No.6 – The South African fence: notes towards a literary history

I seem to recall that some years ago James Clarke, then writing an environmental column, claimed that there was not a spot in the whole of South Africa that was further then ten kilometres from somebody’s fence.

That would take some verifying, but the point is roughly supported by the experience of travelling through it: compared to the vast spaces of Botswana or Namibia, South Africa feels obsessively fenced-off.  It’s hard to get off the road in most places.  In impoverished areas like the Transkei, road-signs actually warn: “NO FENCING.”   Possession and exclusion, it seems to me, has become the rigid, even paranoid soul of this country.  Fences have become a moral constituent of our very psyches.  Fences to keep people out and keep people in, animals in or out, wilderness apart from domesticity, the legal from the marauding, the rich from the poor, the black from the white.  Wire everywhere, with its rich if vicious set of metaphoric monickers: galvanised wire, barbed-wire, chain-link, chicken-mesh, diamond-mesh, jackal-proof fencing, game fencing, electric fencing, razor-wire (the last allegedly a South African invention – a worthy contribution to civilisation, I’m sure).

The technology of wire transformed our rural landscape, fundamentally altering whole ecologies.  From about 1870 on, wire began to replace native and natural barriers of wood, thorn-branches, kei-apple hedges, bomas of prickly-pear.  Wire accompanied and made possible vast livestock agriculture, new grazing patterns, the banishment of a few remaining wild animals to “protected parks”, the enforcement of divisive racial policy, prison systems.  An 1889 Select Committee inquiring into the effects of the Fencing Act included this testimony:

Are the advantages of fencing great? – The advantages of fencing are very great.  It increases the amount of stock which land can carry, it prevents the spread of contagious diseases amongst animals, it checks thieving, and civilizes the country, as there can be nothing worth calling a farm until the country is fenced...

A huge industry flourished on enclosure.  In 1906 13,400 tons of wire was imported into the Cape; in 1928, 47,600 tons.  Today, as much livestock is replaced by game farming, some quirky relic fences also pass into obsolescence: the fence-posts made from long slivers of rock in the Karoo, and increasingly rare sneezewood posts, sought after by wood-carvers and instrument-makers.

It would be surprising if the fence didn’t make it into our literature.  Never mind the ubiquity of the suburban garden fence, in all its defensive variety – a society-defining industry as vast as the rural one.  Here are just a few rural teasers.

In 1909, the ‘Kipling of Rhodesia’, Cullen Gouldsbury, lamented the loss of the freedom of the Great White Hunter; the fence was destroying romantic nomadism and the migrations of humans and animals alike.  This is the closing stanza from his poem, “The Ring-Fence”:

Hang up thy rusted bandolier, and let the rifle rust,

For now the dreams of yester year and all they held in trust

Must take the place of strenuous days and starlit nights of old

Of morning mists, and noontide blaze, and weariness and cold –

No more the Tusker of those dreams shall charge, with trunk uncurled,

No more, at dawn, thou’lt pace the paths with dancing dew empearled –

No more crouch low and test the wind – the Ring-Fence hems the world!

(And how widely is the term “ring-fenced” used as a metaphor now!)

Fences can be as destructive to animals as they can be protective.  This is writ small, but with a terrible compassion, in a poem by Gouldsbury’s successor as Rhodesia-Zimbabwe’s premier white poet, the now neglected N H Brettell.  This is the evocative description from “Wind and an Eagle-Owl”.  The speaker and his wife are contemplating the aftermath of a quarrel:

We rode out with the pealing day before us,

Down plains all wind and woods in trouble,

With the first tooth of winter in the air:

All the world’s doors flew open for us –

Crippled and craven, the plovers scattered crying

On the shuddering air, peevish, lamentable:

And in a fence, the great bird trapped and dying

With splintered scapulars spreadeagled there.

You luckless fellow of our night of wind,

Who through the breathing solitudes had hunted,

And blindly struck, like us, suddenly pinned

And broken on the barbs that we had blunted.

                I tie my timid filly up

                To get a stick to kill you with;

                With pity brimming like a cup

                I come deliverer in disguise:

                Your great beak gaped in savage grin,

                Your great stare narrowed to a frith

                Of gleaming horror and surprise ...

What starts off as almost Shakespearean symbolism, narrows to grim and visceral mercy, with the fence as the murderous frame or fretwork.

To return to South Africa, and to turn from poetry to fiction:  J M Coetzee’s futuristic masterpiece, The Life & Times of Michael K, follows the meanderings of Michael K from his career as Cape Town municipal gardener into the dry interior, almost haplessly trying to slip past all restrictions and constrictions, including even the need to cultivate and eat.  He is the ultimate nomad, a “wraith” eluding history.  But he gets caught up in a police raid, interned in a labour camp (walled and fenced) and, ironically, assigned to a fencing crew:

... The work was slow, for they were using not new wire but lengths of old wire which when joined together coiled in inconsistent directions.  K liked the leisureliness of the work and its repetitiveness ... Once the farmer took K aside, gave him a cigarette, and commended him.  ‘You have a feel for wire,’ he said.  ‘You should go into fencing...’

But K’s desire is to transcend fencing, his “feel” is to go through and away:

            ‘So can you open the gate?’ said K.

                ‘The only way to leave is with the work party,’ said the guard.

                ‘And if I climb the fence? What will you do if climb the fence?’

                ‘You climb the fence and I’ll shoot you.  I swear to God I won’t think twice, so don’t try.’

                K caressed the wire as if weighing the risk.

The fence reappears countless times in this novel and, I venture to speculate, in sundry other rural and plaasroman farm novels.  I predict that once you start looking for it, the fence will appear everywhere, the all but unacknowledged legislator of our landscapes.  One more sample: Henrietta Rose-Innes’ recent deft novel Green Lion.  Like Michael K  it’s set in the Cape and vaguely futuristic.  Table Mountain is now ringed by a secure fence, ostensibly to protect its wildlife but also inviting transgression; like K, the lion of the title, last of its kind in the remnant of a disintegrating zoo, also effects an escape into something like myth.

Having so trapped ourselves in every direction, it seems, there is something in us that longs to get out again.  One might finally agree with Grahamstown poet Robert Berold, in his poem “boundaries” (from Rain across a paper field):

I no longer recognise these fields

cattle, fences, boundary stones

boundaries make no sense to me

the idea of a country is so strange

can God’s forms, tree and tusk

contain this chaos? ...

No 5. – Animal suffering: denying the undeniable

 

Within the last month, one step forward, two steps back.  Forward: Ian Michler’s new documentary Blood Lions appears set to make a major impact on canned lion-hunting – film having an effect where years of writing and activists’ legal nagging have failed.  Backwards: two court decisions.  One allows ‘local’ trade in rhino horn – a case brought to serve the commercial interests of a South African rancher.  Time will tell if this will actually help save the rhino.  Another: a judge reportedly decides that tying up baby elephants and beating them into submission, in a case brought by the NSCPA, does not qualify as cruelty. 

All three instances reveal, at some level, certain humans’ profound lack of imaginative insight into the world of the animal itself.  There’s an assumption that because they are “animals” – that is, somehow in essence, en masse, different from “humans” – their mental and physical suffering need not be considered.  But this is a category mistake. For tens of thousands of years all the world’s animistic systems, long before the advent of the monotheistic religions, assumed that men and beasts had as many commonalities as differences: that is why eating animals was (and is) invested with spiritual significance, why one might magically but literally take on the power of a particular animal through imbibing it, wearing it, painting it, dancing it.  This sense of our being integral to animality, of being just one animal amongst many, has been echoed, oddly, by science: evolutionary and genetic biology conclusively establishes our common ancestry and features.  And, as Rupert Sheldrake has argued in his book The Science Delusion, there is a tonnage of experiential evidence of compassionate communion between humans and animals that shouldn’t be dismissed just because scientific models can’t measure it.

Yet both ancient and modern systems, spiritual and materialist, still deeply depend on animal incarceration, death and consumption.  The canned lion, rhino horn, and elephant-taming cases have another thing in common: the assumption that the animals are ultimately available for human commercial use.  Enshrined in finance is an assumption of fundamentally disrespectful superiority: in short, power.  We do it because we can.

I think that we hunt, sacrifice, tame, imprison, utilise, eat, love, fear and compulsively represent animals in the arts because we believe they make us what we are.  By categorising all others animals as animal, we become ‘human’.  We have become human on the back of animal suffering.

Not that we like to admit it.  A student of mine has just completed a fascinating Master’s thesis on meat-eating in South African fiction.  His observation: no South African writer – not even J M Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello – has written a novel so focussed on meat-consumption as, say, Annie Proulx in That Ol’ Ace in the Hole, or Ruth Ozeki in My Year of Meat.  While there seems scarcely a South African novel in which meat does not appear, the vast majority of references are incidental elements of verisimilitude, just part of the furniture of the depicted world.  Seldom remarked upon, described in detail, or ethically questioned, are the underpinning machineries of death, the massive industries of farming, breeding, transporting, slaughtering and packaging those once-breathing, complete, individual animals. 

Yet the undertow of animal suffering is almost always there, in mere hints sometimes, but as unmistakable as molehills.

Horses in the Boer War: from an etching by William Hider

I’ve just read an early novel by South African-born Justin Cartwright, Freedom for the Wolves (1983).  Not one of his best, perhaps, but interesting for its animal presences.  The novel falls roughly into two halves.  In the first half, young Frank Thompson, a somewhat reluctant soldier, arrives in Zululand in 1879, at the sputtering end of the Anglo-Zulu War; he is involved in the ignominious capture of King Cetewayo, then in the unseating of Pedi king Sekukuni, finally in gold-mining on the Reef, making enough to establish a couple of farms.  In the second half, his grandson James, having spent a long period in England, returns to South Africa in 1959 and tries, rather haplessly, to get one of the farms going again.  (In this aspect, James Thompson is a prototype for the character of James Kronk in Cartwright’s later novel, White Lightning.) 

So although the novel is not overtly about animals, they are nevertheless there.

There is, firstly, lots of meat-eating, described in culturally different contexts.  There are “tons of tinned beef”; “wild duck, guinea fowl, boiled beef, roast lamb”; “roasting meat on the fires”; “pies, made with god-knows-what bits of leftover beef and kidney”; and many more examples, unremarkable yet vital.  Because Thompson is intrigued by indigenous culture, even as he is aiding in its destruction, he often remarks on Zulu or Swazi attitudes towards cattle, and their occasional, highly ritualised eating of them.  In one of a few such instances, he looks down at a slaughter scene:

In a small kraal six or seven warriors helped an old man marshall some animals.  Slowly he walked around them and then lunged forward with a spear and buried it beneath the shoulder of an animal, which at this distance seemed barely to react.  It walked on and then stumbled once before sinking mutely to the ground.  Immediately two of the assistants began to skin it while the old man walked calmly after the surviving cattle until he had one cornered; he lunged again, deftly. The cattle seemed to accept the inevitable with resignation...

In parallel, the machinery of imperial invasion is carried by animals, “thousands upon thousands of oxen and horses, covering the hills and valleys” – almost all surely destined for some violent demise.  In this animal mass, in Frank Thompson’s view, the “logical imperative [of] materialism”, its drive to “impose some order and solidity and above all meaning on this vast continent of impermanence”, is made manifest. 

Sandra Swart, professor of history at Stellenbosch University, has shown in her wonderful book, Riding High, that the history of the country would not have unfolded as it did without the horse: for two centuries, the horse bore the burdens of the wars and of peacetime transport and communication alike.  Wolves is suitably replete with references to horses, mounted by soldiers, pulling wagons, and suffering terrible casualties.  And Frank develops only one companionable relationship with an animal, ‘his’ horse Khelim, who survives all the battles and diseases and lives to old age.  He is “not so much a horse as a beacon”, a slightly rebellious and “homespun” animal, reflecting the values of his owner.

Contrasting this rather casual affection Frank, amidst the wreckage of a kraal on his farm – the people had been “moved on” –  encounters an emaciated “feral” dog.  He chooses to shoot it.  Whether this is cruel or merciful is unclear, even to Frank; and he subsequently regrets the act, not so much for the dog’s sake, but because “Africa could never be tidied away”.  So the shot dog is also symbolic of the ambivalent but apparently inevitable progression of the ”magnificent Leviathan” of European development.   (The incident foreshadows Kronk’s killing of the baboon Piet in White Lightning, where human-animal relations are a bit more consciously worked through.) 

The dog-shooting incident is echoed later in the novel, when grandson James, decades later, remarks on the “mortality rate” of dogs run down on Johannesburg’s township roads.  The relationship between animals and human technology has also changed radically, in some ways enabling us to distance ourselves even further from animal suffering.        

Increasingly through the novel, wild animals –  lion and elephant, monkeys and baboons – are encountered only tangentially, or by hearsay; at the end, James Thompson tries ineffectually to farm impala and blesbok – the wild herds reduced to mere commercial counters.  This also goes for African medicines in a city market: “birds, crocodiles, aardvarks, servals, genets, turtles, bats ... horns, hooves, dried skins” – the desiccated remnants of multiple killings of inevitably terrified animals.

           

There are also passing mentions of many other forms of animal exploitation, from the leopard skins worn by Zulus and Swazis, to the “calf-skin” boots worn by a gentleman back in England.  Leather everywhere.  Finally, there are numerous instances of animal descriptors or metaphors: General Redvers Buller looks “as benign as some prodigious farm animal”; a lady is “gazelle-like”.  Pallid reminders that we are animal.

This is to cull just a few examples from a single novel.  So much more to explore!  I guess the question for me is this: how much longer can we go on ignoring our animal dependencies and interdependencies, whether in our literary productions or in our real lives?  Is there any good reason why we should ignore them?

Etching by Cindy Dardagan Britz, from Dan Wylie and Cindy Britz, Slow Fires (FourthWall Books, 2013)

No.4 - Butterflies, climate change and the imagination

Two events are under way this week which direct my errant thoughts towards climate change.  The first is COP21, opening in bomb-shocked Paris, hoping at last to make progress towards globally-binding agreements to limit toxic emissions and mitigate their impacts.  World leaders have flocked there, as well as protesters and lobbyists in unprecedented numbers, like migrating butterflies. 

Gradually, the world is recognising that the ecological crisis is the crisis of our times.  It will dwarf all bombs.

On the other side of the planet, real butterflies – Monarchs – are migrating a thousand miles across the United States to their wintering grounds in Mexico.  Insects can be especially sensitive and measurable indicators of anthropogenic damage: they suffer visibly from the zillion apparently small but fatal human decisions that together build up into “climate change” – a phenomenon which otherwise can seem too nebulous to be observed, understood, or even believed.   It’s all in the detail.  Monarch butterflies have declined in number from around a billion in 1995 to 35 million last year. This is mostly due to pesticides and food- and habitat-loss (farmers slashing vital milkweed as ‘weeds’, for instance), but also to subtler disruptive changes in temperature, season, and weather.

I’m not, in retrospect, surprised at this decline.  A decade or so ago, on a farm near San Diego in southern California (also a Monarch migration destination), I was dismayed at night to hear not a single chirrup of cricket, see not a single moth at the lights.   Insects had been wiped out, and it felt desolate.  Compare that to the late afternoon scene before me as I write: cicadas laying down a seamless skirl of sound; diaphanous clouds of midges above the flowering trees; bees burring amongst the red-hot-poker blossoms; locally-migrant Cabbage-white butterflies – all pollinating an interdependent complex of vegetation, and in their turn providing supper for a whirling circus of drongos and swallows and swifts, not to mention spiders, geckoes and chameleons.  If only it were still so fecund everywhere.

On the positive side, the state of Texas is reportedly spending $4 million to restore Monarch habitat such as eucalyptus trees, and on its side Mexico is distributing fertilisers to similar ends.  Restoring vegetation complexes can also only be good for carbon sequestration and soil-creation. (You can read more on a devoted website, www.monarch-butterfly.com .)

Brazilian butterfly

The Monarch butterfly crisis has generated at least one recent novel, one of perhaps hundreds that have recognised climate change as an interesting, legitimate, perhaps even inescapable theme.  This is Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent fiction, Flight Behaviour (2012), set in Tennessee, which imagines a Monarch migration thrown awry by climate change.  Kingsolver, Orange Prize-winning novelist and essayist, often brings her training as a biologist to bear on her stories.  She can include passages of intricate detail, such as this:

She walked closer so she could see this as her son was seeing it.  She hadn’t examined the clumps at close range, and even now it was hard to understand how they were constructed.  The butterflies didn’t seem smashed or stuck to the wings of other butterflies, not like a hundred-car pileup, it was nothing as simple.  They seemed to be holding on by their needle-thin front legs to some part of the tree itself, bark or branch or needle, out to the very tips.  The tree’s basic shape was still visible underneath, the column of trunk and broomlike sweep of the branches, but all enlarged and exaggerated by the hangers-on.  Only at the ends of the dangling clusters  did butterflies seem to be clinging to the legs of other butterflies.  The insecure and the desperate, she thought.  No world can be without them.

This unpretentious but intimate description lifts at the end into an almost existential statement: the protagonist, Dellarobia, and perhaps a goodly segment of humanity generally, is also insecure and desperate.  It’s hard to write about climate change without sounding didactic or hectoring, but Kingsolver’s scientific knowledge is deftly embedded in Dellarobia’s story of disaffected marriage and love, and within a portrayal of her richly imagined community of colourful and conflicted humans.

This is the purpose and power of fiction, of course: we learn about the butterfly phenomenon along with the initially uninformed Dellarobia.  We are, like her, sucked in to gradual understanding.  In an essay entitled “Jabberwocky”, from her volume High Tide in Tucson (1995), Kingsolver writes:

A novel works its magic by putting a reader inside another person’s life.  The pace is as slow as life.  It’s as detailed as life.  It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life ... Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another.

Writers, I discover, have been writing about climate (not to mention the pervasive presence of weather) for a century, at least since Jules Verne wrote The Purchase of the North Pole in 1889.  He helped pioneer science-fiction –  the ‘sci-fi’ genre which is evolving into a new buzz-genre, ‘cli-fi’, which works with the current definitions of ‘climate change’.  Prominent amongst these fictions are so-called ‘speculative fictions’ – stories projecting current trends and technologies realistically into the future.  Such novels range from J G Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) to Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), from Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain (2005).

Forty Signs is the first in Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” trilogy.  The novels follow the trajectories of scientists and policy-wonks in Washington DC as they try to cope with a massive shift in ocean currents, unprecedented winters and deluges of stormwater (East Coast Americans are already experiencing these).  He can be a tad ponderous, but he writes accessibly, and his science is solid.  He packages the material in ways more persuasive and affecting than scientists’ computer-model projections of where current climate trends might lead us.  Those projections are, in their way, also fictional.

The future, by definition, is a matter of the imagination.

Robinson forms part of a study of climate change in fantasy fiction being pursued by one of our Master’s students.  He’s also exploring Frank Herbert’s Dune (for its depictions of dry-land ecology, certainly a present reality and threat for many regions) and George R R Martin’s Game of Thrones (for the ways in which that imagined society deals with the effects of a threatened mega-winter).  I can’t say I’ve enjoyed the writing in either of these two works – I’ve not found a single sentence in Game of Thrones I’d relish reading twice – but my student has persuaded me there’s some interesting and complex political thinking concerning climate going on.  And Martin’s less well-known book, Tuf Voyaging, reveals his very clear concern with ecological matters.

To return to South Africa: butterflies also feature in a local speculative novel, Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir (2004).  The protagonist Souvenir (Souvie) is a clone-woman whose job is to float about the interior desert of the Karoo region in a hot-air balloon, servicing windmills.  She falls in with a roaming Nigerian lepidopterist, whose subject of study – non-cloned butterflies – are survivors of human intervention.  The novel maybe tries too hard, incorporating everything from cloning to a tsunami, but it’s an adventurous foray in a genre still rather tentative in local writing.

But South African and African sci-fi, if not cli-fi, is starting to take off.  Look out for the butterfly effect.

Amazon butterflies

No.3 – The multiverse of Odysseus

In our current charged campus atmosphere, amidst the drive towards some as-yet ill-defined “transformation” and “Africanisation”, the question of what we teach, and how we teach it, assumes especially urgent attention.  How, in a literature department, do we choose from an overabundance of riches, at least eight hundred years of English, mutating into a menagerie of global varieties?

For some, just the term “English literature” implies we must inevitably be hung up in some sort of tweedy Victorian time-warp, wrapped in the cocoon of “the canon” – Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, and other such ‘approved’ work. 

But perhaps “the canon” never really existed.  Rather, there have always been many canons through time, overlapping and competing with one another like waves on a beach, endlessly argued over and flexing according to fashion and circumstance.  At one time Dryden and Thackeray were “canonical” and therefore regularly taught; now they are hardly even mentioned, let alone studied.  I’m not sure there’s a department in this country that still teaches primarily, let alone exclusively, anything like an “English canon”.  What was always a contested category has been enormously complicated and enriched by the postcolonial explosion of “world Englishes” – so now we also teach South African and Zimbabwean, Kenyan and Ugandan, Nigerian and Canadian, Irish and American, Australian and Indian literatures.  We jockey and argue perpetually about relative aesthetic, intellectual and thematic worthiness of this text against that – new canons waxing and waning with every successive wave.

Which is just as it should be.

And yet...

Between the waves, certain rocks seem to retain incredible resilience.  The Bible, of course, and yes, Shakespeare and Dickens and George Eliot, whose Victorian tome Middlemarch arguably remains the finest novel in the language.  (Arguably, ha ha!)

But of all the world’s great works, I wonder if any surpasses Homer’s Odyssey for longevity, persistence and flexibility – its Protean quality, Homer himself might have said.  Nearly three thousand years old, setting the standard and pattern for the poetic epic in many languages, unsettlingly modern in its seamy beginning, its episodic structure, and its dubious ending.

In his 1842 poem “Ulysses”, Lord Alfred Tennyson famously re-imagined that ending – Odysseus (aka Ulysses) coming home after twenty years, giving his wife a desultory smooch and shoving restlessly off again.  As a youngster I thrilled to the reckless abandon, melancholy longing, and intoxicating rhythms of its closing lines:

                        Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

           

Ah, those thundering iambic pentameters. 

Years later I sequestered myself in a cottage in Zimbabwe’s Inyanga highlands and doggedly read James Joyce’s novel Ulysses from cover to cover.  Dauntingly massive, dense with linguistic invention, really an “anti-novel”, it took a while.  I still find the book’s parallels with the episodes of Homer’s original a bit obscure, in that tangential Modernist fashion – but I loved the brilliant rendition of a cat’s greeting: mngiaowr.  Later still, I enjoyed following, guide-book in hand, the precisely-related steps of the central characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, in their mini-odysseys through the streets of Dublin.  I tramped from Martello Tower to pub to the Library to the Book of Kells and back to the pubs – all shamelessly profiting from the fame of a writer who in his lifetime was forced into exile, vilified for daring to describe Poldy Bloom taking a dump.

Which just goes to prove the point about the mutability of canons.

Joyce, along with other Anglo-Irish writers like William Butler Yeats, who also worshipfully employed Homeric motifs, could be described as “postcolonial”: after all, Ireland had been colonised by the English longer than anyone – nine centuries.  Similarly, the Odyssey has proved a fruitful model for writers from other former colonies, especially for those on journeys of exile, alienation and temptation; and those from sea-girt archipelagoes. 

           

In the Caribbean, for instance, Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott transforms Odysseus into a humble Trinidadian fisherman, Achille, describing his meanderings and desires in the book-length poem, Omeros (Greek for Homer).  Not only is this a rare modern epic poem (a form distinctly out of fashion), it’s written in loose terze rima, the interlocking rhyme scheme in which Dante wrote the Divine Comedy – in its way another Homeric offshoot.  Here Walcott’s blind character Seven Seas celebrates the global reach of blind Homer himself:

O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros,

as you did in my boyhood, when I was a noun

gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise.

A lizard on the sea-wall darted its question

at the waking sea, and a net of golden moss

brightened the reef, which the sails of their far canoes

avoided.  Only in you, across centuries

of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise

of the surf lines wandering like the shambling fleece

of the lighthouse’s flock, that Cyclops whose blind eye

shut from the sunlight. Then the canoes were galleys

over which a frigate sawed its scythed wings slowly.

Just beautiful.  And look up Walcott’s poem, “A Sea Chantey”, with its own Homeric echoes.  It’s one of the most moving poems I know.

I was actually stimulated in this direction of thought this week by reading a 2014 ‘transnational’ novel by Bengali novelist Amit Chaudhuri, Odysseus Abroad – definitely a journey of both alienation and temptation.  The Indian protagonist, Ananda, attends university in England, lightly bouncing his “adventures” off Homer’s original.  Immensely readable, it’s at once an examination of postcolonial displacement in multicultural London and a delightfully perceptive depiction of a student of literature.  Many of our students would identify with Ananda’s comic tribulations.

           

Among African writers, Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka magnified and universalised his prison experiences by refracting them through both Homer and Joyce, in his stream-of-consciousness series A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972).

           

Another ‘Homeric’ African, I dare to venture, is one Dan Wylie, whose volume Sailor: Poems for my father includes a scattering of echoes and quotations from the Odyssey.  I found this a terrifically enriching way of meditating on what my late father means in my life – remembering that the opening books of the Odyssey are not about Odysseus at all, but about his son Telemachus’ search for him.  So the ancient remains fully functional in the now; relevance is not pre-given, but proactively created in timeless interactions.  This is Sailor’s opening poem:

TELEMACHY

I am in search of a certain man. 

Nestor, Menelaus, have you seen his sail?

Memory, can you resurrect his voice?

You ask: How would we recognise him, this man?

He has a skull as blunt as an apothegm.

He has a chest like a depth-charge.

He has forearms like steam-trains.

He has hands that break resistance into kindling.

He has calves striated as volcanoes.

You ask: By what manners might we distinguish him?

He has a stride that scythes through armies.

He has eyes that would melt ice, then turn to ice.

He wields an argument with the rectitude of a hand-axe.

He has a laugh that collapses the lungs of nuns.

He has a memory to shame elephants.

An obstinate, cunning, and irrepressible intriguer.

So persuasive, so quick-witted, so self-possessed.

Eloquence and sound judgement, too.

You ask: What is this man to me?

He spoke me into being.

Year on year he strove

to teach me how to fight

how to read thoughtfully

how to seek

how to stare down failure

how to comprehend machines

how to navigate into unprecedented seas.

He beat me just once.

He embraced me once.

He let me go more than once.

I turned from him more than once.

The gods turned his head to darkness.

Have you not fragments I can piece together

to make at least the semblance of a father?

I wanted to ask him: Did I fail you?

I wanted to ask him: Did you perish incomplete?

I have sailed the length of the sliding world, and return,

looking for his footprints on the surfaces of waves.

Even as I draw closer, with cautious oars, he fades.

Where am I to look for him now?

With a bit of luck this, too, might one day emerge from obscurity and become canonical! 

(To order a copy of Sailor, email me at danwylie1959@gmail.com )

No.2 “The little Bushman stands guard”

An especially warm memory: Grahamstown poet Don Maclennan – mentor, friend, fellow-climber – brews tea in a billy over a twiggy fire, passes a mug to Irish poet Seamus Heaney.  Heaney crinkles up those almost Mongolian slits of his laughing eyes.  There are eight or ten of us, lounging about beneath the overhangs at Salem, twenty kilometres or so from Grahamstown, and discussing the russet fading Bushman paintings speckling the ledges above us.  Then, taking turns, we read through the 34 sections of Don’s collection of short poems, Rock Paintings at Salem.  (The last section said simply: "I am listening".) 

That was 2002.

I became interested in the ‘Bushmen’ – San, Khoikhoi, Basarwa, abaTwa, or however one might choose to name this nebulous, complex scattering of peoples – mostly through my exploration of ecological dimensions of literature: the ways in which novelists and poets represented and felt about landscapes, natural vegetation, animals.  There was the “little Bushman”, as Laurens van der Post called ‘him’, popping up everywhere as the necessary guardian of ecological well-being, balance and respect.  The radical opposite of rapacious, planet-destroying industrial modernity.  The Bushmen were the victims of our very own Southern African genocide, the “Harmless People”, the gentle ones, living their eco-friendly desert lives in “original affluence.”

Most interesting, for me, was the clutch of white poets who had turned to Bushman material for inspiration.  Thomas Pringle, of course, had the Bush-boy running at his side in his poem “Afar in the Desert” in 1821 or so; 180 years later, there was Don Maclennan responding to Salem’s mystery-laden paintings, artist to artist.   Then there were those who had drawn directly on the extraordinary /Xam Bushman testimonies, collected in the 1870s, now fully available online – 12,000 pages of notebook pages: the Bleek-Lloyd Archive.  Jack Cope, Stephen Watson (Return of the Moon), Antjie Krog (The Stars Say Tsau!), Alan James (The First Bushman’s Path), most recently erstwhile Zimbabwe resident poet Harold Farmer.  All of them turning the song-stories – kukummi – of //Kabbo, Dai!kwain and other informants into ‘poems’, versions of translations from a now-vanished language.  Watson and Krog even got embroiled in a weird ‘plagiarism’ spat, as if those old “stories that float from afar”, as //Kabbo called them, had somehow come to belong to them.

//Kabbo

What is the attraction?  Guilt at the earlier genocide?  Disaffection with ‘civilisation’?  A wish to root oneself more securely in African soil, via the earliest known inhabitants of the subcontinent?  To connect better with ‘Nature’, however vicariously?  To connect with what seems the very fount of poetry itself?  For some – like contemporary Khoi-San identity lobby-groups – to resurrect a lost and marginalised ethnicity of belonging? – the kind of thing encapsulated by the return of poor ‘circus-freak’, colonial super-victim Saartjie Baartman, rather irreverently sent up by Diane Awerbuck in Home Remedies (see my first blog).

Whatever the motives, I became aware of how regularly the figure of the Bushman surfaces in our poetry and, even more so, our fiction.  There was a phase, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of travel accounts and letters (including Thomas Pringle’s, recently edited by Randolph Vigne) detailing without much compunction the hunting of the Bushmen like vermin, like jackals or rabbits.  By the later nineteenth century, a certain nostalgic guilt was setting in – witness Waldo (foreshadowing Maclennan) mulling over Bushman paintings on the kopje in Olive Schreiner’s 1881 novel Story of an African Farm.  At the same time, anthropology was taking off as an academic discipline. Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd would be followed by the Marshalls, Megan Biesele, Thomas Dowson, Jeannette Deacon, pre-eminently David Lewis-Williams, and a veritable swarm of others – all subjecting the remnant groups of cornered Bushmen to the most intense scrutiny of any hunter-gatherer group in the world.  The anthropology would deeply colour other portrayals of Bushmen, even as discontents with the academics were voicing a certain unease.

The first discontent perhaps was the (in)famous Laurens van der Post, who in The Lost World of the Kalahari and The Heart of the Hunter did so much to romanticise the eco-attuned Bushman; he even tried to style himself as a “white Bushman”, and was one of the first to draw on the Bleek-Lloyd testimonies to do so.  If his biographer J D F Jones, in Storyteller: The many lives of Laurens van der Post, is to be believed, a lot of it was exaggerated, if not completely invented.  But his influence is not to be denied, and I suspect there is something in his critique of ‘the West’ worth re-evaluating.  From him flows a stream of representations of the Bushman as rescuer, tracker, guide.  One example: in Wilbur Smith’s The Burning Shore, Europeans shipwrecked on the Namibian coast are rescued by Bushmen and taken to a kind of doughnut-shaped Eden in mid-desert.  This motif is echoed in Lauren St John’s teen novel The Elephant’s Tale.

Now there are any number of the-Bushman-will-save-us-from-ourselves narratives, fictional and non-fictional and some uneasily in-between.  World water expert James Workman, in The Heart of Dryness, looks to the Bushmen to show us ways of surviving in an increasingly water-poor world.  John Paul Myburgh’s The Bushman Winter has Come marries Bushman lifeways with a New-Age rhetoric of finding-one’s-inner-spirit; similarly Uys Lafra’s The San Piper: Encounters with an Otherworldly Bushman, and Brad Keeney’s Way of the Bushman.  There’s the more level-headed What Dawid Knew by the ultra-traveller Patricia Glyn; and the fictional Cape gangland-meets-Boesman story by Don Pinnock, Rainmaker (one of whose protagonist’s guides is named, unsurprisingly, Mr Kabbo).

And there are so many more appearances – probably hundreds.  We just keep on wanting to listen to the Bushman.  And this is just white writing in English – what of all our region’s other groups’ and languages’ literatures? If you know of any examples yourself, do let me know. 

But the point of this blog is really an invitation.  No one, as far as I know, has yet written a thorough survey and assessment of the Bushman’s literary presence.  A fabulous PhD project for some one. Any takers?

Welcome to "Critical Diaries"

Welcome to "Critical Diaries"

Welcome to "Critical Diaries" - what I hope will be an on-going series of brief posts and discussions about books, reading, cultural artefacts, universities, pedagogy, cats, and whatever else stimulates a restless mind.  It will definitely not be about ME - no seamy revelations here.

To begin everywhere and nowhere.  I have just finished reading the latest novel by a one-time student of ours at Rhodes University, Grahamstown: Diane Awerbuck's Home Remedies.  Diane has already won a prize or two for her fiction, but with this it seems she has unquestionably come into her own.  What an intelligent, nuanced, richly textured and ultimately compelling read.  It is at once an irreverent (even at points outrageous) sidelight on the Saartie Baartman saga - the returning of that poor person's remains from the display cabinets of a prurient Europe to reburial in South Africa - a densely-observed portrayal of Fish Hoek, and a moving story of a mother's life and traumas.  

Home Remedies is one of just a number of I think deft and insightful novels by both the established and the younger generations, moving beyond the blunt politicisations of current South African discourse, without ignoring them.  We would do better reading these works than the newspapers, in many ways!  I can't begin to keep up, but I have been able of late to read some other local women's novels, all of them fascinating.  Claire Robertson's The Spiral House offers two narrative strands.  I couldn't quite fathom the link between them, and the second strand didn't interest me as much as the first.  This is the voice of a young woman of the early Cape Dutch settlement, of Malay origin, trapped in a condition of near slavery without formally being enslaved.  There were in fact quite a number of such women, of rather indeterminate legal status, often better educated than their farmer-'owners'.  While the voice Robertson invents for this character is just that - invented, an English she could never have actually spoken - somehow it feels exactly right and authentic: a wonderful achievement.  

The Cape seems to be The Place these days: Henrietta Rose-Innes' latest novel, The Green Lion, is a slightly futuristic take on a Cape Town cut off from its natural mountain-slope nature by a substantial (not quite impenetrable) fence, with the remnants of an old zoo and its leonine inhabitant.  I thought Henrietta's earlier novels, Shark's Egg and Nineveh still had the feel of a writer finding her feet, but this one is very deft, inventive, funny, moving.  It also moves into another apparently burgeoning focus of attention: human-animal relations with a touch of the magical thrown in: Lauren Beukes' Zoo City and Peter Merrington's Zebra Crossings spring to mind, and there are others.  I wonder what's going on with that: a subtle invasion of the popularity of 'fantasy' into the 'realist' mainstream?  An inventiveness born of frustrations with the conventional?  A subject for future blogs, perhaps.

At any rate, it is a pity - and an indictment - that our education systems and our general media seem in deliberate collusion to prevent our people from developing the love of reading that these and many, many other South African novels deserve.

This is a bit of a test blog, so hope you will visit again soon.
Dan
14 November 2015