Events

Better to Have Gone

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Better to Have Gone

Memoir, utopia and belonging in the postcolony

Research seminar, English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town. 8 April 2021.

I cannot thank you enough for your letter… I have read it twice and intend to read it again. It told me so much about your thinking. I admire you on your pilgrimage. May it have a good ending. But no matter, better to have gone on it than to have stayed here quietly. At the end of my life I realize that there is nothing worthwhile except love and compassion and the search, which I have not made, for reality. — John Walker III to his son.

In Better to Have Gone (2021), the non-fiction writer Akash Kapur weaves family memoir together with a history of Auroville, an intentional community or ‘living laboratory’ in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Subtitled ‘Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia’, Kapur’s personal quest to understand the deaths of two founder members of Auroville widens out into a reflection on 20th-century utopianism and its discontents. Here I consider the problems and possibilities of life writing within this complex social terrain, mindful of what historian Jessica Namakkal calls ‘the paradox of a postcolonial utopia’. At the same time, I explore Kapur’s work as a departure from the scepticism which tends to inform mainstream cultural responses to utopian thought, tracing how it returns to ideas that are often written off as discredited, unworkable or dangerous.

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Memory and Forgetting

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Literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s and lost memories.

“Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties and embedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature and Memory: Public lecture series on life-writing, autobiography, personal narrative (UCT Summer & Winter School: January & August 2020).
Artwork above by Robin Rhode.

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North by South

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Bergen Literary Festival, February 2020

I joined fellow South African writers Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Koleka Putuma in Bergen. In the picture above they are discussing ‘The Meaning of Mandela’ and evoking the decades in which they came of age: a beautiful session. I talked to Jonny about his recent book.

“What to do? The amnesty machine seems not to have been designed to imbibe the unexpected. It was struggling enough just to process the routine.”
— One Day in Bethlehem (2019)

‘In short, there are problems’: Literary journalism in the postcolony.
Excerpt from Experiments with Truth: Narrative Non-fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa.

In an epilogue to Little Liberia, his 2011 account of an African diaspora in New York, Jonny Steinberg records a telephone conversation with a man whose life he has just spent two years researching. The author has given Jacob Massaquoi a printout of the manuscript, along with a note proposing that 50% of the royalties be channelled to community projects. Four days later he receives a call:

‘I have read everything’, he said. ‘There are very serious problems with this book: problems that will hurt family back home, problems that will have re- percussions for me in Staten Island. And then there are still more problems I cannot discuss now. In short, there are problems.’

A Strange Luminescence

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A Strange Luminescence

On John Akomfrah’s Four Nocturnes (2019).

Catalogue essay, Risk in Writing, A4 Arts Foundation. 1 July 2020.
Collaboration / diptych with Anna Hartford: Spreads Like Wildfire.

The decade began, just a week ago, in eerie red light. First pitch darkness at nine in the morning because of the smoke, then a red light on the horizon as the fire front approached. This was in eastern Australia, where navy ships began evacuating those being driven into the sea by the bushfires, but it was also everywhere. We saw it on our screens and it joined that category of uncanny aesthetic phenomena being generated week to week as the planet moves deeper into the Anthropocene: weather maps inventing new shades of purple as heat records are shattered; shards of ancient black ice calving from Arctic shelves, tints that might never before have touched human eyes. White glaciers in New Zealand went a uniform dirty yellow from Australian ash, as if a finger on a touch screen had flicked past ‘sepia’ and ‘vintage’ to opt for the filter ‘post-apocalyptic’, now and forever. ‘Post-apocalyptic is the new normal’ read one headline; every day something really not normal at all is the new normal, so with luck this copy-writing concept – so deadening as it slickly tries to absorb the radically unknown so quickly and knowingly into the already known – will itself soon be normalized and abandoned. Instead I kept watching a clip of man wearing ski goggles, on his boat with wife and children under the red sky, the fire wind lifting up his hair like static as he reached the limits of language, Mallacoota style:

‘Fuck. We, ah, decided to, ah, fuck off from the fucking houses, and thank fuck we did, cos the fire front’s come through. Everyone’s safe and sound. Got the girls and the dog’s up front. Got supplies but, I hope everyone’s fuckin just fuckin fuck the houses man. Get into the water. It’s fuckin…chaos. Fuck. I’ve never seen anything like it. Hope everyone’s safe man. Good luck.’

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Sea Power

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From Cape Town to Dar es Salaam, and back again.

Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard (excerpts) | Africa is a Country | 10 September 2013.
With photographs by David Southwood | Memory Card Sea Power.

A genre-busting book, Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard does a rare thing: it is non-fiction that breaks the mould of works that look in on the continent from the outside. It shows the ancient and complex connections that exist within and beyond African borders in emotional, historical, cultural and metaphysical ways that others shirk from.
Billy Kahora

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Literatures of Betrayal

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Literatures of Betrayal

Risk, collaboration and collapse in post-TRC narrative.

The Eleventh International Conference for Literary Journalism Studies
‘Literary Journalism: Telling the Untold Stories’. Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande so Sul. Porto Alegre, Brazil, 19-21 May 2016.

While the first decade of post-apartheid South African literary production saw a range of works which responded with journalistic and impressionistic immediacy to the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the second decade of democracy has been marked by a wave of what might be called post-TRC texts: more distant and recessed forms of accounting for the ‘unfinished business’ of the transition. This piece explores a series of texts that grapple with questions of betrayal and collaboration in the varied and complex senses of those words.

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The True Confessions of a First Year Convenor

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The True Confessions of a First Year Convenor

Curriculum change: problems and possibilities. 

Third Space Symposium: Decolonisation and the Creative Arts. 
ICA, University of Cape Town | 13-14 May 2016.

Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? | New York Review of Books | 9 October 1986:

Let us begin with a few suggested definitions...The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading…”

If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love. Except at school. And school should enable you to know, either well or badly, a certain number of classics among which—or in reference to which—you can then choose your classics. School is obliged to give you the instruments needed to make a choice, but the choices that count are those that occur outside and after school.

It is only by reading without bias that you might possibly come across the book that becomes your book.

What is this thing called ‘literature’, and how does it work? What does it mean to read the classics from where we are – Shakespeare and 19th-century novels transplanted to southern Africa like those street signs, DICKENS, COLERIDGE, KIPLING, set down incongruously in the suburbs of Woodstock, Observatory and Salt River? Are we dealing with ‘English literature’ or ‘literature in English’? What is the purpose of it all anyway, when others in the university are working on solar panels or vaccines for drug-resistant TB? What will be in the exam?

These are questions that all of us teaching in the big undergraduate courses must field and grapple with each year. We have to think hard about how to broach the core ideas of literary studies over thirteen weeks. How to do this in a way that is engaging and critically astute, but also so that it will not exclude any members of the student body? It is all very well to talk about how the literary work might ‘estrange’ what we think we know, and make the familiar unfamiliar. But how can theoretical ideas of productive artistic difficulty be explored in a way that does not estrange members of the student body – many of whom, at least in first year, do not have English as a first language.

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