Archive for the ‘Feature’ Category
by Lindsay on May 10th, 2012
Rebecca Davis spoke to Stan Engelbrecht and Nic Grobler about their series of three photographic books, Bicycle Portraits, for the Daily Maverick.
Engelbrecht and Grobler discuss how the project came about and explain how they managed to convince the reclusive JM Coetzee to write an essay on bicycles in South Africa for one of the books. The exhibition, at a pop-up gallery on the corner of Long and Leeuwen streets in Cape Town, ends this Friday.
A new photographic project by two Capetonians explores the world of commuter cycling in South Africa, giving us intimate portraits of bike riders and their trusty steeds. REBECCA DAVIS doesn’t ride a bicycle, but she might start after this.
The bicycle occupies a curious position in South African culture. On the one hand, it’s long been associated with the poor – those who couldn’t afford motor vehicles. On the other hand, it’s an increasingly fashionable mode of conveyance for a new generation of hip urban youngsters. For the first time in South Africa’s history, riding a bicycle might soon no longer carry connotations about class and money.
This certainly hasn’t been the case up to now. In a fascinating essay about bicycles in South Africa by JM Coetzee, he notes that “even in the golden age of the bicycle in the early 20th century, the bicycle did not catch on widely in South Africa”. He suggests distance as a deterrent factor, and sparse road networks didn’t help. Bicycles simply never became big as transport for commuting in this country.
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by Lindsay on May 7th, 2012
Justice Malala enjoyed Patrick Flanery’s Absolution, a book set in post-apartheid South Africa, but it left him wondering where all the black South African writers have gone. Malala believes in the value of writing what you know, which he feels explains the lack of black voices in Absolution, but this leads to his question of where these voices are being represented and by whom. Read his Times LIVE column:
I have just finished reading a moving, gripping new book about South Africa today and yesterday.
Absolution, the debut novel of American writer Patrick Flanery, is a book for South African literature lovers: it has echoes of Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, nodding at their writing and their complicated relationship with this and the old South Africa, and at its heart is South Africa’s unfinished business with its past.
Who betrayed whom among the freedom fighters and among us, ordinary men and women? Who was a spy?
How do those complicit in the past’s terrible acts of betrayal atone for their deeds? What was the point of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
I approached this book with some trepidation. One reviewer had pointed out that it felt, well, unsettling to have some American upstart (Flanery was born in 1975) come here and tell us about ourselves.
I felt pretty much the same but was ashamed of the thought at the same time.
The twitterverse was quick to respond to Malala’s article:
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by Lindsay on May 6th, 2012
In an interview written for the UK Sunday Times Magazine, American Gods author Neil Gaiman pays Stephen King a visit and talks to him about his life, writing and Dr Sleep, the sequel to The Shining. Gaiman has made the raw copy of the interview available on his website, Neil Gaiman’s Journal.
The first time I met Stephen King was in Boston, in 1992. I sat in his hotel suite, met his wife Tabitha, who is Tabby in conversation, and his then-teenage sons Joe and Owen, and we talked about writing and about authors, about fans and about fame.
“If I had my life over again,” said King. “I’d've done everything the same. Even the bad bits. But I wouldn’t have done the American Express “Do You Know Me?” TV ad. After that, everyone in America knew what I looked like.”
He was tall and dark haired, and Joe and Owen looked like much younger clones of their father, fresh out of the cloning vat.
The next time I met Stephen King, in 2002, he pulled me up onstage to play kazoo with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a ramshackle assemblage of authors who can play instruments and sing and, in the case of author Amy Tan, impersonate a dominatrix while singing Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made For Walkin’”.
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by Sophy on May 4th, 2012
Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer has penned yet another treatise on the loathed Protection of State Information Bill, this time for The New York Review of Books. The article, entitled “South Africa: The New Threat to Freedom”, follows Gordimer’s Black Tuesday call for the bill to be rejected in its entirety.
While the NYRB article adds little to her previous discourse on the importance of sustained press freedom, it has propelled the 88-year-old into our headlines once again. Gordimer’s thesis is simple, though one we’ve heard before: the bill “will return South Africa to apartheid-era limits on free speech”.
The regime of racism in South Africa was maintained not only by brutality—guns, violence, restrictive laws. It was upheld by elaborately extensive silencing of freedom of expression. The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 had definitions of communism that were vastly inclusive. What was forbidden included advocacy of industrial, political, economic, and social change.
In 1982 an updated version of the Suppression of Communism Act, the Internal Security Act, was passed, which banned the African National Congress and the Pan African Congress along with the South African Communist Party. It retained almost all of the previous definitions of what was forbidden.
The Publications and Entertainments Act of the apartheid regime banned thousands of newspapers and books in South Africa from 1950 to 1990. The works of world-famous writers, including D.H. Lawrence, Richard Wright, Henry Miller, and Vladimir Nabokov, were prohibited along with the novels and nonfiction works of South African writers, including Todd Matshikiza, Bloke Modisane, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, André Brink, Can Themba, and three of my own novels. Among the taboo subjects of everyday life was sexual relations between white and black. In the 1970s the films Jesus Christ Superstar, A Clockwork Orange, and The Canterbury Tales were prohibited.
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Photo courtesy Daily Maverick
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by Sophy on Apr 29th, 2012
In an essay for The Millions, freelance journalist Nina Martyris contemplates the rise of what she refers to as “modern escapee Tiger Lit” – literature with a “tiger-escaping-from-zoo story” at its centre.
With a grandfather in India’s RK Narayan, author of A Tiger for Malgudi, Tiger Lit has come into its own in recent years thanks to a number of award-winning books, from Téa Obreht’s Orange Prize-winning The Tiger’s Wife to Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger. According to Martyris, “all kinds of besotted, bombed-out, starving, mangy, metaphoric and misunderstood man-eaters are now on the loose”:
In the lead story of Rajesh Parameswaran’s acclaimed first collection, I Am An Executioner, a Bengal tiger escapes from an American zoo and runs amuck. “The Infamous Bengal Ming” is hair-raising, but all I could think of while reading it was: Not one more tiger-escaping-from-zoo story?
Tiger Lit has never been so popular. Look at the number of award-winning fictions in the last decade in which tigers escape from zoos. There’s Rajesh Parameswaran’s story (the collection may well win a prize); Téa Obreht’s Orange Prize-winning The Tiger’s Wife; Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer-finalist play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo; Carol Birch’s Booker-shortlisted Jamrach’s Menagerie; Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winner The White Tiger, in which the tiger’s escape is a metaphor for breaking out of the cage of poverty; and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which also bagged a Booker. And we’re just talking tigers here, not animals-escaping-from-zoo fictions, which would give us Salman Rushdie’s Luka and the Fire of Life, Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, and no doubt several others.
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- Three Plays: Gruesome Playground Injuries, Animals Out of Paper, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph
EAN: 9781593762940
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by Sophy on Apr 23rd, 2012
Uitgeverij Cossee, who you may remember as the Dutch publishers of Een Manier van Vriendschap, have released a sneek peak of the late JC Kannemeyer‘s Coetzee biography, JM Coetzee: A Life in Writing. We’re noting this as further testimony to the Dutch nation’s unfailing fondness for our Nobel laureate — it’s all in the name Cossee.
While we await the release of JM Coetzee: A Life in Writing in South Africa in September, the rights to the ground-breaking biography are slowly being sold around the world – most recently to Editions du Seuil in France. Cossee has allowed its readers access to a document which outlines the book’s contents and includes some pretty juicy pictures of a young Coetzee; take a look:
In spite of his world-wide eminence as a novelist and a literary scholar, the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee has not thus far been the subject of a comprehensive biography. For J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, J.C. Kannemeyer, well-known for his two-volume history of Afrikaans literature, and the author of six extensive biographies of Afrikaans authors, had the cooperation of Coetzee himself, who granted him interviews and put him in touch with family, friends and colleagues who could supply information about events in the author’s life. Coetzee also provided him with copies of comprehensive documentation in his private possession, and granted him access to the manuscripts of his novels that are due to be permanently lodged at the University of Texas at Austin later this year. Apart from the information gathered through these channels, Kannemeyer also made a study of the enormous body of literature on Coetzee, and through archival research unearthed further information not hitherto accessed.
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by Sophy on Apr 23rd, 2012
By Gillian Anstey for the Sunday Times:
Gaile Parkin writes novels that take a lighthearted view of difficult places.
Gaile Parkin doesn’t have a home. Oh, she is not homeless, just a nomad who doesn’t do “stuff”, she says. Neither does the author of the recently published When Hoopoes go to Heaven have a base where she stores possessions. Everything she owns fits into a 20kg suitcase and a laptop bag, and she is continually replenishing, giving away and “regifting”.
“For me home is a state of mind, it’s not a place,” says the 55-year-old, surprisingly elegant for someone semi-permanently in transit. Born in Zambia, she now lives in various African countries, between which she jets off to Britain “because that’s what my passport says and I don’t need a visa. But I’m not British, my passport is; I am African.”
Two African countries, Rwanda and Swaziland, have provided the settings for her delightful novels about celebration within a context of sadness. And what better way to celebrate than with a cake, especially one designed for the occasion?
Hence the story and title of Parkin’s first novel, Baking Cakes in Kigali, whose central character is the ample-bodied Tanzanian Angel Tungaraza, who describes herself as “not an educated somebody who reads books,” married to “an educated somebody”. To help support the orphaned grandchildren she and her academic-turned-consultant husband take care of, Tungaraza bakes cakes to supplement their income.
Readers all over the world loved it. Baking Cakes has been translated into 16 languages, from Japanese to Portuguese, and there are early-stage discussions about a possible UK-US co-production TV series.
Parkin says she is not holding her breath, but if that goes ahead, she will celebrate – with a lemon meringue or carrot cake.
It’s not every writer who publishes their first novel in their 50s. Parkin’s arose primarily because nobody would listen to her. While she had considered writing novels as a fall-back if all else failed, she has spent much of her life collecting qualifications, perhaps as a reaction to not doing “stuff”.
“I’m a bit of a course junkie,” she says. She did linguistics honours at Rhodes, followed by a masters at Wits, “but then I went on to study all sorts of other things in other places”, she says.
“I’ve studied psychology, did a masters in gender and international development at the University of Warwick (UK), and I have done loads of training and counselling. You name it and I will have done a course in it.”
This led to diverse jobs, and so she found herself in Rwanda, the East African country where an estimated 800000 people were massacred in 1994.
“After I left Rwanda I thought everyone was going to ask me about it, because you’d expect some questions. But nobody asked anything and I realised it was because they felt they already knew … and they didn’t want to know any more.
“But my experience of it was very different. Yes, of course there was that dark, devastated side to it, but I had also laughed there, more than I had laughed anywhere. There’s a very different side to it that people just didn’t know, and people weren’t really interested in me telling them about it, so I wrote it,” says Parkin.
But it wasn’t so straightforward. How could she balance the lightness with the tragedy?
“I wanted it to be funny, but I really battled with it. Is it appropriate to write something funny about such a tragic place? And then I realised that if I did it with enough respect, and didn’t dismiss the darkness, it might work, and then I was able to start writing.”
Her lifestyle provided her with her main character, the outsider.
In Baking Cakes in Kigali, Parkin said she chose to make her central character a foreigner, because when she had lived there, Rwandans were quite suspicious of each other and “no one knew for sure what anyone did during the genocide. So I thought if I brought in a foreigner, they would speak to a foreigner like they spoke to me.”
For her second novel, When Hoopoes go to Heaven, the narrator starts off as even more of a bewildered outsider: Angel’s eldest grandson, Benedict.
He is 10 years old and so views the people and events happening around him with the naivete and misinterpretation of youth, a device which reinforces both the humour and the tragedy.
Set in Swaziland, which Parkin believes “is the country the world forgot, a place of imagination and myth”, Hoopoes is about the same Tungaraza family as Baking Cakes, but is a stand-alone story.
At first it has the illusion of being a children’s book, but touches on socials ills such as schoolgirl abuse by teachers, xenophobia and, ultimately, Aids. Yet the novel is laced with humour, such as the homeopathic Rescue Remedy Benedict feeds sick animals.
It is this blend of serious and light which gives Parkin’s novels their charm. Although one website critic called Baking Cakes “genocide and Aids lite” (which Parkin didn’t think was insulting when it was pointed out to her), another wrote: “So often books are either light, feel-good reads or heavy, thought-provoking tomes; it takes a very skilled writer to address significant social issues and world events within the context of an agreeable, charming read. Gaile Parkin is one of these rare talents.”
Parkin justifies her lightness of touch: “Who is going to pick up a book they think is heavy and gloomy about Rwanda, about Swaziland?”
She is busy writing her third novel, also about the Tungaraza family, but set in a different African country and told by a different narrator.
Ten days after our chat in Joburg, Parkin is scheduled to be on the move again. I don’t ask to where. Does it matter?
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by Sophy on Apr 22nd, 2012
Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz is set to release a brand new collection of short stories, his second, in September this year. The highly anticipated release of This Is How You Lose Her will mark more 15 years since the publication of his first collection, Drown, and five since the release of his bestselling The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
The latest issue of The New Yorker contains one of Díaz’s as-yet-unpublished short stories, which will most likely appear in the forthcoming collection. Read “Miss Lora” and a Q&A with Díaz below:
Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.
You’d fuck anything, someone jeered.
And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.
Your brother. Dead from the cancer, and sometimes you still felt a fulgurating sadness over it, even though he really was a super asshole at the end. He didn’t die easy at all. Those last months, he just steady kept trying to run away. He’d be caught trying to hail a cab outside Beth Israel or walking down some Newark street in his greens. Once he conned an ex-girlfriend into driving him to California, but outside of Camden he started having convulsions and she called you in a panic. Was it some atavistic impulse to die alone, out of sight? Or was he just trying to fulfill something that had always been inside him? Why do you keep doing that? you asked, but he just laughed. Doing what?
This week’s story, “Miss Lora,” marks the return of Yunior, who last appeared in the magazine two years ago, in “The Pura Principle.” In that story, Yunior’s brother, Rafa, has recently been diagnosed with cancer. “Miss Lora” takes place shortly after Rafa’s death, when Yunior is still dealing with “a fulgurating sadness” and also sleeping with his neighbor, an older woman. Back in 2010, did you know that you were going to write this story?
My brother’s cancer—what I used to call his exile to Cancer Planet—it’s one of those fractures in my past that I keep returning to. Very boring for readers, I’m sure, but all artists have their chronotopes, these time-spaces we keep circling, and this happens to be mine. But yes, I knew I would write “Miss Lora.” Actually, I tried to write this story first but it just wouldn’t stick, and so then I wrote “The Pura Principle.” What really sparked me was that I was hanging with a group of my boys, they asked me what I was working on, and I told them—this older-woman thing—and a few of them started talking about their own experiences in high school. Two of them had been in similar situations, even lost their virginities to older women. They were proud of what happened, too, a serious notch in their masculine belts. This type of impropriety was not as uncommon as one might imagine, not in a Caribbean community like the one I grew up in, where boys were encouraged toward a hypermasculine ideal, where the line between adults and minors was not as safeguarded as it should have been. Anyhow, this alarming conversation got me back on track. Ignited the work.
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Photo courtesy Jezebel
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by Sophy on Apr 20th, 2012
Today we are delighted to bring you an extract from the short story “Warm Enough”, which appears in Colleen Higgs‘ brand new collection, Looking for Trouble. The collection consists of ten stories, centring on the Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville in the late eighties and early nineties.
In “Warm Enough” – a nostalgic and humorous piece – we are privy to one side of a conversation between old friends who have lost touch with each other:
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Grant lived in a flat at the bottom end of Dunbar Street. You didn’t ever see his flat did you? I only went there a couple of times. And the one time I visited him there he’d filled his whole flat with branches he’d brought in from when the Council pruned the plane trees in his road. He was so mal, hey. Bos bevok. He didn’t want to leave them there to die in the street like rubbish, he said. His place spaced me out, completely. Apart from the branches, which was enough to push me over the edge, his flat was dirty and I mean vuil, hey. Dishes and pizza boxes and crusty pots rotting all over the place and I’m not exaggerating. Stompies and bottlenecks – not even in ashtrays. The oke was living like an animal. I was glad my old lady couldn’t see how he was living, she would have turned in her grave. Well she isn’t dead yet, but you know what I mean. No furniture apart from the mattress and sheets and blankets so filthy you couldn’t tell what colour they were originally. It was worse than bergies, and that’s saying something. I couldn’t stop myself from tuning him, “Sies man Grant, how can you live like this? Are you a dog?” But you know what? Not even dogs, not even pigs live like that.
Old Grant was always such a joker, so full of life and laughs, I felt like a dried up old prune around him, even when we were kids. He could always make you hose yourself. But I’m sorry, that flat was the end for me. Something inside me tightened. It scared me. I don’t think Ruth ever went there, she would have run a mile. Grant used to visit her in his leather jacket, somehow emerging from that bloody pig sty cleaned up enough for a person like Ruth to be cool with. No you’ve got to hand it to the oke, he’s pulled off some tricks in his day and getting involved with Ruth was one of those occasions – big time.
[...]
I remember this one night, we were all at Dawson’s. It was before Ruth and Nathan split up, she and I were still friends and somehow Grant came along for the ride that night. He used to pitch up at my place when he wanted something to eat and he couldn’t come up with a better plan. One time when he couldn’t find me he ate loquats from one of those big gardens in Jan Smuts near the Zoo, where the trees hang over onto the pavement. Anyway I think that was when they met, Grant and Ruth. The Radio Rats were making a comeback and Dawson’s was cooking. People like James Phillips and Johannes Kerkorrel showed up. Definitely the best jol in Joburg that night. We all danced like mal, even Nathan, who wasn’t really a dancer. His heart wasn’t in it, but that night he was jiving with the best of us. That journalist who got shot a few months later in Katlehong was there too. Everybody was at Dawson’s, even the short drug dealer who always wore that mustard-yellow felt homburg. When I think about it now, it was like we were celebrating the end of something terrible that we’d lived through our whole lives. It was like the war was over and who the fuck knew what would happen next?
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by Sophy on Apr 19th, 2012
Earlier this week, James Ibori, former governor of Nigeria’s Delta state, was sentenced to 13-years in prison by London’s Southwark Crown Court.
Ibori, an ex-convict consider to be one of the country’s most influential politicians, pleaded guilty to charges of corruption and fraud after the extent of his embezzlement was revealed. In an article for The Guardian, Nigeria’s Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, author of I Do Not Come to You by Chance, comments on the sentencing of Ibori in the context of the pervasive corruption among Nigeria’s political elite.
According to Nwaubani, many Nigerian leaders are guilty of the belief that they are “Somebodys” who are “born to own” and control. While many celebrate Ibori’s sentencing, Nwaubani believes that it changes little as there is “a multitude of latent Iboris temporarily keeping themselves occupied with noisy calls for reform”.
This week, former Nigerian state governor James Ibori was sentenced by a British judge to 13 years in prison. He is guilty on two counts. One is corruption – a crime of which many other Nigerian leaders are guilty. But the second is his belief that some people are “somebodys” who are born to own, control and enjoy while others are “nobodys” whose lot is to serve, toil and endure – a mindset shared by most Nigerians, at every stratum of our society.
Here, the politician can’t accept that “nobodys” like his driver and cobbler are expected to appoint him to the throne. Instead, he seeks the anointing of powerful godfathers, and then arranges to rig the elections. The nurse takes home the bedding donated by charity to the government hospital wards; she knows that the wretched patients are used to sleeping on sheet-less beds in their homes anyway. The newspaper editor would rather make a lead story of the minister’s mother-in-law’s 80th birthday ceremony than of the fact that 400 children died of lead poisoning in Zamfara state. The wealthy madam doesn’t bother that the nannies accompanying her prim children are dressed in rags; she can afford to clothe them nicely, but then, she can also afford to cast pearls on swine. The dead body lies in the street until it bloats and bursts, because no person of worth has reported a missing relative.
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Photo courtesy The Guardian
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