Some thoughts about the dreadful Franschhoek Literary Festival, and white South African writing

“They found writers easier to classify than their books.” — Ivan Vladislavic

White South Africans may be the group most aware of the fact that they live in a place that they shouldn’t live, at this specific moment in history. We’re flotsam that washed up far from home. Every white South African can tell you which country her foremothers came from. We’re acutely aware of the fact that we didn’t wash up harmlessly.

Every group of people must carry the knowledge that their ancestors massacred other people. But for us, even those of us born in the past twenty years, these are not distant facts in history books. We inherit the loot of our father’s crimes. We become complex little creatures of guilt and anxiety and excuses.

Of course, so do white people everywhere. So do many groups of people, in fact. It’s something South Africans should be grateful for, our proximity to history. Other groups of people are able to lie to themselves in their wealthy countries about the fact that they’re basically good people just getting by in the world. We have to live in the crime scene, picking our way through the corpses to get to the bathroom.

If literature is about understanding the flawed thoughts of human beings and their consequences, we should all be Booker winners. But of course, we’re not. As a group of people, we’re incredibly ignorant of what we’ve done, and what we continue to do. In my darkest moods, I spend long hours reading the comments on News24, marvelling at the refusal to see the world as it is. No officer, that’s not crack, that’s talcum powder, promise.

Maybe novels — this shuffling zombie of a medium that refuses to accept that it’s dead — is the most appropriate medium for us. Maybe it’s best that no one reads these books. We already take up far too much room in public discourse. Perhaps our role now is to turn inwards and try to heal our own damaged minds. It already seems like the nice white ladies buying local books are the same ones writing them. Good, I say.

Let the young black writers, the ones with new ideas and stories that have never been told, get the world stage. Let them blow up in America and Europe. Let them pen the bestsellers that are going to move culture forward. Let them discover the entirely new mediums for transmitting fiction, the ones we haven’t even dreamed of yet. The world is changing. Culture doesn’t have clear centres, any more — it’s a heady world mix of people contributing to the conversation, from everywhere. The future is here and it’s glorious.

If we read these stories and we listen, then maybe, eventually, we’ll start to learn some empathy.

Until then, we’ll sit here politely with our quiet, unradical, middle class form that no one reads any more. That’s for the best. It’s better no one else has to endure our tired hand wringing as we confront our irrelevance and our fear and our guilty excuses. We’ll go on writing different versions of Disgrace, over and over again. Until, maybe, one day, it purifies us.