Calling Time

Blogging has been rather haphazard this this year. In the battle for balance it seems the personal has triumphed over the digital in 2011, but fear not, normal blogging shall resume shortly.

Blogging the Caine Prize: In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata

This is the fourth story in the series of Blogging the Caine Prize. Past posts can be found here. Indeed, the stories keep getting better with each passing week and unlike the others, Lauri Kubuitsile’s story (PDF) is a wonderful, funny tale that doesn’t perpetuate negative stereotypes, the writing is light and unrepetitive - yes, there is good and bad repetition in literature as I’ve noted before.

“In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata” is set in Nonkanyana village in Botswana about a deceased casanova, McPhineas Lata who, “though despised by most husbands ... was adored by most wives” and his funeral is “full of dramatic fainting and howls of grief echoing” from his many married female friends some doing their best to out mourn the other, by lying on his grave, as if it were a competition to show which of them loved McPhineas the most.
 

This story foregrounds the importance of memory when someone has passed on. The husbands fear that the wives’ desires to cling onto the memory of McPhineas will construct into a legend, an untouchable super-sex hero. As these memories are fused with the imagination, they become retold as altered representations of actual events that neither the teller or the subject - McPhineas - can ever recall so the memories become more spicy with the telling and re-telling of the women’s sexual escapades. Substitute the situation for any other and this is how ordinary people and nationalists create myth. The past then becomes a romanticized alteration of the past - with both good and bad effects, of course. 


Zunguzungu finds an interesting relation between sex, work and masculinity and suggests that because the men work long hours they are lousy in bed whereas McPhineas doesn’t work and is a great lover. I suppose his sex is his work - unpaid work - as he spends his days attending to the sexual needs of women. In presenting McPhineas as a ladies man and his encounters with them as an open secret within the community, it says something about the gender relations in this society. 


The men may be upset with McPhineas for being a better lover and what that means for their masculinity, but they don’t seem to object to their wives sleeping with him in the way a spouse might do. Why? I get that the story is meant to be that way, just a light-hearted story about the people of a funny little place but I want to think of this in a deeper way: whether this signifies any sort of empowerment for the women as it’s okay for them have extra-marital relationships and whether McPhineas helps maintain a balance between the genders. 

Historically speaking, is there a comparable McPhineas figure / practice in Tswana culture? And in a country where HIV is so prevalent (24.9% of 15-49 year olds are pregnant), what does it mean to have a McPhineas character who sleeps with all the women. Sure it’s great that there’s no sense of enforced monogamy in this community, but this kind of sexual freedom also has terminal limits in Botswana. And on that party pooper, note: The End.


This story is worth the read and if you’re interested in read the opinions of others here are a few thoughts from other co-bloggers:

Method to the Madness
The Oncoming Hope
Backlash Scott
Mumpsimus
Zunguzungu

6th International Conference of Caribbean Women's Writing: Comparative Critical Conversations

Comparative Critical Conversations

Friday 24 and Saturday 25 June 2011

Goldsmiths, University of London

‘Comparative Critical Conversations’ is an international 2-day conference that aims to reconfigure methodologies through comparative responses to the literature in a bid to further understand the deep and complex relations between texts that derive from a culture variously described as mimetic, hybrid, fragmented, syncretic and so on.Caribbean Women’s Literature as a body of work has become rooted in the region and across the diaspora. As a result, critics and teachers engaged in discovering, interpreting and disseminating the study of the texts have sought and found various discursive spaces from which to explore its distinctive aesthetics and particular complexities. The resulting transition from silence and absence to differentiated presence has opened a range of questions which this conference wishes to address. Centrally, we ask: how might the readings of Caribbean Women’s literature, alongside other ‘minority’ and ‘canonical’ texts within given national literatures produce perspectives that might re-invigorate as well as re-address contemporary critical processes?

Guest Speakers include Marlene Nourbese Philip

Conference Programme: Here

Blogging The Caine Prize: What Molly Knew

This is the third short story in the Blogging the Caine Prize series I'm participating in with several other bloggers. This week's story, What Molly Knew is by Tim Keegen from South Africa. Of all the stories thus far, this is the best - hopefully the stories will keep getting better. Unlike last week's story, 'Butterfly Dreams' the writing is much tighter and with each sentence comes a development in the story unlike 'Butterfly Dreams' which was so overwritten in several places that it stunted the development of the story, as I've said before.

'What Molly Knew' is mainly set in Goodwood, Cape Town and tells the story of Molly Retief's daughter's murder. Molly's prime suspect is Tommie, the son-in-law, an illegal, half Black half White Mozambican she refuses to recognize as family. Making clear her dislike, she says to the investigating officer: “I hate it when you call him my son-in-law. I never thought of him as part of my family.” His race, migrant status and political connections to the ANC are negative markers of difference for Molly and in marking him in this way, she also reveals the dynamics of race and foreign othering within White South African society. 

The gossip session at the haridressers on Tommie's percieved betrayal to the Portuguese (and by extension the White race) and unsavoury political connections affirm that the stranger is definitely 'not one of us' unlike other Coloured South Africans of the Cape who have insider/outsider status within the Afrikaans-speaking community because of the shared history and language. However, like many other Coloured characters in the (White) Afrikaner world (e.g. Josef Malan in Looking on Darkness by Andre Brink and Michael in JM Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K), Tommie functions as a figure of moral and political censure against privatised, casual racism, an enduring social feature even in the new South Africa.

The story opens with a desire for routine, normalcy - Molly's cat expects to be fed, and she walks around the house in her pinafore over a "shapeless lavender jersey", as she always does when cleaning the house. But that normalcy is interrupted and contaminated. Though it may seem like this day is like any other, it isn't. Sarah, her daughter, is dead.

Rather than deal with the loss of her daughter, Molly finds it apt to try and carry on as though things were normal - despite the glare of the cameras and reporters lurking about and a policeman visiting an overly neat house - everything must be normal. And that includes, Rollo's drunken tirades. 

To a certain extent, I agree with Mumpsimus who criticised this story for being 'nice writing' - where it's easy to identify good and bad. Mumpsimus writes:

Tim Keegan clearly does not like racism or domestic abuse. We, too, do not like racism or domestic abuse, and so we can read the story and feel all the proper emotions. Nasty Rollo! Poor, deluded, weak Molly! Good Sarah! Wronged Tommie!

It's easy to feel sorry for Molly, and also to feel at least a tinge of contempt for her: Stupid woman, sticking with such a man! It's easy to hate Rollo. It's easy to feel anger that Tommie is so badly treated. 

This is true, it is easy to dislike Rollo and Molly and get on a soapbox and preach about racism as I'm doing here in this post, but the meaningfulness of 'easy fiction' depends on how we as readers engage with it. In my view, the niceness of this story invites the reader to look beyond - beyond the things that we're comfortable with, like disliking Rollo and Molly, to see what else the world of the characters tells us. How telling of South African society, is the Reitiefs' desire to preserve the normal or rather illusory normalcy of their world with all it's half-truths, untruths, sad truths and family skeletons? (See AfricasACountry link below) In an eerily measured tone that marks the pace of the Retiefs' life, things seem to happen in slow motion in this story, there are no big action scenes, no climactic emotional/awakening scene. Life continues to roll out in slow motion, just like that real life story (read: country) you've heard one too many times before and you as a listener (read: citizen) don't have the power to stop from recurring.

...If there is one actionable message for the new post-apartheid South Africa, as a whole, apart from that to do with the politics of race, Afrikaner privilege and acknowledging prejudice, it is also the treatment of the stranger, the foreign African. In theorizing the notion of hospitality, Derrida argues that  the stranger is one who is the diametrically opposed 'Other' to the Self, but the notion of community and humanity embodied in hospitality mean that co-existence is possible, but rarely is this ever the case in migration and ethnicity politics - the stranger never belongs. And for the Retiefs, there is no feeling of responsibility or hospitality towards Tommie. With news of at least five recent xenophobic killings of Zimbabweans in South Africa, I couldn't help but think of the parallels in Tommie's otherness and foreign others, like Farai Kujirichita who was wrongly accussed of a crime and bludgeoned to death in Diepsloot Pretoria.

Although I enjoyed this story, I find myself strangely coming back to my weekly question about the Caine Prize and what the choice of shorftlisted story says about how the Caine Prize sees Africa and Africans. The previous stories played up stereotypes but this is story doesn't. It's well written and deserves to be shortlisted, but why do I hate feeling like this isn't the best of African writing. I haven't quite articulated how I'd ask the question of the Caine Prize in regards to this story without sounding like a overly-critical critic, but there is a question, somewhere.

Views from other bloggers:

Africa is A Country

Method to the Madness

Mumpsimus

Blogging the Caine Prize: Butterfly Dreams

This is a late post that should've been done on Friday (!), but real life got in the way, so here it is:

The second in the series of Blogging the Caine Prize is Butterfly Dreams by Beatrice Lamwaka from Uganda. She is published author and teacher and if interested you can read her story Vengeance of the Gods which was later turned into her first novel.

Butterfly Dreams is the story of a female rebel child soldier who comes back to her family after having been taken to fight by the Ugandan rebels in the conflict between the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Acholiland.

For me, Butterfly Dreams reads much better than Hitting Budapest - there's a bit more structure to the story and there's actual plot development. However, there's too much overwriting in the some parts of the story and as a reader I felt like there was a slightly tortuous dragging out of the story rather than  purposeful repetition where new facts or twisted metaphors are added. In some places the repetition works, because the writer actually does something with the words or she lets lets the story tell itself.

Compare and contrast:

Exhibit A:

We watched you silently. In return, you watched us in silence. We gave you food when we thought you were hungry. You gulped down the sweet potatoes and malakwang without saying a word. We didn’t want to treat you as if you were a stranger but in our hearts, we knew that you were new. We knew that you would never be the same again. We didn’t know what to expect of you.

Exhibit B:

This is something that we don’t understand. This is our home, something that we don’t know how to explain to you. Something we took refuge in. This is our home that keeps us alive. Keeps us sane. Just huts. Grass and bricks. Just huts to hide our nakedness.

Clearly B is much stronger than A because B actually describes refugee camp where they live and also explores the emotions of the family whereas A is, well, just words. And too many of the same ones, they don't move the story along but stagnate it. At points it comes across as an 'art for art's sake story' because it embraces certain stereotypes about Africa. What Neelika at Africa's a Country calls 'mining for misery.'

Unimpressed by the number of cliches in this story, The Oncoming Hope said in this very frank post:

name an African development storytelling cliché, this story's got it, from child soldier to displacement camps to walking to school though bombs to cartoonishly evil rebel soldiers.

Again I ask, if these are the stories the Caine Prize shortlists, what does that say about how the Caine Prize as a literary institution - with all the power it wields within African literature -sees Africa or expects to see Africa represented?

Backlash Scott had a more balanced, but equally critical view:

 the tone of the writing was what separated this piece from other “poverty porn” types of stories for me. Even then I’m kind of torn. The story is about a family’s struggle to cope with a crisis as much as it is about showing you how bad children have it in the North. While I would hardly expect a writer born in Gulu to shed the atmosphere in which she grew up, it is interesting to see how many of these Caine Prize stories will cater to the troubled-dark-continent narrative. 

...When reading this story I was reminded of the late great Yvonne Vera's Under the Tongue which similarly works on repetition and lyricism - only that Vera brilliantly executes it. Don't believe me, go read her. it also deals with muteness as a result of child trauma and the woman-centered family - Grandmother and mother - become the conduits through which the protagonist, Zhizha discovers a new language with which to speak, it is a language that isn't filled with the trauma of the past. Being taught to read by her mother becomes one way for Zhizha to regain her voice and another is through her Grandmother's stories of the family's history and in speaking, Grandmother exorcises the skeleton's of her past and also regains her right to speak as a woman because her husband had often told her 'a woman cannot speak'. Similarly in Lamwuka's story, the matriarchal family is the healing unit for the protagonist - hence the constant use of 'we' but it's used in a 'we and them' way rather  than an 'us' - as seen in the family dynamics discussed below. Education is also a form of catharsis for the child - but strangely also her obsession. Curiously before she is conscripted and after the war has begun she still goes to school: 

Even when the war started and many children were waylaid, you managed to get there. You cursed the teachers and called them cowards when you didn’t find any children or teachers. Days after a heavy fight between the rebels and soldiers you continued to go to school. You never gave up even when you didn’t find anybody there.

In the present-time of the story Lamunu's about 11 years old, so she was younger before she joined the war. Reading this I wondered how realistic is this, what parent would allow a child to go to school under such circumstances? I know it's fiction, but come on. There's got to be a level of credibility.

In her book, The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry explores the silencing effect of pain and trauma, it 'has a resistance to language' thus making it difficult for the traumatized to speak. So as much as the authorial voice of this story wants Lamunu to speak, she cannot. The pain is 'unshareable' and the only place of refuge is the special school where, through therapy she will speak again and have a new relation to language that will enable her to unburden the horrors of war. On the morning of her first day at school, she speaks:

You said apwoyo. You said thank you to Ma. That’s the first word we have heard you say. 

But the family responds: 

We’re happy to hear you say something. We hope that you will be able to say a lot more. Tell us more than Anena, Aya, Bongomin, Nyeko, Ayat, Lalam, Auma, Ocheng, Otim, Olam, Uma, Ateng, Akwero, Laker, Odong, Lanyero, Ladu, Timi…. Most of all, we want to hear your voice.

If the family still want to hear Lamunu's 'voice', then they are not listening. She has spoken by saying 'thank you.' It's a breakthrough! You'd think they'd make a song and dance about it, but they don't. Perhaps this is why Lamwaka's character finds sanctuary in an educational institution whereas Vera's protagonist finds refuge in her family who educate her and give her a 'new language.' In both of these stories the acts of expression could be described as a gendered performance of orality (oral + literature) as language is a pre-dominantly patriarchal construction and privilege and the wars in both Uganda and Zimbabwe are largely patriarchally-constructed struggles. Mmm okay, nice feminist jab there, I think I'll leave that issue now.

Onto the last bit, which I found really jarring:

Ma says that you will get special treatment. Most of the children are like you. They too have killed, tortured other children. They too fought in a war that they didn’t understand. The teachers will treat you well, Ma says. They have had special training.

'Most of the children are like you. They too have killed, tortured other children.' - From one sibling to another, eh? I get the feeling the family doesn't quite understand the new Lamunu or her condition and they don't seem to want to. Having already lost the father, lived in a refugee camp where they eat posho (a yellow maize meal like polenta that's often used as drought relief food in southern and parts of East Africa excl Kenya) that they used to feed the dog, they really aren't willing to deal with anymore tough emotional issues - they want to move on and be happy again. And they don't have the cultural capacity to do so, either:

"We had never been taught how to unbury a tipu. We only hoped that your real tipu was not six feet under."

For the family, any disruption would open the floodgates of tears and trauma they've tried so hard to keep shut, so Lamunu will have to go deal this at her 'school of the other children' and find her tipu. 

A list co-bloggers and their thoughts on this one:

 The Oncoming Hope, Backslash Scott, Africa is a Country, Method to the Madness, The Mumpsimus and ZunguZungu.

Blogging the Caine Prize

As from this Friday a group of bloggers are going to be reading, blogging and cross-posting the stories nominated for the Caine Prize for African Writing. 

The shortlisted stories are:

NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) ‘Hitting Budapest’

Beatrice Lamwaka (Uganda) ‘Butterfly dreams’ 

Tim Keegan (South Africa) ‘What Molly Knew’

Lauri Kubuitsile (Botswana) ‘In the spirit of McPhineas Lata’ 

David Medalie (South Africa) ‘The Mistress’s Dog’ 

If you're interested in participating, holla - whether its reading one story or all of them. Even if you don't have a blog you're welcome. Also, please checkout ZunguZungu's blog for more info.

Dear ...

...from Saul Williams

Dear ....

As the media sways between reporting on the huge disservice Julian Assange has done to government secrecy and posting the secrets, as Interpol tries it's hardest to track him, as the American government places him on the top of their most wanted list, and as the barefoot bandit sits alone in a cell awaiting trial- I would like to take a moment to admit that these guys are pretty much heroes in my book... and I don't think I'm alone. The hacker is the digital dignitary of the i-generation. These are the same guys I seek out to help me burn hard to find dvds onto my hardrive, the same guys who help me get music off of my ipod and into my itunes. They save me from waiting lists and long lines at the genius bar and overpriced software, they help me replace lost and mistakenly deleted files, and if I had the savvy they did, if I could prove that the government was lying about the number of civilian casualties during a seven year war that I thought was wrong from the start, if I could help make this “Age of Transparency” a bit more transparent, I would gladly play my part. I'm not an anarchist. I shy away from most labels, yet register as a democrat when it means I can vote for someone I believe in. I've got my own set of contradictions. I'm also a musician and know damn well that I wouldn't like someone breaking into my computer and leaking my music before I decided it was time. But I have also celebrated the fact that I could now give away music for free by doing just that. And that freedom is the result of the hard work of people I do not know: programmers, engineers, fellow makers and creators, artists of the wire who dabble between worlds and understand codes where I see chaos. I respect them. Those that can capitalize on it and use it to their advantage are the pioneers of our time and those that would use it for the greater benefit of humanity, are the heroes.

Most of my heroes have been arrested. Many have stood on the wrong side of the law. And the law has not always stood for truth. The law has stood for control, dominance, and sometimes even manipulation. Law, at it's best, has served to protect. Yet it has also served as a means of restricting growth and has not always seemed to change at the rate of human consciousness. Some laws have some catching up to do. So do some governments. So do some people. And I'm sure that in some regards I am also one of those people. If I was in the military and believed I was protecting and serving my country by fighting in a war and some hacker gave away the correspondents to our barracks or fire-power, I imagine, I'd be pretty upset. Yet, I find it hard to be upset when I think the best support for our troops would be sending them home and enlisting them in college. If you want to help rebuild the infrastructure of a country send engineers, send teachers, build hospitals (no preachers).

But I digress. And who says I understand how to fight disingenuous governance, poverty or hate? I'm just saying I understand the importance of counterculture, of those who prefer boom over pop. Hardcore. Underground. The ones who dare to question and expose, who put their lives at risk, like soldiers fastened to their beliefs, but who fight alone or in small packs of the daring and courageous, Those who stand up and speak out even when the masses seem apathetically addicted to the status quo, which is probably good for business. And I'm not anti-good business. I'm just for new business models. And new fashion models, while you're at it. They don't have to be so skinny!

But the reason that I'm writing you Santa is because Kanye already rocked a red suit, I wanted to suggest a yellow cape, something with fringes, maybe a few feathers or ornaments. It's not like you have any connection to Jesus so you might as well change your shit up and get on some newness. The way I see it, you're another one of them do-gooders. You give kids something fun to dream about while we adults scramble the meaning of things. Things like the meaning of power, or the role of responsibility within it. Things like the power of the imagination and the beauty that can come about when you engage it. Anyway, it's nice to have someone to write to sometimes and I thought you might like a letter that wasn't asking you for anything. Do your thing, big guy, my son is counting on you.

My love to the Mrs.

xxx

shamelessly jacked from Saul Williams' Facebook Notes

4 December 2010.

Zuma's Bastard: Encounters With a Desktop Terrorist

Azad Essa is a journalist, columnist and aspiring filmmaker and Zuma's Bastard is his debut novel. Originally from Durban, he is currently based in Doha, Qatar where he works for Al Jazeera as a journalist. Zuma's Bastard is based on the politics of South Africa and the World in the post-Mandela era. 

With chapters like  ‘Was Eugene Terre Blanche a Muslim?’, ‘Blue Julius (and Pink Floyd), ‘Let’s jerk off to Climate Change’ and ‘Nobel Obama Trumps Superman’, no political figure is safe from his satire, even if they dip in their walk. Part of his writing is from the Thought Leader blog run by the Mail and Guardian and his column provides a platform upon which he unrelentingly questions populist rhetoric and asks, at times provocatively, South Africans how bad does it get before we sit up and take notice? As Ferial Haffajee puts it, Essa is of a “generation of South Africans who reached political maturity in the era of Polokwane – the quintessential voice of the Born Frees”

Describing the book, Professor Ari Sitas Head of Sociology at UCT writes:

‘Zuma's Bastard is the new generation's arrogant and self-critical voice about Durban, South Africa and Africa in the world. Azad Essa, a Bollywood-soaked, Indian-battered, black South African-tinged, accidental academic and incidental journalist - who has seen India and Kashmir, India better, in Kashmir, Pakistan, the so-called Middle East and Europe - leaves no holy cows untaunted – nay he even imagines them as beefburgers…His popularity is catching but the moral questions he asks of us cannot be sidestepped. Read this book, buy the T-shirt, be with it and get angry because the author takes his jokes (often us) seriously.’

In an interview with the Daily Maverick he explains his choice of title as thus:

The title is not completely legitimate, but there’s good justification for it. Without giving too much away, the book is made up of two headers: “Zuma’s Bastard” and “Encounters with a desktop terrorist”. They are equally important because they collectively introduce readers to the central theme of the book: a rabid Indian bastard on the loose under Zuma’s watch.

I don’t know what it means to fight for freedom. And in many ways, the title locates me as a child of the Zuma presidency. I was too young during the honeymoon Mandela period to engage in the new democracy and so it doesn’t count. Zuma, touted as the man to lead us away from tendered one-night stands and deliver on promises to the people, capital and who-ever-else he conned, has created a nation of bastards, trying to make sense of it all.

At the same time, I have straight hair, “Indian” skin and go to mosque; I am a desktop terrorist with views of the world that are politically incorrect, sometimes blasphemous and incongruent with the good Indian muslim boy who must open a shop, play the system, marry a virgin and look forward to more in heaven.

If anything, the book is about the coming-of-age of a generation of South Africans who want to finally fight for their freedom.

The book is definitely not anti-Zuma, despite the flattering title. That would be far too easy. The book, like the blog, addresses a variety of themes relevant to South Africans, the usual suspects included, but written from a fresh and humorous perspective. It’s a bludgeoning view of the world from an Indian perspective. And my cousins aren’t going to be thrilled.

Of course the title is meant to create a stir, but we also think it’s the character of the writing (rather than a shocking title for kicks). And about the press material; they probably sent you the polite version.

This book is available in South Africa and will shortly be released in other parts of the world.

The Truth That Is Nadine Gordimer

Nobel Laureate and political activist, Nadine Gordimer is one of South Africa's best writers whose work I first encountered in university and have not stopped reading since. If you're looking for insight into the lives of ordinary people during the apartheid days I'd recommend The Conservationist, July's People (my fav'rit!) and The Burger's Daughter. Of course Nadine Gordimer's but one writer in a sea of many fine, accomplished South African writers but since this post is about her, I might as well point you to her good stuff. Below, are the best bits from an interview in which she spits some truth about democracy, Zimbabwe and Mandela :

Of South Africa: "We are still in the morning after. I cannot emphasis strongly enough, we have had 16 years [since democratic elections]. That's all. Sixteen years. It's not even a generation. And here you, in Britain and America, have had hundreds of years of working towards democracy, and it's still not perfect; you've still got poor people, you've still got xenophobia. But we're expected to have done it in 16 years."

...When Gordimer met Robert Mugabe, not long after he came to power, she thought "he really seemed to be a good man. It's the old thing of absolute power corrupts. He seems to have gone a little mad. And I also blame the wives. Very often the wives of these people become the world's biggest shoppers; including his. His first wife was a good influence, but this one comes to one of the biggest hotels in Johannesburg, brings her entourage, she shops like mad. She's also been to Dubai to shop. While all these people are starving." 

What does she think will happen when Mandela dies? "I can only compare it to the 27 years he was in prison; stone walls do not a prison make. Mandela was with us when he was in prison. And in a strange way, Mandela will be with us when he's dead and gone. I don't know how long that will last. But he will become more of an icon, just as Mahatma Gandhi did."

...The fiction might be what matters, says Gordimer, but it is the deeds of her life by which she wants to be judged. "That through the way you lived your life as a human being, rather than what you did as a writer, you could earn your way to being an African. I am an African. I am white. I in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right. Nothing else."

Twitter Be Like African Drums

Big Think Video

....Margaret Atwood says:

 ...People used to perform their lives this way to themselves in their diaries, and also through letters to other people.So for me, anything that happens in social media is an extension of stuff we were already doing in some other way. 

So, it’s all human communication. 

And the form that most closely resembles the “tweet” is the telegram of old, which also was limited because you paid by the letter. And so short communications very rapidly sent. So all of these things, the postal service, et cetera, they’re all improvements, if you like, or modernizations of things that already existed earlier in some other form. 

Even African tribal drums, for instance, could send very complex messages over great distances. They were very rapid, they were very well-worked out and communications could just go like wildfire using that medium of communications. So all of this stuff is what we do now, but it’s not different in nature from what we have always done, which is communicate with one another, send messages to one another, and perform our lives. 

We’ve been doing that for a long time.

Atwood fotocred - J.Allen

more from Atwood: 1. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/29/atwood-in-the-twittersphere/

2. http://bigthink.com/ideas/24253

fisttap bombastic element

RIP Lews Nkosi

pic jacked from BooksZA

I had the honour of being taught by Professor Lewis Nkosi, one of the Drum generation writers in SA, and I was very saddened to learn of his passing. He was one of the coolest, funniest and sharpest lecturers in African Studies, coming to his class was such a relief after being tortured with contemporary literary theory. You could laugh out loud in his class and engage in thought-provoking discussions with this koolkat - that's what he was a very wise, engaging smooth cat rather than stodgy academic - you know them types.

Lewis Nkosi, you will be missed.  

This is from Books SA:

The giant of South African letters and one of the last remaining voices from South Africa’s famed Drum generation of writers, passed away yesterday in Johannesburg, after a long illness. He was born in December 1936 in KwaZulu Natal, making him 74.

Nkosi’s first novel, which won worldwide acclaim, was Mating Birds. It was banned by the apartheid government; Nkosi lived for long periods in exile, particularly in Switzerland. His last novel, which I [Ben Williams] had the privilege of editing, was Mandela’s Ego. It was shortlised for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.

His publisher, Annari van der Merwe said:

“If I think about Lewis, two things come to mind: the brilliance of the man’s mind, and his sense of irony – of self-irony. And of course he was quite naughty, but endearingly so. For all his bravado, he was sensitive in a way that few men truly are. There was a real empathy with people – and he had a very broad perspective, from having lived in a different cultural environment for so many years. The devil inside him prevented him from taking things too literally. It’s difficult to think of somebody so vibrant not with us any longer. He will be greatly missed.”

Bulawayo Burning

If there's one thing, rather two things you must know about the great Professor Terence Ranger is his deep love for one of Zimbabwe's finest writers, Yvonne Vera and Bulawayo (the city with the bluest skies!), hence he named his book Bualwayo Burning after Yvonne Vera's Butterfly Burning, a beautiful novel set in 1940s Bulawayo about a young Black woman who dreams of becoming one of the city's first African nurses in order to escape the poverty of the ghetto. While Yvonne Vera focuses more on the personal experience of living in Bulawayo in 1948, Terence Ranger's book provides the historical backdrop of the text - fusing both historicl and literary styles of writing. I look forward to reading this book as it's been in the pipeline for some years now, since before Yvonne Vera's tragic and untimely death in 2005. The book is available for pre-order through James Currey in the UK incl. US & Europe and Weaver Press in Zimbabwe. 

a utilitarian jacking

I got this really interesting piece from a blogger called savage clown, I wanted to ask for it but there was no room to leave comment and ask to re-post this so, in my utiliarian thinking (the greatest good for the greatest number) and spreading the word, I figured I'd jack it and re-post....all credits to unreal of course and sincerest apologies I did not ask. Read on...

holborn 3:24 p.m

‘ . . . there were like two hundred thousand killed. It was really bad.’
 ‘You mean in Pakistan?’


‘No, no. It was like really bad. Like it was one of those big disasters. Some big thing. You know, one of those really big disasters.’


‘What? Like in what happened in America?’


‘No! You must have heard it. It was everywhere. Like three hundred thousand people lost everything. It was one of them black countries. Sort of Africa or something.’


‘No. I don’t remember that. What do you mean they lost everything?’


‘They lost like half of families were like killed. Kids with no parents or aunties. Everything was destroyed. Completely everything. And because it was one of them black places, like African, it was like there was nothing there. It was like they had nothing.’


‘So if they had nothing then they had nothing to lose. Apart from their lives. That was all.’


‘Sometimes I think you’ve got no heart!’


‘Oh, come on. I’m joking you. But serious if they had nothing then what did they have to lose?’


‘Well they had brick houses and stuff. And they had like families and you know . . . ‘


And they fell out of ear-shot. A tall woman in high-heels walking beside her boyfriend or possibly work colleague. They were very London. Very gelled up. Very giggly.

copyright savage clown

My Heartfelt Congratulations To Brian Chikwava & Petina Gappah

Congratulations to my good friend and comrade with an infectious laugh; Brian Chikwava for winning the Zimbabwe NAMA (National Arts and Music Award) award for his first book, Harare North and to my FB friend, the amazing Petina Gappah whose book An Elegy For Easterly has been a trailblazer, winning and being nominated for various prizes all over the world. She is one person I never tire of heaping praise upon; it's well deserved, and Brian is one person I really admire and feel, "if I only I could write like that and be so funny...", "if only I was so cool, calm and collected like that...."

Here is an excerpt from a review published in Pambazuka News:
(see http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/books/56610/print)

"Harare North is a tale of a ‘paper-free’ immigrant who comes to the UK and claims asylum. Yet ironically in Zimbabwe, the migrant was part of the ruling party’s 'Green Bombers' who were instrumental in the political violence against the opposition MDC and the violent seizure of farms. Cleverly written in first-person narrative, Chikwava tells of the unnamed narrator's experiences in London, commonly known to Zimbabweans as Harare North because of the long history of large numbers of Zimbabweans who have gone to live and work there.

Chikwava’s comedic tale experiments with private voice and language to capture the immigrant experience of London. Arriving at Gatwick Airport as an asylum seeker, the narrator makes it past immigration to meet his cousin in-law. This first encounter shows how family changes when abroad, as he is made to feel very unwelcome at the home of his cousin Paul and Paul's wife, Sekai. Sekai’s manner toward him is so cold that he describes her 'a lapsed African'. Becoming increasingly aware he is an imposition and eager to fulfil his mission to raise £3,000 so he can return to Zimbabwe and live comfortably, he leaves Paul’s home in search of work and finds his way to Brixton where he meets Shingi who works as a carer or a BBC ('British Bottom Cleaner').


In this share-flat, the main characters of the novel are low-income earners who live on the margins of Britain’s middle-class society in the ghettoes of Brixton, where they work as fish 'n' chip shop workers, porters and hair shampooists and braiders. The most striking thing about these characters is the familiarity of their conditions. Many Zimbabweans and immigrants of other nations work in intensive labour low-paying jobs and suffer multiple, inter-connected forms of social discrimination that Chikwava’s novel brilliantly portrays. As the story unfolds, the somewhat good-intentioned narrator changes and the witty and humorous tone of the novel shifts to an embittered critique on the individual, and the collective circumstances which led to his demise.

...An Elegy for Easterly is a collection of thirteen tales about life in Zimbabwe that offers an intimate view of the everyday lives of ordinary people. Each of the stories shows how people survive in the hyper-inflationary, politically volatile and plagued society we are often (rightly or wrongly) told is Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. This text shows the survival strategies people use in order to live from day to day. Despite the mass exodus of Zimbabweans to neighbouring countries and abroad since 2000, it is not everyone who can or wants to leave.

For as many reasons that people left Zimbabwe, there were as many reasons to stay and make life work as best one could. This, in my reading of Gappah’s book, seems to be strongest message: That life must go on in Zimbabwe. Despite the harsh conditions faced, people still live and they have triumphs and tribulations just like anyone else in any other part of the world. This is evident in the characters of Mai Toby who sews for a living and Martha the socially ostracized woman in "An Elegy for Easterly" and Emily in "The Annexe Shuffle", who is a promising, ambitious university student but has some deep psychological issues.

Gappah courageously tables issues that often produce deathly silences when raised among strangers for fear of persecution as one never knows to whom they are expressing their political opinion. The book is also filled with some truly hilarious stories like "Our Man in Geneva" and "The Mupandawana Dancing Champion" that the reader will love...." So far the book has won The Guardian UK 2009 First Book Prize and has been nominated for award the LA Times Art Seidenbaum First Book Award and the Sunday Times in Johannesburg.



                                                                                                                              

             Makorokoto, Amhlope, Congratulations to both of you.  

picture of Brian jacked from www.africanwriter.com and picture of Petina jacked from www.faber.co.uk