Does 'SA Literature' matter?

By Leon de Kock

"Now, 10 years after JM Coetzee left the country ... South African literature in English does not matter very much any more.”
This sweeping – and to many, potentially devastating – comment, was uttered just a few weeks ago by veteran UCT-based critic Ian Glenn during his public spat with Imraan Coovadia.
In the context of his intra-UCT wrangle with Coovadia, Glenn’s judgement serves to diminish Coovadia’s importance as a South African author, but in a more general sense the statement deserves wider consideration.
Is it true that South African literature doesn’t matter “very much any more”?
A few years ago, I published an academic article under the title, Does South African Literature Still Exist? In that piece, I asked whether the anti-apartheid imperative of “landlocked”, special-case struggle literature had not fatally overdetermined what we used to call “SA Lit”.
Not only did the symbolic and legislative conditions for such a literature disappear after 1990 (though not the material ones), but the world also became “post-national”. It is a globalising world in which success as a writer increasingly demands readership – and content – beyond determinate borders.
 Simply put, “national” struggles such as apartheid – and national “exceptionalism” – no longer capture the world’s attention. As a writer, you now need to speak to larger issues, breaching terrestrial boundaries.
In the wake of apartheid’s end, the SA Lit “home industry” – built up at SA universities over about three decades by figures like Stephen Gray, Tim Couzens, Michael Chapman, Ian Glenn and others – quickly began to lose its steam.
Critical theory and cultural studies gradually eclipsed academic interest in SA Lit. It became a lot sexier in academia to write in one’s own name on discursive trends relating to cities and subcultures, for example, than to opine boringly about the qualities of yet another Gordimer novel.
At the same time, “creative nonfiction” authors like Jonny Steinberg and Antony Altbeker stole much of the limelight from the novelists who were trying to outdo Coetzee and Gordimer, and failing. “Reality” seemed to be getting the better of “imagination”.

Enslaved Fiction: André Brink's Philida

By Margaret Lenta

André Brink's latest novel, Philida (Harvill Secker), deals with the life of a slave woman immediately before the announcement of the emancipation of slaves, which took place at the Cape in 1834. Only in 1838 were they finally free to leave their masters.
The first chapters of the novel record that she suffered gross sexual exploitation, a commonplace of slavery. There was a shortage of women; slaves were in almost every sense the property of their masters and the law was administered by white men who had a strong interest in evading provisions designed to protect slaves.
Perhaps the most inhuman feature of the concubinage of slave women was that their children by their masters were included in the slave group, and often sold by their biological fathers.
The paradox at the root of slavery is that slaves are as much at the disposal of their owners as a chair or a bowl, yet both parties to this horrible relationship know them to be as human as their owners. This produced a climate of secrecy; everyone knew but owners refused to acknowledge that all kinds of abuse, from rape to murder, were taking place. Historical sources - the diaries of Lady Anne Barnard are probably the best example - make this clear, but they leave the novelist with a problem. If no one was allowed to speak of these horrors, in what voices can an author tell the story of slavery? Brink's answer in 1983, when he published A Chain of Voices, was the casting of his narrative into a series of internal monologues, as he has done here, where the story is told in the thoughts of the interacting slaves, owners and officials. Here the thoughts of Philida, her master, his son and the official to whom she testifies are used to tell the story. As in A Chain of Voices, the agonies can seem overemphasised, and the reaction of this reader was often, in the first section, "I've got that point now".