Abstract
This interview is based on an encounter between Ivan Vladislavić, Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski in Melbourne, Australia, in October 2014, revised December 2015 in Stellenbosch, South Africa, for this special section of Thesis Eleven. It should be read in conjunction with Vladislavić’s essay on discovering Samuel Beckett, and with the companion essay, ‘Finding Ivan Vladislavić – Writing the City’, in this issue of Thesis Eleven.
Ivan Vladislavić, thanks for this opportunity to tour and talk with you. We are keen to share your work with the Thesis Eleven audience, in the antipodes and globally. The journal, as you know, has a Marxist origin and its trajectory still bears some marks of this path. It’s possible we see Marx where he is not, though he does get around. I’m going to begin with a more formal question. It seems to me to be unmistakably the case that you’ve been influenced by Marx. This is evident in the way that you build passages of your writing, I think perhaps particularly in Double Negative where you discuss a figure called ‘Hegemony Cricket’. But as well as in-jokes, there seem to be fundamental Marxian themes about depth and appearance and phenomena like inversion. You make it very clear that there’s a sort of comfort with the Marxian vocabulary. These notions of both the hardness of material life and the dialectics of the symbolic world, the notions of essence and appearance, are really important to you. I’m curious to know what that part of your life was at Wits [University of the Witwatersrand]. I would like to know about the influence of other thinkers who really strike me as being more like soulmates, thinking of Beckett and Kafka and such, but would you care to say something about Marx to begin?
I went to university after a cloistered upbringing in Pretoria, a fairly conservative, middle-class, white upbringing. I went to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg at a time when a strong current of Marxist thinking was coming into the academy. It had been there before, of course, but in the mid-1970s a generation who’d been students in the ’60s were becoming lecturers, and they began to shake up many of the disciplines with their leftist ideas. In my first year I did courses in sociology and international relations, the latter at the encouragement of my father, who thought I might have a future in the diplomatic corps! But I think the main reason was to fill up my first-year curriculum: my real interests lay in English and Afrikaans literature. In retrospect, I’m sorry I didn’t do classics or history, which I grew more interested in later, but I ended up doing sociology. And so I was introduced to the fundamentals of Marxism and other kinds of thinking about society, and read some of the key texts. But I guess the stronger influence would have come through contact with the young scholars I mentioned earlier, who were working with broadly Marxist ideas in a range of disciplines.
Let me go back a bit and put this into a wider context. Before then, the study of English in South African universities had been focused pretty much on the Western canon and practically no attention was paid to South African or African literature. As I recall, we started with some of the Old English texts and Chaucer, and worked our way through to Eliot or thereabouts. There was hardly any contemporary writing on the curriculum. In three years of English study, I recall a single elective on the modern novel (Bellow, Murdoch, Spark and a few others) or on African fiction (the only name I recall now is Achebe). Young academics like Tim Couzens, who taught me Elizabethan drama and made a particularly strong impression on me, and Stephen Gray, who was not one of my teachers but whom I knew as a poet, were trying to shift the focus somewhat, to get South African and African literature acknowledged as a legitimate field of study. There were others like Mike Kirkwood, with whom I subsequently worked at Ravan Press, Tony Morphet, Michael Chapman, a generation of academics who were trying to unsettle the canon and introduce South African and African subject matter. They were also trying to understand culture in its social and historical context. So, they were interested in class relations, they were interested in looking at South Africa not just through the racial prism, but also through the prism of class.
In those years, there was tension, and indeed conflict, between people who adopted a more political, social approach to culture and those who wanted to preserve some sort of unsullied, romantic detachment for art and artists. A parallel tension, perhaps a version of the same dynamic, was that between scholars who wanted to approach culture generally and literature specifically from some theoretical perspective or other and those who viewed the artwork as in some way beyond this kind of analysis. For them, the intrusion of both politics and theory into the work and its interpretation was perceived as a threat. Some of the people who were most supportive and encouraging of me in those years in fact came from the more conservative camp. So, as a young student and a beginning writer, I had to negotiate these tensions, not just in the cultural field but on the terrain of my personal life. I often found myself on both sides of the divide. Later on, as my thinking matured and South African culture revealed itself to be more complex than I’d imagined, it became clear that the dichotomies were often false or reductive. There were no clear lines between the defenders of literature on the one hand and the promoters of engaged art on the other, between the personal and the political, or the lyrical and the theoretical. Which isn’t to say that the conflict was imaginary or there were not vital issues of culture and politics involved in breaking the deadening fixation with Europe and turning South African writing towards its own social and historical context.
I had friends at university who were much more directly interested in Marxist theory and who were studying Althusser and so on, but I never studied the Marxist literature in that way, except for these grounding courses in sociology. Now and then I read something that interested me, but I was more readily drawn to fiction. Later, there was a more important phase when I did an honours degree. I was in the trial year of a new programme in comparative literature under Professor Reingard Nethersole, who knew a lot about the Frankfurt School. The thinkers she introduced us to made a lasting impression on me, specifically Walter Benjamin. We also read Lukács, which was interesting in relation to South African literature at the time. Social realism had its supporters. Another component of the honours degree was semiology, which had then arrived in South Africa with a vengeance. I remember we read Barthes’s Mythologies, The Pleasure of the Text and other works. Besides Barthes, whom I still read with pleasure, it was Benjamin who stayed with me.
The other thing I should mention is that one didn’t have to study formally to pick up Marxist ideas in those days. They were very much in the air. For instance, there were regular stagings of Brecht. I must have seen half a dozen of his plays in those years. Now I can’t remember when last there was a Brecht put on in Joburg.
It seems clear that there’s a kind of Marxism that can become an iron cage when it comes to thinking. What strikes me about the sort of Marxist sensibilities that you show is that they remind us more of the historical writing, more of the Marx who lives in the inverted world where there are ghosts, the kind of Shakespearean Marx, who I think is the interesting one. That’s where the legacy is, because the weave is quite open and there’s a level of curiosity about the human condition that isn’t prescriptive. There’s a sense in which you might say politics is the end of thinking in some ways or it has prescriptive and utilitarian kinds of imperatives that lead away from thinking. So, we can also see the presence in your work of thinkers like Benjamin and de Certeau. You acknowledge the influence of local actors like Tim Couzens. Couzens appears in the note to Portrait with Keys; he was a kind of so to say anthropologist too – he stuck you in a kombi van, took you out into the streets of Johannesburg, got you out walking.
Tim Couzens was a social historian. As I mentioned, when I first came across him, he was teaching Elizabethan drama in the English Department. I remember his superbly entertaining classes on Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Not long afterwards, he helped to set up the African Studies Institute at Wits, along with Charles van Onselen, and did pioneering research into black culture and intellectual life of the ’30s and ’40s. He wrote an extraordinary book called The New African, a study of the life and work of South Africa’s first black playwright, Herbert Dhlomo. It’s a recovery of the experience of a whole generation of educated black people between the two world wars, a world that had been neglected if not actively repressed. He was also interested in Sol Plaatje and in Thomas Mofolo, who wrote the first novel by a black African. If I remember correctly, Couzens also introduced me to Modikwe Dikobe’s novel The Marabi Dance, an account of life in the Doornfontein yards of Johannesburg in the 1930s. Couzens was part of a generation of researchers and writers who were very concerned with recovering writing that had been forgotten or directing attention to things that had been neglected. It was a world away from the defence of the Great Tradition. It was also a completely different approach to reading and interpreting literature.
Until then, I’d been exposed mainly to a fairly unreflecting practical criticism. Even the really good teachers in this mode made little effort to put poems, novels or plays into their social context, or to articulate and examine their own critical position. Along come these young academics and researchers who say, ‘We actually have to look at the social conditions out of which work arises; or this novel can tell you a lot about South African history, and so on’. In this process, Couzens seems to have morphed from a literary scholar into a social historian. Many ground-breaking researchers were associated with the African Studies Institute. The Comparative Literature Department also aligned itself with the ASI. During my honours degree, there was a course on narratives of slavery, for which we joined up with ASI students. The semiology course saw us joining up with social theory students from the Sociology Department. This was a new and exciting alignment for literature students. Tim’s own working methods, the investigative research and travel, and active engagement with the world, undoubtedly influenced my ideas about the kind of writing I wanted to do.
You studied Afrikaans literature as well. What drew you to the literature? And did it also influence the kind of writing you wanted to pursue?
This is a huge generalization, but Afrikaans writers on the whole seemed more contemporary and experimental. The term ‘experimental’ makes people uncomfortable these days, as if it’s necessarily pretentious, but it captures their approach. The important Afrikaans writers of the ’60s and ’70s were not mainstream realists. They were in tune with the experimental strands in European writing, whereas English South African writers were often stuck in a kind of British realism, which felt quite outmoded to me. There was – and still is – a strong realist tradition in South African fiction. But I was drawn to writers who had tried to bend that a bit or find other ways of writing about South Africa. I came to understand this better later on. Then I just had an unformed notion that realism is not necessarily the best way of looking at a complicated, fractured society, and that there’s an affinity between modernist or subsequently postmodernist forms and societies that aren’t cohesive, unified or particularly logical.
So, you were reading in Afrikaans?
Yes.
And also, and perhaps this is a naïve or simple question, do you think that Afrikaans writers then were more open or experimental because of their place within society? Was it the case that they could play with ideas more than perhaps English-speaking or black writers could?
I’m sure it’s very complex. One of the things that matters is that their links to European culture were different. For English novelists, going all the way back to Olive Schreiner who stands at the beginning of the South African novel tradition, there was a particularly strong connection with England. This is true even for a writer as widely read and as deeply rooted in the local as Gordimer. Many of these writers travelled to England or lived there for some time, and of course they published there. By contrast, the Afrikaans writers usually went to Paris or Amsterdam and were exposed to a different set of influences.
It may also be that Afrikaans writers had a certain freedom because they were writing for a small, local readership. Often English South African writers were pursuing a broader readership in England or America or elsewhere – they felt part of or wanted to be part of a global English network, and this took them in particular directions, perhaps constrained their choices. Afrikaans writers may have had more freedom because they were innovating within a young tradition. The language itself had only been around for a few hundred years and the very innovative writers of the 1960s were writing in the context of a small, conservative literature. They had picked up absurdism and surrealism and they injected these things into their writing. Some of the key writers of the ’60s, the ‘Sestigers’ as they’re known, were Jan Rabie, Etienne Leroux, who’s a particular favourite of mine, André Brink, Chris Barnard, Breyten Breytenbach, Bartho Smit, and Adam Small. I had read some Afrikaans novels at school, quite conservative books about farm life and so on. But I loved the language, and I wanted to read more, so I enrolled in the Afrikaans Department at Wits in ’75, and there I discovered this incredibly lively tradition. I think one of the first things we studied was Rabie’s wonderfully inventive modernist fictions.
Afrikaans was also taught in a different way. Unlike the English Department, they didn’t have a huge canon to contend with. The historical texts we looked at were in Dutch, and we also read contemporary Dutch and Flemish work. Interestingly, the Afrikaans Department at Wits was one of the more open, adventurous departments on the campus, certainly among those I had contact with. Among the lecturers were Ampie Coetzee, Ernst Lindenberg and his wife Anita Lindenberg, the novelist John Miles, a very fine writer. In the year I started at Wits, they founded the independent publishing house Taurus, which went on to publish Breytenbach, among many others. They were inclined to teach novels and poetry collections that had just come off the press. It was incredibly bracing for me as a young student. While the English Department was arguing about whether we should be studying South African writing at all, the Afrikaans Department was teaching books that were engaged intensely, critically with the immediate society. The work was also innovative, formally and linguistically challenging. The context got even more interesting in 1976 with the Soweto student uprising, which was sparked by resistance to Afrikaans as the ‘language of the oppressor’. It was a situation full of torsions and contradictions, as you can imagine. I remember some of my friends getting hot under the collar because I was studying Afrikaans. They didn’t think I should be doing it: it seemed suspicious to them. It was a very instructive experience – it taught me to be wary of passing easy judgement on people and their positions.
What you’ve just described is an experience for which we have no direct parallel in Australia, though there are similarities or parallel paths in some of the things you were describing earlier. I think the enthusiasm for historically marginal European thinkers like Benjamin and this pattern of recovery of local traditions and local thinkers is still going on in the West. In a different sense, much less politically charged than the situation under apartheid, or after, one of the positive things that happens in connection with the post-modern in Australia is the shift away from realism. There is a recognition that the mirror’s broken, that you can’t use a kind of photographic metaphor for the interpretation of reality. But you’ve also been suggesting that because of parallel paths in South Africa between the canon and the Anglo tradition and the Afrikaans, there are two different kinds of relationships to empire or relationships to two different kinds of empire being discussed. The absurd is present here, thanks to our absurdist friends, and thanks no doubt to the sensibilities which South African intellectuals were cultivating vis-à-vis Algeria and the broader issue of French colonialism. You were much taken with Beckett, is that right?
I was reading Beckett. But before I get to that, I should add that the ‘English’ tradition was not monolithic either. There was also a tradition of black writing that had been disrupted by the mid-1970s and had to be recovered. There was a flourishing of black writing in the 1950s and early ’60s, especially among the writers associated with Drum magazine – Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Casey Motsisi, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Zeke Mphahlele and others. They were producing vital, innovative work in English, but it was disrupted by apartheid, the destruction of communities, exile. It could be that the innovative Afrikaans tradition survived, despite its critical stance and irreverence, because it was connected to the power in the country, whereas the black tradition was really severed. If figures from the ’30s and ’40s like H.I.E. Dhlomo were neglected, this was no less true of the later writers. Publishers like Ravan Press and David Philip in Cape Town played a role in getting some of this work back into print, including books that had been banned. Then there’s writing in the indigenous languages, and there’s an oral tradition, and these were also put under strain or distorted by apartheid. So there were not just two streams, the English and Afrikaans writing I was particularly engaged with, but many.
Following on the specific allusion that you made to oral culture, do you think of yourself as a storyteller: Geschichte ist Geschichte?
No. I’m telling stories, to use the phrase in a loose way, but I don’t think of myself as a storyteller. I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. In a culture with a strong oral tradition, storytelling means something quite different. Storytellers are primarily performers, and they’re often drawing on stories that have been passed down – there’s an element of preserving a heritage or doing something sanctioned by tradition. Of course, there are storytellers who both perform and publish, and there are storytellers who are very innovative within their tradition. Generally, though, I’m at the other end of the spectrum. I’m a writer: I work on the page. Occasionally I have to read my work before an audience, but it’s not something I would choose to do. The significant interaction is not between me and the listener, but between the text and the reader.
So, could we call you a reporter, a journalist? I’m thinking of Portrait with Keys in particular.
No, I think being a reporter, a journalist, carries different demands and responsibilities. When I was writing that particular book, I began to think of myself as a documenter of some kind. I still refer to the book as a ‘documentary’. But what that means is less clear to me now than it was then. The book does document things, but then fiction documents too.
How did the reader become a writer?
I was always a reader. As a young teenager, I was largely reading the popular fiction of the day – John Creasey, Alistair MacLean, that sort of thing. We had a typical bookshelf in our house, one I’ve seen replicated with variations in many South African homes. Quite a few of the books were old school setworks – Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe – with mom or dad’s name and ‘Form III’ written on the flyleaf. Then a row of Reader’s Digests. And maybe Ian Fleming or Leon Uris. My parents encouraged me to read, but they didn’t guide my choices much. At high school, I had a marvellous English teacher by the name of Gavin Wilmot, who introduced us to writers who were not part of the syllabus. He played us those beautiful Dylan Thomas recordings on vinyl. Also Monty Python and the Goon Show, things you couldn’t access easily in South Africa. He actually encouraged us to read Mad magazine! He was an extraordinary fellow. I think it was partly because of him that I started reading more widely.
I joined the public library in the city and my dad would take me down there. At some point, I read in the newspaper about Waiting for Godot and it intrigued me. Perhaps it was a review of a production somewhere, I can’t remember. It’s also possible that it was simply an article about Beckett. Anyway, I went and took Godot out of the public library. I must have been 12 or 13 at the time. It had a profound effect on me. I honestly could not make head or tail of it. I read it from cover to cover with a sense of complete bewilderment. Yet I was also amazed that such extraordinary things could actually happen in books. I had no idea the play was funny. Beckett is surrounded by this haze of despair, which I may have picked up from the newspaper, but it’s such a funny, funny book. So that was my first reading of Beckett at an entirely inappropriate age. I’ve come to realize that inappropriate reading is one of the best things that can happen to anybody. Of course, I came back to Beckett at university, and saw a production of Godot at the Market Theatre, and an entirely different work was revealed to me. I read the novels too. Although he’s not a writer I go back to all the time, I certainly discovered him at a very impressionable age. I think you can see the influence in The Folly, which was my first novel.
Folly is a good idea, isn’t it? Humans are good at it.
Very. I’ve come across similar stories about reading, by the way. My friend Chris van Wyk, who died recently, tells a story in his memoirs about reading Camus’s The Outsider when he was a schoolboy. I guess almost any book that was really out of the ordinary could shake up your stable frameworks if you hit it at the right time. Something that hadn’t been approved and certified by your parents and teachers could open up the world for you.
However old you are. I tried for I think four or five years to read Capital from about fourth form; that was a big mistake, I guess, but then I was saved by the practice of group reading, so reading it together was actually really useful.
In other conversations as we find ourselves together we have spoken about artists like John Wolseley, but we have also touched on Agnes Heller’s work.
I’ve mentioned to you, Ivan, that we’d been talking more about comedy, which took me to Heller’s Immortal Comedy, where among other things she writes: ‘For the comic to exist certain things must be serious. They must be meant and done in earnest.’ Would you like to comment on this in relation to your own work?
It’s a commonplace about South African culture, one of those true commonplaces, that people find humour in the bleakest situations, that they laugh in the face of dreadful adversity. Laughter is a powerful thing. So much of the misery in the world is caused by people who take themselves too seriously. Diverse societies are necessarily full of incongruity and oddness, and laughter is the appropriate, positive response.
We haven’t in this interview entered the labyrinth of what you’ve done or how you’ve done it. Earlier you used the word experimental to describe your work, and this seems to make sense because if we sit down as readers with the books there’s no sense of obvious continuity. There’s a continuity of sensibility, but the ways the books are constructed are different one from another. Is that something that you’d like to talk about, how that happens? Does it happen to you? Do you make it happen?
I suppose it’s just evolved that way. As I’ve suggested, I was drawn as a young reader to books and writers that worked in an unconventional way. Quite early in my writing life, I became aware that there were all kinds of possibilities to be explored, ways of setting about the activity of writing that would take you into different territories, but that writers generally worked in quite a staid and convention-bound way.
The idea of the writer as a kind of monk in a cell somewhere doing this desperately serious activity also seemed limiting. I had a fairly broad interest in the other arts, in music for instance, and I grew increasingly interested in visual art as I went along. Working alongside artists felt like a really productive thing to do, allowing oneself to be drawn into another world. Artists often think more about the process than writers do. This is a generalization, of course – there are writers who think deeply about what they’re doing and are able to express it. And there are artists who are totally inarticulate on this score, and sometimes misguided too. But perhaps the conceptual turn in visual art has compelled many artists to analyse and articulate what they’re doing more rigorously. My conversations with visual artists about the process of making work, its relationship to reality and its nature as representation, have been galvanizing. Let me repeat that I’m generalizing, but writers often shy away from this kind of reflection, they deal with language as if it’s quite transparent and storytelling as if it’s a simple thing. My dealings with artists have helped me to develop a more complex understanding of the relationship of my own work to its context and to a cultural tradition. So that’s been part of the appeal of working across disciplines. There’s been quite a lot of chance involved too. Often I’ve been drawn into projects by other people’s needs or interests, and I’ve tried to negotiate an engagement that’s productive for both of us. Most of the time it’s worked out, although you have to keep your eyes open in the art world.
There’s also been a productive relationship between my editing work and my writing. Obviously a lot of the editing has simply been bread-and-butter work to keep a roof over my head. Some of it has driven me to distraction. But then I’ve also worked on many books that have nourished my thinking about things and steered me in a slightly different direction. I don’t want to venture too far into interpreting my own work, but as I’ve gone along my sense of my work as a whole has changed. To start with, I thought the books were extremely different, but now they seem to be converging rather than diverging, and I get a stronger and stronger sense of continuity. It’s not that there’s one voice – I suppose that may be my saving grace – but there’s a range of voices or registers, with relationships between them that I can diagrammatize. Is that a word?
You just made it up. As you do, and must.
Let’s say that I can diagram – it sounds like a more snappy, contemporary word. There are half a dozen voices I can identify in my first story collection, Missing Persons, and I can take one of them and trace it through the later work. It gets picked up in this story, and then in that novel, and then in this new piece I’m working on. Or there’s a slightly more ironic voice, that goes with a certain kind of ironic realist approach, and I can trace it from an early story to Portrait with Keys and then to Double Negative. You end up with a kind of flowchart. Probably you could do this with any body of work, tracing voices or perhaps themes, ideas, metaphors or settings. Once you have enough work, you begin to see these currents that flow through it, because in the end I do think one’s working and reworking the same set of things, circling around the same territory. It’s more evident with some writers than others, and perhaps the formal diversity of the work complicates things. Perhaps this diversity disperses the sustained concerns and so they come up in different ways and this somewhat obscures the continuities. Is that a sensible answer to this question?
Do you view your writing as autobiographical, or is that true of all writing?
All writing is autobiographical in the sense that one is working always with the material of one’s own experience and consciousness. Even the most objective kind of writing comes out of your mind, your body, your place in the world. What else is there to work with but what you’ve experienced? And that doesn’t mean you need to have gone out into the world and seen it, it may also be something you’ve read or dreamed, and so on. However, when people say all writing is autobiographical, what they often mean is that it’s all ‘true’. That drives me to take a contradictory perspective. All writing is fiction, in the sense that when you cast something in language, you transform it.
Some readers at least think of my work as fantastical or surreal, despite the documentary aspirations of a book like Portrait with Keys. They assume that I have an overactive imagination. My partner Minky, who has inside knowledge on certain things, jokes that the more absurd the fiction gets, the more likely that it was based on an actual event, whereas readers tend to assume the opposite. In the end, fiction is such a mysterious process of refracting your experience through a lens whose effects you don’t quite grasp.
SS: Can I ask just one more question about fiction? Often we hear writers say that a character arrives, and they inhabit the author, it’s like a kind of possession. Then the author arrives at an idea of how they might write the story or character, but in fact the character ends up taking over and the writer writes what the character demands. Do you have that experience, that you feel possessed sometimes by your characters?
I’ve sent this notion up a bit in my story ‘Kidnapped’. Some writers have a romantic sense of it. I’ve read more than one interview in which writers said how at the end of the book, when their main character died, they sat weeping over the page or the keyboard. I’m sure that for some writers it really is a form of possession, and that for many of us the characters assume a strange kind of reality. It’s a bit like having a parallel life. The Restless Supermarket took me a long time to write and I kept having to set it aside for periods. Then going back to it again was very much like entering a familiar place I hadn’t visited for a while. If you visualize the fictional space of the book strongly, which you have to do if you’re going to embody it properly, it acquires the reality of a memory. You can get lost in it, as you do when you return to a place in memory or in a daydream.
One has flights of fancy as a writer, when something just begins to come out and you lose yourself, and then you sit up two hours later and you’ve got all this stuff. But for me it’s a lucky break when this happens. Losing oneself in this way is made difficult by the fact that language is a sequential, linear thing. It was easier when I was younger and I thought less about what I was doing. Now it’s more difficult to leave the conscious editing mode behind and enter the freer, more intuitive compositional one.
What I do experience is that the text has a life of its own. The writing happens in the writing, if I could put it that way. Whether I start with an idea, a voice or an incident, once I actually start to write it goes off in another direction. The text has its own logic and dynamics. Clearly some writers need to plot and plan their books quite carefully in advance. They need to have an organized plot before they begin the writing. But the work I do is more speculative than that – and I don’t mean that I’ve taken to science fiction in my dotage. I mean that the writing is a conjecture about how things are or were or might be.
I have one final question to ask. To what extent are you necessarily a South African writer? Did you ever consider leaving South Africa? You don’t have to answer this, but given the difficulties of living in South Africa, did you ever contemplate leaving?
I’ve thought about it often enough, in different contexts. For instance, like many young white South Africans I had to deal with conscription. Some of my university friends left the country when they graduated to avoid serving in the army. This was a very clear moment of choice, where I had to decide whether to stay in the country and go into the army, with the moral dilemmas and compromises that involved, or leave the country and avoid doing it. This was not long after the Soweto uprising, when the army was becoming more and more active in civil conflict, and so the issues were pressing. I decided to stay and that’s a choice I have to live with.
Historically, there have been waves of emigration in moments of crisis, after Sharpeville, for instance, and again after the Soweto uprising. Also when the state of emergency was imposed in the mid-’80s. Black South Africans left, often clandestinely to join the struggle against apartheid, or to make better lives for themselves. People continue to leave now. Many people are restless in the globalized world we live in. South Africa is also not an entirely comfortable place to live, even if one’s life is materially comfortable and privileged. Now people leave because the environment is unsafe or unpredictable, or because they have work opportunities elsewhere, or because they’re pessimistic about the future.
I feel grounded in South Africa and I care about what happens there. Being a writer keeps me rooted in a particular way. I’m sure I could go on writing elsewhere, but it wouldn’t have the same value for me. If I went to live in another country, I imagine it would take years to acquire the particular kinds of knowledge and experience that I take for granted at home, before I had the confidence to say anything that would feel meaningful to me, because the deep layers of every society are so difficult to access. How would I get to the point of writing freely and critically? I’m also held there by ties to family and friends.
There’s another story to be told about people going back to South Africa. Many people returned after the end of apartheid – and some of them could not get used to being there again. Even now people who have spent half a lifetime in other countries are being drawn back. And people who have spent a lifetime there are leaving. South Africa is full of tensions and contradictions (to use the Marxian vocabulary we started with). Some of them would be relieved or resolved by the creation of a society that’s more equitable and humane, more open and at ease with itself. And some of them may be irresolvable, for the immediate future at least. If one can use the obvious limitations productively, these are fertile conditions in which to write.
Thanks for your time and patience, Ivan. We know that this interview has been fairly tight in its focus, and has left much of your work beyond consideration. Until next time, all we can do is invite and implore readers to scan the breadth and depth of your work, the extent and achievement of which take us well beyond the limits of our conversation here.