Post-Traumatic: South African Short Stories

Description

The contributors of this anthology make up a wide spectrum of South Africans: black, white, men and women, established and budding who write in either English or Afrikaans. Among these are writers who began their careers in the fifties (George Weideman), to those who were active in the black consciousness period of the seventies (Achmat Dangor, Chris van Wyk, Maropodi Mapalakanye) through to writers who first appeared in print in the eighties and nineties (Rayda Jacobs, Finuala Dowling, Zachariah Raphola, Roshila Nair, Roy Blumenthal, Allan Kolski Horwitz). While many of the writers in this anthology have established themselves as poets, novelists, dramatists and oral storytellers, they all choose the short story as another means of expressing a diverse South Africa of rural and urban life, white suburbia, black township, childhood, love, hate, reconciliation, the grim as well as the funny that make up the tapestry of a country as it used to be and as it is today.

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine
• Collection
• Collections

Informations

• Publié par: Botsotso Publishing
• Date de parution: 25 décembre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781990922220
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

P O S T T R A U M A T I C South African Short Stories Edited by Chris van Wyk and Vagn Plenge

First published under the titleOpbrudin Denmark by AKS/Hjulet 2000

Published by Botsotso Publishing 2003

This edition published by Botsotso Publishing 2009

BOTSOTSO PUBLISHING PO Box 23910, Joubert Park, 2044 [e-mail]

Copyright © Introduction, Chris van Wyk 2003 Copyright © for individual stories, the authors themselves 2003

Set in 11 pt Garamond

ISBN 0620305002

Cover design and layout by Michael Vines [e-mail]

This book was funded in part by the

\ NATIONAL ARTS COUNCIL O F S O U T H A F R I C a

C O N T E N T S

INTRODUCTION Chris Van Wyk5 SOUTH AFRICAN SHORT STORIES TODAY Michael Gardiner9 A GRAIN OF SORGHUM Johnny Masilela13 MAGIC Chris van Wyk19 SWARTLAND Rachelle Greeff30 COMPRESS George Weideman33 YOU ARE THE DAUGHTER Rayda Jacobs42 COUPLE ON THE BEACH Arja Salafranca47 CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE Ken Barris61 A MOTHER, HER DAUGHTER, AND A LOVER Roy Blumenthal69 LESIBA THE CALLIGRAPHER Zachariah Raphola90 A CERTAIN KIND OF LOVE Roshila Nair103 CHANGE Barry Hough108 A CHANCE ENCOUNTER Farida Karodia116 SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES Achmat Dangor132 DANCE CYCLES Maropodi Mapalakanye145 JULIE AND THE AXEMAN Finuala Dowling157 THERE’S TOO MUCH SKY Moira Lovell166 GEMORS Allan Kolski Horwitz175 THE SPY WHO LOVED ME Maureen Isaacson194 A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF ART Graeme Friedman204 THE NEW FORD KAFKA Ivan Vladislavic216 SWEET HONEY NIGHTS Gcina Mhlophe225 GLOSSARY230 BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS232

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Botsotso, an annual literary magazine

POETRY

We Jive Like This Botsotso Jesters (Siphiwe ka Ngwenya, Isabella Motadinyane, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Ike Mboneni Muila, Anna Varney)

No Free Sleeping Donald Parenzee, Vonani Bila, Alan Finlay

Dirty Washing Botsotso Jesters

5 Clinton Du Plessis, Kobus Moolman, Gillian Schutte, Bofelo wa Mphutlane, Lionel Murcott

Purple Light Mirror in the Mud(compact disc) Botsotso Jesters and Lionel Murcott (a joint production with 111)

SHORT FlCTION

Unity in Flight Maropodi Mapalakanye, Peter Rule, Zachariah Rapola, Michael Vines, Phaswane Mpe, Allan Kolski Horwitz

Un/common Ground Allan Kolski Horwitz

ART

Manuscript Exhibition 2000 Manuscript Exhibition 2002

POSTTRAUMATIC

I N T R O D U C T I O N Chris van Wyk

THIS ANTHOLOGY IS UNIQUE in that it was originally published in Denmark, in Danish of course, and is now being published in South Africa. The Danish edition was conceived and sponsored by the Danish organisation South Africa Contact (SAC), formerly an antiapartheid movement. This English edition is sponsored by the South African National Arts Council and Botsotso Publishing, a nonprofit writers’ collective dedicated to exposing contemporary South African literature. SAC’s very generous sponsorship of this anthology went beyond a desire to help give exposure to South African writers. On a visit to Denmark in 1998 the organisation — involved for many years in South African politics and culture — intimated a burning curiosity at what South Africans were writing about now, six years after the historic first democratic elections and at the dawn of a new century — a question that in recent years has provoked much vigorous debate inside the country too. So the brief that I sent out to over fifty South African writers was to submit a story on any theme as long as it was written after 1994. And the twentytwo most positive responses in my opinion and that of the Danish publisher, Vagn Plenge — are what are contained in this anthology. The contributors make up a wide spectrum of South Africans: black, white, men and women, established and budding who write in

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INTRODUCTION

either English or Afrikaans. Among these are writers who began their careers in the fifties (George Weideman), to those who were active in the black consciousness period of the seventies (Achmat Dangor, Chris van Wyk, Maropodi Mapalakanye) through to writers who first appeared in print in the eighties and nineties (Rayda Jacobs, Finuala Dowling, Zachariah Raphola, Roshila Nair, Roy Blumenthal, Allan Kolski Horwitz). While many of the writers in this anthology have established themselves as poets, novelists, dramatists and oral storytellers, they all choose the short story as another means of expressing a diverse South Africa of rural and urban life, white suburbia, black township, childhood, love, hate, reconciliation, the grim as well as the funny that make up the tapestry of a country as it used to be and as it is today. While apartheid did end in 1994, its effects will be felt for many years to come, and the memory of it will not easily disappear from the country’s consciousness — and, I hope, it never does. Many of the black writers represented here began by using their writing as a means to an end; as part of the fight to win freedom, aligning themselves to a specific political ideology. In the seventies this ideology was the black consciousness movement, and later, in the eighties, the United Democratic Front/African National Congress. These allegiances are no longer prevalent in the writing as the writers increasingly express themselves as individuals, turning their attention to issues outside overt political confrontation towards those ordinary relationships between friends, relatives, spouses, lovers, neighbours and strangers that in the past were largely ignored as mere indulgences and concerns that were not at the top of an agenda during the struggle against oppression. South Africa has never been short of catchphrases to describe its changing moods and passions. “Swart gevaar”, “total onslaught” and “liberation now, education later” of the turbulent seventies and eighties have been replaced by “African renaissance” and its odd twin “Afro pessimism”. Mapalakanye’s “Dance Cycles” and Moira Lovell’s “There is Too

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POSTTRAUMATIC

Much Sky” acquaint us with people whose first experiences of the new South Africa have not been pleasant. Mapalakanye’s character makes his way across Joburg city bearing in his heart the heavy burden of the past that the new democracy has not relieved him of. He begins a dance of freedom, drawing crowds and provoking ridicule but never stops his routine, spending his days in an insane gyration. Lovell’s frail character becomes the victim of muggers and burglars and creeps into a shell of paranoid terror, away from the real new world from which white privilege can no longer protect her. Dangor’s characters gather at a party to celebrate an aspect of the new country when issues from the old times creep up on them to turn their lives into an uncomfortable analysis of the recent apartheid past. In Karodia’s “A Chance Encounter” a man, wellintentioned but naive, insists on living in his own recent past when a chance meeting with someone from that past forces him to grapple with issues that need his attention in the present. Ivan Vladislavic (“The New Ford Kafka”), Zachariah Raphola (“Lesiba the Calligrapher”) and Ken Barris (“Cat Got your Tongue”) take the reader on journeys into dreamworlds where the paths twist and turn in unexpected directions and where quirky people inhabit locales not often visited in South African fiction. Maureen Isaacson’s narrator is a journalist in the real, present South Africa who has a nightmarish encounter with one of apartheid’s ruthless killers now seeking amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A white family in Barrie Hough’s “Changes” optimis tically prepares for the inevitable transformations the democratic elections will bring. But an unexpected, tragic death, on election day, brings these changes more quickly than they had anticipated. Graeme Friedman, on the other hand, indulges in the genre of science fiction to make a point about communication and passion in the world of fiction and modern technology. Roy Blumenthal’s mini novel “A Mother, her Daughter and a Lover”, Horwitz’s “Gemors”, and Arja Salafranca’s “Couple on the Beach” deal with the ageold aches of love: unrequited, elusive and destroyed. Finuala Dowling’s “Julie and the Axeman” uses subtlety

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INTRODUCTION

and humour to help us look deep into a modern marriage and marvel at how the small, innocuous problems are the hardest to resolve. The new South Africa is well on its way, but we all carry into the future the products of the old — as lingering memory, anger, shame or contrition — whose sellby date has not yet expired. Seven writers — Rachelle Greeff, Rayda Jacobs, Chris van Wyk, Johnny Masilela, Roshila Nair, Gcina Mhlophe and George Weideman — have chosen childhood, adolescence and youth, to bear witness to incest, rape, alcoholism, family breakdowns, poverty, and madness — as well as happy memories. Many of these stories could and should have been told in the old South Africa but their authors were tethered to ideologies and had preoccupations that had the label of apartheid and political struggle attached to them. These searches into the past are not a refusal to move on, rather I see them as a need to dredge up and scrutinise the personal histories of people whose world was cordoned off by politics. The years under apartheid saw the stifling of our culture and history through censorship, bannings, exile, jailing and even death. Now, in the new South Africa, not only has this repression been halted, but a positive reversal has begun. Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, thousands of South Africans have come forward to tell their stories, victim and torturer, black and white, orphaned children, mothers whose sons and daughters had been tortured, maimed, scarred — in harrowing and heartrending tales none of which would have been allowed into the public domain of the old South Africa. This anthology is as representative of new South African writing as can be offered within certain unavoidable limitations. Some of the writers approached did not have new work to offer at the time while others submitted stories that did not fall within the ambit of our criterion. But here then are twentytwo new South African stories chosen to showcase the new as well as for their entertainment value — which after all is one of the primary reasons why people all over the world write and read.

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POSTTRAUMATIC

S O U T H A F R I C A N S H O R T S T O R I E S T O D A Y Michael Gardiner

THE RICHNESS, DIVERSITY AND tenacity of short story writing in South Africa tends to persuade one that short stories are probably the brightest and liveliest star in this country’s literary sky. That needs to be said, despite the presence of a really powerful tradition of poetry that persists to the extent that today, in Johannesburg, for example, it is possible to attend a poetry reading every night of the week at a different venue, Some would have us believe that we are unique in the unusually varied contexts in which stories are told. That is patently absurd. Storytelling in all and every human situation goes on all the time. Perhaps it is possible to say that the stories that are written in South Africa are not written for books, but for people, and that the stories usually show an interest in and a care for listeners and readers and are not there for their own selves or sake. In other words, the local stories believe that they are speaking about real concerns to real people. This is true of even the most absurd and most seemingly farfetched of the stories, of which, happily, we have numerous examples. Because the writing of stories is accounted a worthy, longstanding and respectable occupation in this country, there is a sense for writers that they belong to a wellestablished literary environment that now has the configuration of a tradition. This being so, short stories need no longer strive for unnecessary inclusiveness, nor need they contain the excessive detail that was supposed to give South African short stories their peculiar and par

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