Essays

Nuclear Summer

Nuclear Summer

A walk through South Africa's nuclear pasts and futures.

Sunday Times, 7 Feb 2016. Sunday Times article PDF [1/2] | [3]
Photographs by Neil Overy (above) and Barry Christianson.

Recently I took part in a ‘walking residency’, making my way from Cape Point to the centre of Cape Town. Writers, artists, archaeologists, architects, academics - 12 of us hiked along coastlines and firebreaks and through informal settlements.

We visited ancient shell middens and ruined stone cottages, the site of forced removals. Huge cloudbanks filled up False Bay and broke against the landmass; weather systems came and went. We got sunburnt, argumentative, sentimental, sunburnt again. We put away our electronic devices and began remembering our dreams ...

Half-lives, Half Truths. Svetlana Alexievich and the nuclear imagination, South Africa PEN essay series, 18 August 2016. Republished in Firepool.

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Waterlog

Waterlog

A journey through the public pools of greater Cape Town.

Openings columnFinancial Times, 8 January, 2016.

Waterlog #3 | Sea Point Pool | 19.01.16

Since Silvermine there have been terrible heat waves; fires leaving smoke all over the city’s horizon; helicopters toiling through the night, scooping up water from the reservoirs, dropping it in tiny white plumes on the shoulder of Devils’ Peak.

A banner appeared, taking up the whole face of an apartment building at the top of Long Street: Zuma Must Fall. Then an ANC-led march ripped it down, turning on a man who (allegedly) called out Zuma se ma se poes! On social media, self-appointed pundits explain that singling out the President is tantamount to racism, and that mob violence is only to be expected. People can only be insulted for so long.

Can you blame a man for wanting to go to the water?

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A Useless Life

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Literary biography and the limits of 'research'.

Visions of Tsafendas, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. Volume 16, Issue 4, 2015.

Research seminar, research cluster, research output. The word is almost a fetish within the contemporary academy—but what does “research” actually mean in a discipline like literature? And what happens when a research project overspills its bounds, or pushes up against disciplinary limits and protocols? In this piece, I explore such questions via the figure of Demetrios Tsafendas, the “mad Greek” who assassinated apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966, supposedly acting on instructions from a tapeworm inside him. It is one of the strangest facts in South African history; it is also, of course, a kind of fiction, and one that has been refracted into a range of literary and artistic works. Reading across both official and “creative” archives, I address a range of methodological problems that I encountered in attempting an academic treatment of Tsafendas and his (as the presiding apartheid judge put it) “useless life”.

Relocations

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 A public lecture series transformed into a beautiful book.

Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa | University of Cape Town Press | 2015. 

With essays and reflections by Gabeba Baderoon, André Brink, Imraan Coovadia, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Rustum Kozain, William Kentridge, Neo Muyanga, Zackie Achmat, Duncan Brown, John Higgins, Isabel Hofmeyr , Peter D. McDonald, Rajend Mesthrie, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Coilin Parsons, Sandy Young. And me. Designed by James King and Alexandra Dodd. Published by Juta.

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MER1CA

MER1CA

On first impressions, snap judgements and Achille Mbembe's sense of style.

Openings column (shorter version): Financial Times14 August 2015.

‘America is the most grandiose experiment that the world has yet seen,’ wrote Sigmund Freud in 1909, ‘but, I am afraid, it will not be a success’. 106 years later I spotted the line on a poster while attending a conference at New York University – my first visit to the States. It cheered me up during a misanthropic, jet-lagged daze and set off a complex series of recognitions. For one thing, I had been thinking along the same lines myself, and marshalling every scrap of evidence to clinch the case: the bad coffee at four dollars a pop; the garbage everywhere; the fact that I got asked to move out the way at least five times a day.

But at another level, what I responded to was the tone: the sweeping confidence of the declaration, with that magisterial throwaway clause – ‘I am afraid’. How this Mittel-European sentence stoops down from on high, taking its time (four commas), to deliver a vast, over-reaching social diagnosis on an entire continent. This, I realized, was a voice that I recognize from people coming to my country and making huge pronouncements on South Africa – or just ‘Africa’ – when they have barely stepped off the plane. A short taxi ride from Cape Town International to the guesthouse and already they are experts.

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Cecil Rhodes: My Part in His Downfall

Literature in the time of decolonization.

My attempt to make sense of the coincidence of MAN Booker International and the Rhodes Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town. Including one amazing fact you never knew (or needed to know) about the Rhodes statue...

The Essay: Life and Arts. Financial Times,3 April 2015.

See also: The Atlantic25 April 2015.

Just uphill from Rhodes, toward Table Mountain, I spotted a second, smaller plinth. On top of the pedestal stood a striking black woman, with her back to the statue and her face, obscured by a traditional beaded veil, angled down as if she was meditating. She wore a black leotard and had a quite untraditional pair of shiny stilettos on her feet.

The woman was Sethembile Msezane, an MFA candidate at the university and a Zulu-speaking performance artist from Soweto, outside Johannesburg. She’d made it her trademark on public holidays to juxtapose her young, black, female body with monuments of old, white, male colonial and Apartheid-era figures, and to turn up in silent vigil at sites of resistance to oppression.

On the Brink of the Mundane

On the Brink of the Mundane

Rereading Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket and Double Negative.

(Much) shorter version at the New Statesman, 9 January 2015: Lost in Joburg: One of South Africa's most accomplished prose stylists gets a timely reissue.

Do copy-editors still use their time-honoured signs: the confident slashes, STETs and arrowheads, the fallen-down S that means transpose? Or is everything now done via the garish bubbles of MS Word Track changes?

Midway through Ivan Vladislavić’s 2001 novel The Restless Supermarket, the proudly anachronistic narrator Aubrey Tearle gives a disquisition on the delete mark. As a retired proofreader, regular writer of letters to the editor, and grumpy but occasionally endearing old man, he suggests that of all his erstwhile profession’s charms, this is the most beautiful and mysterious:

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I and I

I and I

Meeting Geoff Dyer.

Edited version published in the Mail&Guardian, 23 December 2014.

Can I use ‘I’ in my essays? The question, often asked by first-year literature students, isolates the problem succinctly. The first I in the sentence means me, the special, singular, irreplaceable self; the second is a devious linguistic particle: a shifty, worn-out pronoun forced on us all the moment we enter language. And the perilous thing about book festivals is that they tend to collapse the two. The I who has been flown out to Cape Town and given a name-tag is now asked to answer for, or ‘speak to’, the I on the page.

In this case, Geoff Dyer, with whom I sat chatting during the Open Book festival in September this year while we waited for a panel on ‘The Art of the Essay’ to begin – a bit like TV newsreaders used to before or after the bulletin. I told him that he was one of only two people I had ever written a fan letter to (the other was Terry Pratchett, but I was ten years old then). I asked him if he actually enjoyed going to literary festivals, being interviewed, the whole scene. ‘I can honestly say’, he replied, ‘that the only reason I write any more is to be invited to literary festivals’.

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N2: A Bibliography

Cityscapes, Issue 05. April 2014.

You see them all along the N2: a red circle bisected diagonally, the universal code for no, not allowed, don’t, though in this case the line is drawn not through a cigarette or a knife but a thumbs-up. The sign means “no hitchhiking”, but if you are lucky enough to be flashing by in a vehicle it can produce an instant of cognitive dissonance (anti-good times, anti-like?). In 2014 the sign is hardly true to life—it has been outstripped by rising petrol prices and hard-nosed financial logic. Most people waiting on hard shoulders on the N2 hold currency in the air: ten, twenty, fifty rands. It is also a simple lesson in semiotics: even the simplest, most programmatic signs—whether pictographic, linguistic or property of the South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL)—can be infiltrated by unintended and contradictory meanings.

N2. Curled up in that tiny alphanumeric are thousands of kilometres, hundreds of service stations, millions of tons of concrete. N2 can mean a London bus route; an intelligence officer in the US Navy; an anti-nuclear song by the Japanese indie group Asian Kung Fu Generation. But for my purposes it is the longest highway in South Africa, which starts at an unfinished flyover near the docks in Cape Town, follows the eastern seaboard of the country (roughly) for over 2000 kilometres, then bends west below Swaziland to end at the town of Ermelo in the province of Mpumalanga. Major highways like the N2 are not liked, or at least, not thought about much.

Writing a hidden history of the UK’s motorway system, Joe Moran suggests that this bland corporate terrain of tarmac, underpasses and thermoplastic road markings is “the most commonly viewed and least contemplated landscape” in Britain. “The road is almost a separate country, one that remains underexplored not because it is remote and inaccessible but because it is so ubiquitous and familiar.” 

Juice Time

A wayward tribute to Alice Munro... and Raymond E. Feist.

Republished at Books of the Year, 21 January 2015.

Electricity gone down from Flower Road to Davenport. No internet on a Sunday. Peace.Electricity gone down from Flower Road to Davenport. No internet on a Sunday. Peace.

Yesterday’s swimming is still in me, in my shoulders and hair. Clifton 3 ½ beach with A. We splash out to the rock, but are too cautious to jump off it, slide back into the water over the barnacles. We run into Anna, Jemma and their friends, in knitted swimwear and dungarees. ‘Mary’s daughters’, says A., ‘They march to the sound of their own djembe.’ The beach is packed: the real girls thread their way between the incorrigible babes, looking for a place. Today the wind has stopped entirely and I want to go back. But she is having lunch with her grandparents and I know that a swim that perfect comes only once a year.

Reluctant to start work over the last weeks: lazy, a little depressed. To remedy it I try to break all routines, to force the days into new shapes. Sitting in a Turkish steam room in mid-afternoon. Shopping for shirts with D. at 9am, when the Waterfront is deserted. We have fish and chips at 11am and he says the harbour scene reminds him of the Canadian island where he grew up. Not the motorized pirate boat pulling out with the tourists, but the cranes and industrial mess behind. I ask if he is proud of Alice Munro and the Nobel.

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Indefinite Delay

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The Last Days of Nelson Mandela.

New Statesman10 October 2013. Cover Story.

In 1977 a group of journalists was permitted to visit Robben Island as part of a government attempt to convince the outside world that conditions there were not as bad as widely believed. There is a photograph of Nelson Mandela from that outing, one rarely included among iconic images of the man. He leans on a spade, his face closed with anger or disdain. Rediscovered in the archives long after the fall of apartheid, the photograph has a caption that reads: “466/64 ’n Gevangene werksaam in die tuin” – “a prisoner industrious in the garden”.

There are several ironies surrounding this image. Mandela wears sunglasses here; we now know that years of working in the lime quarries of the Island damaged his eyesight permanently, affecting his tear ducts and even (so it is said) making it impossible for him to cry. The Afrikaans caption tries, absurdly, to make the world’s best-known political prisoner into an anonymous labourer – or, to use a phrase that has not entirely disappeared from some corners of South Africa, into a “garden boy”.

Prisoner 466/64 did have a vegetable patch in the prison courtyard on Robben Island where he tended chilli and tomato plants. When transferred to another prison on the mainland in 1982, Mandela presided over a large and productive rooftop garden, made from sawn-off oil drums filled with soil. “The Bible tells us that gardens preceded gardeners,” we read in his 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, “but that was not the case at Pollsmoor.” But the 1977 photograph was taken against his will, and the strip of gravel shown in it was no garden – hence, perhaps, the look of disdain at this tawdry attempt to manipulate and meddle in his own careful, self-created mythology.

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Getting Past Coetzee

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In the shadow of the Nobel laureate.

Financial Times, 28 December 2012.

There remains the matter of getting past Coetzee. Dusklands (1974).

There is an odd made-for-television documentary from 1997 which shows footage of JM Coetzee conducting a guided tour of Cape Town’s southern suburbs. From the slopes of Table Mountain he points out the hospital where he was born; the suburb of Plumstead where he lived as a young boy; the university campus where he spent much of his academic career. A colleague recalls how Coetzee would not take calls from the Booker prize committee because he was invigilating undergraduate exams: a measure of his professionalism. We visit his Standard Three classroom at Rosebank Primary and the grassy common where he participated in school sports days. He recalls taking gold in the running backwards race of 1948, as if enjoying a wry joke at the expense of anyone who thought that such an exercise might grant some privileged insight into his work... 
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First published in Bokvennen litterært magasin | Oslo | nr. 3.12

These somewhat unfair thoughts are stirred by Disgrace, which is a very good novel, almost too good a novel...It sometimes reads as if it were the winner of an exam whose challenge was to create the perfect specimen of a very good contemporary novel.

James Wood, ‘Coetzee's Disgrace: A Few Skeptical Thoughts’, The Irresponsible Self (2004).