 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 May 2000 Issue No. 483 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 May 2000 Issue No. 483
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
In my last column there was no space to deal with the second article I mentioned, "Culture and the masses," published in the last issue of The Open Eye, the organ of the British Open University. It discusses a "unique research programme" aiming to document modern multi-racial Britain. On 19 May, there will be an inaugural symposium where Culture Secretary Chris Smith will deliver a keynote address. Other leading academics and media men will participate in the event. When in 1994 South Africa got rid of Apartheid, opting for democracy instead, I wondered what liberal South African writers would choose to write about after that. Both black and white writers had devoted their works to critiquing the system, but it was the white novelists who managed to reach the West.
Novels by Nadine Gordimer, Breyten Breytenbach, Christopher Hope and others reflected life under Apartheid. When Gordimer was asked what she would write about after the disappearance of Apartheid, I remember her giving a rather optimistic, if somewhat naive, response. Writers, she said, can deal with new subjects -- a black boy and a white girl growing up together and finally, happily falling in love, for instance.
After six years of independence, though, white South African writers are reflecting on the state of things now. A debate has been raging amongst them, initiated by the Booker Prize winning Disgrace by J M Coetzee. Described as "a dark allegory" of modern South Africa, the novel recounts how a white girl is gang raped, after which she still asks, "What if this is the price one has to pay for staying on? Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?"
In an interesting article in the Sunday Times R W Johnson writes that the white writers who hailed the coming of the African National Congress (ANC) are now its fiercest critics. Many, he explains, are already leaving South Africa. And the title he chose for his article, "Crying for the Beloved Country", becomes an ironic comment on the novel "Cry, Beloved Country".
According to the article there is a sense of disillusion that transcends the merely political; there is a deep disquiet concerning what is happening to the country. The writer describes this as a crude and overtly racial form of affirmative action that has often resulted in inefficiency, growing crime rates, corruption and unemployment, as well as deep anxieties concerning the possibility that the ANC's elite may lead the country towards a future resembling that of Zimbabwe.
The tendency of writers and artists to leave the country is characteristic of the professional classes in general. Already some have emigrated to Denmark, France, England and the U S A. The Booker Prize winner Coetzee, who is a professor at the University of Cape Town, may follow suit. At the time of writing his Sunday Times article Coetzee was in Chicago; there is some likelihood that he will stay.
These writers are still closely attached to their country, though. Johnson quotes Hope: "Of course I love the place. I can't stay away. But South Africa is the capital of hypocrisy. The saddest thing is to see the exhaustion and disappointment of white liberals. Of course, some disillusion was bound to set in after the euphoria of 1994, but it goes deeper than that. They never thought the race card would be played against them but now it is and all the time."
And yet many white writers are adamant about staying on. One of them described the country as "an unrequited love affair which, nonetheless, one cannot give up." There is also a feeling, expressed by, among others, Andre Brint, that writers have lost their cause of anti-Apartheid struggle and must now revert to writing historical novels. But now, he goes on to say, the overall situation in the country is pretty gloomy. There is a new sense of "rudderlessness", almost liberating. "You can write about anything now, there is no sense of duty."
What is interesting is that although all those writers use English as a medium of expression, they are Afrikaan and love their country with "a 19th-century passion": they may posture and rebel but then they are "at the beginning and at the end", the children of a country they must now think of disowning." And if they live in exile it is only by remembering South Africa.
