Please Check Against Delivery

In a recent statement I quoted the following lines from a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, the late poet laureate of the state of Illinois in the USA:

Art is life worked with; is life
wheedled, or whelmed:
assessed:
clandestine, but evoked.

The stubborn aptness of those lines to the art and craft of storytelling should become apparent as I continue. In the production of literature what the writer has to deal with is life through language; in other words, the writer works with, creates with language through the texture of life. The story, like any other piece of fiction, is not a mirror reflection of life. Mirrors are passive and, assuming they are clean, can only reflect what stands or is put in front of them. The story does much more than that; the story reflects on lived experience; the story uses that experience, whether imagined or actual, as a point of departure for the storyteller’s imaginative exploration of the possibilities of whatever aspect of life has provoked the artistic sensibility. In this way the end product, the world created by the storyteller, becomes real to the reader or the listener.

In Chinua Achebe’s “ Anthills of the Savannah”, a novel that could easily have been pessimistic had Achebe allowed himself the luxury of cynicism, there is a white-bearded elder whose words of wisdom regarding the importance of the story command attention. Let me quote this elder from Abazon in Kangan, an imaginary African country with disturbingly familiar features:

“The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards – each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which one of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. Do you hear me? Now, when I was younger, if you had asked me the same question I would have replied without a pause: the battle. But age gives to a man some things with the right hand even as it takes away others with the left. The torrent of an old man’s water may no longer smash into the bole of the roadside tree a full stride away as it once did but fall around his feet like a woman’s; but in return the eye of his mind is given wing to fly away beyond the familiar sights of the homestead …

“So why do I say that the story is chief among his fellows? The same reason I think that our people sometimes will give the name Nkolika to their daughters – Recalling-Is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbours.”

The elder from Abazon proceeds much further to illuminate the crucial role and importance of the story. What commands attention in the elder’s intervention is not just the content, what he says, but it is also in the telling, the narrative techniques he deploys to make his story interesting and enjoyable. And his narrative techniques are rooted in the collective memory that gives birth to image, metaphor, nuance, steeped in the juices of his people’s experience, his point of departure. From the context of his people’s experience the elder has carved out the content and the form of his story, on the “story”. The experience and profound observations of the elders in society are thus used as the foundation on which to build.

Later in the novel we are told of an old man who told Ikem Osodi, a resourceful journalist and poet with a remarkable sense of social responsibility, the story of the tortoise who outwitted and made a fool of the leopard threatening to kill him. Osodi informs his audience that that old man is now in jail. Asked the reason why? Osodi explains: “Because storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit – in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.”

Earlier this year the Department of Arts and Culture partnered with the Mutloatse Heritage Trust to launch the “Memory is Our Heritage” Fellowship Grants. These are grants awarded to writers and researchers to write the biographies of artists who have made significant contributions to our memory, our heritage, our story; to artists who have made significant contributions to the development of our culture. Through these contributions of our artists we enter one of the most crucial sites of the struggle to reclaim our sense of ourselves, of our identity, as South Africans. By launching these fellowships we took an important step to activate our collective memory from different angles to establish it as a vital aspect of our living heritage, enabling us to recreate ourselves as we move to inform and shape our future with a knowledge, assertion, and affirmation of who we are and our possibilities.

Because of the interconnectedness of, and interaction between elements of artistic and cultural expression, I will venture to repeat something I have said on another literary occasion:

“The human family is unique in its ability and desire to externalize itself through acts of creation reflecting on its experience, its environment, its own life as a species and its imagination. The human animal sings, dances, sculpts, carves, paints, recites poetry, tells stories and records its memories.”

The development of literature in South Africa is dialectically related to the history of struggle. The br utality of colonialism did not allow space for the proverbial fence-sitter or for a writer who could straddle it. Whether the writer was an out-and-out racist monster who did not accept the indigenous African as part of humanity ; or a liberal who just loved the African and had a number of friends in the township to parade as proof; or a black cultural nationalist boasting the glory of some pristine African past; or a protest writer appealing to the conscience of the oppressor; or whether you were a revolutionary unconditionally committed to the national liberation movement, under scrutiny the literature you produced would place you somewhere recognizable in relationship to the history of struggle. And apartheid made it very easy for any interested person to be part of the struggle because the enemy was so easy to identify, or so some thought. However, many who were against apartheid, writers as well as other members of society, did not do enough homework to know what they were for.

Literature, whether oral or written, because it is created with expressive language through the texture of life, is the major depository of a people’s cultural and social values. Over the years South Africa has produced a number of outstanding short story writers, especially in English and Afrikaans. Here, one must pause and ask the compelling question: Why especially in those two languages? The answer to that question has to be sought in the power and economic relations which resulted in privileging the development of those two languages and literatures, often at the expense of the indigenous languages and literatures. I will not to attempt to open up that debate tonight; in and of itself it would require far more time and space than we have.

Although the story in written form, that is the short story, originated in the United States of America, it did not reach its artistic heights there. We would have to look at the development of the short story in Russia for that. But in South Africa there is a wealth in the crucibles of the various indigenous oral narrative traditions that has yet to be mined more deeply. The aspiring South African short story writer can dig deep into those mines to hone her/his skills in the context of producing stories that explore our experience and contribute to the development and strengthening of our cultural diversity.

I welcome the BTA/Anglo Platinum Short Story Competition for the value it adds to the development of the short story in South Africa. I would like to take this opportunity to appeal to our writers, especially the young ones - the older ones might be carrying loads too heavy to allow them to change their habits – to work very hard at developing reading habits. No one can develop as a writer out of a vacuum. In order to hone your writing skills you have to know what has been done; you have to work very hard to learn what your literary voice is connected to. You must know that you are a small part of a huge international community whose other members know very clearly that you need much, much more than talent to know how to tell your stories. And those stories must plant their feet firmly on South African soil to be nourished enough to guide us to the future as well as to the past.

In conclusion I would like to congratulate those who worked hard enough to make it to the final four in this competition. I hope not only do you continue to write but you make writing an essential element of your being-in-the-world. I believe the major reason for holding this competition on the 8 th of September, International Literacy Day, is that BTA and Anglo Platinum are determined to encourage the writers to read. So read as widely and as deeply as you can in order to develop the tone of your literary muscle. And, write, write every day to stay alive, to make your contribution to the development of the new South African.

Thank you.

back to top