It may be an invented memory, but I do seem to recall, back in 1983, the first rumblings of controversy over the plan to divert the N2 highway around Grahamstown, instead of through it. Moreover, because Army property straddled the obvious route through flat land on the northern side of town, it was decided to drive the bypass through the tortuous hilly country to the south. This would involve some exceptionally deep and (as it turned out) unstable cuttings.
Don
Pinnock, resident in Grahamstown at the time, described the “farce” of a public
meeting about it (in his delightful book of essays, Love Letters to Africa):
Few townspeople wanted the
bypass. Grahamstown’s traders talked of lost revenue, hotels of lost guests,
romantics of a lost town along the N2. There were predictions of horrendous car
accidents along the new speedway (eventually, they proved correct). But this
was the mid-1980s and the apartheid government wanted a fast road that didn’t
go through poor townships where youths burned tyres, threw stones and worse.
... The people objected. But this wasn’t democracy, it was a lesson in
self-interest. The plans for the bypass were approved.
The
cuttings, however, have provided more than one unexpected bonus. One was that
Guy Butler, doyen professor of English at Rhodes University and leading light in
establishing the 1820 Settler Foundation,
managed to rescue a number of the larger sandstone boulders from the roadworks,
and set them up as compass stones outside the Settlers’ Monument where it looms
over town like a beached crate.
I
started with these pseudo-Neolithic menhirs in my introduction to the recent (I
think fourteenth) edition of the annual Literature & Ecology Colloquium,
this time held at Rhodes. I started the Colloquium in 2004 as a forum for the
few academics in the country who were interested in conjunctions between
literature and environmental concerns. I felt that since the ecological crisis
is unquestionably the global crisis
of our times, at least some of us literati ought to be thinking about how we
can contribute to educating our students about it. In the intervening years,
with the willing participation of sundry colleagues and institutions, the
Colloquium has migrated around the country, drawing into its ambit various
scholars, both established and emergent, to think outside their usual boxes and
extend their chosen subjects in ecological, or ‘ecocritical’, directions. We
have explored numerous themes along the way – animals, trees, birds, pedagogy,
belonging, water, shorelines and more – and spawned a decent range of published articles
in journals and books.
This
time, the theme was geology. Eyebrows were cocked, but the more I thought about
it, the more avenues this seemed to open up, especially in the Southern African
context. I hoped that the Colloquium
would attract a range of papers on local manifestations of the geological in
our sundry literatures. For whatever reasons – the timing, lack of funding,
Grahamstown’s vast isolation, bemusement at this crazy idea, or whatever – it didn’t
really. Charne Lavery did talk about the various islands sprinkling our
territorial waters (which are more extensive than our territory on land!), but
her interest is more pelagic than geological; and Dirk Klopper offered a
wide-ranging treatment of the weird consort of the occult and palaeontology
shadowing some texts, including Olive Schreiner’s famous novel, The Story of an African Farm.
Several
papers were not about our region, but opened up further possibilities. Sam Naidu
introduced us to a crime novel about Mexican migrants into the US caught in the
geological wastes of the Sonora Desert, reminding me of the rich literature of
the Kalahari and the Namibian deserts (I thought of Laurens van der Post in the
Tsodilo Hills, or the unlikely ‘doughnut’ mountain formation in Wilbur Smith’s The Burning Shore). Tsitsi Sachikonye
talked about the effects of volcanoes and earthquakes in the Caribbean novels
of Maryse Condé (no irrelevant matter, as Mexicans, Japanese, Italians,
Pakistanis, and many others just in the last year, will tell you). And I
thought about the quake-induced tsunami with which Jane Rosenthal closes her
futuristic novel of the Karoo, Souvenir. My erstwhile PhD student Jyoti Singh’s paper
on William Blake’s phantasmagoric use of geological features raises a perpetual
question: when does reality, or realism in writing, and scientific observation,
spill over into the realm of symbolic meaning, and why? This question also haunted Alan Northover’s
paper on Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, Shaman,
an imagining of Neolithic lifeways which indirectly evokes the famous rock
paintings of France’s Chauvet Cave. I am reminded here of the numerous
travelogues, stories and poems in Southern Africa invoking Bushman rock art for
all sorts of spiritual purposes, as well as of other caves: the Cango caves of
Anne Landman’s novel Devil’s Chimney,
for example, or the sinkholes in Michael Green’s novel of that title.
And so
it goes on... so much more to explore in this geological vein. Mountain aesthetics, road-building,
riverlines, shorelines... all geological. Vegetation distributions and water
availability are fundamentally governed by the geology being just what it is. Our
extensive farming literature is dependent on soils: that’s half our economic
history. The other half is driven by mining and powered by fossil fuels; one
could start with Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy
and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country,
and track the literary history of mining’s impact on our society all the way
through to the laments of Marikana.
So one
is hurtled back through incalculable tracts of time. As Goonie Marsh, geologist
complete with unruly beard, tanned knees and sandals, laid it out in his
marvellous pocket survey at the Colloquium: not only is it hard to get one’s head
around the numbers and the layered taxonomies of aeons and periods and
formations, but also hard to accept that humanity is an eye-blink in those
aeons, our advent and eventual demise to be regarded dispassionately.
Well,
we literati aren’t very good at being dispassionate: we live for the love and turbulence, the loyalties and betrayals, the
emotional horrors and beauties of our briefly embodied lives, as captured in
the compressed and flexing time-spans of literary works. A poem or a paragraph
can connect materiality with thought across millennia. Section X of Grahamstown poet Don
Maclennan’s enigmatic ‘long short story’, A
Brief History of Madness in the Eastern Cape, hints at both continuities
and differences:
It was raining
the day Mavis and I arrived in Georgetown . So we went to the museum. We whispered along the corridors of exhibits,
the dumb past all entombed and labelled.
There was one in particular – a piece of mesozoic fossil beach. It should have been displayed with
searchlights on black velvet, like the crown jewels, in a chamber all of its
own. It is a chunk of fossil life, with
thousands of different shapes and sizes of crustaceans packed into each other,
eating and being eaten, like a Notre Dame gargoyle, foot in mouth, shell
overlapping shell, and endlessly impacted palimpsests.
Then there was also a
collection of Settler culture – not so tightly packed as the fossil, but
clearly in the making. Individual life
agonies imprinted on these derelict possessions – spectacles, baby bows, bridal
nighties, fading, intimate diaries. Each
one posed a question for the future.
Two sets of communal life-forms, packed in analogous
displays. The questions for the future? What is the meaning of the past for
us? How do we penetrate its dumbness? Are we so different from those mesozoic
life-forms? Is there something that
makes us uniquely human?
To that last question there is the obvious answer: language
and poetry – or to put it in terms of an image Maclennan returned to often, the
making of bread from stones – of culture from the material of the world. For Maclennan, as for many of us, the most
enduring fascination and mystery is that human culture, with all its predatory
idiocies and its artistic glories, should somehow have arisen from sheer
geology and become conscious and, even more astonishing, loving and ethical in
its awareness of ‘individual life agonies’.
In an unremittingly
over-written but provocative recent book, Stone:
An ecology of the inhuman (2015), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen avers:
Stone becomes history’s bedrock as lithic agency impels
human knowing. Neither dead matter nor pliant utensil, bluntly impedimental as
well as collaborative force, stone brings story into being, a partner with
language ... a material metaphor. ... [W]hen imagining deep time, a
shared vocabulary of cataclysm reveals an abiding inclination to stories of
rocky entanglement, to the making of exigent and unexpected art.
This last Colloquium was great fun and unquestionably
educative. But I feel the enterprise has reached the end of its natural life,
at least in its present form. Someone else, with a different vision and energy,
will have to take it onwards now. Wow: fourteen years of it – gone by in a
geological eye-blink.
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