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looking into the mirror of the rapists

1/29/2013

1 Billion Rising event in Khayelitsha. Thanks to Andrea Dondolo Rising @ FalseBay College, Khayelistha.

What a feast the media has had lately. Pistorius and the beautiful, doomed Reeva Steenkamp. Young Anene Booysen, gang raped, mutilated and murdered. So many words thrown out into the chatter clouds. So much indignation. So much condemnation.
     So little change.
     Once you start listing brutality, it is hard to stop. If you laid all the abused women end to end, would they reach the moon? Mars? Venus? What about some names: Malala Yousufzai, the fifteen year old Pakistani girl who was shot for wanting girls to go to school; Jyoti Singh, the Indian woman who was gang raped on a bus and so brutally assaulted that 90% of her intestines were removed; Kozaphi Elizabeth Kubeka, 92 years old, raped and strangled by her 38 year old grandson…the list never ends. If you laid out the names end to end would they weave a rope long enough to bandage the wounds? To tie up the rapists? To shroud the dead?
     After Anene Booysen was raped and disembowelled, our politicians fell over themselves to decry the offence. They called for the perpetrators to rot in jail, to feel the full might of the law. The same politicians whose corruption and greed perpetuates the cycles of poverty in which abuse festers, who shelter the teachers who impregnate students, and the councillors accused of sexual harassment. A few weeks after Anene’s murder, a 49 year old woman laid charges against a police officer who allegedly raped her in the “trauma-room” of the Herbertsdale Police Station, one of many accusations of police rape. No politician has bothered to comment on this. Ten years ago, Baby Tshepang was raped in Louisville, a crime born of poverty that rocked the nation. Her rapist was jailed, but nothing has changed in the town.
     Of course I was sickened by what happened to Anene Booysen, and tempted to join the public lynch mob that wanted to hang her rapists high. But there is that uncomfortable truth, that nagging feeling that Anene was paying a price for a system that benefits me and all others born into privilege; that the rapists, along with Anene and millions like them, have been rotting in jail since they were born: the jail of poverty, alcoholism, and social deprivation; Anene was forced to leave school in Grade Seven; her rapists no doubt had similarly grim prospects. They all suffered the daily assault of a bleak, impoverished life with no chance of escaping it. Most children growing up in abusive situations see the world as divided into only the abusers or the abused – their only prospect of improving their situation is make sure they are the former.
    Few would deny that people are brutalised by poverty and deprivation. What is seldom acknowledged, though, is how much we are brutalised by wealth and power. Society decries the rapists, but condones the brutality of governments and warmongers who conscript youth and turn them into raping and killing machines then send them to war for the sake of profit and power; The brutality of a pornographic industry that dehumanises both they watchers and the watched; the brutality of a world that throws half its food away every day while millions go to bed hungry; the brutality of an entertainment industry that fosters our thirst for violence with no regard for what this might do to the minds of children; the brutality of the oil and energy barons who will sacrifice the peace and security of the world to ensure that our dependency on oil is never diminished…
     Lynching Anene’s rapists will do nothing to stop this . And it seems to me that the practice of isolating and condemning instances of barbarity often serves to obscure the barbarity that underpins the fabric of our society. It fosters the illusion that our social political, religious and economic systems are fundamentally decent. But until these systems are truly governed by the principles of kindness, morality, dignity, equality of opportunity and freedom of expression, we should not be surprised when the barbarians feast on the weak. It happens all the time, in opulent boardrooms where rainforests are condemned, in courts where justice is for sale, in Asian sweatshops where children sew sports shoes for American athletes, in dark alleys where young girls die in agony.
     But the dark forces who prowl these precincts are not the only movers in the world. The One Billion Rising campaign is one of many impulses towards a more enlightened society. Every human right, every instance of social justice in this world has been won through struggle by the underdogs, or those who defend them. Not one has been handed out willingly by the oppressors. It is up to all of us to make sure that the underdogs never stop barking; to make sure that in pursuing the scapegoats we never forget who the real perpetrators of brutality are. The brutality meted out to Anene Booysen, Jyoti Singh and the millions of forgotten victims is a mirror of our ugly, cracked society. Let us never be afraid to look at its truth, and do what must be done to change it.

Below is a poem I wrote some time ago to express the despair I sometimes feel as a mother of daughters – my own and everyone else’s:

The women’s Lament
Oh we women
Who dwell among thorns
Our brains a tangled skein of fears
That we knit, unravel, and knit again

Our clicking needles strive in vain
To weave a coverlet for our children
To shield their tender limbs
From the chill winds of fate

How we lament
The porousness of our membranes
The permeability of our defences
The hollowness of our vessels
That are so easily stuffed with hate

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How to unwrite a novel

1/24/2013

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No wonder the only thing in your in-tray is the cat…

‘What the hell have you been doing’ my publicist Kennedy demanded. ‘NO blog posts for over three months! How do you think you’ll keep your fans?’
     ‘Fans? What fans? The only fan I have is the lacy one my dad gave me with I love Madrid on it. No, wait, I lost that at the last Spanish themed party I went to.’
     ‘Well, no wonder the only thing in your in-tray is the cat. I think I’ll have to find a less lesser spotted author to publicise.
     ‘I’ve been busy,’ I whined
     ‘Doing what?’
     ‘Unwriting my third novel.’
     ‘Oh, please,’ he snapped. ‘You’re supposed to write novels, not unwrite them. Even you should know that.’
     So I wrote the following, to explain myself. Kennedy remains unconvinced….

How to unwrite a novel

When I was young, I assumed my life was a novel. Like that man in ‘Stranger than fiction’, I could always hear some authorial voice narrating my story, commenting with admiration or disgust on my exploits, finding meaty metaphors for my state of mind, rewriting unsatisfactory dialogues. Over time I became annoyed with the Author of Me for being such a poor planner – the plot was meandering, with tedious passages about going to the dentist or learning for geography tests. The characters were improbable, and the main protagonist had markedly few moments of heroic distinction.
As I grew older my rational mind told me that I couldn’t be a character in someone’s novel, (although part of me still wonders). But this long-standing delusion made me realise that I’d be forced to write a novel. If only to show that hopeless Author of Me a thing or two about how to do the job properly.
So I sat down after lunch one day and dashed off a novel, more or less, and when I’d finished I said smugly to the Author of Me, ‘There, that wasn’t so difficult’. This novel found a publisher promptly, garnered a few favourable reviews, and was a modest success although the proceeds would keep me alive for a few months only if I didn’t mind living in a bus shelter and eating dog food.

The second novel is an altogether different animal

First novels often fall quite spontaneously out of their authors, which is why they are seldom published, although there have been some notable first novel wunderkinds. When I failed to win the Booker prize with mine I consoled myself with examples of people whose first book is such a success that they never manage to pull off another one, and sat down to write Novel #2.A Second Novel is an altogether different animal. The pressure surrounding a second novel is enough to drive any creative thought right out of your brain.
It began with the intention to write an ‘ecological thriller’. But I soon realised that the force that would drive the novel was something far less tangible: something about grief, forgiveness, and regret, and the healing power of landscapes, and the odd tapestries that these forces weave in human relationships.

The idea was elusive

This idea was elusive but insistent. And the long and often painful process of tracking it down taught me an important lesson: the idea that breathes life into a novel is not necessarily the most brilliant, or fashionable, or commercially viable, but it is the most tenacious. It may be a story, or a gesture of a passing stranger, or something that catches your eye on a train or an odd thought that occurs to you when watching the bathwater run out of the plug hole. Or, if you are Franz Kafka, when watching a cockroach squirming on its back.
It doesn’t really matter what idea starts the story, what matters is it’s tenacity. Like an oyster producing a pearl, some bit of grit has to get under your skin and bug you until you turn it into something lustrous and nuanced with no ragged edges. (At least, you hope that with luck and hard work, your effort creates a pearl and not a lump of organic grunge).
Novel #3 has benefitted hugely from this lesson. But I didn’t know it when I wrote The Unseen Leopard. I failed to pin down the idea, and thus lost sight of it. I did masses of research around genetic engineering, and wanted to cram it all into the book. The setting clamoured for attention instead of hovering subtly in the background. Minor characters seduced me into rambling engagements with their dramas. Back stories demanded to be heralded as main events.

As I wandered hopelessly through its tangled thickets I heard the Author of Me snickering in the dark.

    I was like the sorcerer’s apprentice. I had wielded the wand of authorship with little sense of responsibility, and had no idea of how to rein it in. My story self-seeded into an impenetrable forest which engulfed the Idea, and as I wandered hopelessly through its tangled thickets I heard the Author of Me snickering somewhere in the dark.
     My publishers were kind but firm.
   ‘Cut.’ They said, when I staggered into their office with a 700 page manuscript.
     I picked myself up, dusted down my bruised ego, came to terms with the fact that not every growth I had sprouted was a precious flower to be preserved at all costs, chopped out a few hundred thousand words and one or two family sagas and took it back.
     ‘Cut,’ they said again. But where? I wailed. And this was the problem. The editors were in dispute. Some loved this character, others hated her. Some thought one aspect of the story was the most compelling, others thought that was a side-show and something else should be shoved to the fore.
     Finally, as I lay awake one night deranged by contradictory advice, the light broke through. The story I had to focus on was the one that I felt most compelled to tell, and the voice I needed to narrate it had to offer the prism that offered me the most compelling view of that story.
     It did not matter that this editor liked it and that one didn’t. What mattered was my own passion for it – not because I know better than everyone else, but because if I lacked the conviction and passion, the story would be dead before I’d written a word.
     And so, I went into the forest to unearth the story I wanted to tell, and to identify the characters I wanted to tell it. The story was pretty much the original idea; but the one narrator was a surprise. In my early versions, I tell Melissa’s story through a diary. The breakthrough came when I realised that her story needed to be narrated through her self-confessed killer, James.
     What a lot of unwriting I had to do! And rewriting. And unwriting again. This was when I discovered how important unwriting is to a novel – both in the sense of knowing what to delete, and of knowing what not to write in the first place. And this means recognising the soul of your story early in the process, and keeping it always within your sights.

Honour your stories in whatever humble form they arrive

So the best advice I can offer aspiring authors is to recognise the stories that are given to you, and to honour them in whatever humble form they arrive. If a goblin comes knocking at your door demanding to have his story told, don’t try to dress him up as a vampire just because vampires are all the rage these days. It won’t work – you’ll just end up with some sad wannabe vampire that’s lost all his authentic goblinness.
Writing a novel is a very long, very lonely endeavour. Your only friend in this process may be that goblin who wants his story told, so you had better learn to love him, warts and all. He needs to be so real that you converse with him constantly in you head, and expect to bump into him in the street. If he isn’t, you can be sure that your readers will toss him aside after page one with no compunction whatsoever. At the same time, however lonely you are and however much you love your goblin, don’t let him invite his extended family, unless they are critical part of his story. And if they do come, don’t let them steal his thunder – the more you write, the more you’ll have to unwrite.
Honour your stories in whatever humble form they arrive I sometimes get annoyed with the stories that blow my way because they lack murders or mayhem or flashy contemporary chic. But I have learnt to treat them with tremendous respect. And yes, I’m also a lot less cocky nowadays with the Author of Me. Because that Author, poor thing, does not have luxury of the delete key, and has to faithfully record every numbing detail of my life – no wonder he/she/it/ has come up with such a clumsy effort…Now, if only we could unwrite some of that novel!

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a night out in lagos

9/11/2012

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So, how were the awards?” Kennedy my publicist asked, as I staggered in from Lagos, my ears still ringing from the combined assault of continuously blaring hooters and “shake your bum-bum” being played full volume on the car radio of our affable driver and guide, Azubike.

“Fantastic,” I said. “Except for the bit when I stood on the stage before a room full of Lagos crème de la crème, in my funny pink party dress, while they read an outdated bio about me that did not even reflect my few modest achievements.”

“Did they mention me?” he asked, casually toying with his rubber crab.

“Well… actually…”

“Typical,” he muttered, with a bitterness quite unbecoming in a small dog. “If you’d bothered to take me you’d definitely have won. And then you could have bought me a lot of rubber crabs”

“I don’t think they like dogs in Lagos,” I said. “I didn’t see any. Although one guy at the award dinner was wearing them on his robes.”

“If they’d had a chance to meet me, they might have changed their minds,” he snarled (a falsetto snarl, being a Chihuahua).

The only dogs I saw in Lagos…

Anyway, the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa Award Ceremony, to give it its full title, was an astonishing event, during which I could pretend for several hours to be someone else, as a surprisingly large array of people thrust cameras in my face. (I assume they did think I was someone else, someone worth photographing. They’ll probably be quite despondent when they print out their pics and discover that I’m just a lesser spotted author, and not a rare bird of paradise.) In between the flashing cameras, and attempting (unsuccessfully) to consume my goat soup, I was roundly entertained by speeches, music and dancing from the Crown Troupe and the masked saxophonist, Lagbaja: all in all a pageant with true African flair

As for not winning, I’ve been practicing that for most of my life so I’m pretty good at it (I think my last prize was in Grade One for Good Progress, but sadly they don’t seem to give those out to grown ups). The organizers kindly told me that The Unseen Leopard put up a convincing fight for first place, beating over 400 books before losing to a worthy opponent. Sifso Mzobe’s Young Blood is a fascinating read, which scooped both the Sunday Times and the Mnet awards on its release. And I was consoled by their gratifying comments on The Unseen Leopard, reproduced below.

Besides, the Nigerians are a wonderfully embracing lot, and they all made a good show of being just as eager to be photographed with me after I proved to be not-the-winner.

What really struck me about the event was how much literature is celebrated in Nigeria. This was clearly a party that people wanted to attend, with an impressive line up of dignitaries including the ex president of Ghana; John Kufuor, Babatunde Fashola and Senator Ibikunle Amosun, Governors of Lagos and Ogun states respectively; Professor Wole Soyinka to mention just a few. The sponsors not only paid for my and Sifiso’s flights and accommodation, but also the $20 000 prize – impressive by our standards but dwarfed by Nigeria’s literature prize of $100 000. Nigeria clearly loves both books and authors, and consequently has produced a stable of very fine writers over the years. Definitely something South Africa can learn from – our local press and bookshops still seem a lot more willing to promote overseas titles. Local novels seldom make it onto Exclusive’s New Books stand, for instance – they usually scuttle straight for the “African Fiction” shelves.

I met some hugely inspiring people, including Sifiso Mzobe, and Promise and Azubike Ogoduchukwu. Promise is an author and poet, who has done remarkable work to promote literature and reading in Africa through the Lumina Foundation as well as running an orphanage on the side.

With Promise Ogoduchukwu

With Sifiso Mzobe

I sadly did not meet Professor Soyinka, but I heard him speak, and was delighted to discover that he is every bit as irreverent, articulate and acerbic as his writing suggests. He spoke about the threat to the libraries of Timbuktu by what he called “these throw-backs”, and decried the “anti-human” activity going on in our continent in the name of religion.

He challenged the Nigerian government, which has been criticized for over-accommodating the Islamic fundamentalist Boko Haram, to decide whether it was on the side of the “philistines or our common humanity”.

He also condemned the trend of sharia law to relegate women to second class citizens, “stoning women for giving their bodies to whomever they please, as if anyone has the right over someone else’s body.”

Altogether a fascinating evening. And having the opportunity to experience the Lagos was something else, but more on that in another blog

The Judges:

Eid Shabbir: Professor of literature and chair of African Studies, International University of Africa, Khartoum, Sudan

Prof. Olu Obafemi: Professor of English and Dramatic Literature, UniLag

Liesle Louw: award winning journalist, South Africa

Dr Awo Asiedu: Acting Director of the School of performing Arts, University of Ghana

Jonathan Moshal: Professor of Comparative Literature, Cote D’Ivoire.

Remarks made by the judges on The Unseen Leopard

The novel is a fascinating read, gripping and the themes are universal. They are so maturely handled that one gets drawn in. The language is graceful, apt and the dialogue is brilliant. It’s a wonderfully elegant piece that works its spell on the reader. It’s really witty with a savage humour that makes the book timeless and terrific.

It is difficult to find a novel with such a rhetorical strategy that weaves nature—animals, plants, fauna, hideous caves and vast waters to portray a subject of the quest for the cause, motive, and the culprit of the death of a triangularly loved deceased. It engages the subject of capitalism and national patriotism. The language exudes lyrical beauty with a rare economy of words.

It is captivating and mature. Pitt demonstrates in this novel a competent command of language, with a text spiced with flashes of humour.

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the wole soyinka prize for literature in africa

9/3/2012

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Wole Soyinka. There’s a name for you. One of those magnificent minds of our time, a man to restore your faith in humans and remind you why you love writing, reading, and being an African.

So I was deeply honoured when heard recently that The Unseen Leopard was one of three books shortlisted for the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Although such news can a bit alarming for a lesser spotted author – I might have imagined for a moment that I could become more spotted, as it were.

However, this illusion was soon dispelled when I went into my local branch of Exclusives to purchase the two other books on the shortlist: Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood, and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets. I fought my way past towering heaps of Fifty shades of Tripe and all its tawdry little sequels, plus a newcomer to the stable – (Fifty shades of yellow) – which seems to be about having a sadomasochistic and pornographic relationship with a cello. I didn’t expect bunting and champagne, but I thought that the shop might at least stock the shortlisted books. No. There was one copy of Young Blood (although the slip of paper inside suggested it had been ordered for someone who didn’t pitch up) but none of Unseen Leopard, or Roses and Bullets. There wasn’t even anything by Wole Soyinka.

Anyway, I haven’t let that dampen my enthusiasm. I am completely delighted to have my name associated with Soyinka’s in any capacity, even more delighted that he will be at the award ceremony to hand out the prize. Not that I am expecting to be on the other end of the prize that he is handing out, but, since the Lumina Foundation is generous enough to pay my way, I will at least be in the audience.

I first met Soyinka’s work over 30 years ago, when I was a young and eager anti-apartheid activist, and English teacher. A big part of our activism as teachers was to redefine Africa for our pupils, to free them from the stultifying and racist garbage that they encountered in their official textbooks. An important weapon in our armoury was the Heinemann African Writer’s Series, which featured works by a range of notable African authors such as Soyinka, Achebe, Ousmane Wathionga’o to mention just a few. How refreshing these books were, with their assured African voices; their revelations of the profundity and wealth of African culture; their merciless exposé of the brutality, arrogance, and hypocrisy of the colonial forces.

I used passages and poems from these in my lessons, and kept copies in my classroom for interested pupils to borrow, until the authorities became sufficiently annoyed by such subversiveness to fire me. I then handed them out to other young activists, until they were all finally re-distributed. So I no longer have any of my original Soyinkas, although I managed to purchase his childhood memoir, Ake, which I have been rereading and absolutely relishing for its intelligent, wry and razor sharp observations.

John Updike had this to say of him:

“He is remembered in Nigeria with awe, both for a political boldness that landed him in prison and for a commanding intellect that is manifest in every genre he tackles” Hugging the Shore (New York: Knopf, 1983) pp. 683-4”

Soyinka’s intellect is indeed commanding (he presented himself to the schoolroom when he was not yet three years old, with an armful of his father’s books), and he has produced a prodigious number of plays, poems, novels and essays which led to him being the first African to win the Nobel prize for Literature in 1986. This is just one of a string of awards and honours, including the Golden Plate Award (2009) and several honorary doctorates from various institutions, including Harvard and Princetown. He has also been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

Apart from his prodigious talent as a writer, Soyinka has always been a vociferous commentator on injustice. His outspoken criticism of the Nigerian government landed him in jail in 1967, where he was kept for 22 months. In the book he wrote to describe this, he said, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny” (The Man Died (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) p. 13).

He remains a fiercely independent thinker, highly critical of dictatorships and corrupt governance in Africa, while never losing his deep love for and appreciation of African culture and philosophy. His depth of thinking and intimate knowledge has enabled him to weave a richly nuanced tapestry of contemporary African thought. As William McPheron (Standford University) said, ‘Soyinka’s discordant mixing of genres, his wilful ambiguities of meaning, his unresolved clashes of contradictions cease to be the aesthetic flaws Western critics often label them and become instead our path into an African reality fiercely itself and utterly other.’ (Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts)

So come Friday, I’ll be on a plane to Lagos, courtesy of the Lumina Foundation and kindly arranged by the wonderful Promise Ogochukwu. Kennedy is withholding judgement until he knows Soyinka’s views on Chiahuahuas, but I imagine they will be as reasoned, open-minded and intelligent as all his others….

Below is another quote, written nearly forty years ago, and yet so pertinent to our contemporary imperilled world, which those in power persist in treating as if it were dispensable…

“There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?” Death and the King’s Horseman (1975); cited from Six Plays (London: Methuen, 1984) p. 189.

For more on the award, go to The Lumina Foundation.

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Trashing New york

8/8/2012

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It’s hard not to love New York. Especially after a fleeting taste of it, as I had recently: a few heady days of riding the subway and trawling the art galleries, wishing I was one of those savvy, hip residents clipping past at a brisk snap while I stood clutching my map and peering vaguely down the street. It is safe, funky, endlessly varied, and offers a dizzying smorgasbord of culture and creativity, some highly expensive but quite a lot free.

So having returned from a city that treated me so generously, it may seem churlish to complain. But there was one thing that really bothered me. To put it in a simple and quintessentially American way: Trash.

New York generates a heedless stream of needless trash. And while I know that some New Yorkers are deeply concerned, touring the city offers little evidence that anyone cares

A particularly egregious and massive contribution to the daily trash pile is disposable food containers. Virtually every eating and drinking experience I had in New York was served entirely or partially in disposable dishes and cups, with plastic cutlery on the side. Most containers also have lids, which lie around on the pavements, waiting to be swept into the storm drains and into the sea where they will join the tons of plastic already swirling through our oceans.

New York generates over 36,200 tons of garbage every day (The Observer)

A brief cast around the web reveals staggering statistics on the wastefulness of this culture:

In 2010, Americans used 23 billion paper cups. This entailed chopping down 9.4 million trees; using 8500 Olympic sized pools of water; and enough energy to power 77000 homes. It generated 363 million tons of waste. Paper cups cannot be recycled as they are lined with plastic. They go to the dump, where the paper rots, but the plastic NEVER DOES. Think about this: Plastic does not biodegrade. The remnants of that take out coffee you enjoyed this morning will be around for thousands of years. (Figures calculated by the www.papercalculator.org and the Environmental Defense Fund, on the The Sustainability is Sexy website)

The Environment Action Association reports a study by Starbucks and the Alliance for the Environmental Innovation (April 2000), which states that each paper cup manufactured is responsible for 0.24 lbs of CO2 emissions. Multiplied by 23 billion, that’s about 24 million tons.

The joy of eating off non-disposable crockery...

Add to this the national obsession with bottled water. New York tap water passes all government standards, and is amongst the cleanest of all major cities. Yet few people drink it. In 2010, Americans were consuming 1500 plastic water bottles every second; buying 50 billion bottles in a year, and recycling a mingy 20%. 17 million barrels of oil are used in producing bottled water each year. This despite the fact that bottled water costs 1,000 times more than tap water, and the plastic leaches into the water causing long term health problems. (quoted in treehugger.com)

And yet it is not as if the disposable food container culture improves anybody’s life. In fact, it makes the coffee and juice bars a dispiriting experience. You go into them to have a breather and give your feet a break, but you end up standing in line at a counter trying to choose a beverage from a bewildering array. You then perch on a stool designed for discomfort, gulp it down, toss it in the trash, and continue. Joanna and I were completely delighted on discovering The Bowery Diner, which served us tea, coffee, and really excellent blue berry pancakes in china cups and plates with metal spoons. They came to the table to take our order. They brought it to us – it was luxury. The only disposable part of the meal was a tea bag.

Contrary to popular belief, trash cans do not eat trash…

So using disposable containers make eating miserable, it’s unhealthy (all those chemicals leaching into food), it’s catastrophic for the environment… WHY DO IT? Is it to save on labour? What kind of sense does it make to consume vast amounts of environmental resources to save labour, when the world has a huge abundance of unemployed humans and a dire shortage of environmental resources?

For a city as visionary, dynamic, and technologically advanced as New York, this kind of short-sighted wastefulness is shocking and demeaning. So much more can be done. I saw virtually no recycling bins – these should be on every corner. The Blue Hill Café at Stone Barns Farm offers plant-based cups, which can be thrown into the compost. If they can do it, it can be done. Good old-fashioned china cups have served humans for centuries, there’s no reason why they can’t go on doing it. Some websites have suggested that people carry their own cups, and coffee outlets offer a discount for beverages served in these.

With a little effort, it is not a difficult problem to solve, and the political leadership could go a long way by regulating the fast food industry to ensure that they pay for the environmental costs of their containers – they would find them a lot less profitable to use.

This is not just finger pointing. South Africa is trotting happily along the path of mass consumption, and it is only our lack of disposable income (ironic term) that is inhibiting our own trash pile. Let’s learn from this and turn from this path before the habit becomes addictive!

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Let's hear it for the actors

7/6/2012

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Puppets discuss how to torture their manipulator’s legs during a break in the performance of “A tale of Horribleness”

Aren’t actors astonishing? I’ve always held them in high esteem, but I took this to a whole new level at the National Arts Festival last week after seeing my daughter’s agony when she developed Puppeteer’s Leg Syndrome. This excruciating inflammation of the knee muscles is caused by running up and down stairs in a crouch while manipulating a hand puppet called Squirt who talks in an Australian accent and is secretly in love with his squadron commander, Zip. Despite the fact that she could barely walk, she has continued putting herself through this for an hour each day just to amuse children and their parents with the delightful “A Tale of Horribleness”.

While festival-goers shuffled from one venue to another, bitching about the cold through multiple layers of polar fleece, semi-naked actors delivered lines through chattering teeth without a murmur of complaint. They really do deserve every hand-stinging clap that you award them. Most of the time.

I reminded Michael of this when he wondered why he was watching a man roll himself up in a giant piece of paper (like one of those raggedy joints we used to make), instead of the European Cup Final. (I can’t see why watching people chase a small rotund object around a field for two hours is any more compelling, but that is where we have learnt to differ.) Rolling yourself in paper without tearing it is extremely challenging, and the man had doubtless spent many hours perfecting it. The least we could do was watch and applaud.

But we both agreed that watching almost anything would have been preferable to sitting through Steven Cohen’s performance art piece, “The Cradle of human kind”. Cohen doubtlessly endured a lot of physical hardship in creating this – wearing that illuminated corset and strapping himself to a dead baboon did not look comfortable – but he seemed so determined that the audience should share his misery, that it was hard to be magnanimous. I tried to escape when he started brandishing his dead baboon in front of a screening of screeching chimps dismembering monkeys, but I couldn’t find the exit. So I ended up in a dark corner of auditorium under a chair with my fingers in my ears, and admired the foresight of Elizabethan audiences, who came to plays armed with rotten turnips.

Like several other shows we saw, Cohen’s work explored the origins of humans, the relations between the tribes, and the grotesque 19th century European habit of “displaying” black people from the colonies as natural history curiosities in public showings. To help him explore this complex topic, Cohen enlisted the aid of his 90 year old ex-nanny, Nomsa Dhlamini.

Had she been a completely equal partner, he might just have avoided being offensively patronising. But I saw nothing to suggest this. I did not see her quoted in any interviews or articles on the work – Cohen spoke for her. On stage, she drifted around wearing only a kind of furry G-string; being either marched and manacled, or graciously led about by Cohen depending on which phase of tribal relations he was portraying. But at no stage did it feel as if she was in charge. To me it just felt like a re-enactment of the gender/race power relations he was supposed to be parodying. As a paying spectator, this made me feel uncomfortably like one of those Colonial gawkers. Putting his audience in this invidious position was manipulative, and disrespectful to both Nomsa Dhlamini and those who came to watch.

In stark contrast was Brett Bailey’s Exhibit A, who tackled this theme through a series of museum style exhibits of live humans portrayed by actors. All care was taken to shift the power relations between the viewer and the viewed. It was a small, intimate show. Members of the audience were each given a number, and taken into a room. We were instructed politely but authoritatively by a (black) actor to stop talking, and to leave the room one by one when our number was called. Thus, before we saw the first exhibit, we had been stripped of authority and control, and encouraged to adopt a mood of solemn contemplation, which prepared us for the horror of what were about to witness.

The exhibit itself was a series of vignettes, detailing and illustrating some of the atrocities committed by European powers in the past and present (the exhibit included contemporary acts against refugees). The subjects watched us intently as we read the plaques describing these, so that we became the observed rather than the observers. Bailey’s work is often confrontational and dark. But this was an extraordinarily moving and haunting piece, deeply disquieting in all the ways that art should be, and profoundly transformative both for the viewers and the viewed. I believe it should be compulsory viewing for all, but especially for any Westerner who still contends that European civilisation was any more ‘civil’ than the societies it so viciously subjugated.

Less confrontational but equally transformative was !Aïa, a dance/physical theatre piece directed by Philippe Pelen Baldini and Thierry Moucazambo. Described as a “transversal work between art, culture, science and traditional wisdom”, it transported me to an ethereal space where humans, animals, the cosmos, memory and history were woven together in a complex and subtle dance. Inserted into this was a jarring parody of the “human display” phenomenon, which, in the context of the rest, sharply highlighted how anti-human, anti-spirit, and anti-life such practices were.

Kennedy thinks we deserved to sit through Cohen’s performance, because we left him at home when we travelled to the festival. I explained that he should count himself lucky, firstly because the Boerbul at the guest house we were staying at (aptly named “Tank”) would have eaten him without even noticing; and secondly, because Cohen might have decided that a stuffed Chihuahua was a more compelling stage prop than a stuffed baboon. But Kennedy was not convinced. Besides, watching him do “Roll over” and “Paw” should be enough entertainment for anyone, in his opinion.

There was much more besides. It is lovely, every now and then, to immerse yourself in the creative journeys of other people, and give your brain a whole new marching band of things to think about, and new ways to think about them. However impressively your Chihuahua performs

This man, Ota Benga, was taken from his home in the Congo and exhibited “each afternoon during September” at a Bronx Zoo in 1906. (Wikipedia)

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motherless on mother's day

5/14/2012

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My mother giving us words (I am the lesser spotted daughter, characteristically crowded out by my siblings)

Mother’s Day is quite a sad day for Kennedy and I, who are both, effectively, motherless. And I don’t mean this in the way we used to, when describing our condition after too many visits to the party punch bowl (“The Punch bowl” at those gatherings was no crystal affair with little glass tumblers, but a plastic bucket of cheap wine and spirits in which swam some highly inebriated tinned pineapples).

No, I am motherless because my mother died 18 months ago, and Kennedy is motherless because he was snatched from his mother at a tender age. He tried to find a mother substitute in Thula, our dominatrix German Shepherd. But she spends her days holding him down with one paw while stealing his toys, which is more sadistic-big-sisterly than motherly.

I, at least, have the privilege of being a mother, which Kennedy will never have. He doesn’t even have the necessary equipment to be a father (this was summarily removed when we realised that an ‘intact’ male Chihuahua was more dog than anyone could deal with).

Mother’s day never featured much in my childhood. My own mother was acerbically intolerant of any display of mawkish sentimentality, and harboured a particular aversion to Mother’s day cards featuring the verses of Patience Strong. I am made of softer stuff, and when my own children came home with sticky pink cards featuring doilies and lentil and pasta hearts, I succumbed without reserve. I faithfully kept these offerings until I discovered when clearing out a cupboard one day that they’d hatched a whole colony of small mysterious insects – whose own mothers had recklessly abandoned them as eggs in the lentils.

But even if she didn’t have much truck with Mother’s Day, my mother was an extraordinary mother – as well as an inspired teacher and a remarkably forward-thinking school principal. One of her first initiatives in 1975 was to introduce Zulu as a subject to the school and to (illicitly) admit black school pupils. I remember her telling me how, when the government authorities visited the school, she would pretend that the lavatory next to her office was exclusively for the use of the only black teacher on the staff, as this was one of bizarre legal requirements of that era.

She was a staunch defender of the underdog, and was always alarming my father by hiding any black person in our neighbourhood fleeing police pursuit. She roundly refuted any suggestion on his part that some of these people may actually be criminals, rather than innocents being harassed for the colour of their skin. In between all this she found time to mother five children, and to read me the whole of What Katy Did on the night after my tonsils were removed.

She loved words, she loved poetry and literary prose, and had a quote for every occasion, making even the simplest lines sound like the incantations from some magical arcane brotherhood, which we lesser mortals could barely hope to comprehend. It was these quotes of hers that put me on the prickly and troublesome path of lesser authorhood, and doomed me to a life time of despair because I would never, ever devise a line as expressive as T S Eliot’s ‘I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,’ not to mention a hundred others. Way to go, mom.

But really, I am deeply grateful, and it was to express this that I wrote the following poem for her when she turned 80:

For Dodo

Mothers hand out many things
Marmite soldiers, baby swings
Fairy wands and painted wings
But my mother gave us words.

She brought them in, those travelling bards
Those alchemists of eloquence
To nightly pace our parquet flooring
Leaving stardust trails of words
That drifted through our sleep-tossed turning
Their drowsy syllables enthralling
With visions of some half glimpsed world
Far beyond our heart-stitched yearning

She denounced those words that blight,
Words that hang their heads in shame
Like prejudice, exploit, abuse
And cast out their shadow with the light
of words that glow with steady flame -
Respect, compassion, fortitude

My mother gave us words to fly
Our wings to spread, our fears to quell
To send us soaring through the sky -
And words to catch us, when we fell

Flamboyant words that never slept
But danced all night on moonlit streets
Giddy as a young girl’s heart
Small humble words that softly crept
And curled themselves beneath tired feet
With some quiet wisdom to impart

And silly words to make us smile
Sassy words to give us style
Sombre words to enfold our sorrow
Words of hope to raise tomorrow

Words to play with, words to plunder
Words to fill our minds with wonder
Words to free our headstrong dreams
Words to trail in mountain streams

Mothers give us many things
Healing balms to doctor stings
Lullabies and magic rings -
But my mother gave us
Words.

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The Commonwealth shortlist and crazy kudu's

3/26/2012

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Clarence the Kudu. Please note that Kennedy is boycotting this photo as he thinks that Kudus are over-rated

I heard yesterday that my story ‘Next full moon we’ll release Juno’ has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth short story competition, which is very exciting. My publicist, Kennedy, is not that impressed because the story doesn’t feature Chihuahuas, but he may be biased.

I have a very personal attachment to this story, which is associated both with pleasure and pain. The pleasure was watching an amazing adaptation of it as a play, pulled together by my daughter Joanna. She scripted and directed it with four actors – and it was really magical to see a story I’d written come to life like this. Whenever I say ‘a story I’d written’ I feel uncomfortable, because the more I write the more I feel that stories come to us, and we as writers/ actors or whatever just manifest them. What was wonderful to see how this same story, which was a gift from the great whatever, could be manifested so beautifully as a play – with all the nuances and subtleties offered by a live performance.

The pain came when we were building a life size kudu puppet for the play. Joanna and I made up in enthusiasm for what we lacked in expertise, and the final result was pretty spectacular. But we were working to deadline, and in a last minute dash to the hardware store for an essential part, I chose to run under a tree branch because it seemed quicker than running round it. A few seconds later I picked myself off the pavement with concussion and whiplash, from which I am still suffering… my head had failed to clear the branch. Ah well… all in the name of art…

For more on the Commonwealth competition, go to: www.commonwealthwriters.org

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The lesser spotted blog

looking into the mirror of the rapists

How to unwrite a novel

a night out in lagos

the wole soyinka prize for literature in africa

Trashing New york

Let's hear it for the actors

motherless on mother's day

The Commonwealth shortlist and crazy kudu's

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