These essays offer perspectives on a single endeavour: how to talk
about art in a politically demanding milieu. My art talk, politics
talk, arises from the specificities of South Africa; my observations
from the dying days of apartheid in 1989, through the 1990s, to the
contemporary scene. My observations – I trust – have applicability not
only to a South African readership, but also to a wider literary,
cultural and political community. The essays have appeared, in earlier
versions, in various literary journals. Revisions, where deemed
necessary, attempt to modify my own insights in the light of changing
circumstances. While the essays remain discrete contributions which the
reader may approach in any order, I have sought in the sequential
arrangement to develop, cumulatively, several strong points of
contention.
The society of my contention, South Africa, is a
testing and teasing amalgamation of diverse, potentially divisive
linguistic, cultural, religious and belief systems. We inhabit a
postcolonial condition as a material condition, if by postcolonial we
mean once colonised, now independent in politics, but bound at the
‘edges’ of the world to northern economic and institutional power;
bound to regimes at the centre which impose their truth – as well as
their pop culture – on our periphery. (Our periphery – I generalise –
both hates and loves the imposition. We profess to hate US
warmongering, but love US denim, fast-food, Hollywood, and smart
information technologies.)
We inhabit, also, postcolonial
forms of representation: interlanguage in the translatability or
untranslatability of cultures; hybridism in the mingling of
traditional, popular, and elite forms of expression, whether African,
Western, or somewhere inbetween. These constitute our subjective,
experiential understanding, our ideas, the art of living in a
particular time and place. South Africa may be typified, accordingly,
as Australia and Nigeria annexed to a single heterogeneity. The art
talk, politics talk of African majority speech – in, say, praises –
co-functions in a society of extreme inequalities with a culture of the
book.
The context and text provoke a question to which there
is no simple answer: is South Africa, Africa or the West? Do our two
Nobel literature laureates, Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, regard
themselves as South African writers, African writers, postcolonial
writers, Western-internationals, or world writers? One basks here in
the recognition of achievement. At home, however, Gordimer’s
novelJuly’s People was adjudged by a high-school literature committee
to be not entirely free of racial stereotyping, and Coetzee, although
recipient of presidential congratulations on his Nobel success, had
been castigated shortly before by official ANC voices for his (white?)
pessimism. Was Coetzee in his novelDisgrace – the censorial tone
implied – suggesting that any African government is inevitably doomed
to fail. Coetzee has relocated to Australia.
I point here to a
correspondence of the literary culture to the political demand, whether
in South Africa, Africa, or what postcolonial commentary refers to as
the South of the world. The South may link Africa to India, or South
Africa to the former eastern Europe. The art of storytelling, for
example, places in comparison and contrast the Zulu folktale and the
fiction of R.K. Narayan or Salman Rushdie. The politics of poetry
invoke not only panygerics to ancient chiefs, but also the subtly
subversive words of Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska.
As
I am suggesting, a comparative method governs the critical pursuit. The
method is not hierarchical: two nations, two languages, two great art
works. Rather, the comparison is non-hierarchical in the mapping of a
differentiated literary and social terrain. An alternative title might
have been ‘South/North’, with on the cover a map of Africa, ‘upside
down’. I do not wish, however, to be diagrammatic. Categories in the
essays – Africa, the West, the South, the North, elite art, the oral
voice – are utilised as conveniences to be qualified in the course of
the argument. There is no singular Africa; there is no singular West.
Art/politics talk in the 1970s and eighties was characterised by the
exigencies of the times, according to which binary oppositions reacted
to binary oppositions: white over black became black over white;
African community in reaction to Western individualism; the popular
statement in reaction to the personal lyric, and so on. These essays
reconsider binary categorisations in a more flexible, arguably in a
more challenging climate of sense-making, whether in ‘post-apartheid’
South Africa or in the so-called post-ideological world. What is
evident is that literary culture cannot be understood in any erasure of
its locality; neither in the South can it be understood in any erasure
of a 350-year interaction with the northern hemisphere. Art talk, or
politics talk, in Africa, more generally in the South, cannot proceed
in isolation of art talk, politics talk in a conception of modernity;
or, pressingly for aesthetic understanding, without considering the
impact and influence of the major twentieth-century art movement in the
West: modernism.
Modernism is a term that recurs in my
discussion and, as the comparative method is central to the project, I
pose a key question in the opening essay, ‘Modernism and Africanicity’:
has modernism relevance to the South of the world? This exploration of
an ‘ethics of aesthetics’ provokes the phrase, ‘artist and citizen’:
the title of the essay on the sculpture of Andries Botha. These essays
consider the credence of imagination in societies of narrow tolerances.
It is a consideration that underlies the collection as a whole. How do
we, can we, recover – for contemporary democratic purpose –
traditional, often belligerent praises of chieftaincy? What is the
contribution of the ‘Xhosa voice’ to the development of African
literature? What is lost, what is gained, in Can Themba’s conflation of
the short story and the journalistic record? How to interpret Ruth
Miller’s poetry: poetry that from one perspective is private; from
another, private within the political? If praises are traditional – are
they not popular? – then ‘popular’ is the category of challenge in
Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s African fiction. Is Mandela an African? The
question inLong Walk to Freedom is not self-evident. Comparative
discussion of an ‘idea’ of literature in Africa, India, the West, and
from the perspective of the other Europe, re-positions the concepts
South/North as global filaments. The new challenge is how to strike up
conversations in sets of unexpected relationship. Politically
incorrect, Roy Campbell offers an opportunity to re-visit modernism at
the end of history; while ‘Story . . .’ – after apartheid, after the
Berlin Wall – endorses the potential of human intricacy in a form of
expression that prefers art talk to politics talk. The final essay,
‘African Literature, African Literatures . . .’, subjects familiar
categories of mapping to the challenge of the project.
The
challenge is to suggest that even in societies of the political
imperative, art talk can contribute to ethical claims; that despite the
assumption of truth residing in the North, the South of the globe can
offer fresh perspectives on the valued life. In this the critic plays a
mediating role: a role that has its own responsibilities, namely, to
communicate the issues, the perceptions, the evaluations with a clarity
that does not evade complexity. As Mandela confirms, there is no easy
walk to freedom, whether in the realm of action or ideas.
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