If texts are constructed by particular readers in particular ways, then one cannot claim either objectivity or neutrality in one’s reading of particular texts. It follows that I need to say something about my own position as white South African academic writing about the work of black South Africans. Some would view this as a disqualification: do I, can I, should I claim to speak with any authority?
In spite of its apparent plausibility, there are serious problems with a position that, as it were, disqualifies readers on the grounds or race, class, gender, nationality or whatever. This kind of argument assumes, in particular, that black South Africans – by virtue of being black – have privileged access to cultural or racial knowledge and experience that is unavailable to white South Africans. It assumes “a reflexive relationship between black intellectuals and their racial constituency” (Sole, “South Africa Passes the Posts” 143).35 This is a position that can hardly be seriously
35
Sole gives a more extended discussion of this problem in his doctoral study, ‘Authority, Authenticity and the Black Writer’ (see for example pp. 17 -21).
sustained. One cannot regard all black writers or critics as “authentic” or reliable representatives and interpreters of their people’s cultural experience – unless one regards the black population as entirely homogeneous, with no significant differences in terms of ethnicity, class, age, education, region, gender, political affiliation, etc.36 This view would also seem to preclude any critical role for a black writer or
intellectual. This has not, however, prevented such arguments from being put from time to time, a case in point being Mzamane’s critique of Shava’s A People’s Voice (1989). The opening paragraph of his extended review reads:
The most useful thing about Piniel Viriri Shava’s A People’s Voice:
Black South African Writing in the Twentieth Century is its quite
unintended demonstration of the need to cultivate an authentic people’s voice in the criticism of South African literature.
(“Cultivating a People’s Voice” 59). Ironically, here we have one black (South African) critic telling another black (Zimbabwean) critic that his approach lacks authenticity – or even sufficient familiarity with the field of study. This is attributed to the influence of Shava’s “mentor”, Rowland Smith (“He echoes Smith in his mimic’s voice” (65)), and to Shava’s entrapment in a “bourgeois liberal, formalist criticism” (64) – a result of the fact that he has “internalised the dominant mode of discourse in the West” (66).37 Clearly then, being black is not in itself a guarantee of anything. Interestingly, two critics whom Mzamane does cite favourably, and at some length, are both white South Africans – Tim Couzens and Mike Kirkwood.
Another case in point is the criticism of Lewis Nkosi, which has evolved significantly from his early, dismissive response to the writing of black South Africans. His well-known essay begins:
With the best will in the world it is impossible to detect in the fiction of black South Africans any significant and complex talent which
responds with both vigour of the imagination and sufficient technical resources, to the problems posed by conditions in South Africa.
(“Fiction by Black South Africans”130)
36
Gilroy points out that “cultural insiderism” gives race or ethnicity “an incontestable priority over all other dimensions of . . . social and historical experience, cultures and identities” (3).
37
Is there such a thing as “the West” – and what might its “dominant mode of discourse” be, one wonders.
Nkosi goes on to explain that “what we do get from South Africa . . . is the
journalistic fact parading outrageously as imaginative literature” (132). One reason for this is that black South Africans apparently write as though they were entirely
unaware of “the accumulated example of modern European literature” and “as though Dostoevsky, Kafka or Joyce had never lived” (130). This (rather odd) invocation of the artistic norms of European modernism would presumably – in Mzamane’s eyes at least – disqualify Nkosi from serious consideration – on the grounds that his voice is not “authentic”. Clearly, then (whatever the shortcomings of either Shava’s or Nkosi’s approach), race or “blackness” is not a guarantee of “authenticity” (or indeed, I would argue, of anything else).
If one needs the counter-example of a black South African writer who does not invoke essentialist or simplistic notions of “blackness” or “authenticity”, then one need look no further than Ndebele (notwithstanding his own appreciation of and indebtedness to Black Consciousness). His cultural and critical essays display what De Kock calls “a persistently critical awareness of the sources and mediations of oppositional thinking” (“Postcolonial Analysis” 56) – and in particular an awareness of the need for African writers and intellectuals to sever their dependence on
information produced and disseminated by “liberal institutions” (“Turkish Tales” 24). Ndebele argues that this dependence helps to explain the resort to “sloganeering” on the part of the oppressed: “The slogan is the substitution of the gut response for clarity of analysis based on systematically acquired information” (25). Ndebele anticipates the argument that “Africans do have information about themselves as the actual sufferers” (in other words, information arising from their experience of being black and oppressed), but he argues that such information has only limited validity: “Only institutionalised information is subject to ideological scrutiny” – and, unfortunately, he says, “there has not been, among Africans, a consistently original intellectual and analytical base from which to domesticate information and turn it into a truly
transforming tool of liberation” (26). His argument implies that while, on the one hand, black South Africans need to draw on and affirm their own historical, political and cultural experience and knowledge, it is impossible to do so in a simple,
unmediated or untheorised way – all of which suggests that being “black” does not in itself confer authority or legitimacy or authenticity.38
38
At the same time, one must of course understand the imperative that led many black writers, in the context of mounting resistance to apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, to affirm a black identity forged in
I am of course conscious that as a white South African I may seem to be guilty of special pleading in developing this kind of argument. One obviously cannot claim the intimate knowledge of a cultural insider, and one must acknowledge that one speaks from a position of personal and structural privilege (almost automatically conferred on one by virtue of one’s white skin). My own limited exposure to the conditions experienced by black communities under apartheid, and my own limited ability to speak a black language, are serious constraints. I take seriously the question raised by Vaughan, writing in response to the 1981 York Conference (which brought together black and white writers and critics from Southern Africa):
It leads, however, to another point that concerns me . . . and this involves the relation between white academic critics and black writers and (self-) critics. Is, indeed, such a relation possible, let alone
significant? As one white academic critic, I have felt myself drawn more and more to the position that the most socially significant developments in literature in South Africa are taking place in black township literature. To engage with this literature in a socio-critical spirit has come to represent an absolute critical priority. At the same time, this engagement raises the question of critical “address”. Black township literature is written by and for the inhabitants of black
townships: its concepts, and the criticism and self-criticism that sustain and correct it, are derived largely from the ideological and political milieu of the township – a milieu I do not share, except in the form of certain texts, which, furthermore, come to me divorced from their normative contextual associations.
(“Ideological Directions” 62) Ideally a critic, if he or she wishes the engage with the cultural production of black South Africans, should have some familiarity with the dynamics of black community life and should be fluent in at least one indigenous language. While acknowledging my particular limitations, however, I need to point to the obvious fact that black writers did not write for an exclusively black, South African, township audience, and would not have wanted to impose limits on their potential readership. In his article, “Constructing the ‘Cross-Border’ Reader”, Nkosi suggests that in a divided society like South Africa’s, where “boundaries and borders seem to be a condition of our
struggle and mobilise resistance to apartheid on that basis. The success of this strategy (and for the founders of Black Consciousness it was a strategy) can be gauged by the way in which the political and cultural landscape of South Africa was transformed in the decade following the Soweto uprising of 1976. It would be idle to question either the effectiveness of Black Consciousness as a political and cultural movement - although this does not preclude criticism of some of its assumptions.
national life” (40), any process of communication will necessitate the crossing of linguistic, cultural, racial or national borders. He goes on to suggest that “for the black writer the kind of cross-border reader implied may be none other than the white South African reader” (45) – and he argues that this might apply “even in the case of such valorised ‘township’ texts as [those of] Mtutuzeli Matshoba” (46). His argument leads him to conclude that “the character and identity of South African literature is in fact determined “somewhere else, by people outside the community in whose name the writer claims to be speaking” (48).39
Nor can one suppose that the literature produced by black writers is the product of a pure, uncontaminated, indigenous black cultural experience (if such a thing indeed exists). By choosing to write and publish in English, and by
appropriating a particular literary form (in this case, the short story), they utilise non- indigenous traditions and conventions, and make their work available, not only to a wider South African audience, but also to a world audience. Moreover (as the preceding discussion has shown) if one regards cultural syncreticity as “an
inescapable and characteristic feature of all postcolonial societies” (Ashcroft et al 30), then it is difficult to sustain the notion of a simple division between cultural “insiders” and “outsiders”.
One must conclude that no reader or critic should feel the need to explain or apologise for his or her interest in African literature and culture, or in black South African writing in particular. Ultimately, this kind of argument assumes that we are trapped within fixed, racial (or class or gender) identities. In fact, we inhabit multiple identities. As Brenda Cooper puts it, in the context of her discussion of her own position as “a white South African female critic of African fiction” (40): “We are all travellers across a network of changing, nomadic identities” (44).40 It is also
contradicted by the ability of literary (and other) texts to speak to readers who are differently situated in the world, but who have the willingness and receptivity to enter
39
In the case of white South African writing in English, he argues, the “cross-border” reader is likely to be a “metropolitan reader in New York, London, or Paris” (48).
40
Cooper quotes Spivak’s response to white male students in the United States who feel silenced: “‘I say to them, why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced’. Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very deterministic position – since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak. I call these things . . . somewhat derisively, chromatism . . . and genitalism” (46). I would agree with Cooper that one can “transform the script prepared for [one] and speak another role, one that understands power and oppression” (46). Ultimately her postion (and mine) rests on a progressive humanism (rather than on what she calls a “Eurocentric liberal humanism” (48).
into the world of the text. There is, arguably, such a thing as the republic of letters, and it has no boundaries or border posts (apart of course from the very serious limits imposed by literacy, education and economics).
This study flows from my own interest in literary texts (of many kinds). As I have suggested, literary works are, paradoxically, both time-bound and timeless – a fact which helps to explain both their continuing interest, and the impossibility of final interpretation. It also follows that texts are appropriated or transformed by those who read them – and any reader inevitably brings to bear his or her own knowledge, experience, interests, expectations – and limitations. It is difficult, then, to claim that some readings are privileged over others – unless one employs some notion of literary and cultural competence. What one can hope to do, as a literary critic or scholar, is to produce readings that are at least self-reflexive and informed by some understanding of both text and context, and of the conventions and operations of literary works. My interest in the writing of black South Africans is a product of my ongoing personal and professional interest in and engagement with literary works, but it is also
(inevitably) influenced by my own political affiliations and commitments. Conditions in South Africa in the 1980s made it difficult not to actively oppose the apartheid regime, and the formation of the UDF in 1983 created the political space in which to do so. My own political activity during that decade has given me a fairly immediate understanding of the politics of the period, and its impact on particular oppressed communities.
Finally, this study is of course conditioned by the post-apartheid perspective from which it is written. The present may still be disfigured by the legacy of apartheid – the economic disabilities and inequalities resulting from apartheid continue, and the trauma inflicted on individuals and communities lives on – but it does at least provide some perspective from which to view the recent past, and from which to reread texts that can be seen as products of very specific conditions. There is, as Chapman puts it, a “dialectical relation” between “past significance” and “present meaning”, and this means acknowledging both the original context of production and the present context of reception: “the structure of the work is created in specific times, places and
conditions, but lives in the process of its reception” (Chapman, “Writing Literary History in South Africa” 42).