V.S. Naipaul @Festivaletteratura – 10 settembre 2010

Ed eccomi finalmente all’incontro della bisticciata tra V.S. Naipaul, premio Nobel per la Letteratura nel 2001, e la giornalista e scrittrice Caterina Soffici. Preferirei non parlarne, ma visto che ho iniziato a scrivere questi post per fare una “relazione personale di alcuni incontri interessanti a cui ho assistito”, non posso farne a meno. Anche perché molte persone che hanno letto gli articoli sui quotidiani nazionali mi hanno chiesto che diavolo è successo. Devo confessarvi che non ho capito neanch’io cosa diavolo è successo!
Prima di tutto, per chi non conoscesse V.S. Naipaul: è uno scrittore di origine trinidadense, figlio di immigrati indiani, emigrato all’età di 18 anni in Inghilterra e che ha scritto sia della sua isola natale, sia di India, sia di Africa. E’ uno degli scrittori caraibici e postcoloniali più conosciuti al mondo e, come ho scritto prima, è stato premiato con il più importante premio letterario del mondo, il Nobel. Ultimamente ha scritto soprattutto reportage di viaggio, che vengono descritti come sinceri e dettagliati. Il fatto è che l’intervistatrice ha cominciato la presentazione dal punto di vista sbagliato, sottolineando le polemiche che girano intorno al personaggio. Vi spiego tutto: V.S. Naipaul è spesso bollato come anti-terzomondista (pur venendo egli da un paese del terzo mondo), provocatoriamente anti-islamico, snob, colonialista e viene visto, da un punto di vista più prettamente personale, come una persona difficile. Caterina Soffici lo definisce “uno dei campioni del politicamente scorretto”, ricordando anche una sua dichiarazione, che però così fuori contesto può voler dire tutto e niente (per la cronaca la dichiarazione era “in Inghilterra non esistono più i domestici di una volta”). Ora, siccome l’incontro era una presentazione dell’ultimo reportage di viaggi di V.S. Naipaul intitolato “La Maschera dell’Africa”, Caterina Soffici si addentra nella polemica che questo libro ha suscitato, in particolare citando un articolo uscito sul Sunday Times e scritto da tale Robert Harris che definiva il libro “tossico, grossolano, in accurato, in una parola repellente”. Le polemiche si riferiscono in particolare ad un passaggio in cui Naipaul dice che in Ghana sono talmente affamati da mangiare i gatti (ohibò, lo si faceva anche in Italia in tempo di guerra e poi onestamente non ci vedo nulla di strano nel mangiare un gatto, quando noi mangiamo galline, mucche e cavalli) e ad un’intervista a Winnie Mandela, che rivelava alcuni particolari della politica sudafricana post apartheid che poi lei ha smentito (anzi, ha smentito di aver mai fatto l’intervista, ohibò di nuovo). Naipaul risponde garbatamente all’intervistatrice dicendo che se un decimo di quelle cose che gli vengono attribuite fossero vere, non avrebbe nessuna reputazione. Egli non ha intenzione di difendere i suoi libri contro questi attacchi, perché chi li ha letti sa benissimo che non è lui ad avere pregiudizi nei confronti dell’Africa, ma sono i giornalisti ad attribuirgli i loro pregiudizi sul continente. Detto questo l’intervistatrice avrebbe dovuto capire che non era il caso di continuare a parlare della polemica e magari focalizzare su un altro argomento. A questo punto lo scrittore si è arrabbiato, percependo probabilmente erroneamente che l’intervistatrice era prevenuta nei suoi confronti e che o non aveva letto il suo libro oppure era “troppo di sinistra” (Naipaul dice che i suoi libri sono apolitici ma che comunque viene continuamente attaccato dagli intellettuali di sinistra). Nonostante Caterina Soffici abbia assicurato lo scrittore che non era così e che lei era anche d’accordo con alcune delle cose che lui scriveva nel libro, l’atmosfera diventa tesa e astiosa, con l’autore che si rifiuta di rispondere ad ogni altra domanda della Soffici e il pubblico che si schiera ora dalla parte di uno, ora dalla parte dell’altro.
Io mi sono trovata un po’ interdetta, non avendo letto il libro in questione, né conoscendo a fondo la polemica (l’articolo del Sunday Times è tra l’altro disponibile on-line solo a pagamento). Penso che ci sia stato prima di tutto un grosso malinteso, causato forse anche dall’età di V.S. Naipaul (ha 78 anni e sembra star invecchiando malino). A comprovare la cosa c’è il fatto che la moglie di Naipaul, Nadira, deve intervenire due volte a sedare gli animi e a parlare per il marito, insistendo sul fatto che hanno viaggiato per un anno e mezzo in Africa per scrivere questo libro e che le polemiche che sono state sollevate denotano che non si è capito il lavoro che è stato fatto sulla magia e sulle tradizioni africane. Conclude affermando – come se non si fosse capito – che suo marito ha un’alta considerazione del suo lavoro, tutto qui.
Dopo due tentativi dell’intervistatrice di portare la discussione, ormai irrimediabilmente compromessa, su altri binari facendo una domanda sull’Islam (altro argomento altamente a rischio) e una sulla scrittura (ma avrebbe dovuto pensarci prima) a cui Naipaul non vuole rispondere, egli esprime la volontà di terminare qui la conversazione (facendo, ahimè, la figura dell’antipatico snob che si porta dietro). La vera vittima della situazione, come afferma tra l’altro la scrittrice iraniana Azar Nafisi, presente in sala e intervistata dalle televisioni poco dopo la fine dell’evento, è il pubblico, che ha pagato il biglietto per conoscere un autore rinomato, per sentir parlare di letterature e invece non ha ottenuto niente di tutto questo.

Che delusione! Delusione di non aver ascoltato un dibattito impostato bene e delusione di aver “conosciuto” uno scrittore così irrispettoso del pubblico che è venuto per sentirlo.

“Mamba Boy” di Nadifa Mohamed + random questions sulla letteratura africana

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 2010
Genere: romanzo
Paese: Scrittrice di origine somala “based” in Gran Bretagna. Romanzo “itinerante” ambientato un po’ in tutta l’Africa orientale e nel Medio Oriente, fino a raggiungere il Galles nel finale.

La recensione di questo è libro è uscita nella rivista di cultura on-line Paper Street ed è disponibile a questo link.

Colgo l’occasione per segnalarvi due puntate della rivista “Che libro fa…” di Giovanna Zucconi che sollevano domande importanti riguardo alla letteratura africana postcoloniale (ma sarebbe ora di abolire questo termine, perché non tutta la letteratura africana tratta necessariamente di tematiche legate al postcolonialismo). La prima è: “perché i kenioti scrivono così poco? E perché lasciano agli stranieri, soprattutto ai giornalisti, il compito di raccontare la loro terra?”. Nel tentativo di portarci un paio di esempi di kenioti che scrivono l’autrice ci nomina Stanley Gazemba, che ha vinto il più importante premio letterario del Kenya e che vive in uno slum, dimostrando che la letteratura non è solo appannaggio dei ricchi, e Lily Mabura, che è stata finalista del Caine Prize con la sua storia “How Shall We Kill the Bishop”.

L’atro quesito sollevato recentemente da “Che libro fa…” riguardo alla letteratura africana è: “ma i neri sudafricani leggono?”. Con riferimento ad un articolo pubblicato sul Times sudafricano che ha creato numerose polemiche e aperto un dibattito, appaiono cause diverse dalla presunzione, razzista, che i neri non leggano. Ovvero, non ci sono biblioteche nelle scuole, scarseggiano le librerie (l’unica di Soweto ha appena chiuso) e, non da ultimi, la gente ha altre cose a cui badare, come ad esempio procacciarsi il cibo per il pranzo di domani. Credo che sia il problema di molti paesi africani. Progetti timidi e personali spuntano qua e là (con una mia amica un tempo era nata l’idea di spedire dei libri in Afghanistan, vedi il banner “A Modest Proposal” qui a fianco), ma chissà perché le persone più volonterose sono sempre quelle prive di fondi. E’ vero: ci sono cose più importanti, come aprire ospedali ed ambulatori, ma il progresso si ottiene solo attraverso l’istruzione, l’ha detto qualcuno di famoso, credo.

“Fossili” di Arianna Dagnino

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 2010
Genere: romanzo
Paese: la scrittrice è italiana, ma il romanzo è ambientato tra il Sudafrica e la Namibia.

Zoe Du Plessis è un’afrikaner, discendente degli ugonotti francesi che alla fine del 1600, nel tentativo di scappare dalle persecuzioni religiose, si imbarcarono per la Colonia del Capo. Attraverso diari personali e memoria storica tramandata di generazione in generazione, riesce a ricostruire la storia di tutta la famiglia e di una maledizione xhosa che colpisce le primogenite Du Plessis. Ma Zoe è una scienziata, una paleoantropologa per la precisione, ed ovviamente non crede a queste cose, fino a quando l’uomo che ama non muore durante un tentativo di rapina nella pericolosissima Johannesburg, esattamente come è successo a molte sue ave. Forse per esorcizzare la perdita, decide di imbarcarsi per il deserto del Kalahari, in Namibia, dove per molti mesi cerca gli “scheletri di Adamo ed Eva”, convinta che la vita umana possa aver avuto origine a sud dello Zambesi, diversamente da quello che dicono le teorie più accreditate. Qui si incrocia con i boscimani, depositari di tradizioni e sapienze antichissime legate alla loro terra, ma anche con il senso di colpa afrikaner. La segregazione razziale è infatti finita, ma i discendenti dei coloni boeri sembrano ancora incerti del loro ruolo nel continente africano. Le loro relazioni interpersonali e sociali nella nuova democrazia sudafricana sono messe in ombra dal rimorso perenne di decenni di apartheid. Come precisa l’autrice, le strategie del marketing editoriale hanno trasformato quella che è una storia sudafricana in una “storia d’amore in Sudafrica”, ma il libro è molto più di questo. La storia d’amore, con uno scrittore sudafricano che ha pagato la sua opposizione al regime con la perdita di quello che aveva di più caro nella vita, ovviamente c’è, ma non è l’unico fattore che mantiene il ritmo del libro incalzante.
Si tratta di un romanzo che evoca in maniera dettagliata e poetica i maestosi paesaggi africani, che variano da quelli urbani di Johannesburg, fino ai deserti del Karoo e del Kalahari, estremamente solitari ma anche corroboranti, e ai vigneti del Finistère, rifugio per Zoe che proprio qui affonda le sue radici familiari. Con un romanzo ben documentato che travalica numerosi generi – romanzo del mistero, romanzo d’amore, romanzo giallo, romanzo storico – Arianna Dagnino ci presenta un paese, il Sudafrica, certamente difficile, in cui diverse culture convivono, ma non sempre pacificamente, in cui ci sono contraddizioni enormi e in cui bisogna sapersi mettere in relazione con la natura dirompente, a volte crudele dell’Africa australe.
Arianna Dagnino, giornalista e autrice di saggi, ha avuto l’idea - per così dire un po’ balzana nel panorama della letteratura italiana - di scrivere un romanzo ambientato in Sudafrica, anche forte degli anni che lei stessa ha vissuto nel paese di Nelson Mandela. Abbiamo quindi a che fare con un libro sudafricano filtrato da occhi italiani, anche se il filo che lega il romanzo all’Italia è piuttosto sottile. L’unico italiano, infatti, muore nel primo capitolo! Non facile forse da digerire ed apprezzare per i cultori della letteratura italiana, abituati a romanzi scritti e ambientati esclusivamente in Italia. Arianna Dagnino, infatti, sta conseguendo un dottorato sul “romanzo transculturale” alla University of South Australia e risiede attualmente ad Adelaide. Si definisce una nomade per vocazione (il suo sito è www.nomads.it), avendo vissuto a Londra, Mosca, Boston e Johannesburg, prima di approdare in Australia.
Piccola curiosità: nei ringraziamenti finali si nomina il "vicino" di Adelaide, J.M. Coetzee, che si è prestato a rivedere i termini e le espressioni in afrikaans contenuti nel libro!

10. “Burger’s Daughter” by Nadine Gordimer

Year of first publication: 1979
Genre: novel, political novel

Country: South Africa

I must admit that it’s just a coincidence that I am reviewing a South African book when the Football World Cup is on in the rainbow country, but it’s exciting anyway!
The book is set in the 1970s, when apartheid was still plaguing the country. Rosa Burger is the daughter of famous anti-apartheid activist Lionel Burger. Since she was little she has known how to divert the police or hide important information in apparently frivolous conversations. Nonetheless, she has always been considered simply Lionel Burger’s daughter and was never allowed to have an identity of her own. Now all her family is dead: both her parents died in prison and her little brother drowned long ago. Even Baasie, the black child he called her brother, has vanished. In order to appease the discomfort of her father’s moral inheritance and unable to cope with his memory, she decides to travel overseas. In the south of France she leads a completely different life: people don’t know about her and call her la jeune anglaise. She spends her time bathing in the Mediterranean sea and having dinner with her new European friends. At the first reunion with her old companions, she meets Baasie and makes the mistake of kissing him on both cheeks, like they do in France. The absurdity of this action makes her realize how inappropriate she is in Europe. Baasie reminds her that his real name is Zwelinzima, which means “suffering earth”, and not Baasie, a nickname given to him by white people. His father too died in prison because he was a political activist, but people only remember Lionel Burger, the white activist. Baasie-Zwelinzima is in fact tired of living out of white people’s leftovers. Having realized all of this, Rosa Burger goes back to her home country to accept her legacy. The book is therefore not only about the racial conflict in South Africa, but also about the whole nature of commitment.
This is my fourth book by Nadine Gordimer, after A World of Strangers, July’s People and Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. It is one of her most famous works, and deservedly so. Moreover, it was included in Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th century, a list compiled at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. It is one of Gordimer’s most political novels: the anti-apartheid activists were communists who came to the idea of abolishing apartheid as a result of their political ideas. Also, Mandela’s ghost floats over the whole book (he was still a prisoner in Robben Island at the time the book came out) and the Soweto Uprising of 1976 is also in there. It is harshly realistic and painful at times: a scene featuring a donkey being flogged by a drunk old black man and an argument in a house in Soweto being the most relevant examples. Burger’s Daughter was initially banned in South Africa and then unbanned because it was finally judged too one-sided to be dangerous. The book is intellectually challenging, with many unmarked quotations from real anti-apartheid activists like Steve Biko or Bram Fischer, but also moving and introspective. What struck me as brilliant is that in the book political activism and everyday life are not separated: several times in the novel political arguments are interrupted by people arriving with food or changing the subject and saying something trivial.

When we watch how South Africa is today we should always remember how it was until not many years ago. Apart from this, Burger’s Daughter is also remarkable for its literary value: the shifts from Rosa’s internal monologue addressed to her semi-lover Conrad to the omniscient narrator and back are proof that Gordimer deserved the Nobel Prize.

Napo Masheane

Napo Masheane is a South African writer, poet, director, playwright and acclaimed performer.
She was born in Soweto, the most famous township of Johannesburg, but grew up in Qwaqwa (Free State, another part of South Africa). Caves Speak in Metaphors is her collection of poems and essays. She has performed and shared stage with many famous poets, among which Linton Kewsi Johnson (a famous Jamaican poet).

She read her poetry a few days ago at Festivaletteratura in Mantova. I could not go but I saw a video of the performance and I would like to share it with my readers. It is very powerful, I was mesmerized.



At the beginning she performes a piece of her poem SAMBURU "My people" (read the full version here), full of words in Bantu languages. She says: "We are Samburu north butterfly / I stand on the backs / Of those who are called Bakganka / Singing songs that the rains and the winds / Never whispered to dinoka. / Badimo baka waiting to be praised / With the buzz of the bees, / The beats of the drums / They chant to my unsaid choruses. / I stride on shoes of giants, / Creating the legacy of their conquest, / Embracing their names in verse, / Reflecting their voluptuous looks on lakes, / Pulling their strings from Khalagadi, / Placing them on borwa ba AFRICA".

Here's another poem by Napo Masheane, more accesible to us who don't speak Zulu or Xhosa (yet).

SUNRISE VOICES
God grafted the lines of the universe
Making the sunshine
At the birth of every being.
The fire that lights,
Through which new rays of life breaks,
A moment of time,
Where our new voices collectively
Must heal the diseased land-souls,
Liking the aged and the unborn.
Turning our childless grave yards
Into laughing homes,
Where our people are empowered and developed.

The chains of our past
Should not trouble us forever,
But seal the lips of slavery caves.
Our people should stop
To live under the tyranny of silence,
Turn deserted lands into farm fields.
We must sow the seeds of UBUNTU
Building and shaping our future on firm grounds,
So that our royal languages can echo proverbs,
At a place where our ancestors walked.
Let us help the poor and the lame
To open the closed doors
So that they can dress our hearts differently.
Let us move earth and assemble our villages
So that our tears can become raindrops
For the sea of education
For the rivers of prosperity
For the lakes of democracy

Our voices should write new poetic bibles
And prose of golden beauty,
Casting away HIV/AIDS- unemployment and felony
Let us use our voices to fashion the old
Build strong bridges of awareness
Bridges that will take us far beyond
The skyline of time.
Bridges that will transform our core from
Dance floors of misconception
As we re-create who we really are.

Let us dress our behaviours like monks
Allowing our offspring to pick fruits
From the highest trees of spirituality
So that they can destroy the walls of orphan villages
Giving each home a name

We are pillars of a proud vote
Bound by a period in which
Every being must speak colour sounds
Of togetherness.
Let our voices find ways
In which the webs of life are woven

A place where mothers cannot escape
The messages of their own bodies.
Let’s allow our fathers’ spirits
To stretch and match science, history and politics
Let our unique voices teach us
How to dig, plant, water our seeds
So that we can buy our children’s smiles.
Let our words call peace
As ancient drums still our voices
Sending us to a place
Where the love of UNITY lives
To draw our people as a unit,
Let our SUNRISE voices shout
For we know where it all begun
We know where we are
We know where we are heading

The sparks of the sun
Opened the sealed envelop of my words
They, tied in endless riddles
Are perused out to the world by my faith
For God grafted the lines of the universe
Making the sun shine
At the birth of my soul.
The fire that lights,
Through which new rays of life break,
A moment of time,
When our voice together
Must weave the diseased land-souls
Liking the age and the unborn.
Turning our childless grave yards into laughing homes
Where our people can speak the same
Let our SUNRISE voices shout

[from this website]


Read my post on Es'kia Mphahlele, another South African poet, here

16. "July's People" by Nadine Gordimer

Year of first publication: 1981
Genre: novel
Country: South Africa

About the author: Nadine Gordimer was born near Springs, a mining town outside Johannesburg in 1923. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants, her father originally from Lithuania and her mother from England. Her sympathy towards the condition of black people in South Africa came partly from the experiences of her parents. She mixed with black people for the first time when she went to university and started to write short stories for magazines. She began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in the 1950s. The arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre spurred Gordimer’s entry into the anti-apartheid movement. During this time, the South African government banned several of her works, two for lengthy periods of time. She joined the ANC when it was still an illegal movement and she was one of the first people that Nelson Mandela asked to see when he was released from prison in 1990. She achieved recognition quite early, culminating with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. In the post-apartheid period she has been an activist in the HIV/AIDS movement.
Virtually all of Gordimer's works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. Her first novel The Lying Days (1953) is a bildungroman about the growth of political awareness in a young white girl in small-town South Africa. In 1974 she was awarded the Booker Prize for The Conservationst (1974), the story of a wealthy white industrialist. Burger’s Daughter (1979), written just after the Soweto uprising and banned in South Africa, is the story of a woman analyzing the relationship with her father, a martyr of the antiapartheid movement.

Plot: Nadine Gordimer writes about an uprising in Soweto and in other parts of South Africa that forces the white minority to flee from their comfortable houses. The Smales family had a good relationship with their servant July, who invited them to take shelter in his village in the bush. The Smales are a liberal family and aren’t prejudiced against black people, but they were not prepared to leave their comforts and luxuries in order to live a simple and impoverished life in an African village.

Some thoughts: Having read and loved A World of Strangers, one of Gordimer’s first novels, last year I decided to cue for a couple of hours and go to a theatre to listen to her presenting her new collection of short stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She is a very lively and witty old lady who genuinly loves Italy (she said that it resembles Africa because we live much in the streets, which I think is a compliment). In spite of that, I didn’t enjoy Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black as much as A World of Strangers, which is quite an old book, having been first published in 1958. Perhaps it’s because post-apartheid South Africa is difficult to tell in stories (and in fact only one story was, partly, about “the black issue”), but I was a bit disappointed with it. Anyway, I thought that it would be great to read one of her old novels, in order to know more about South Africa during the apartheid, which is something that Nadine Gordimer can describe very well.
In July’s People, Nadine Gordimer tells us of an uncommon family in 1980s’ South Africa: rich and liberal, the Smales are not racist, even though they enjoy the luxuries they have. For them it was normal to have black servants living in the house and to allow them to go back to their villages once every few years. They never treated July badly and insisted that he didn’t use the word “master” with them. When they are forced to leave their well-furnished seven-room house to leave inside a hut made with mud, they have difficulties to adjust to the new life. When July says that, back there, with their wine glasses and the clothes in the cupboards, they looked different, he underlines that the main difference between them is not he colour of the skin but the money, and therefore the lifestyle they are used to. In the village they are forced to live like everybody else, their privileges being erased by the loss of their house and their money. When July takes the key of the yellow bakkie, the Smales’ car, the last privilege is gone: he takes the power from them and becomes their “master”. It is unclear if July did it on purpose or not, since he is quite an ambigous character. Another symbol of Bam’s power is his gun, which gets stolen and changes the relations of power and the ways of communication between the Smales and the black people of the village. This underlines how much the question of who has the power in South Africa was related to the possession of tools, such as weapons, technology or a better education.
If the Smales in their big house could convince themselves that they were not racist, in the village it is somehow different and their prejudice feelings come out every now and then (for example when Bam asks Maureen if she couldn’t have asked a black woman to kill the kittens, as if a black person is more suited for the job). Frustrated by the fact that they are helpless and restricted to a village where they don’t know anybody, they become nervous and begin to wonder if this is how black people have always felt about South Africa, their own country. Even though Maureen is supposed to have a better relationship with July than her husband Bam, she is the one who is more stressed by the change of habits: she cannot adjust to the life in the village, whereas Bam tries to become part of the community. As a consequence, Maureen’s relationship with July is broken: there are awkward silences and misunderstandings between them. The ending is ambiguous: a helicopter is heard and Maureen runs towards it, even though she doesn’t now if it brings saviours or murderers. The good thing about July’s People is that the relationship between black people and their white upper-class masters is not stereotyped. The characters don’t have clear-cut opinions on the racial issues of South Africa: you have to understand their opinions on apartheid and on the condition of black people through small clues in the novel. In A World of Strangers, on the contrary, the characters are quite strongly pro or agaisnt apartheid, maybe too much. In spite of this flaw I liked that book best, maybe because the relationships between the characters were easier to understand. With July’s People you are never completely sure that you have understood everything: for example, is it only my imagination or were there some sexual undertones in July and Maureen’s conversations?

Es'kia Mphahlele (1919 - 2008)

I am so deeply ashamed by the fact that my specialization at university was postcolonial literature in English and I can hardly name any black South African writer (I know Bessie Head but she’s usually considered a Batswana writer, even though she was born in South Africa). Not that you find many books by black South African writers in bookshops, but I think I’ve seen a book my Zakes Mda in my local library. Now that I’ve checked the list on wikipedia I can name some black South African writers apart from these two: Mongane Wally Serote, Sipho Sepamla, K. Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe, Njabulo Ndebele, Mbongeni Ngema and Miriam Tlali. I know they are difficult names to keep in mind, but I'll do my best...

Es’kia Mphahlele was born in Marabastad Township in Pretoria, but spent most of his childhood in Maupaneng, a large village outside Pietersburg (now Polokwane). At 13, he and his brother and sister returned to Pretoria, moving in with their maternal grandmother in a house on Second Avenue in a teeming slum neighborhood.
Collecting and delivering the laundry that his grandmother washed for white customers, he learned his place in South African society. About school, he said that it left him “detribalized, Westernized, but still African.” The conflict, both social and artistic, between African and Western identities would become an important theme in his work.

His first book of short stories, Man Must Live, was published in 1947. Banned from teaching in his country by the apartheid government, he fled to the British Protectorate of Basutoland, now Lesotho. Due to his political commitment, he lived most of his life in exile, teaching in Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, France and in the United States.

He wrote most of his books in exile, for example The Living and the Dead (1961) and In Corner B (1967). His memoir Down Second Avenue (1959) vividly dramatized the injustices of apartheid and became a landmark work of South African literature. Its depiction of traditional rural life, and of violence and oppression in a black township in Pretoria, reflected the experience of countless thousands of his fellow black South Africans. In his first novel, The Wanderers (1971), Mphahlele offered a sweeping view of African racial problems as seen through the eyes of an exile very much like himself, unable to live in South Africa but ill at ease in freer African states.

In 1977 he surprised everyone by going back to South Africa and becoming the first black professor at Witwatersrand University, where he created the department of African Literature.
In an essay in The Star, a Johannesburg newspaper, the journalist and editor Barney Mthombothi wrote, “If Nelson Mandela is our political star, Mphahlele was his literary equivalent.”

"Disgrace" by JM Coetzee

Year of publication: 1999
Genre: novel
Setting and time: Contemporary South Africa

Themes: sexual harassment, rape, post-Apartheid South Africa, race relations

Man Booker Prize, 1999

About the author: John Maxwell Coetzee was born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa. His family descends from early Dutch settlers dating to the 17th century. He belongs to a generation of South African writers who raised their voices against apartheid. Although reared in an Afrikaans-speaking family in Cape Town, he attended an English-speaking school and while English became his primary language, he remained fluent in Afrikaans, a language with its origins in Dutch settlers. He has sometimes defended Afrikaners against the stereotype that they are uniformly racist. He was the first author to receive the Booker Prize twice, in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K and in 1999 for Disgrace. In 2002 he relocated to Australia and became an Australian citizen in 2006. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

Plot: (*may contain spoilers*) The book tells the story of a Cape Town professor's dismissal from his job after his affair with a young student becomes known. He withdraws to his daughter’s small farm, but she is raped by three black strangers. Horrified, David wants to call the police, but Lucy asks him to tell no one of the rape and her subsequent pregnancy.

Some thoughts: Somebody said that this is supposed to be the best novel written in English in the last 25 years, but I was somehow disappointed. The first 25 pages of the book are very dull: a middle-age professor, David Lurie, complaining about his poor sex life and academic interests. Boring, boring, boring. After that, it gets a little bit better: Lurie joins his daughter at a farm in the Eastern Cape. I liked the novel only when it was set in Lucy’s farm and I so wanted to skip all the other parts, especially when Coetzee rambles on about some ill dogs that have to be put down.

Violence enters the novel by the hands of three black men who rape Lucy and so the problems of post-apartheid South Africa are introduced. Nonetheless, I feel that something was missing: Coetzee doesn’t explain the social reasons for the violence perpetrated by black people on white South Africans and doesn’t even try to explain why white South Africans are so guilty as to meekly accept it. He merely speaks of ‘vengeance’ and 'guilt for the past'. The novel sends a negative message about South Africa: when David asks his daughter if she will love the ‘rape child’ that she is bearing she says: ‘The child? No. How could I? But I will. Love will grow — one can trust Mother Nature for that. I am determined to be a good mother, David. A good mother and a good person. You should try to be a good person too’. Coetzee is very pessimist about the future of his country and many South Africans think such a celebrated author shouldn’t speak like that of his own country. I believe that he was right to be realist and declare that South Africa is no ‘rainbow country’(even though I don’t like depressing novels). Is this why Coetzee left South Africa and became an Australian citizen? Too much violence and uneasiness with a situation he cannot control?

In South Africa, the African National Congress accused Coetzee of representing as brutally as he could the white man’s perspective of the post-Apartheid black man and of implying that in the new regime whites would ‘lose their cards, their weapons, their property, their rights, their dignity’, while ‘the white women will have to sleep with the barbaric black men’ (have a look at this article to know more). As a matter of fact, black men in Coetzee novel are all greedy and evil. I so missed Gordimer while I was reading this book!