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the wole soyinka prize for literature in africa

9/3/2012

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

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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