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What are the potential ethical and creative limitations of seeking to represent, in one’s work, the experience of the black subaltern class? This was a topic at the forefront of my mind as I embarked on my novel, Zebra Crossing, in January 2010, a work which I knew would place a Zimbabwean immigrant with albinism at its fore. As an apparently empowered white writer and academic, South African-born but Europe-educated, I was well aware of the taboos; traditional postcolonial theory makes them explicit. This paper, however, seeks to argue that an alternative discourse is slowly emerging within contemporary South African creative writing, one that offers a very different position to the one frequently posited by traditional postcolonial sensibilities and by the majority of South African authors who, I would argue, remain sceptical about the writer’s right and literary ability to imagine with authenticity and integrity what Edward Said terms the “forbidden” other (2009, 295). Although I make reference to my own work in this paper, my main focus is on the writings of Antjie Krog, Marlene van Niekerk and Zukiswa Wanner, all of whom were interviewed via email for this article.
ABSTRACT
What are the potential ethical and creative limitations of seeking to represent, in one's work, the experience of the black subaltern class? This was a topic at the forefront of my mind as I embarked on my novel, Zebra Crossing, in January 2010, a work which I knew would place a Zimbabwean immigrant with albinism at its fore. As an apparently empowered white writer and academic, South African-born but Europe-educated, I was well aware of the taboos; traditional postcolonial theory makes them explicit.
This paper, however, seeks to argue that an alternative discourse is slowly emerging within contemporary South African creative writing, one that offers a very different position to the one frequently posited by traditional postcolonial sensibilities and by the majority of South African authors who, I would argue, remain sceptical about the writer's right and literary ability to imagine with authenticity and integrity what Edward Said terms the "forbidden" other (2009, 295).
Although I make reference to my own work in this paper, my main focus is on the writings of Antjie Krog, Marlene van Niekerk and Zukiswa Wanner, all of whom were interviewed via email for this article.
KEYWORDS:
Imagining 'the other', postcolonialism, taboo; creative writing, South Africa; ethics, Apartheid, prose, poetry
"One thing the writer is for is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions".
Salman Rushdie (qtd. in Trikha 64)
In her article, "Marginality as site of Resistance", the African-American critic and writer, bell hooks, states what she considers to be the problematic position of the white author when he or she attempts to speak for, or on behalf of 'others', whether they are marginalized in terms of sexuality, gender, class or race:
No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer; the speaking subject and you are now at the centre of my talk.
(1990, 341)
Although hooks never actually uses the terms 'the Other' or 'the other' there is much in the above quote which echoes the definitions given by Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin in Post-Colonial Studies, the Key Concepts. Here, 'the other' with a small 'o' is defined thus:
In post-colonial theory, it can refer to the colonized others who are marginalized by imperial discourse, identified by their difference from the centre, and, perhaps crucially, become the focus of anticipated mastery by the imperial 'ego'.
(2000, 170)
By contrast, 'the Other' with a capital 'O'
has been called the grande-autre by Lacan, the great Other, in whose gaze the subject gains identity [ . . . ]. The Other can be compared to the imperial centre, imperial discourse, or the empire itself [ . . . ].
(2000, 170)
Hooks's quote clearly plays upon notions of 'the Other' and 'the other' as defined above, and relating themes of power, subjectivity and identity construction. First, there is the idea that in attempting to speak for 'the other', a white author such as myself ('the Other'), is dismissing the right and/or ability of 'the other' to speak effectively for him or herself, implicitly claiming that "I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself." Hooks also implies that inevitably such a narrative is transformed in a way that it is deprived of its authentic connection with its source; for the appropriating author, the story of the 'other' has "become mine, my own." According to hooks, such a story ceases to belong to 'the other'. Rather, it has been colonised.
It is also certainly no coincidence that hooks is using language which implies a certain grasping, even psychic cannibalism on the part of such an author, who asks of 'the other': "Only tell me your pain. I want to know your story" (1990, 341). Underlying this appropriation and colonisation, is power. An assumption that as a white author, I (and other white authors) will simply seek to reaffirm our 'authority' and with it, implied hierarchies of difference which place our experiences above those of 'the other', thereby asserting that "I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer, the speaking subject and you are now at the centre of my talk" (1990, 341). There is an implied need on the part of the appropriating author: "Re-writing you, I write myself anew." Hooks seems to imply that white authors such as myself lack adequate tales of our own. Rather, as 'the Other', we must feed off the tales of marginalised 'others', for the "imperial ego" needs 'the other' in order for its own identity to be "established" (qtd. in Ashcroft et al. 2000, 171).
Hooks's statement thus encapsulates the ethical and creative concerns that many postcolonial thinkers might have when considering a creative enterprise like Zebra Crossing, undertaken by a writer such as myself. That is to say hooks's statement encapsulates traditional postcolonial preoccupations with tracing "the ideology of colonialism and the legacy of the colonial era within texts" (qtd. in Baker 2011, 15) as well as its "desire to speak to the Western paradigm of knowledge in the voice of otherness" (qtd. in Goldberg et al. 2002, xii-xvi).
As a South African writer writing within the framework of our particular history (colonialism and later Apartheid) there are added sensitivities. Indeed, one of the many crimes of South Africa's past is not just the highly problematic representation of the racial 'other' in public and political discourse but the fact that such racist and reductionist representations frequently manifested themselves in its literature too. It could be said that colonial and later Apartheid South Africa encouraged a refusal to imagine 'the other'. The racist Apartheid state, through a system of censorship and indoctrination, attempted to control, and at times even silence our imaginative faculties, not only because the imagination through art has the power to ignite powerful debate and dissent, but also because it is the route to empathy. As Adam Smith notes in his 1757 version of The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some ideas of his sensations.
(2012, 12)
Empathy was arguably perceived as a potentially politically dangerous emotion by a regime constructed around systems of hierarchy and oppression and so it comes as no surprise that under Apartheid we were encouraged not to imagine 'the other', but rather to impose our racist colonial myths (supposedly grounded in scientific fact) upon 'the other'.1
However, in spite of the censorship and creative impediments placed upon South African authors under Apartheid, there were those who rebelled against such reductive depictions of 'the other'. J. M. Coetzee, for example, cleverly exposes Apartheid's racist and corrupt way of seeing 'the other' in his novel, Foe (1986). Published in a year when the government was fast being brought to its knees by international and local pressures, it uses the mask of an eighteenth century British setting and the story of Defoe and his writing of Robinson Crusoe (1719) to stress the limitations of a racist, colonial vision of the 'other' as perpetuated by Apartheid. In it we encounter the enigmatic island 'native', Friday, who refuses to be 'known' by Susan Barton and eludes all her attempts to reduce him either to simple, barbaric savage or victimised exotic 'other' (two views of the racial 'other' perpetuated under Apartheid). By the novel's close, Susan is no closer to 'knowing' Friday - he remains elusive till the end. Similarly the reader too is left with more questions than answers and in this way, Coetzee warns us against simple reductive, definitions of 'the other'.
For Coetzee (and many other authors writing against Apartheid at the time) imagination and the process of imagining 'the other' in provocative ways, thus became a means to inspire social change. The American social activist and author Grace Paley, who dedicated much of her writing to exploring and articulating the position of 'the other', argues in her essay, "Of Poetry and Women and the World":
White people have to imagine the reality, not the invention but the reality, of the lives of people of colour. Imagine it, imagine that reality, and understand it. We have to imagine what is happening in Central America today, in Lebanon and South Africa. We have to really think about it and imagine it and call it to mind, and call it to mind, not simply refer to it all the time.
(1998, 171)
Paley's emphasis upon the need to imagine those who are 'other' as well as those who are in different and difficult social and political situations (the article was written in 1986 when all of the countries mentioned were in political turmoil) alludes to her belief that imagination is the route to compassion and empathy, not only for the writer, but also for the citizen. It is a conviction that has been at the very core of my own creative belief system since I first discovered her book of essays, Just As I Thought (1998) in London in 2007. It is also this desire to imagine 'the other' for self-illumination and self-humanisation, that inspired my first collection of short stories, This Place I Call Home, published in 2010 and underpins my most recent novel, The Woman of the Stone Sea, due for publication in 2019.
This Place I Call Home tells ten South African stories in ten voices, all of which are 'other' to my own. Like Zebra Crossing and The Woman of the Stone Sea, it was galvanised by a desire to imagine 'the other' in order to better understand and empathise with the memories and motivations of a country that I was considering returning to after twentytwo years in self-imposed exile. It was whilst preparing to launch that collection (and steeling myself for a potential postcolonial discourse 'black-lash') that my colleague, the poet and academic Antjie Krog, drew my attention to other writers and critics, including Edward Said and Amos Oz, who have also stressed the ethical and creative importance of imagining 'the other'. In his essay, "Barenboim and the Wagner Taboo", Edward Said states:
Ignorance is not an adequate political strategy for a people, and therefore, each in his own way must understand and know the forbidden Other. [ . . . ] [This] does mean that reason, understanding, and intellectual analysis, and not the organization and encouragement of collective passions such as those that seem to impel fundamentalists, are the way to be a citizen.
(2009, 295)
As with Paley, a link is made by Said between imagining 'the other' and social harmony. Amos Oz echoes these ideas in his 2005 Goethe Prize speech: "I believe that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred. It is, in my view, also a major moral imperative."
Paley, Said and Oz thus all stress the ethical (and political) imperative to imagine the lives of 'the other'. All, I would argue, are aware of the potential pitfalls of such an enterprise, as posited by postcolonial discourse. Indeed, Said's seminal work, Orientalism (1978), makes explicit the negating effects of racist Western representations of the Oriental 'other', as well as how the constructions of the Orient were driven by the European desire for difference and exoticism, the impulsive, primal, sexualised 'other' became a necessary foil to rational Western notions of what was deemed civilised and civilising. However, in spite of this understanding, Paley's, Said's and Oz's emphasis remains nonetheless upon the individual to at least try to imagine the 'forbidden other' in order to gain greater depths of understanding and with this to achieve greater levels of social harmony.
Such a view offers an alternative creative (and ethical) discourse to the more strident political postcolonialists such as hooks, who place their emphasis upon the colonial construction of race and difference rather than upon empathy and dialogic process, and in doing so, it could be argued, risk encouraging us to remain strangers to one another.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Said is Palestinian and Oz is an Israeli Jew. Both writers have emerged from a Middle East where ongoing conflict and ancient distrust and antipathy has prevented Arab and Jew alike from imagining 'the other', to the detriment, it could be said, of both sides. In both instances 'the other' remains a "forbidden other" in Said's terms.
In South Africa, even though we are more than 20 years into democracy and are now in what is commonly referred to as the 'second transition',2 divisions (which are physical, in terms of our urban geographies, social and socio-economic and psychological) remain.3 Similarly, failures to imagine one another in open and inclusive ways also continue. In his essay, "Embracing the Others of Our Selves", Ashraf Jamal states "[t]he South African imaginary has by no means overwhelmed, bypassed, or ignored the conditions for its continued oppression" (2005, 17).
For some members of the older generation of South African writers, this continued failure might be a legacy of the education and indoctrination of Apartheid and the divisions and distrust it fostered within them. This lingering legacy was highlighted for me in 2009 when I met the author, Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele. Ndebele is outspoken about his belief that as South African writers and citizens, members of a, "diverse, multi-cultural society", we must, "achieve bonding across community boundaries [ . . . ]. Since such boundaries may not necessarily be crossed physically, at least for some time, it is crucial that they be crossed deliberately in other ways" (2007, 160).
However, during our conversation, Ndebele confided that he had abandoned a novel he was working on, a novel with a white protagonist. Ndebele had realised that he could not imagine what that protagonist would be feeling when he walked into a room and saw his white mother. Ndebele found himself unable to imagine the white 'other', perhaps due to a lifetime of being 'prevented' from doing so by a system that sought to keep him apart from whites, both literally and metaphorically. Ndebele has since stuck to black protagonists.
Significantly, the majority of contemporary South African writers, even those born after democracy arrived in 1994, seem as reluctant as Ndebele to imagine 'the other', and particularly the racial 'other', in their works. When they have done so, some have argued that their depictions often seem at best sentimental, and at worst one-dimensional. This is true both for white writers and the growing number of published black ones. The literary critic Craig Higginson declared in 2013:
[W]hite writers continue to write idealised, naive, sentimental, and often rather inarticulate black characters, and black writers have more often than not declined to represent white characters at all - when they have, they are usually predictably one-dimensional.
(18)
Perhaps this reluctance to fully engage with 'the other' is because many contemporary South African writers fear transgressing the postcolonial ethical concerns mentioned above (so the orthodoxies have become points of creative constraint), or because they feel that there are other issues which are more pertinent to their own creative projects. Or perhaps they simply feel inadequate to the task. Regardless of their reasons, I feel that such an omission has wide social and moral implications. Higginson agrees:
I often return to the statement of Susan Sontag's: that drawing a line is an act of violence. We ought to have learned this from our past [ . . . ]. When you reduce your subject matter to the other, and you draw a solid line between yourself and it, you are exercising a kind of violence on your subject matter - and you oughtn't be surprised when a reciprocal violence is the response you get from it.
(18)
In Zebra Crossing I sought to demonstrate the wider social and moral 'violence' that results when we draw a line between 'the other' and ourselves. Through my depictions of the suffering of my protagonist, Chipo, and the community of immigrants around her, I attempt to highlight the destructive implications of encouraging divisions (through stereotyping and prejudice) rather than building bridges of understanding between 'the other' and ourselves. What is particularly significant about this representation, and which I sought to examine through my narrative, is how such 'othering' is not only occurring between whites and blacks but also through prejudicial attitudes such as homophobia and xenophobia towards people with albinism within the black community itself. Zukiswa Wanner shares such concerns, an idea I will examine further in my section of this article about her work.
Antjie Krog is one South African author who has long engaged with questions of the subaltern 'other' in South African literature and society. On the one hand, she has articulated her belief that such an endeavour is necessary for white South Africans, as highlighted by the title of her non -fiction book, Begging to be Black (2009). On the other hand, Krog's use of the verb, "begging" also alludes to how challenging she believes such an endeavour actually is. In a public conversation with Prof. Duncan Brown at the University of the Western Cape, Krog was asked what she thinks the role of South African fiction should be. Krog replied, "For me fiction would imagine our togetherness, would take risks from what we know into what we have never imagined" (2011). However, she also went on to add, "But I have always suspected that one needs financial stability and a confident grip on one's surroundings in order to begin to imagine." In other words, Krog is aware that not everyone in South Africa is able to take up her challenge. Limited financial (and educational) resources within many sectors in the country limit who in South Africa can write (and therefore imagine through published texts). Furthermore, a certain degree of acute insight and sensitivity is also required, "a confident grip on one's surroundings" is in order, it is implied, to do the task justice.
Krog has further concerns about literary attempts to imagine 'the other' and the ethical and creative challenges of such an endeavour. When asked in our interview in 2015 if she agreed with Said's and Oz's statements, and thought them pertinent within a South African context, Krog replied:
Of course it is a moral imperative to begin to imagine the other [ . . . ]. But to imagine the other can be highly unethical precisely because of many dangers: of simply usurping the very otherness of the other, of suggesting the other is actually simply a version of oneself . . . After 1994 many people were prepared to say white and black are after all the same, but nowadays many would say: typically black, typically white. We are disappointed that we are, after all, not the same. That our backgrounds, class, upbringing, education, generational experiences are making us behave so differently from one another. So I have it against the unethical way writers wipe out these differences instead of honestly engaging with difference, which may probably take a lifetime of research.
(Krog 2015)
More recently, during her keynote address for the 2017 Writing for Liberty conference, Krog expanded on many of these ideas:
A writer is free to write what she wants, but only constant selfinquiry and destabilisation about the how will bring some kind of integrity to the project. To write meaningfully about those whom you cannot, and accordingly to some pressure, may not, write about, takes more than just putting a hat on your head [ . . . ] one has to be prepared to harass, surpass, even crucify one's tamed imagination.
(2017)
Krog continues:
To write about the marginalised, the subaltern, the oppressed, the foreigner, the stranger, the other, demands an enormous destabilisation of the writing and even more of the writing self [ . . . ]. You have to become decentered. Become minority, go where you can't, and be honest in the text about how you can never get there. '
(2017)
In her poetry collection Synapse (2014), Krog stresses these complexities and concerns regarding the representation of 'the other', but at the same time she stresses her compulsion to at least try. In it we encounter her attempt to decentre her creative self in her attempt to stress that even though the writer may feel ethically compelled to write 'the other' and has a right to try, such an attempt is always doomed to fall short, a failure that Krog believes the text itself must manifest.
These creative and ethical nuances and tensions are best highlighted by the poem "servants talk". In it we are presented with two voices, that of the white, well-meaning misses, and that of the black domestic worker, who has asked her employer for a loan of R10 000 ("half the misses salary") to buy her father a tombstone (Krog, Synapse 61).
At first glance, the poem appears to be a sort of dialogue which alternates between the voice of the employer, and that of the black domestic worker, who speaks in isiXhosa (a translation of which is supplied in the footnotes). However, upon further reading, one realises there is no actual conversation going on at all. They are not speaking to one another, they are simply speaking. Each is wrapped up in her own concerns, the white employer with her assumptions about her worker and her well-meaning (if slightly patronising) advice:
she says she'll pay it back of course she says it she knows next month she'll just say she's run out of food
I said all of this but you know how it is also you don't know how much English they really understand
(Synapse 2014, 61)
Meanwhile the domestic is embroiled with her own family concerns including, it is implied, supporting an HIV-positive relative:
* you mustn't get sick I don't want to have to swop jobs with you my body's burning I feel nauseous it's those clinic things you should have listened to Ouma now the powers are against you.
(Synapse 2014, 61)
According to postcolonial theory (and as hook's comments highlight) attempting to speak in the voice of 'the other' if you are not 'the other' is perhaps one of the most taboo creative endeavours of all. Krog is well aware of this. She is also aware of her own beliefs regarding the difficulty of such a task; the very format of 'servants talk' on the page points to this. The isiXhosa of the black woman is in a smaller font than the words spoken by the white woman alluding, I would argue, not only to Krog's acknowledgement that her ability to realise the black voice is lesser than her ability to realise the white one, but also to the fact that the voices of domestic workers within a patriarchal, capitalist South African society, a society that continues to place little value on the labour of its uneducated black female workforce, have less social currency than those of their white employers.
Krog's English translation of the isiXhosa voice is also tentative. It is prefaced with a question mark, as if highlighting the poet's own uncertainties about her ability to translate even her own imaginings of isiXhosa 'servants talk' into something truly reliable and adequate. In our 2015 interview, Krog explained the format of the poem thus:
It cannot be a poem, its poemness falls apart, it has three strands not connecting: the master and misses are good, well meaning people, they try to hear, they imagine, they want to help, the Xhosa is unclear, incorrect, tentative, the translation opens with a question, the print is small, also inaccurate, cut off.
(2015)
All of this, Krog says, is born of her desire to stress the writer's
ethical duty to confront how we are shaping others through our representations, how we are reinforcing images and fantasies, erase and idealise the shadow of the other. But knowing and acknowledging one is failing is itself an ethical way of listening.
"Servants talk" is prefaced by a quotation by Drucilla Cornell. This echoes Krog's statement about acknowledging failure in order to be an ethical listener and presumably, writer of 'the other', "the noting of the failure of representation itself becomes a form of listening" (2014, 60).
The second quotation in the poem's epigraph is by the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak:
By definition we cannot - no self can - reach the quiteother . . . This is the founding gap in all act or talk, most especially in acts or talk that we understand to be closest to the ethical - the historical and the political. We must somehow attempt to supplement the gap.
(qtd. in Krog 2014, 60)
This statement by Spivak is arguably a summary of Krog's own position towards the creative enterprise of imagining 'the other'. On the one hand, there are the undeniably extreme challenges - Krog might even argue impossible challenges - of such a task. On the other, there is the desire to "somehow attempt to supplement the gap". The inability of the writer and indeed the individual to imagine 'the other' is not simply a problem of imagining across class, race, gender and ethnicity. Krog makes it clear in another Synapse poem, "the snail as chimera on the sleeping subaltern cheek", that such a failure is a universal predicament. The snail, crawling on the human cheek, "yearns" to understand the human body:
ecstatic from within the hump a momentary pulsing penetrates her deepest brain the snail is in turmoil her feelers rejoice hydraulically she pumps language
(2014, 66)
Yet the snail's initial ecstasy of connection of knowing suddenly fails as she is burned with "human sweat" and "everything fails and she shrinks back into her white coils" (2014, 66). Physiological difference - the saltiness of human sweat, the snail's body's extreme aversion to this - makes true empathy and true knowing impossible.
Interestingly, Spivak herself has declared that the subaltern 'other' cannot convey her true experience. Spivak's argument is that the subaltern voice has been too corrupted by dominant cultural discourse and she has in effect been completely erased, reduced to, "an (empty) space, an inaccessible blankness" (qtd. in Gilbert 1997, 102). Krog's snail poem, I would argue, builds on this, implying that all authors (whether categorised as 'the other' or not) are subject to the same limitations of perception, of the imagination and of language. Consequently isn't absolute knowing and with it absolute accuracy of representation an elusive objective for all of us? Alain Badiou's 'unnameable', Samuel Beckett's 'ineffable', Sigmund Freud's 'uncanny', Paul de Man's 'blindness' and Jacques Derrida's 'call of the other' are just a few of the theories which explore and support a questioning of notions of essentialism in meaning and expression.
Marlene van Niekerk, a South African novelist, poet and essayist who writes in Afrikaans, also moves into the realm of imagining and articulating the "forbidden other" in her 2004 novel A gaat (published in English in 2006) and her 2013 poetry collection, Kaar.
In our 2015 interview conducted for this paper, van Niekerk echoed my belief that the writer's creative process and ethical right, with regards to imagining 'the other', must be framed by an acknowledgment that all writing is a form of imagining otherness. Describing her creative output to date, she explained:
If I can write in the voice of a mute bedridden woman whose neurological illness I have never experienced, why can I not write in any other voice that I want to? I have written in the voices of members of a white trash family, in the voice of a cancer patient, in the voice of a Dutch hobo, in the voice of stones, birds, dust and leaves.
(2015)
Her work, including the representation of the racial 'other', is thus a declaration of the writer's right to creative and imaginative "exploration" and "a refusal of arriving at a terminus of meaning and opinion" (2015).
This refusal to offer absolutes or to be dictated to by literary taboos or creatively constricting discourses is highlighted by van Niekerk's representation of the figure of Agaat. Agaat is a coloured farm worker who is taken in by a white woman, Milla, when she is just a child. Milla raises Agaat, teaches her to be her domestic and helper on the farm and later, nursemaid to her son. When Milla gets older and has a stroke, it is Agaat who tends to her now paralysed and mute mistress while running the farm.
In the novel we never hear Agaat speak - all that she says is filtered through Milla and Milla's standard Afrikaans (in the original version). Until her illness Milla also attempts to mould Agaat, shaping everything from what she wears to the little room she sleeps in and the sorts of books she reads, much as the coloniser (and later the white Apartheid status quo) attempted to mould and shape black and coloured selfidentity. Is Agaat therefore a symbolic representation of the plight of the dispossessed and voiceless subaltern pre- and post-Apartheid within the context of the white Afrikaner stronghold of the plaas or working farm?
Van Niekerk, I would argue, does not see Agaat nor her 'othering' by Milla in typical postcolonial terms:
The language Agaat was drilled in came from Milla [ . . . ] but the reader never hears it in direct speech from Agaat's mouth. Milla only hears back what she has put into Agaat's mouth as a child. She gets it back in reams. It is part of the punishment. The punishment of the creator of Agaat.
(2015)
Van Niekerk understands that power dynamics are complex and can be fluid. Now that Milla is herself in a position of powerlessness and silence, Agaat uses a lifetime of moulding by Milla as a weapon to take revenge on her mistress. Her monologues to her mute mistress are designed to taunt. They parrot back lessons or expressions that have been forced onto Agaat over the years and deny Milla intimacy and true communication just when she needs it most. As such Agaat is a far more subtle and problematic figure than initial appearances might suggest. Similarly Marlene van Niekerk's take on the classic Afrikaans plaasroman and mistress/servant power dynamics, refuses to subscribe to narrow, traditional colonial or postcolonial readings or epistemologies:
The topic in this novel is art, the process of creation. Creation always involves power and capture and the intimate relationship between the creator and creature. If you look carefully you'll see that Agaat is an artist, and she is every bit as cruel as her creator who is also an artist.
(van Niekerk 2015)
It is such risk-taking by the author, such jostling against contradiction and nuance, a questioning of assumptions and, "a simple unitary consciousness" that van Niekerk says should constitute the "ethics of writing" (2015).
Significantly, van Niekerk does not share Krog's conviction that the enterprise of imagining 'the other' is doomed to fail and that that failure must be written into the text, so to speak. Agaat's failure to speak directly to the reader in the novel is not a simple symbolic representation of the historical silencing of women like Agaat within South Africa and its white-dominated literature. As van Niekerk has herself stated, Agaat's filtered narrative has other symbolic implications.
In terms of the potential limitations of a writer's craft when attempting to write and imagine 'the other', van Niekerk seems to believe that a rigorous dedication to craft and research (including linguistic analysis) can ensure that her representations of voice and character are wholly credible. Anastasia de Vries praises van Niekerk's creative methods when composing the handful of Kaaps poems in Kaar, which De Vries argues enables a "true and authentic reflection of Kaaps as it is spoken in the Boland and Macassar near Strand in the Western Cape" (2015, 9):
Dit laat my vermoed dat sy soos 'n taalkundige die woorde en gesprekke foneties getranskribeer het sodat sy dit so lewensgetrou moontlik in haar literere werk kan weergee. Op dié manier is sy nie bloot skrywer of digter nie, maar 'n medium deur wie Kaaps versend word.4
(2015, 9)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, van Niekerk's decision to use Kaaps (a vernacular tradition commonly associated with Afrikaans-speaking coloured communities in the Cape) has also met with some resistance, most notably by the Kaaps poet, Nathan Trantraal:
Ek lees nou die dag Marlene van Niekerk se gedigte wat in Kaaps geskryf is en toe skud ek net my kop. Sy se dis limericks, maar dis nie 'n f····n limeriektaal nie. Dis mense se regte realitiet. Dis nie 'n joke-taal nie. En dis wat ek teen (die bruin skrywers) Adam Small en daai Peter Snyders het. Hulle het dit 'n joke-taal gemaak. Hulle het gedink dis 'n taal waarin jy sing en dans, 'n f····n coon-taal.
(2013)5
Trantraal's comments echo the anxiety and discomfort of hooks. Here is a white, Afrikaans author who is, he claims, through her depictions of coloured voice, cannibalising and trivialising 'the other' she is representing. In particular, he has taken issue with the implied humour of the limerick genre. But what Trantraal fails to consider is that humour has also long been an agent of subversive and defiant energy within the coloured community (and its literature) against definition and norms, much like the Brer Rabbit genre of African-American folk tales - a laughing at the assumptions of the racists' status quo rather than a collusion with them, and an affirmation of the right of non-standard vernacular to stand.
As stated earlier, it is not only white authors who seem reluctant to imagine the racial 'other' in contemporary South African literature. The majority of black authors too shy away. One exception, however, is Zukiswa Wanner. Blogging about her novel London - Cape Town - Joburg in 2014, and expressing frustration at being repeatedly pigeonholed as a "black woman writer", Wanner stated, "I wanted to turn this idea that as writers we can't cross the racial or gender lines, on its head too because I believe that human experience is similar" (2014).
Wanner's emphasis on shared experience rather than racial difference echoes remarks made by Sindiwe Magona, who observed that "As human beings we all share the same emotions. There is no 'other'" (2017). Both statements are in direct contradiction of Krog's view that difference is irrefutable and must be acknowledged by any author attempting to imagine the racial 'other'.
Although Wanner's blog statement refers to her most recent work of fiction, I would argue that her first novel, The Madams, already demonstrates Wanner's conviction that it is the author's right to write across 'gender and race lines', as well as Wanner's desire to emphasise shared human experience rather than difference or othering through her work.
The novel focuses on three female friends living in post-Apartheid Johannesburg. Significantly, Wanner chooses to include a woman from each one of South Africa's three key racial groups: Thandi, the narrator, is coloured, Lauren is white and Nosizwe is black. At first glance, Wanner's decision would seem to emphasise difference as well as potential racial and cultural tension and indeed the author is not oblivious to the potential conflicts and discord that can arise when three women, even if they are friends, embody differing heritages and identities within the context of South Africa's fraught racial and political past.
Race, perhaps unsurprisingly, is an important point of tension, as are lingering racial prejudices (both white towards black and black towards white). White Lauren posits herself as a 'liberal' but treats her own black maid, MaRosie, with the distrust and disdain presumably cultivated by notions of black inferiority and white superiority during the Apartheid era. Thandi and Nosizwe resent Lauren's false and sometimes hypocritical liberalism (yet interestingly enough this does not result in the termination of the friendship). In contemplating her own racial identity as someone who is bi-racial, the protagonist Thandi admits:
Maybe sometimes I tend to overcompensate in order to fit in, just as other 'bi-racial' (as the Brits like to call us) children tend to in order to be welcome by our darker kinsfolk. I mean, just a look at history is enough to highlight this. Malcolm X was bi-racial (his grandfather, like mine, was white) and he detested white people with a passion.
(2006, 20)
However, in spite of such tensions, Wanner quickly shifts the narrative's focus beyond notions of difference (including race) to explore what is shared by the three women. The three female protagonists, although all of different races and all aware of racial difference, are united by a shared class. They are all "The Madams"; women with sufficient economic means to employ other women to clean and perform child-care tasks for them. However it is more than just class or gender that ultimately bonds the three protagonists.
The narrative traces this transition as each of the women, through her own process of pain, disillusionment and ultimately self-realisation, learns to imagine her friends (and other people in her life) with greater sensitivity, empathy and compassion. This is highlighted when Thandi and Nosizwe discover that Lauren is a long-suffering victim of domestic violence. With this revelation they reframe their perspective on their friend: she is no longer a snobbish, at times hypocritical and myopic white madam (whom they nonetheless love) but a vulnerable human being. Significantly, once the secret of Lauren's domestic abuse is revealed to her friends, her behaviour towards her black domestic improves and a kind of solidarity is forged there too:
Since Lauren had started treating her in a more humane way, MaRosie had become very affectionate towards her and the children. Had she known what had actually transpired, I would not have been surprised at her hiring some tsotsis to go and beat up Mike as he had beaten up his wife.
(2006, 127-28)
The implication is that Lauren's insensitive treatment of MaRosie was not in fact born out of intentional or racialised malice but rather stemmed from her own private pain as a woman and a human being who had endured ongoing physical and emotional trauma.
As an author, Wanner, like her characters, demonstrates her willingness and ability to imagine the "forbidden" racial 'other' with empathy and compassion as she articulates the histories, hurts and complex motivations of each of her three female protagonists in ways that transcend commonly-held racial and social assumptions or prejudices. In this regard she, like her characters, is striving to imagine 'the other' in ways which question the very nature of otherness itself.
In our 2015 interview, Wanner made the following declaration regarding her relationship as author with her white protagonist, Germaine, in London - Cape Town - Joburg:
I'm not sure that Germaine is really that much of an 'other'. She is female as I am. Our socio-political leanings are more or less the same. The major reason I wrote Germaine as I did was because I was actually trying to highlight our similarities rather than our differences. That it's not utterly impossible that a white woman from England and a black woman from South Africa can be simpatico.
(2015)
As for the ethics of such an endeavour, Wanner argues that the only ethical "obligation" for a writer seeking to imagine 'the other' is to, "research and write your character and setting well" (2015). In this regard she echoes Marlene Van Niekerk.
London - Cape Town - Joburg is a novel that examines the multicultural identities of the children of exiles and their own experiences of returning to post-Apartheid South Africa. The novel centres on a mixed race couple, Martin O'Malley, a South AfricanBritish man with an MSc from the London School of Economics, and his white, feminist wife, Germaine Spencer, a ceramist and an art lecturer. The novel is narrated by Martin and Germaine, and includes a few excerpts from the diary of their son, Zuko.
Yet whilst Wanner herself may feel "simpatico" with her characters, regardless of race or gender, the novel itself tells a different story about the state of life in post-1994 South Africa. In fact upon arriving in the country in 1998 (and up until the narrative's close in 2011), the family encounters a South Africa where race still dominates national (and often private) discourse. As one character in the novel explains, whereas in London people are either cool or uncool, the colour of their skin is irrelevant, "in South Africa race is everything" (2014, 125).
This ongoing tendency in South Africa to foreground race and racial difference, Wanner makes clear, is grounded in complex social 'needs', not all of which are noble. As Germaine's friend Noma explains to the baffled émigré:
[N]o one does victimology like South Africans. These black people are taking our jobs according to white South Africans. And these white people can't sell back land they never bought according to black people. We pull race cards and reverse race cards. [ . . . ] South Africa loves a victim because we're all victims, see?
(2014, 231-32)
Yet such simple and reductive definitions of identity fail, as Wanner makes clear, to acknowledge the more nuanced aspects of life and experience which bind rather than divide in South Africa. They also fail to take into account points of tension that occur in spite of a shared racial identity. This failure is made explicit with Wanner's recount of the 2008 xenophobic attacks:
The international and local media call it xenophobic attacks. Liam called it negrophobic attacks. "It's hatred of blackness, bra. You can't call it xenophobia since we never created the borders and in any case, there are no white or yellow people being killed in all this. Just other blacks."
(2014, 235)
It is perhaps no coincidence that Martin's brother, Liam, the character who is perhaps most attached to affirming racial differences (even though he and his brother in fact share bi-racial origins), seeks to deflect from the reality that race alone cannot be considered a determiner of affinity, community or unity. Rather than acknowledge this, Liam seeks to reframe the attacks from the perspective of victimhood. The attacks are, he argues, a reflection of internalised black self-loathing, negrophobia, fostered by those who created the borders (the colonialists).
Yet the real victim in the text, the reader discovers by the novel's tragic close, is neither white nor black, nor even one of the Africans who are murdered during South Africa's xenophobic attacks. The real victim is another subaltern figure, the child. Germaine and Martin's son, Zuko, endures sexual abuse at the hands of his uncle, Liam, and vulnerable, exploited and silenced, he commits suicide.
That Zuko is sexually abused by his own black uncle is, I would argue, Wanner's ultimate challenge to her readers to move beyond simplistic (and lingering) boundaries which define the enemy (and unity) primarily along simplistic lines of race. Evil, she seems to imply, has no skin colour, just as a shared racial identity or history does not guarantee solidarity, unity or empathy.
In conclusion, all of the authors discussed seek to challenge the taboo of what is and what is not permissible within South African literature, as well as what is and what is not permissible for South African authors seeking to represent the "forbidden" racial 'other'. Although they do not all agree on how successful such an endeavour can ultimately be, it is significant that they all affirm the author's right to try.
Certainly this refusal to collude with postcolonial restrictions and taboos is partly about a belief in the author's right to creative and imaginative autonomy. He or she has the right to write what he or she likes. However, I would argue that perhaps something more profound is also being reached for, namely a building of creative, social and empathetic bridges borne out of necessity.
I would argue that the authors discussed in this paper feel that South Africa needs its authors to imagine the forbidden 'other', not only for their own creative and ethical ennoblement but also because there is a need to disseminate such values down into a wider South African society, a society which remains rife with prejudice against 'the other', albeit in a guise that differs from the racist Apartheid manifestations of old. Furthermore, it could be argued that this is a necessary provocation, that silence is collusion and that without risk-taking there can be no forward-moving dialogue in South African literature or society, but rather the creation of new taboos. At the same time, all the authors discussed in this paper agree that such endeavours must be carried out with humility and sensitivity and perhaps (in the case of Krog) even the acknowledgment that such subjective representations will inevitably be loaded with silences
NOTES
1. For an interesting in-depth discussion of the detrimental effects of Apartheid on writers' imaginations, see, T. T. Moyana (1976).
2.for context on this term, see Miki Flockemann (2010).
3.The majority of South Africans still live in neighbourhoods divided according to race and ethnicity and very few South Africans speak all eleven official languages fluently. The number of white and coloured South Africans who speak indigenous black languages such as isiXhosa and isiZulu, and the number of black South Africans who speak Afrikaans, is particularly low. Imraan Coovadia argues: "South Africans refuse to form a public, as we see in our everyday registers of separation and distrust, from the height of the walls which surround even the most modest property to the prurient interest in violent crime to the expansion of private schools and private health care to the deep despair of impoverished neighbourhoods expressed in xenophobia and unrest" (2012, 66).
4. "I suspect that she, as a linguist, transcribed the words and conversations phonetically to be as accurate as possible in her literary work. In this regard she is not only a writer or poet, but a medium through whom Kaaps is channelled."
5. "A while ago I read Marlene van Niekerk's poems written in Kaaps and I just had to shake my head. She says it's limericks, but it's not f····n limerick language. This is people's real life (reality). It's not joke-language. And this is what I have against (the coloured writers) Adam Small and that Peter Snyders. They made it a joke-language. They thought it a language to sing and dance in, a f···n coon-language."
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Copyright Institute for the Study of English in Africa Aug 2018