as evidenced by George Steiner's pro- vocative talk of the inspirational power that the "muse of censorship" exercised in repressive societies. Bill Buford has noted the long line of American writers who have reflected covetously on the lit-

erary stature that political adversity seems to generate. Neal Ascherson has reflected similarly on an English jealousy of a social order in which writing and the life of the intellect appear, through the fierce dynamics of risk, to achieve a

higher status. Yet, as Ascherson sagely cautions, such regrets "come close to an

absurdity: to regretting that England has never known occupation or state terror."

In the post-Cold War and post- apartheid era, the very notion of a "muse of censorship" sounds somewhat anti-

quated, despite the continuing persecu- tion of writers in Burma, Nigeria, Turkey, Algeria, Tibet, and China. But

oppression in these nations hasn't ac-

quired the political resonance in the West that the struggles against Soviet and

apartheid domination did. Moreover, the current debate over censorship has in-

creasingly shifted to technological issues-the impact, for instance, of e-mail and the World Wide Web-at the ex-

pense of the solitary heroism of the writer. New media have themselves become the primary symbols and reposi- tories of democratic resistance to the au- thoritarian state.

In South Africa, the relaxation of liter-

ary censorship in the late eighties was a

harbinger of broader freedoms, and it was through the rupturing of the censor-writer dyad that South African artists first intuited that new freedoms could result in imaginative crises. Almost as

AFTERMATHS 67

Brett Murray (South African, 1961- ), Language and Land. 1996. From Art in

South Africa:The Future Present, edited

by Sue Williamson and


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proof that an era had ended, Johannes- burg's Witwatersrand University hosted, in I993, one of those half-uplifting, semi-surreal reconciliation dramas that have become a sign of the times: a forum entitled "The Censored Meet the Censors."

Gordimer has argued that the imaginative legacy of censorship has been

doubly distorting because of both the

cramping pressure of the censors and the

cramping counterpressure of resistance. There is a third legacy, which Ellen

Kuzwayo, author of Call Me Woman, has

pointed out: "The censors gave writers an exaggerated sense of their own im-

portance.What's gone now is the elec-

tricity between writers and readers that

censorship provoked." Novelist Chris-

topher Hope has added that "from the writer's point of view, detestation is a lot better than indifference." Both Kuzwayo and Hope speculated that the passing of

apartheid might result in a decline in literature's authority.

Censorship served as a major barome- ter of relevance. Writers are now facing the increasing irrelevance of relevance as a marker of literary value and inspiration. A rift has emerged between imaginative and political risk-a distinction often

stigmatized under apartheid. Njabulo Ndebele, the lapidary critic

and short story writer, has long stood with Gordimer as the most vocal critic of the reactive orthodoxies that perme- ated South African literature. A decade before his country's democratic turn, Ndebele was already concerned that the brutal prohibitiveness of apartheid was

making some writers obsessed with the

spectacle of oppositional violence. Such reactive writing typically neglected the

everyday experience of black South Africans wherein their culture expressed itself in more mundane, Manicheanless terms. More recently, Ndebele has drawn attention to the immense literary challenge posed by the loss of a clear oppositional role; he speaks of "the para- doxical dependence of so many anti-

apartheid writers on the philosophy that

they attacked. It was brutal, but in some

ways easy to understand."

Emerging from the long night of

apartheid, writers have found themselves

standing not in the clear dawn of liberation but in a misty half-light, thick with

Having forged their pens into swords, South

Africa's writers have now been summoned to

turn their swords into ploughshares

paradox. Having forged their pens into

swords, the nation's writers have now been summoned, from many quarters, to turn their swords into ploughshares. The demilitarization of the literary culture has became a trope for the nineties. Some writers are relieved that they no

longer have to "use words as if they were

AK47s."Just as writing could no longer expect to be "prejudicial to the safety of the state" in the absence of censorship, it could also no longer expect to operate as "a weapon of struggle." As Gordimer asked her colleagues at the Congress of Johannes Segogela

South African Writers, "Shall we be a (SthAfrican, 1937-), Satan's Fresh Meat

cultural army trained for war and out of Market 1993.

place in peace?" The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. From Art in

What, then, is the future of the South South Africa-The

African adversarial imagination? The Future Present, edited by Sue Williamson and

ANC has risen to power: they have re- AshrafJamal

quested, and deserve, a grace period in (Capetown David

which to consolidate the fragile peace P

AFTERMATHS 69



Sandile Zulu and to embark on the trapeze act ofbal- (South African, 1960-), Untitled. ancing reconciliation with transforma- 1996. From Art in tion. South Africa.The

uture Present, edited But Mandela's election has brought Future Present, edited

by Sue Williamson and fewer deep changes than many had Ashrafjamal hoped. For artists steeped in the resis- (Capetown: David

Philip) tance mode-like playwright Maishe

Maponya and performance poet Sandile

Dikeni-this has proven to be not just a bewildering period but a vexing one.

They have both maintained that, whatever the political gains, this half-baked

situation was not the revolution they had been creating for.

While there are broad similarities be-

tween the crises of imaginative identity

experienced by post-apartheid and post- communist writers, there are some critical differences. In most of the former

Soviet empire, the repressive regime did

not fall because of decades of pressure from a mass movement for democracy, as

Once anti-apartheid writers and anti-

Soviet writers chastised Westerners

for coveting their adversity; now those

same writers evince adversity-envy

toward their own recent pasts

happened in South Africa. After 1976, much black South African writing de-

veloped symbiotically with the national-

populist drive for liberation. This writ-

ing, much of it "immediate literature," often sought to articulate a spirit of col- lective endeavor. From the 1976 Soweto

Uprising to Mandela's release in I990,

performance genres proved most popu- lar and imaginatively successful. Theater

and poetry, unlike most Eastern Euro-

pean and Soviet dissident poetry, were

typically composed with performance at rallies, funerals, and concerts in mind.

Still, the tectonic changes that ripped apart the Soviet bloc between 1989 and 1991 were a major catalyst of the cultural changes in South Africa. Without the collapse of communism, South Afri- can negotiations for democracy would not have gotten under way at that time.

Suddenly, both the left and the right in South Africa had to reconceive themselves.

ANC socialism was very different from the state socialisms of Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, and the Soviet Union, which in turn differed

amongst themselves. Nonetheless, the fall of Eastern European socialism im-

pelled a crisis of ideology, idiom, and idealism in South Africa. In the wake of the country's momentous yet ambiguous success, where were writers steeped in the rhetoric of socialist resistance to find a new language and a new vision?

Writers from formerly totalitarian countries have been impaled on a su-

preme irony. Once anti-apartheid and anti-Soviet writers chastised Westerners for coveting their adversity; now those same writers evince adversity-envy toward their own recent pasts. Figures as varied as Milan Kundera, Victor Ero-

feyev,Vaclav Havel, Eva Hoffman, and

Josef Svoboda have all chronicled how certain writers from the ex-Soviet bloc look back fondly on the imaginative se- curities of the past as they flounder amid their newfound, indefinite freedoms. Writers schooled in resilience and resistance have found their blows absorbed

soundlessly by softer, more amorphous




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AFTERMATHS 71

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Penny Siopis (South African, 1953-), Comrade Mother. 1994. From Art in South Africa: The Future Present, edited

by Sue Williamson and

AshrafJamal (Capetown: David Philip)




circumstances. "There is no wall to hit

against," as the poet and translator Michael Hamburger put it. Or as the

flamboyant Russian novelistVictor Ero-

feyev recently observed, Russian writers

"are reeling under the blows of freedom" and watching their fame evap- orate. "One even senses," he writes, a

nostalgia for the days of Brezhnev's cen-

sorship, which "spoiled" literature with its royal attention. Fighting it supplied liberal Soviet writers with a powerful creative motivation. It used to be so sim-

ple: one liberal poem, smuggled past the

censor, would guarantee its author's rep- utation for a number of years.

Now, with the "God" of censorship dead, everything is permitted. But all the

once-daring subjects have been made

bland by their very permissibility.We are

facing a large-scale crisis of socially cen- tered literature, both pro- and anti- Soviet. Russian literature has always been concerned with society, such that other

subjects often appeared superfluous; to a

Russian writer, "art for art's sake" equals aesthetic depravity. This applies with equal force to the quandaries facing South African writing in the I99os. (Bar, that is, the reference to the crisis of pro-Soviet literature: whatever else the apartheid state produced, it failed to generate a

blueprinted pro-apartheid literature to

compare with Soviet Socialist Realism.) In South Africa, the imperative of this

double commitment-to the word and to social defiance-has served, by turns, to animate and distort South African

writing. It pressured writers to use py- rotechnics to try to reconcile the ideals

of autonomy and loyalty. But in a post-

apartheid age, to what will the ethos of

this broader commitment attach itself?

What is the future of relevance? Indeed, what is the future of that stalwart of South African literature, the future itself?

* i *

The suddenly transformed political mi- lieu has wrought deep changes in the

temporal orientation of South African literature. If the present has been stripped of its urgency, so too has the future. South African literature has long been driven by grand speculations about the

shape of the world to come. The very instability of a society founded on re-

pressive minority rule-in which polarized forces fought violently to institute

their polarized visions of the future- meant that both black and white writ-

ing became future-obsessed. Post-1976 South Africa felt like a provisional soci-

ety poised on the brink of the unimag- inable. This precariousness opened up the future for writers: it gave them il-

limitable opportunities to body forth what might be, whether in utopian or

apocalyptic guises. One has only to scan

literary titles from the period to gauge how the nation's writers sought to com- mand the future through metaphors of

dawn, birth, revolutionary redemption, apocalypse, and historical closure: Gor-

dimer's The Late Bourgeois World, Alex la Guma's In the Fog of the Season's End, Co- etzee's Dusklands and Waitingfor the Bar-

barians, Pieter-Dirk Uys's Paradise is Clos-

ing Down, Karel Schoeman's Promised

Land, Brink's Rumours of Rain, and Mon-

gane Wally Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood.

The arrival of South Africa's inchoate

democracy in 1994 limited the number of conceivable futures: at least symboli-

AFTERMATHS 73



cally, the future has arrived and therefore

disappeared. A great source of dreaming has ended, and with it, a great source of

dread. Andreas Huyssen's acute obser- vation regarding post-Cold War East

Germany serves equally well for post- apartheid South Africa: "no utopia ever

dies alone. It takes its counter-utopia with it."

All such endings are, of course, provisional: time does not shut down. But the South African future suddenly appears more imaginable and more mundane. It is certainly less open-ended; with the advent of political freedom, one can no

longer ask, "How will it all end?" In this context, the most vexing issue

to have emerged is what to do with the

past. The I99os have witnessed an up- surge of South African memoirs and au-

tobiographies as writers have begun mining the hitherto under-explored past with increasing vigor. But the consider- ations at stake are not merely thematic or

aesthetic; exchanges about the literary future of the past have become impli- cated in the much broader national debate over how to handle the apartheid past. The critical context for this debate

at source of dreaming has ended,

and with it, a great source of dread

has proved to be the Truth and Recon- ciliation Commission, which the in-

coming South African.justice minister, Dullah Omar, has called an invaluable

step toward "healing the wounds of his-

tory." Directed by former Anglican Arch-

bishop Desmond Tutu, the commission

provides a forum for people of all fac- tions: those who need to confess their

crimes and those who wish to testify to unsolved attacks, disappearances, tortur-

ings, and assassinations of family and

friends. The hope was that the bereaved

and guilty alike would help the society move beyond its traumatic past by en-

couraging it to confront, in ritual form, the fierce, divisive emotions driven down

by apartheid. As the commission's posters put it: "Truth Hurts, Silence Kills."

In any society facing similar struggles-Europe after WWII, Bosnia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Chile, or Argentina -the question of whether and whom to prosecute becomes explosive. Some

forms of state-sponsored violence are so

deep and widespread that they can never

be redressed-the South African gov- ernment's forty-six-year experiment with

apartheid, for example-and so in a

sense the commission is doomed to fail-

ure.Yet it must also be recognized as the most ambitious attempt any society has ever made to challenge the wracking legacy of silence.

The incoming South African govern- ment of national unity opted for a com-

mission with power to grant amnesty rather than a tribunal with power to

prosecute. Without that prospect, it was

felt, no one was likely to come forward:

past atrocities would remain in the dark,

haunting and inhibiting future efforts at

national healing. The South Africans have

thereby sought to avoid a crucial stum-

bling block that has retarded other coun-

tries' efforts to get to the bottom of national atrocities. (In Chile and Argentina, for instance, commissions have largely failed because state-funded criminals have

no motive for revealing their past.) The Truth and Reconciliation Com-

mission has become a massively ambi-




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tious public undertaking, lauded and criticized with equal vehemence by both the right and the left. Many con- servative whites, particularly those who served in the apartheid military and po- lice, have feared a witch-hunt, while the survivors of some of the victims have felt that the state was robbing them of their personal claim to justice. The emo- tional debate over the conception and role of the commission has thus emerged as the crucial context for national ex-

changes about the past, including liter-

ary ones. When the possiblity of establishing a

commission was introduced, the jour- nalist Maya Jaggi wondered whether to

expect an "anodyne literature of reconciliation." Since then, the nation's writ-

ers have joined other citizens in asking questions of searing difficulty: What is the weight of the claims ofjustice against the weight of the need for knowledge? Can knowledge of the past heal? What is the relationship between reconciliation and remembrance? And between

amnesty and amnesia? In a fine reflection on the symbolic

import of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the poet Ingrid de Kok has

suggested that the commission presents itself as the grand political elegy for the

country. Time will show whether it can reveal, repair, and then recompose the

pain at the damaged heart of South African history.

De Kok is not alone among South African writers in her apprehensiveness

AFTERMATHS 75

Billy Mandindi

(South African, 1967-), Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil. 1994. From Art in South Africa: The Future Present, edited by Sue Williamson and


Philip)

~~~~~~~~~~~~- ------- --



Mark Edwards

(South African, 1958-), Neither Known nor Unknown. 1995. From Art in South Africa:The Future Present, edited by Sue Williamson and


Philip)

about the commission's remit.Writers as varied as Mandla Langa and J. M. Coet- zee are concerned that state-orchestrated

forgiveness may open the doors to for-

getfulness. Langa, a novelist and former A.N.C. cultural attache, implored that "we shouldn't inculcate a national creative amnesia, because we'll pay a heavy price." In keeping with this conviction, his latest novel provides a searching look

at human rights abuses in A.N.C. guer- rilla camps.

In this context, many writers feel that

post-apartheid literature plays an invaluable role by preventing, through restless

exploration, the closure of history's chan- nels. If the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission has institutionalized the rhetoric of witness as a step towards

healing, the new literature of autobio-


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graphical witness promises a more lasting refusal of amnesia. To revisit history can

be a regenerative endeavor; it need not entail being stuck in the acrimony of the

past. The lifting of censorship, the un-

banning of outlawed political parties, amnesty for political prisoners, the exiles'

return, and Mandela's electoral victory have collectively led to a new liberty in

which to engage history in more candid, textured, and impassioned terms. The result has been notjust a return to the past, but a return in a more personal key.

The strength of the memoir relative to fiction is one signal development of

this new literary order. Arguably, the rev-

elatory role of fiction was accentuated

by the paranoia and secrecy of apartheid society. Thus novelists and short story writers could stage psychological and

political revelations that nonfiction writers would have balked at disclosing for

fear of self-incrimination, endangering others, or out of fidelity to the anti-

apartheid coalition. Those pressures are

gone. Perhaps more writers now feel

there is less reason for the protective re-

fractions of fiction. Other genres have been affected even

more dramatically. Theater and performance poetry, the mainstays of resis-

tance literature, have been hardest hit.

The end of apartheid has precipitated a fall in theater attendance, while the mass rallies and politicized funerals that pro- vided venues for performance poets have lost their force. To'compensate, some of the most adventurous dramatic

artists-like Zakes Mda and Malcolm

Purkey-are redirecting their energies toward creating work for television.

In the ideologically diffuse times that

have followed the collapse of apartheid and communism, writers from neither

South Africa nor the former Eastern

bloc can expect to reclaim their old

roles. Erofeyev, for one, has predicted- in his inimitable way-that many Rus- sian (we might add South African) writers will "suffocate from too much

oxygen." Yet this decline is not all bad

To revisit history can be a regenerative

endeavor; it need not entail being stuck in

the acrimony of the past

news. Certainly, both black writers like

Mike van Graan and Achmat Dangor and white ones like Brink and Gordimer have argued that despite the passing of the artist as resistance fighter, there are

some benefits.

Finally permitted an imaginative lati- tude they had only dreamed of, post- apartheid and post-communist writers are having to accommodate a diminu- tion of status and a less epic sense of pur- pose. The threats they now face come

from less sensational and less distinctive

quarters: the rival seductions of TV and video culture, the new communication

technologies, the prohibitive cost of

books in an inflationary economy, and

the persistence of illiteracy.Whatever else

happens, these writers are never likely to

be considered the threatening, dangerous breed they once were. They are adjust- ing to a decline in the caliber of both their enemies and their dreams. Still, there remain many blank pages from the

past, in no small part due to the indus-

trious efforts of the departing regimes to shred their clandestine records. The

emergent literature of witness is finding its niche in the wider political contest over the future of memory itself.

AFTERMATHS 77



Deborah Bell

(South African, 1957-), Soldier's Embrace No. 2. 1987. From Resistance Art in South Africa, edited by Sue Williamson

(New York: St. Martin's)

*.:.




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Aftermaths