CREATIVITY AND DEVELOPMENT IN LITERATURE:
A CRITICAL LOOK AT BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE
IN THE CONTEXT OF THIRD WORLD AND WORLD FICTION
© Farouk Asvat
The last few years in
South Africa have been rather traumatic, to say the least. Blacks in the townships, especially the
children, underwent a tremendous amount of tragic experiences, quite often
without the vocabulary to cope with it.
The uprising and
concomitant suppression witnessed, by very conservative estimates, at least
three and a half thousand people killed - mainly children; saw more than 30,000
people - again mainly children - detained.
Thousands of people
saw and smelt human beings actually being burnt alive in grotesque dances in front
of their eyes, saw people being shot for throwing stones at armoured vehicles,
saw little children being hauled off to prison, and thousands experienced
themselves the traumas of being abused, beaten up and incarcerated.
Combined with the
euphoria of inevitable change, people partook in the uprisings with nothing
beyond the easy rhetoric handed out by politicians to cope with these
shattering experiences. As you can
imagine, this has led to a tremendous amount of brutalization of a community
already traumatized by several hundred years of suppression. So that there must be an amazing magnitude of
sheer events that await expression.
But South African
literature has always suffered from the illusion that the severity of
oppression precludes it from vibrancy; that we are doomed to mediocrity: in
life and political leadership, as in fiction. And yet South America, enveloped as it is in
endemic violence and isolation, with a mournful history stretching from pre-Columbian
cultures to Spanish colonialism, through the wars of liberation, to the
terrible peace of countless dictators, has produced a fascinating literature. It has extended the powers of the imagination
to realms beyond that considered possible previously.
That is not to say
that the tragic South African situation has not produced a nascent literature
that in some cases has just begun to reflect the horrors and intricacies of the
situation with a specifically Azanian perspective; that some of our writers are
not beginning to move from the merely autobiographical and reflective to the
creative; or that our writers have not continued writing in spite of the havocs
of death, censorship, imprisonment, bannings and exile.
We need writing that
comes out of the furnaces of our indigenous consciousness, away from the narrow
constraints of most English writing and thinking that emanates from both sides
of the Atlantic; away from the imposed traditions of contemporary African and
much Third World literature, where the oppressed are heroes, and the colonizers
villains.
Most South Africans
literature suffers, even when good, from a very Western bias, reaching perhaps
the nadir in an unpublished collection of the early sixties where Marxist
thoughts were expressed in Shakespearean iambic pentameters; from narrow
nationalistic rhetoric; or lately from a romanticized Marxist-Leninist
perspective.
But on the other
hand, it would be ridiculous to say in the age of satellite communication -
though many of our people still have to walk over many hills to crank a
telephone in a white or Indian shop - that Pablo Picasso's mural protest
against the fascist bombing of a Basque town, the sheer horror of genius gone
mad in Apocalypse Now, the plaintive violin of Yehudi Menuhin, the brush
strokes of Siqueiros or Diego Rivera, the zest of Mercedes Sosa, the sensitive
portrayals in Satyajit Ray's Devi, the musical genius of Bob Dylan, the
joyous calypsos of Harry Belafonte, the plaintive musical streams of Mikis
Theodorakis, the tenderness of Han Su Yin's ... A Many-Splendoured Thing, or
the intenseness of Wole Soyinka's prose in The Season of Anomy, Carlos
Fuentes' brilliant journey into the heart of Mexico in The Death Of Artemio
Cruz; the involvement of Ngugi wa Thiong'o in the anti-neocolonialist war,
the anguished ragas of Ali Akbar Khan, the liberation songs of Victor Jara and
the mournful flutes of Inti-Illimani, or the writings of Stratis Haviaris,
Dambudzo Marechera, and B. Wongar; and the amazing, imaginative genius of Gaudi's
La Sagrada Família did not influence us. It would be even more tragic if we didn't let
it. But they are just part of our
broader vision, providing influences, support, and a worldview to our own
provincial and universal experiences.
And it would be sadder still if we did not let Fyodor Dostoevsky, William
Faulkner, Joseph Conrad and William Shakespeare inspire us.
Whereas the early
seventies saw, with the advent of Black Consciousness, a resurgence of
creativity and exploration, the early eighties seem to be caught in the inertia
of dogma, by the constraints of petty ideological warfare: narrow-minded
nationalists pitted against strait-jacketed Stalinists. It is perhaps a reflection of a nation finally
brutalized by the strains of oppression, as our people indulge in wanton
violence reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge; or collapse into senseless actions
symptomatic of much of Latin America: if you will only ask the mothers of the
missing.
But as much as
literature should emanate from our experiences, we are faced at present with a
retrogressive trend, where emergent and established writers expose themselves
only to South African black writing, and at most to Africa south of the Sahara
(as the desert creeps up on us). They
deny themselves the satire against Indira Gandhi's state of emergency in Salman
Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the anger against the violence of Ireland
in Desmond Hogan's Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea; the desperate
poetic love affair of Mahmoud Darwish with his Palestine in The Music of
Human Flesh; or the psychological torture in Arthur Koestler's Darkness
At Noon; and most of all to the wonder and sadness of South American
literature, for it reflects so much of our own anguish and quest.
But the excuse is
often made, both by black writers and by white writers for black writers, that
blacks are unable to produce anything substantial beside the odd poem in the
heat of the night decrying their own chains, for the sheer degree of
suppression, and for the more mundane needs of
our daily lives - even though artists have composed the most profound
work under the most harrowing circumstances.
Before Gabriel García
Márquez wrote The Autumn of the Patriarch he spent more than 12 years
reading about dictators and travelling the Caribbean islands, and it was 15
years before he started the final version of Cien Años De Soledad. Pablo Neruda spent 12 years constructing his
epic Canto General. Jane Austen worked
on Pride and Prejudice for 15 years (as she did on her other novels),
and Leo Tolstoy devoted 20 years of his life to War and Peace. And yet, our writers are wont to publish the
day after they have written a story.
The other common
misnomer is that oppression prevents good writing: a fallacy born of
justification, no doubt. Good literature
appeals to all our senses of emotion, logic, truth, aesthetics, beauty,
emerging from our everyday lives and struggles, even if manifest in very ugly
situations. Since unfortunately we are
faced with oppression and its white manifestations, it is just as well that
writers and artists exploit the situation to our advantage (as we proceed with
the more mundane mechanics of liberation), so that our writing could even under
the severest conditions attain in beauty and killing power an inverse
proportion to the degree of tyranny.
Another common fault
with South African black writers, which obviously upsets them very much, is
their lack of dedication to their craft, as they are the first to point out
that art is for 1ife's sake. They seem
by and large quite satisfied to read peripherally, provincially and
politically; they seem to give the briefest thought to a poem or short story,
churn it out, send it for publication, and the worst part is that it does get
published, without merit quite often, just because it comes out of a township. And this is destroying our art, or at best
leaving it stagnant.
As García Márquez
says: "I don't think you can write a book that's worth anything without extraordinary
discipline." Having chosen to
write, an artist's function is to master his craft. Ravi Shankar said he had to practice every day
on the sitar for 15 years just to begin to learn to play; painters endeavour
daily to learn the myriad subtle differences in colour, stroke, shade; to feel,
seize, penetrate, to abandon: Paul Cézanne spending three years painting the
same mountain more than 60 times in an effort to capture its essence. So why are our writers excluded? Both carpentry and writing "are very hard
work ... with both you are working with reality ... both are full of tricks and
techniques. Basically very little magic
and a lot of hard work are involved."
Or as Jazz trumpeter
Winston Marsalis says: "I studied classical music because so many black
musicians were scared of this big monster on the other side of the mountain
called classical music. I wanted to know
what it was that scared everyone. I went
into it and found out it wasn't anything but some more music."
It is essential that
our creative artists understand that to be genuinely committed to the
development of our people in a political sense means an equally genuine
commitment to the demands of their art. That they realize, like Neruda did, that
poetry is a full-time occupation; that "it has been the privilege of our
time - with its wars, revolutions and tremendous social upheavals - to
cultivate more ground for poetry than anyone had ever imagined".
Before dealing with
the problems with South African writing in the early eighties, some European
and Third World perspectives in world literature pertaining to our paradigm
have to be dealt with. English
literature as it affects the oppressed nations falls perhaps into the following
groupings:
One that is
essentially racist or at best condescending, with obviously no understanding of
our world, and we shall go no further with the ilks of Wilbur Smith and Robert
Ruark.
Built perhaps on the
old exotic racism of Shakespeare's Othello (a provincial reaction to
something strange), comes a literature with modern perspectives, obviously
empathic, but one that remains the outsider's view: - where the natives remain
peripheral, obedient servants mainly, props for the white man's stories; as in Somerset
Maugham or Graham Greene. These are
rather “objective” portrayals, without the anguish of Mishima committing hara-kiri,
or Marechera unsuccessfully trying to exorcise his ghosts. Faulkner is perhaps the only western novelist
in the 20th century who has the same sense of defeat and loss that we have.
The other is an “insider's”
view, written in the Third World, with a Third World setting, with an attempt
to be sympathetic to its pains, but with a somewhat tubular vision (limited by
exposure), with an essentially European literary perspective by white writers: from
Alan Paton's liberal, wishful portrayal of blacks, to Nadine Gordimer's
inability to distinguish or represent other than Europeans in Africa, to the nebulous,
mute barbarians in all of JM Coetzee's novels; or by Eurocentric
representations by EurAsians like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in Heat and Dust.
But does our
literature exclude European writers, with no holds in the Third World, writing
about their own country, with an oppressed perspective: as Desmond Hogan's
sparse, evocative intensity of vision displays in Children of Lir, or
Stratis Haviaris in The Tree Sings, and perhaps the East European
writers' difficult pursuit of happiness in their totalitarian states.
In contrast with the
above is the writer from the colonized or neo-colonized world, who frowns upon
his own heritage:
V.S. Naipaul flourishing
in a denial of his own culture and background in all his books - a perspective
already evident in his early short stories; still referring to people from
other civilizations as barbarians - in the same way, even “enlightened” western
writers referred to people from other continents and cultures as savages right
into the mid 20th century;
or writers living in
the Third World with an essentially Eurocentric vision like R.K. Narayan and
Ahmed Essop;
or someone who writes
about his world partly with a view for the exotic for a western audience, as
Salman Rushdie does in Midnight's Children.
But then we come to
writers from our world, who write about our lives, usually with excruciating
pain and torment, with a perspective ingrained from their own cultures: the
shatteringly beautiful and valedictory sadness of Yukio Mishima's The Sea of
Fertility, Ralph El1ison's cynical look at Negro life in Invisible Man;
Dambudzo Marechera's verbal acidity and vulnerability in his sardonic tales of
madness, violence and despair in The House of Hunger; George Lamming's
claustrophobic intensity of life in Natives of My Person; Gabriel García
Márquez's infinite despair in One Hundred Years of Solitude; Toni
Morrison's haunting tale of slavery in Beloved ; Wilson Harris' The Palace
of the Peacock; Wole Soyinka's searing poetry emanating from imprisonment
in The Shuttle in the Crypt; Carlos Fuentes' extravagant history of the
world in Terra Nostra; Ngugi wa Thiong'o's blending of the liberation
struggle with the personal and the traditional in A Grain Of Wheat; the
poems of Mao Zedong, Ernesto Cardenal and Costa Andrade, or the stories of
Yusuf Idris in The Cheapest Nights: writers who were or are involved in
the political and day to day struggles of their people.
But black South
African fiction is faced with several constraints: the most demanding has been
the state of censorship and repression that has existed over the past few decades,
but which has gone largely unchallenged in terms of the fiction itself, except
for the regular mouthings of liberal protest sentiments.
Writers and artists
have also had to deal with the prescriptions of both the politicians and the
publishers. Politicians on the bourgeois
left, as opposed to revolutionaries (of which South Africa has an extreme
dearth), have tended to prescribe what “relevant” literature should be about,
and writers themselves have not faced up to the challenge of opposing this, or
explaining the contributory role that literature can play.
Publishers on the
other hand have been bogged down by their western perceptions of “subtlety” and
“objectivity”, their need to service high schools and universities; or simply by
pure mercenary objectives; and have refrained from taking on anything off the
beaten track, anything innovative, or anything controversial, that merits to be
published.
So that reviewing
black South African fiction in the eighties has been largely a journey through
nostalgia, as a host of publishers got old books off the banning list and
played it safe; writers that were published previously had their new books
undertaken; and emergent writers remained unpublished or had to publish their
own stuff. So that our published fiction
remains largely autobiographical, journalistic fact-fiction, based poorly on
the socialistrealism school.
Because so often our
people fall into the sad trap of cultural colonialism where it is impossible to
convince South Africans themselves that their literature is good until the
outside world tells us that it is good. As
Steve Biko has so succinctly put it: "The most potent weapon in the hands
of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed;" and as Ngugi has so potently
urged us to decolonize our minds.
Paradoxically, we
simultaneously suffer from the inverse snobbishness of accepting only
literature that emanates from the uncomplicated reportage of the nationalist
scene masked as “relevant” -discarding the almost superhuman efforts of the few
artists and politicians who transmute our circumstances into a vision that is
cognizant of the universal ideas of humanity. And unfortunately almost all our writers are
more concerned with fame and political “acceptability” than in the development
of their own work.
But we are faced with
another challenge: to discover what emanates from our own suffering, what
creative thinking processes - not only in fiction - are blossoming in our
ghettoes and our rural impoverishments. For
there exists in our midst a tangle of broken traditions - cultures destroying
themselves, or being destroyed by the white man, and increasingly by blacks
themselves;- and a mist of new ideas, befogged by staid ideologues. But it is out of this very tangle of events
and this morning dew that an African and Azanian consciousness must begin to
form itself.
Because fiction
remains the artifice of transforming old realities into new ones, writers and
artists must create a new reality, not merely mirror it. We have been exposed to many cultures, both
the indigenous and the external: both the Western and that brought by the
slaves and indentured labourers. We have
to learn these cultures, imbibe them, and we have to appropriate writers from
other traditions - including our ancestors in the Western canon - to fill the
void.
All of Asia, Latin
America and Africa have been fooled by the illusion of progress; even though
Western culture has been essentially destructive and rapacious. And like most of the Third World we live in a
continent where the novel is a recent development, where many things have been
left unsaid.
So we have to look
back on our tradition which is rich in religious and cultural imagery, at our
sad and proud history of struggle; and we have to look at this hope in our
hearts - for often that is all that we have - because our political life is
fragmented and our history shot through with failure. But our cultural tradition is rich, if only we
will seek it. The time is at hand when
we will have to look at our own faces, our own past: look into the mirror, and
look at these masks we have created.
For we do have an
oral culture to fall back on, though we have no historians of note, (with the possible
exception of the photocopied, underground circulation of 300 Years
(1652-1952); few records of traditional songs; no scholars delving into the
mysteries of the past; and a written literature that is embryonic, going back
less than a century. And yet when we sit
down to write, we must feel the whole of our tradition in our bones: a
tradition that extends from Homer to Arthur Nortje, Imbongi to Shakespeare,
from Mishima to Márquez, Khoi paintings to Picasso, from warriors to guerillas.
The challenges that
confront us are many. And that is the
challenge we face today: to create our own myths based entirely on the truth,
for myths are a tradition, myths breathe, myths nourish the epics. We have to decipher the environment, to
separate the essential elements of a poetic synthesis from a milieu we know all
too well. And we have to learn the craft
of writing: the techniques, the moulding of sentences, the ingenious techniques
of the craft. "To find probabilities
out of real facts is the work of the journalist and the novelist, and it is
also the work of the prophet."
Writers are pretty
powerful, because people eventually come to believe their honest writers more
than their politicians; because the function of the true artist has always been
to be the keeper-of-the-truth, like the keeper-of the-history in our
traditional societies: a most harrowing task, with a great sense of
responsibility, but one that is also most challenging and imperative. But unfortunately most of our writers are not
interested in what they should do, but in what they think they should do,
bringing forth a certain type of calculated writing that doesn't have anything
to do with experience, intuition, or sincerity.
In his excellent book
Open Veins of Latin America, on the pillage of Latin America over the
past five centuries, Eduardo Galeano talks about the supposedly militant
literature aimed at a public of the converted: "For all its revolutionary
rhetoric, a language that mechanically repeats the same clichés, adjectives,
and declamatory formulas for the same ears seems conformist to me. It could be that this parochial literature is
as remote from revolution as pornography is remote from eroticism."
Another common
argument about literature is that unless it is written in simplistic language,
the masses will not understand it. Besides being condescending, it grossly
underestimates the “ordinary” person's power of perception. Pablo Neruda, unexpectedly called upon to
address a group of impoverished labourers in Chile, began reading from his
anthology España en el Corazon (on the Spanish Civil War) to them: "Reading
poem after poem, hearing the deep well of silence into which my words were
falling, watching those eyes and dark eyebrows following my verses so intently,
I realized that my book was hitting its mark. I went on reading and reading, affected by the
sound of my own poetry, shaken by the magnetic power that linked my poems and
those forsaken souls."
As García Márquez
says about a very favourite argument bandied about: "I have a great many reservations about
what came in Latin America to be called “committed literature”, the novel of
social protest ... This is because I
think its limited view of the world and life does not help achieve anything in
political terms. Far from accelerating
any process of raising consciousness, it actually, slows it down. Latin Americans expect more from a novel than
an exposé of the oppression and injustice they know all too well. Many of my militant friends who so often feel
the need to dictate to writers what they should or should not write are,
unconsciously perhaps, taking a reactionary stance inasmuch as they are
imposing restrictions on creative freedom. I believe a novel about love is as valid as
any other. When it comes down to it, the
writer's duty - his revolutionary duty if you like - is to write well."
But there is an
extraordinary potential for vitality in the process of liberation by the
oppressed, all over the world -arising partly from the fact that oppressive
regimes bring forth extraordinary heroes and extraordinary circumstances that
lend themselves to new visions for the future of mankind.
©
farouk asvat
composed:
1985 [Johannesburg, south africa under apartheid]
[] Acknowledgements:
Creativity And Development In Literature:
A Critical Look At Black South African Literature
In The Context Of 'Third' World And World Fiction
was previously published in:
Dokumente Texte Und Tendenzen
VIII:
South African Literature: From Popular Culture to the
Written Artefact:
[2nd
Bad Boll Conference, 11-13 December 1987, Bad Boll, Germany],
(Evangelische Akademie, Bad Boll, Germany, p158-162,
1987]
&
Crisis And Conflict: Essays On Southern African
Literature:
proceedings of
the XIth annual conference on commonwealth literature
and language
studies in German-speaking countries,
Aachen - Liege,
16-19 June 1988:
ed G V Davis (Verlag Die Blaue Eule, Essen, Germany, p235-246,
1990]
It was also serialized in:
The Sowetan ( 06 May, 13 May, 20 May & 27 May 1987) as:
Our Anguish And Quest (Sowetan, Argus,
Jhb, p8, 06.05.1987),
Artist's Function Is To Master His Craft (Sowetan, Argus,
Jhb, p11, 13.05.1987),
'Third' World View Is Vital (Sowetan, Argus, Jhb,
p7, 20.05.1987),
The Problems With South African Fiction (Sowetan, Argus,
Jhb, p17, 27.05.1987);
&
The Indicator (May 1987, June 1987, July & ?August 1987):
Black SA Literature In The Eighties (The Indicator,
p35, 22-31.05.1987),
Artist's Function Is To Master His Craft (The Indicator,
p36, 26-30 June 1987),
Looking At 'Third' World And European Literary Perspectives (The Indicator, p45,
28-31.07.1987),
The Problems With South African Fiction (The Indicator, p?,
?Aug 1987).
Creativity and Development in Literature,
with a Critical Look at Black South African Literature
in the Context of 'Third' World and World Fiction
was also presented at:
The XIth Annual Conference on Commonwealth Literature and Language
Studies
in German-speaking
Countries, at Aachen (Germany) and Liege (Belgium), 16-19.06.1988.
* where it received special mention at the closing gala ceremony.
&
The Afrika Colloquim,
University of
Leiden, The Netherlands, 19.02.1988;
&
Weapons of Words (kindle, 2016);
Weapons of Words (amazon paperback, p15, 2016).
[§] Books by Farouk Asvat:
● Sadness In The House Of Love (novel)
● The Gathering Of The Storm (novel)
● I Dream In Long Sentences (poetry)
● The Wind Still Sings Sad Songs (poetry)
● A Celebration Of Flames (poetry)
● The Time Of Our Lives (poetry)
● This Masquerade (short stories)
● Bra Frooks … (poetry)*
● The Paanies Are Coming (short
stories)*
● In The House Of Love (novel)*
● Weapons Of Words (comparative
literature & literary criticism)
¨ all my books are now available on amazon: in paperback & kindle
___________________________________________________________________________
[] please check out my blogs @:
weapons of words: https://faroukasvat-viewpoint.blogspot.com
piquante: https://faroukasvat-piquant.blogspot.com
streetwise: https://faroukasvat-lingo.blogspot.com
quran lectures: https://faroukasvat-quran.blogspot.com
biography: https://faroukasvat-bio.blogspot.com
books by farouk asvat: https://faroukasvat-books.blogspot.com
[] please join me on:
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___________________________________________________________________________
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