The Short Story in South Africa: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives 9781032129150, 9781032129174, 9781003226840

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: The Short Story in South Africa – New Trends and Perspectives
From Democratic Inclusivity to Postapartheid Disillusionment
Short Stories and the Democratic Vision of the 1990s
Ruptures and Continuities Post-2000
Funding
Notes
References
2 “Translated From the Dead”: The Legibility of Violence in Ivan Vladislavic’s 101 Detectives
Writing Crime: Detection and Legibility
“Lost Detectives”: Language and the Anti-Detective
“Best Kept Alone”: Reading and Legibility
“Reader, Open Your Eyes”: Trauma and Translatability
Conclusion
Notes
References
3 Coloured By History, Shaped Otherwise: A “Decolonial” Reading of Zoë Wicomb
Introduction: Wicomb and Her Critics
Raising the Tone: Wicomb and the Short Story Form
Imagined Communities, Imagined Selves
The Art of Identification
Conclusion: No End to History
Notes
References
4 Hyper-Compression and the Rise of the Deep Surface: Flash Fiction in “post-Transitional” South Africa
Flashback: Tony Eprile’s “The Interpreter for the Tribunal” (2007)
Flash Noir: Michael Cawood Green’s “Music for a New Society” (2008)
Flash Forward: Stacy Hardy’s “Kisula” (2015)
Kisula
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
5 Queer Temporalities in Two Short Stories By Makhosazana Xaba: The Afterlife of Can Themba’s “The Suit”
References
6 Queerying Examples of Contemporary South African Short Fiction
Re: Orientating
Queer/y/ing the Short Story
Margins and Centres
Content and Discontent
Queerly Affective, Queerly Erotic?
Indirectly: Queer Q and A
Queer(y)ing Time
Queering the Canon
Queer Forms?
Denouement: Still (Under)performing Queerly?
Funding
Notes
References
7 Therianthropic Power in Mohale Mashigo’s Speculative Short Fiction
Introduction: Transmuting Genre
“Epigenerics”: Literary Form in Flux
Critical Enfreakment
Archaic Ontology
Intrusive Visions: “Manoka” and “The High Heel Killer”
“Manoka”
“The High Heel Killer”
Conclusion
Notes
References
8 Navigating the Spectacular in Queer African Erotic Short Fiction
Sex, Bodies and Sexuality as Spectacle
The Exotic Erotic in “All Covered Up”
Shifting Gazes and Sexual Pleasure in “Coming Into Self-Awareness”
The Erotic Spectacle as Ordinary in “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus”
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgements
References
9 Imagining Africa’s Futures in Two Caine Prize-Winning Stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”
Introduction
Notes
References
10 On Reading, Writing and Being Read: Journeying With the Short Story
In the Beginning, I Read
In the Present, I Read
The Context of My Writing of Short Stories
Writing Short Stories
Facilitating the Writings of Others
Being Read: Some Examples From Universities
Being Read: Some Examples From General Readers
Being Read and Understood By Literary Scholars
Reading-as-writing and Writing-As-Reading
A Few Words On the Next Collection
Breathing Out
Notes
References
11 Short Stories Born From the Womb of the Past
References
12 “Concrete Fragments”: An Interview With Henrietta Rose-Innes
Funding
References
13 LongStorySHORT: Decolonising the Reading Landscape – A Conversation With Kgauhelo Dube
Notes
References
14 “My Stories Will Remain Written the Way I Talk”: A Conversation With Niq Mhlongo
Introduction
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

“This volume of essays offers an up-​to-​the-​minute overview of the extraordinarily diverse and vibrant palette of short story forms to be found in South Africa today. Combining critical acuity, theoretical eclecticism, and remarkable thematic breadth, this wonderful and timely volume provides a multiplicity of insights into a genre that refracts the complexity, the challenges, but also sheer energy of contemporary South African social dynamics.” Russell West-​Pavlov, Universität Tübingen, Germany “This volume is a groundbreaking, illuminating and incisive engagement with and interrogation of the exploration of a wider dimension of human experience that the short story genre post-​2000 tackles. Setting up an interaction between the critic and literary craftsman, it will certainly provide an invaluable contribution to South African literary scholarship.” Jabulani Mkhize, University of Fort Hare, South Africa “The Short Story in South Africa: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives provides a scholarly update on recent developments in South African short fiction, such as flash fiction, anti-​detective modes, explorations of queer temporalities and spaces, and speculative Afrofuturistic dystopias. The essays in the volume are engaging, accessible, and pay close attention to textual detail –​ the kind of attention that short stories in particular reward.” Sue Marais, Rhodes University, South Africa

The Short Story in South Africa

This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000. The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-​first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-​apartheid or post-​transitional. The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature. Rebecca Fasselt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Corinne Sandwith is Professor of English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Routledge Contemporary South Africa

5. Uprooting University Apartheid in South Africa From Liberalism to Decolonization Teresa Barnes 6. International Mediation in the South African Transition Brokering Power in Intractable Conflicts Zwelethu Jolobe 7. Agency and Social Transformation in South African Higher Education Pushing the Bounds of Possibility Grace Ese-​osa Idahosa 8. Social Policy in Post-​Apartheid South Africa Social Re-​engineering for Inclusive Development Ndangwa Noyoo 9. Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa Place and Play in Johannesburg Alex Halligey 10. Social Media and Everyday Life in South Africa Tanja E. Bosch 11. Radio, Public Life and Citizen Deliberation in South Africa Edited by Sarah Chiumbu and Gilbert Motsaathebe 12. Afrikaners and the Boundaries of Faith in Post-​Apartheid South Africa Annika Björnsdotter Teppo 13. The Contested Idea of South Africa Edited by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-​Gatsheni and Busani Ngcaweni 14. The Short Story in South Africa Contemporary Trends and Perspectives Edited by Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith

The Short Story in South Africa Contemporary Trends and Perspectives Edited by Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith

First published 2022 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Fasselt, Rebecca, 1982– editor, author. | Sandwith, Corinne, editor. Title: The short story in South Africa : contemporary trends and perspectives / edited by Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith. Description: New York : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021048870 (print) | LCCN 2021048871 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032129150 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032129174 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003226840 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Short stories, South African (English)–21st century–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR9362.52 .S56 2022 (print) | LCC PR9362.52 (ebook) | DDC 823/.0109968–dc23/eng/20211005 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048870 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048871 ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​12915-​0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​12917-​4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​22684-​0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003226840 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

For Khulukazi Soldati-​Kahimbaara

Contents

List of contributors  Preface  Acknowledgements  1 Introduction: The short story in South Africa –​ new trends and perspectives 

xi xv xvi

1

C ORI N N E S ANDWI TH , R EBEC C A FA SSELT A ND K H U LU K AZ I SO LDATI -​K A H I MBA A R A

2 “Translated from the dead”: The legibility of violence in Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives 

28

K I RB Y MAN I À

3 Coloured by history, shaped otherwise: A “decolonial” reading of Zoë Wicomb 

46

ARE T H A P H I R I

4 Hyper-​compression and the rise of the deep surface: Flash fiction in “post-​transitional” South Africa 

63

P E T E R B L AI R

5 Queer temporalities in two short stories by Makhosazana Xaba: The afterlife of Can Themba’s “The Suit” 

89

C H E RYL S T OB I E

6 Queerying examples of contemporary South African short fiction  S AL LY AN N MU R R AY

102

x Contents

7 Therianthropic power in Mohale Mashigo’s speculative short fiction 

123

C H RI S T I AA N NAU D É

8 Navigating the spectacular in queer African erotic short fiction 

145

J E N N Y B OŹENA D U PR EEZ

9 Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-​winning stories: Henrietta Rose-​Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” 

168

AG H OG H O A K PO ME

10 On reading, writing and being read: Journeying with the short story 

184

MAK H OSAZ A NA X A BA

11 Short stories born from the womb of the past 

202

SI P H I WO MA H A LA

12 “Concrete fragments”: An interview with Henrietta Rose-​Innes 

217

G RAH AM K . R I AC H

13 LongStorySHORT: Decolonising the reading landscape –​ A conversation with Kgauhelo Dube 

226

C ORI N N E SA N DWI TH , K H U LU K A ZI SO LDATI-​K AHIMBAARA AN D RE B E CC A FA SSELT

14 “My stories will remain written the way I talk”: A conversation with Niq Mhlongo 

242

RE B E C C A FA SSELT A N D C O R I N N E SA N DW IT H

Index 

256

Contributors

Aghogho Akpome teaches in the Department of English at the University of Zululand, South Africa. Previously, he taught/​tutored in Nigeria, at the University of Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand and was a research fellow at the Centre for Africa Studies at the University of the Free State. His interests include postcolonalism, migration, identity/​difference, discourse, literary historicisation, representation, cultural studies, African states and academic literacies. His article, “Discourses of corruption in Africa: Between the colonial past and the decolonizing present”, recently appeared in Africa Today (Summer 2021). Peter Blair is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Chester. His publications include contributions to The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012), The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (2016), and the journals Modern Fiction Studies, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. His most recent publication is the chapter “Anglophone literature of South Africa”, in A Companion to African Literatures (2021). He is founding co-​editor of Flash: The International Short-​Short Story Magazine and Flash: The International Short-​Short Story Press. Jenny Boźena du Preez is a Postdoctoral Fellow hosted by the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University. Her research interests include the representation of gender and sexuality, literature from Africa and the diaspora, women’s writing and the erotic. She is also interested in the discipline of Literary Studies, its critical and transformative potential, and the university. She has published on “ ‘Rediscovering the erotic as ordinary’ in South African Women’s Short Fiction” (2020) in the Journal of Southern African Studies 46.4; “Liminality and alternative femininity in Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi” (2017) in English in Africa 44.2; and “Women’s solidarity in Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi” in Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi: History, Criticism, Celebration (2020) edited by Sabata-​mpho Mokae and Brian Willan.

xii  List of contributors Rebecca Fasselt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria. She is particularly interested in literatures of intra-​African migration and diaspora, Afropolitanism and popular women’s writing. Her recent publications include: “Decolonising the Afropolitan: Intra-​ African migrations in post-​2000 literature” in the Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019); “Defying closure: Hospitality, colonialism and mobility beyond the limits of the nation in Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi”, in Hospitalities: Transitions and Transgressions, North and South (2020); and “Clandestine crossings: Narrating Zimbabwe’s precarious diaspora in South Africa in Sue Nyathi’s The Gold-​Diggers”, in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2021). Siphiwo Mahala is an accomplished short story writer, novelist, playwright and literary scholar plying his trade in English and IsiXhosa. He is the author of the following books: When a Man Cries (2007), Yakhal’ Indoda (2010), African Delights (2011), The House of Truth (2017) and Red Apple Dreams and Other Stories (2019). He is the founder and editor of Imbiza Journal for African Writing. His latest book, Can Themba: The Making and Breaking of the Intellectual Tsotsi (2022), is an appendage of his PhD thesis, which he graduated from UNISA in 2018. He has held research and teaching positions at the University of Johannesburg, University of Pretoria and University of the Witwatersrand. Kirby Manià earned a PhD in English from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) and holds a Master of Arts in Modern Literature and Culture from the University of York (United Kingdom). She currently teaches courses in academic writing, literary studies and the environment at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She also maintains a visiting research fellowship at Wits University. Her research focuses on the crossover between urban spaces, literature and the environment. She is particularly interested in post-​apartheid South African literature, urban ecology, environmental justice, crime writing, postcolonial ecocriticism and writing pedagogy. Recent examples of her scholarly work can be found in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Safundi, and English Studies in Africa. She also co-​edits an eco-​urban poetry journal called SPROUT. Sally Ann Murray is a Professor in the English Department at Stellenbosch University, serving as Chair from 2015 to 2020. Her two 2021 academic essays use a relational, autoethnographic lens to disrupt Stellenbosch University’s “Masked Masterpieces” art fundraising campaign for the so-​called missing middle, and to engage questions of gender, trauma and reconciliation in the short fiction of Ugandan author Beatrice Lamwaka. Murray has published queer short stories in anthologies such as Incredible Journey (2015) and Hair (Tattoo, 2019). Her third poetry collection, Otherwise Occupied (2019), was nominated for a 2020 South African

List of contributors  xiii Literary Award, and her autobiographical novel Small Moving Parts (2009) won multiple prizes. Christiaan Naudé is a PhD candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His doctoral research investigates how African speculative fiction represents the state, thus exploring the relationship between aesthetics and political economy. He has written an MA thesis on the short stories of Ivan Vladislavić, on whom his article, “Ivan Vladislavić’s aesthetics of detritus”, appeared in English in Africa in 2017. He has lectured in English literature and academic literacy at the University of Pretoria. Aretha Phiri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her research examines the intersectional interactions of race, ethnicity, culture, gender and sexualities in comparative, transnational and transatlantic considerations of identity and subjectivity, with a focus on African American, American and contemporary diasporic African literature. She has been a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), SA, the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR) and the Centre for the Study of International Slavery (CSIS) in the UK as well as at the National Humanities Center (NHC) in North Carolina, USA. She has published in various accredited journals and edited a collection of essays entitled, African Philosophical and Literary Possibilities: Re-​reading the Canon (2020). Graham K. Riach is a Lecturer in World Literature at the University of Oxford. While finishing one project –​The Short Story After Apartheid –​he is beginning another, called Global Narratives of Ageing. He has published on African Literature, the short story and the role of form and genre in the analysis of postcolonial and world literature. He is also a filmmaker and has just finished a series of short films about complicity and perpetration during the Second World War. Corinne Sandwith is Professor of English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa and is the author of World of Letters: Reading Communities and Cultural Debates in Early Apartheid South Africa (2014) and co-​editor with M.J. Daymond of Africa South: Viewpoints, 1958–​1961. Her research explores early twentieth-​century print, reading and debating cultures in South Africa. Her current book project focuses on the black printsphere, and black newspapers in particular, as an understudied archive of political-​ intellectual life, looking at questions of the life and form of the newspaper, everyday epistemologies, women’s intellectual history as well as practices of citation, circulation and affiliation. Khulukazi Soldati-​Kahimbaara was a Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Pretoria, until 2019. She was working on her doctoral thesis on “Sexual citizenship in South Africa and neighbouring African countries: Representation and lived experiences”. Her areas of interest were

xiv  List of contributors language and gender, South African literature, women’s poetry and queer theory. She published articles on themes related to cities and HIV and AIDS. Some of her latest publications are “Immersive and counter immersive styles of writing AIDS in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift and Kgebetli Moele’s The Book of the Dead: A didactic approach to writing AIDS” in the special issue on “The South African Novel in Transition: 1990–​2010”, published in Kritika Kultura; and “Parental ‘coming out’: The journeys of black South African mothers through their personal narratives”, in the South African Review of Sociology. Cheryl Stobie is a Professor of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-​ Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus. She has published widely on topics including postcolonialism and representations of gender, sexuality, religion and spirituality, focusing mainly on South/​African literature and film. She is an NRF-​rated scholar. Makhosazana Xaba is an award-​winning multi-​genre anthologist and short story writer. As an anthologist she recently conceptualised, compiled and edited Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000–​2018 (2019) which won the 2021 Human Social Sciences Award in the edited volume category. Her debut collection of short stories Running and Other Stories, won the 2014 SALA Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award. Stories from this collection are taught at South African universities as well as universities in the USA, across disciplines namely Feminism, Black Feminist Thought, Literature, English and Anthropology. Xaba is also a poet who has published four collections. Her poetry has been anthologised widely and translated into Japanese, isiXhosa, Italian, Mandarin, SeTswana and Turkish. It is also taught in South African high schools and universities. She has served as a judge for poetry competitions and anthologies. She holds an MA in Creative Writing (with distinction) from Wits University and is currently a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.

Preface

This volume grew out of a co-​taught Honours module on the South African short story at the University of Pretoria in 2015, a course that benefited immensely from Makhosazana Xaba and Karen Martin’s visit to campus and their generous interactions with students about their anthology Queer Africa I and Khosi Xaba’s collection Running and Other Stories. Expanding on our earlier special journal issue published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, this edited volume is an attempt to capture the renewed vibrancy of short story writing in South Africa. It is dedicated to our co-​editor of the journal issue, our beloved friend and colleague, Khulukazi Soldati-​ Kahimbaara. Khulukazi passed away in 2019 after a long struggle with cancer.

Acknowledgements

The editors are deeply grateful to the peer reviewers of the chapters collected in this volume for their generous comments and insights. We also gratefully acknowledge funding from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria. Many warm thanks to our friends and colleagues Colette Guldimann, Nedine Moonsamy and Silindiwe Sibanda for your generosity and friendship over the past years in the English Department; you continue to inspire and challenge our thinking! We would also like to acknowledge Claire Chambers and Rachel Gilmour, former editors of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, for their support of our earlier special issue. Our thanks also go to the team at Routledge, Helena Hurd (as series editor) and Matthew Shobbrook. Finally, we wish to thank the editors of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Current Writing for the permission to reproduce the following material: Blair, Peter. “Hyper-​compressions: The rise of flash fiction in ‘post-​ transitional’ South Africa.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55.1 (2020): 38–​60, copyright © 2020 by (Blair, Peter) Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd; Manià, Kirby. “ ‘Translated from the dead’: The legibility of violence in Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55.1 (2020): 61–​76; copyright © 2020 by (Manià, Kirby) Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd; Murray, Sally Ann. “Queerying examples of contemporary South African short fiction.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55.1 (2020): 77–​95, copyright © 2020 by (Murray, Sally Ann) Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd; Akpome, Aghogho. “Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-​winning stories: Henrietta Rose-​Innes’s ‘Poison’ and NoViolet Bulawayo’s ‘Hitting Budapest’.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55.1 (2020): 96–​110, copyright © 2020 by (Akpome, Aghogho) Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd; Riach, Graham K. “ ‘Concrete fragments’: An interview with Henrietta Rose-​Innes.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55.1 (2020): 111–​120, copyright © 2020 by (Riach, Graham K.) Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd; Stobie, Cheryl. “Re-​tailoring Can Themba’s ‘The Suit’: Queer temporalities in two stories by Makhosazana Xaba.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 29.2

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Acknowledgements  xvii (2017): 79–​88, © 2017 The Editorial Board, Current Writing, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The Editorial Board, Current Writing. An earlier version of the introduction was published as “The short story in South Africa post-​2000: Critical reflections on a genre in transition.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55.1 (2020): 4–​21. Finally, the interview with Kgauhelo Dube in Chapter 13 was first published as “Decolonizing the reading landscape: A conversation with Kgauhelo Dube.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55.1 (2020): 121–​135.

1  Introduction The short story in South Africa –​ new trends and perspectives Corinne Sandwith, Rebecca Fasselt and Khulukazi Soldati-​Kahimbaara The genre of the short story, while often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. As Jean Marquard contends, “South African writing has excelled in this art form more than in any other” (1978: 11) and, as Mbulelo Mzamane reminds us, the “short story tradition in South Africa is as old as the Xhosa intsomi, the Zulu inganekwane, the Sotho tsomo, and other indigenous oral narrative forms” (1986: ix). Due to the sheer number of publications, the short story, Michael Chapman maintains, is arguably South Africa’s “most resilient and popular literary form” (2004: xii). Often described as a marginal or “ex-​centric” genre (Hanson, 1989: 2), deemed ideal to capture the sensibilities of societal outcasts or “submerged population groups” (O’Connor, 1965: 18), the short story, according to Mary Louise Pratt, has frequently been employed “to introduce new regions or groups into an established national literature, or into an emerging national literature in the process of decolonization” (1994: 104). In the South African context, where the idea of a national literature has been a vexed question in the past (Attwell and Attridge, 2012; Nkosi, 2002; Oliphant, 2004) and continues to be contested in the context of the country’s postapartheid shift towards a “transnational cosmopolitanism” (Frenkel, 2016: 4), the short story has been utilized by various population groups to claim belonging and/​or express dissent with repressive political orthodoxies.1 Most notably, however, short story criticism on apartheid as well as contemporary short story writing published in South Africa has consistently emphasised the genre’s disposition to capture the fragmented realities of socio-​political transitions in the country (MacKenzie, 1999a; Marais, 2014; Oliphant, 1996). In recent years, the short story, Craig MacKenzie notes, “has undergone a renaissance […] and the signs are that the form is destined to play a major role in bodying forth South Africa’s future in imaginative terms” (1999a: 143). Several critics have observed a shift from the overtly politicised short story of the 1970s and 1980s to a return to a more literary and modernist aesthetics in the present (Oliphant, 1996; Titlestad, 2010). In this edited volume, we intend to complicate this reading by mapping out other trajectories the short story DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-1

2  Corinne Sandwith et al. has taken in recent years, which point toward the emergence of more popular subgenres. Despite this noted resurgence of the short story, there has been a striking absence of critical literature on the genre (Chapman, 2003: 383), particularly in the post-​2000s. To date, the main detailed studies of the form in South Africa are Craig MacKenzie’s The Oral-​Style South African Short Story in English (1999b); Trudi Adendorff’s MA thesis South African Short Story Cycles: A Study of Herman Charles Bosman’s Mafeking Road; Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo; Ahmed Essop’s The Hajji and Other Stories; and Bessie Head’s The Collector of Treasures, with Special Reference to Region and Community (1985); Pumla Gqola’s MA thesis Black Woman, You Are on Your Own: Images of Black Women in Staffrider Short Stories, 1978–​1982 (1999); and the doctoral dissertations Writing Black: The South African Short Story by Black Writers by Rob Gaylard (2008); The South African Short Story and its Mediation of the Hegemonic Tendencies of Nationalism by Sopelekae Maithufi (2010); and (Re-​)Inventing Our Selves/​Ourselves: Identity and Community in Contemporary South African Short Fiction Cycles by Sue Marais (2014). The index in David Attwell and Derek Attridge’s The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012) merely lists the entries “1950s white English writers”, “District Six Writers” and “Drum Magazine” under the rubric “short stories”, which all refer to Dorothy Driver’s contribution “The Fabulous Fifties: Short Fiction in English”. While a number of articles on short stories and short story collections by individual authors, most notably Ivan Vladislavić and Zoë Wicomb, have been published since 2000 (Coetzee, 2010; Driver, 2011; Gaylard, 2011; Griem, 2011; Kossew, 2010; Marais, 2014; Riach, 2015; Reid and Graham, 2017; Scully, 2011), a more sustained engagement with the genre in an edited volume seems warranted in the light of its increasing diversification and popularity. This volume aims to showcase the latest scholarship on short story writing in South Africa, written in English. The focus on short stories in English is restrictive given the long tradition and continuous vibrancy of short story writing in South Africa’s other languages. In contrast to Attwell and Attridge’s multilingual approach to South African literatures, the narrow scope of this volume is one of its major shortcomings and invites further scholarship that fully accounts for the conversations between short story writing in South Africa’s various languages. The current edited volume explores questions such as: How does the short story genre reflect or champion new developments in South African writing? How are traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa reimagined in the present? What specific aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities can be observed in the contemporary short story? More specifically, we address the place of the short story in post-​transitional or post-​2000 writing and interrogate the ways in which the short story form may contribute to or recast ideas of the postapartheid or post-​transitional.

Introduction  3 As the various contributions demonstrate, contemporary short stories extend to numerous subgenres such as speculative fiction, crime fiction and erotic fiction, and increasingly examine and challenge conventional sexuality and/​or gender-​based norms and include characters who identify as LGBTQI+. This notable emphasis on the popular, rather than a shift towards a more modernist aesthetic, is visible in most of the selected stories and collections. Moreover, this collection of essays considers the position of South African short fiction within the context of an increasing popularity of new short story subgenres such as flash fiction, microfiction, postcard fiction and short short across the globe.2 Various contributions also testify to a “denationalization” of the short story anthology in South Africa and a growing interest in cross-​ continental projects, fostering a pan-​African short story culture. What is evident is the extent to which contemporary short story writing cultures continue to trouble conventional understandings of the category of South African literature itself. Reaching further beyond strictly text-​centred approaches to contemporary short stories in South Africa, the volume addresses the influential character as well as the shortcomings of the most prominent short fiction prize for African writing, the Caine Prize. In an attempt to complicate strict boundaries between short story criticism and short story writing, the collection features reflective pieces by two of the most prominent contemporary short story writers in the country, Makhosazana Xaba and Siphiwo Mahala. It also includes interviews with Henrietta Rose-​Innes, Niq Mhlongo and arts and culture entrepreneur Kgauhelo Dube, the founder of the LongStorySHORT initiative, an event series which features short story readings by local celebrities in community centres and libraries across the Tshwane region. The critical reflections on recent short story writing in South Africa offered in this book are not intended to provide clear definitions or a finite set of key characteristics of the short story genre in the contemporary South African context. Cognizant of the fact that, as Joyce Carol Oates remarks, no definition of the short story is “quite democratic enough to accommodate an art that includes so much variety and an art that so readily lends itself to experimentation and idiosyncratic voices” (1998: 47), we conceive of the short story as an open, fluid and dynamic genre. While no single short story theory can fully cover the expanding and increasingly diverse body of short stories in South Africa, it remains imperative to investigate the ways in which short forms, short story collections and anthologies are adapted for, and rewritten in, the post-​2000 context.

From democratic inclusivity to postapartheid disillusionment Thinking of the short story simultaneously as a genre that has been especially prevalent in South Africa in times of social and political transition and as a genre in transition, we suggest in this section that the susceptibility of the short story to ambiguities, contradiction and open-​endedness contributes to and reshapes ideas central to what has been called postapartheid and

4  Corinne Sandwith et al. post-​transitional literature (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010). We will first consider trends in short story criticism since the early 1990s alongside major developments that can be traced in short story anthologies, before attempting to tease out significant developments in the post-​2000 era.

Short stories and the democratic vision of the 1990s Developments in short story writing in South Africa in the early 1990s can only be understood against the background of aesthetic interventions that took place in the late 1980s. Most notable in this context is Njabulo Ndebele’s controversial critique of the “representation of spectacle” (1994: 41) in “protest” and “resistance” literature and his advancement of the category of “the ordinary” as an alternative mode for black writing that sought to move beyond simple binaries of oppressor-oppressed. While Ndebele does not comment on the short story genre as such, he refers to three stories by Michael Siluma, Joël Matlou and Bheki Maseko as exemplary of “the ordinary daily lives of people [that] should be the direct focus of political interest because they constitute the very content of the struggle, for the struggle involves people not abstractions” (1994: 57). His project has been criticised for homogenising black writing (Gaylard, 2009), eschewing the complex entanglements of “the ordinary” and “the spectacular” in apartheid and postapartheid culture (Jamal, 2010), and investing in a redemptive national teleology (Geertsema, 2001; Morphet, 1990, 1992). Yet, as Rob Gaylard notes, Ndebele’s central intervention was his interrogation of “the problems inherent in a too-​easy or too-​simple equation of ‘literature’ and ‘politics’ ” and his critique of “the view that only one style or mode of writing was appropriate or possible for a black writer in South Africa” (2009: 50). Ndebele’s discussion of the short story form, we suggest, paved the way for the multiplicities of short story writing in the postapartheid era. Criticism on the short story genre from the 1990s onwards seems divided between earlier accounts that focus largely on the short story anthology as an apt medium for the expression of democratic multiplicity and later criticism which, in contrast to these celebratory readings, highlights the genre’s performance of uncertainty and disequilibrium. Commenting on the popularity of the short story in the 1990s, Andries Walter Oliphant writes that “[i]‌n fluid and transitory contexts such as present-​day South Africa” the short story “can be practiced to great effect” (1996: 62). For him, “[t]he fractured and discontinuous articulations which a body of short stories produces over a particular period” (1996: 62) offer the reader a variety of viewpoints, defying former hegemonic narratives of the apartheid era. The palpable tension between unity and difference, centripetal and centrifugal forces, exhibited in short fiction collections or “cycles”, as Marais contends, are “especially appropriate to a rendering of the tensions and possibilities inherent in a multifarious and ruptured society in the process of attempting to transform itself into a unified but culturally diverse democracy” (2014: 14).

Introduction  5 The forms of the short story cycle and the short story anthology in this sense both express the postcoloniality of “normativity and proleptic designation” and “interstitial or liminal” postcoloniality, two trends that Biodun Jeyifo observes in postcolonial writing. While the former refers to a postcoloniality “in which the writer or critic speaks to, or for, or in the name of the post-​ independence nation-​state”, the latter in Jeyifo’s account refers to African writers of a hybrid cosmopolitan sensibility, often based in the global North, whose writing exhibits an “interstitial or liminal mode” (1990: 53). The short story collection, like many postcolonial novels, expresses both designations, suggesting “that it is preferable to speak of the two poles as a dialectical continuum, rather than as polarized and mutually exclusive entities” (Quayson, 2016: 6). With its specific compositional display of unity and difference, the short story collection becomes a particularly powerful means to express the tension between the normative, futurist agenda of “wholeness” on the one end of this continuum and the hybrid and interstitial designation on the other. In the early transition years in South Africa, the “singular-​yet-​plural” format of the short story collection thus comes to mirror the proleptic, normative nation-​building project without, however, obfuscating the liminal mode as an intrinsic characteristic of the genre.3 This development is echoed in a number of short story anthologies which appeared after the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the release of political prisoners in 1991. This body of anthologies includes those which engage with apartheid history as constitutive of the present, on the one hand, and those in which the present and the future claim the greater attention, on the other. Exemplifying the former orientation, Denis Hirson and Martin Trump’s The Heinemann Book of South African Short Stories (1994) reiterates an earlier liberal emphasis on the diversity of the collection as a means of contesting the ethos of segregation in both the social and the literary spheres, thus advancing an ethics/​aesthetics of inclusiveness, dialogue and connection. In the unstable interregnum between the fall of the national narrative and the rise of the individual story, collections such as Trump and Marquard’s revised Century (1993) and David Medalie’s Encounters (1997) continue to give value to those stories in which the public and the personal, the individual and the social, are intertwined. In addition, however, what is identified as the “master narrative of apartheid” leads to a new recognition of historical complexity and a privileging of stories which, eschewing the apartheid dominant, give space to previously obscured dimensions of human experience. As is evident in Stephen Gray’s description of his 1993 anthology as a collection of “pieces” rather than stories, many of the anthologies that emerge in this period also resist the notion of the story as polished, internally coherent and complete. In addition, against the attempt to arrive at an “all-​ encompassing definition” of the story (Medalie, 1997: xxii), these collections tend to privilege multiplicity and dissensus. Many collections which appear in this period are characterised by tropes of regeneration, renewal, innovation and change as well as a euphoric refusal of

6  Corinne Sandwith et al. the past (Gray, 1993; Macphail and Esterhuizen, 1993; Oliphant, 1992, 1999). To some extent, the emphasis on rupture rather than continuity necessitates a caricatural treatment of the past in which the “rigid” and “outmoded” political orthodoxy of apartheid is conflated with the aesthetics of realism. In the call for formal experimentation and the scrambling of generic categories, what was previously conceived of as a developing realist tradition is reimagined as aesthetic stricture. During this period, if the anthology of the survey retains a presence (MacKenzie, 1999a; Malan, 1999), it is the anthology representing the contemporary writing moment that takes centre stage. MacKenzie’s (1999a) anthology Transitions, presenting a survey of short stories published between 1948 and 1992, also complicates domineering ideas of “newness” in anthologies of the 1990s by consciously selecting short stories that focus on change and renewal across time. Significantly, he emphasises the eminently ambiguous temporality and interminable process of socio-​political transitions: “The transitions that these stories explore”, he suggests, are not complete –​and never will be. In 1948 [Herman Charles] Bosman stood on the threshold of a dark era in South African history. Fifty years later we are again faced with fundamental societal change, this time of a more hopeful nature. Writers over the next fifty years will chart the future transitions. (MacKenzie, 1999a: vi) While this focus on change, evinced in each of the short stories in this collection, appears to invest the present with a similar measure of hope as the anthologies focusing on “the new”, MacKenzie seems more interested in drawing attention to modes of continuity in South African short story writing. Oliphant’s earlier-​cited article similarly cautions against accounts that locate the resurgence of the short story in the 1990s in the irreducible specificities of that historical moment. Referring to the groundbreaking short stories by Bessie Head and Can Themba, he calls for a “broader framework incorporating the ongoing dialogue between past and present narratives” (1996: 62). Deeply sceptical of hasty pronouncements of “newness”, he maintains that “the new” is always imbedded in “an open-​ended and unfolding narrative process in which the short story as a genre, to paraphrase Jacques Derrida, always participates in several genres” (1996: 62). Notwithstanding Oliphant’s reservations, the emphasis on the new, the aesthetically experimental, and the hitherto unexplored continues in what has been termed the post-​transitional period (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010) and is exemplified in a range of short story collections such as Dave Chislett’s three Urban collections (2001, 2002, 2003), Chris van Wyk’s Post-​Traumatic: New South African Short Stories (2003), and Maire Fisher’s Women Flashing: A Collection of Flash Fiction from Women’s Writing Workshops (2005). As in the mid-​1990s, the emphasis on the “fresh”, the “original”, and the “now” predominates. The single example of the conventional survey anthology to

Introduction  7 appear during this period is Chapman’s The New Century of South African Short Stories (2004). However, even this collection rejects the authority and coherence of the anthology as “field guide” by presenting itself as a “miscellany”, a “collection of diverse voices”. It also picks up an earlier questioning of definitive form in an extended discussion of the story as fleeting, provisional, and incomplete. Following the theoretical trend to define the short story genre in juxtaposition to the novel (Beevers, 2008: 15), Chapman contends that “the big narrative of the novel was perhaps the most appropriate response to the national question” (2004: xi) during apartheid. The renewed interest in the short story, he contemplates, may be due to the inconclusiveness of the short form and the short story collection, which he deems a pertinent medium to capture South African society in transition: Whereas the novel is equated with big ideas, big events, the story favours flexibility, ellipses, surprise, emotion, implication. With large, singular plots (the narrative of nationalism or socialism) discredited, the story permits us smaller, various, often unconventional insights. (Chapman, 2004: xi) Chapman’s argument highlights the potential of the short story and, perhaps even more so, that of the short story anthology, to undermine “the idea of the book as necessarily unified, complete, in some small sense representing, standing (in) metonymically for a complete, unified world” (Hanson, 1989: 7). In its enabling of the “diversity of our possibilities” (Chapman, 2004: xi), the short story collection here appears to become the democratic genre par excellence,4 echoing the early postapartheid national narrative of reconciliation and “unity in diversity”. Chapman’s emphasis on the short story as a genre particularly germane to the present moment may however run the risk of obscuring the earlier noted continuities in its deployment, which gesture towards its suitability for literary expression during crucial moments of transition throughout South African history. Because of its brevity, immediacy and presumed intensity, the short form has repeatedly been regarded as a viable avenue for the expression of social resistance in times of rapid political and socio-​economic change. For most writers of the Drum era, which marked “the substantial beginning, in South Africa, of the modern black short story” (Chapman, 2001: 183), the short story constituted a popular form to voice dissent and document apartheid’s exclusionary racist politics and the dire social and material realities. The Drum decade was very much an era of transition and the short stories of the time, favouring a realist aesthetics of documentation, set their plots against the backdrop of South Africa’s “rapid transition into an industrialized urban country” (Graham, 2007: 170; see also Nkosi, 1983 and Gready, 2002). The short story, as a result of material conditions that writers deemed unsuitable for the production of novels, became, not least because

8  Corinne Sandwith et al. of Drum’s editorial policy, the period’s foremost literary output with more than 80 short stories published in one decade (Zander, 1999: 136). The resolute urbanity that Drum epitomised thus found its most appropriate literary medium in the short story. Bloke Modisane, for instance, maintains that the short story “serves as an urgent, immediate, intense, concentrated form of unburdening yourself –​and you must unburden yourself ” (1963: 3). Similarly, Es’kia Mphahlele, influenced by Richard Wright’s and Langston Hughes’s deployment of the short form in the context of racial oppression in the US as well as by Nadine Gordimer’s modernist stories, draws on the genre’s ability to capture the momentous force of apartheid in short, definitive strokes (Mphahlele, 1969: 474). That the genre continued to provide an apt medium for the representation of states of unease is evident in the stories which begin to appear in Staffrider magazine from the late 1970s onwards. The magazine’s commitment to the publication of unedited township voices facilitated the emergence of a range of new writers, many of whom paid little heed to the conventional economies of the short story genre and experimented instead with an unorthodox melange of witness testimony, documentary realism, political polemic and the patterns and tropes of oral modes (Vaughan, 1986; Chapman, 2003; Gaylard, 2008). However, as Gqola (1999, 2001) has argued, the experimental risk-​taking of the staffrider/​writer was not extended to the representation of African women, who remain fixed within stereotypical depictions of decorous, maternal femininity.

Ruptures and continuities post-​2000 While there seems to be a new emphasis on the pleasures rather than the politics of stories in the post-​2000 period, these stories continue to be informed by this earlier understanding of the short story as a “concentrated form of unburdening yourself ” (Modisane, 1963: 3), albeit with a reconfigured idea of political commitment that leaves behind apartheid and transition-​ era visions of nationalism, focusing on marginal figures, new concerns as well as formations of transnational exchange and connectivity, specifically with other African countries. The exploration of hitherto unexplored areas of experience such as sex, sexuality and subjectivity is evident in titles such as Identities (De Kock and Southey, 2002), Attitudes (De Villiers, 2004), and Touch (Szczurek, 2009). This period is also characterized by the rise of the more popular commercial anthology, variously comprising the niche anthology –​stories of personal emancipation, erotic stories (Schimke, 2008), queer stories (Martin and Xaba, 2013; Xaba and Martin, 2017; HOLAAfrica!, 2020), crime stories, science and speculative fiction stories, ‘epic fantasy’ (Ndlovu, 2020) and flash fiction –​and the (overlapping) anthology-​by-​invitation in which writers contribute stories relating to a particular theme. Two recent collections –​Joanne Hichens and Karina M Szczurek’s hair: Weaving and Unpicking Stories of Identity (2019) and Niq Mhlongo’s Joburg Noir (2020), each assembled around the tropes of ‘hair’ and ‘Johannesburg’,

Introduction  9 respectively –​reveal the complexities and multiple refractions of an unequal, divided and diverse society. The anthologies by Xaba and Martin and the HOLAAfrica! Project also break with anthologies of the proleptic designation of the early 1990s, bringing into dialogue queer short stories from across the continent. This trans-​ African focus echoes earlier initiatives such as Gray’s anthology Writers’ Territory (1973) which includes stories from South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The shift to a postapartheid aesthetic and the break with the South African survey anthology tradition is emphasised in new forms of visual staging such as the retro tabloid styles of Twist: Short Stories Inspired by Tabloid Headlines (Morris and Moffett, 2006) and the gritty, urban designs of Urban 01, Urban 02 and Urban 03. Post-​2000 collections also mark their distance from established form through the use of unconventional layout and typographical styles. The break with tradition is also suggested in various forms of paratextual apparatus which tend to be far less elaborate than earlier examples, are more oriented towards a popular readership, and tend to employ a more informal and accessible style. In 2013, two short story competitions were established which also often revolve around a theme and testify to the growing significance of (Southern) Africa-​ based short story prizes next to international prizes such as the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing (see Chapter 9 in this volume) and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Kiguru, 2020).5 Short Story Day Africa seeks to counter what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her famous TED talk (2009) termed “the danger of the single story” about Africa. As the organisers write on the website, “Short Story Day Africa has established a day, 21st June –​the shortest day of the year –​on which to celebrate the diversity of Africa’s voices and tell you who we really are; what we love; love to eat, read, write about” (Short Story Day Africa, n.d.: n.p.). The initiative brings together short stories from across the continent and publishes a selection of the best entries in an annual anthology. The anthologies Disruption (Zadok et al., 2021), Hotel Africa (Moffett et al., 2019), Migrations (Chela et al., 2017), Water (Mulgrew and Szczurek, 2016), Terra Incognita (Dorman, 2015), and Feast, Famine, and Potluck (Jennings, 2013), as well as the 2017 theme “ID” that focuses on identity, especially gender identity and sexuality, further testify to the diversification of themes, trans-​African dialogues and the growing interest in popular fiction in recent short story writing. Initiated in the same year, the Short.Sharp.Stories award is organised by the National Arts Festival and aims to provide a platform for fiction at the drama-​dominated festival (Warren, 2014: 616). The annual call equally focuses on a specific theme and the best entries are published each year in a collection. The inaugural anthology, titled Bloody Satisfied (2013), was edited by Hichens and focused on the theme of crime. In 2014, the project published Adults Only: Stories of Love, Lust, Sex and Sensuality (Hichens, 2014). Subsequent collections are: Incredible Journey (Hichens, 2015) and Die Laughing (Hichens, 2016) –​which features stories “of wit, satire and humour”

10  Corinne Sandwith et al. in which “writers have poked a little fun at our crazy country, at our politics, our idiosyncrasies, our down-​ right ridiculous habits” (Short.Sharp. Stories, 2016: n.p.) –​Trade Secrets (Hichens, 2017) and the final issue Instant Exposure (Mbao, 2018) which was published online. Echoing initiatives by the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) to promote short story writing in the past, these short story prizes, next to the Black Letter Media initiatives and the older Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award as part of the annual South African Literary Awards (SALA), point to the ongoing significance of the genre in the contemporary South African literary landscape, but also to the viability of the form for cross-​continental collaboration and literary exchange.6 Whereas these anthologies seem to advocate the novelty of the present and a break with past stylistic and thematic paradigms, recent short story criticism (Titlestad, 2010; Barnard, 2012) that has turned to critically investigating the parameters of the short form in relation to the notion of “post-​transitional literature” (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010) appears more vigilant around this language of innovation. Like MacKenzie (1999a) and Oliphant (1996), these accounts bear witness to significant elements of continuity in the employment of the short form across the differentials of the apartheid, transitional and post-​transitional phases. The short story anthology is now no longer read as a demonstration of democratic multiplicity. However, the renewed interest in the short story, particularly the modernist short story with its proclivity for fragmentation and open-​endedness, is regarded as a pertinent medium for the expression of postapartheid disillusionment or the acknowledgement that the “forward march” version of transition has been conclusively derailed, leaving indeterminacy and plot loss in its place (De Kock, 2016: 15). Michael Titlestad writes: In some respects, the modernist short story […] might be particularly suited to our present, just as other modes of the short story were appropriate to our past. The smaller canvas of the genre compels an author to devise situations and moments of interiority (recognition, resignation, hope or aspiration) that distil the swirling realities of the world. At their best, modernist short stories are never pedantic; they never resolve the matters they raise, but rather leave both their characters and readers suspended on the brink of a recognition that remains –​for all of its powerful implications –​somewhat inchoate, just out of reach. In a transitional context like ours, in which most of us experience the world as difficult to read, this hesitation, this modest authorial purview, seems entirely apt. (2010: 191−192) It appears, then, that the earlier association of the short story, specifically the short story anthology, with the “normative and proleptic” nation-​building project has given way to an emphasis on the genre’s aspects of liminality,

Introduction  11 fragmentation and implication rather than resolution. It is in this sense that the short story in recent years, as Rita Barnard observes, has “enabled attention to smaller, more local ways of meaning […] because as a form it is less subject to the pressure of being interpreted as national allegory (or at least, state-​of-​ the nation report) than the novel” (2012: 666). If the “present moment” for the short story writer who, as Gordimer famously argues, “see[s]‌by the light of the flash” (1968: 459), was “the only thing one can be sure of ” during apartheid, this fleeting certainty has given way to even more pervasive restlessness and fragmentation. Yet Titlestad’s discussion of the modernist short story as “particularly suited” for “a transitional context like ours” (as well as his predominant focus on an older generation of writers such as Medalie, Vladislavić and Wicomb) tends to flatten out some of the complexities and nuances of the contemporary literary scene. As this edited volume shows, authors use and adapt various forms of the genre for a range of political interventions which move beyond a strict bifurcation of the short story into either more political/​ popular or avant-​gardist iterations. These sentiments are echoed in several contributions to this volume. A similar disruption of conventional binaries is evident in Henrietta Rose-Innes’s commitment to “honest commentary” through minor form: These brief, eclectic contributions also feel like a natural and appropriate way to consider South Africa now [...] It’s hard for anyone to have a good overview of what’s happening with our country, to the extent that it can feel artificial and hubristic to try. Rather than a magisterial narrative, it may be that a mosaic of stories, its overall form undefined and with the capacity for new elements to be added quickly to the mix, might be the best and most honest commentary on our condition. (2020: 113) More recent subgenres of the short story further add to this interpretative focus on indeterminacy, rapid change, adaptability and a loss of the proleptic vision. Peter Blair suggests in his chapter on flash fiction that this subgenre, “a minimally plotted narrative that maximizes implication”, is “apt to the under-​plotted indeterminacy of the post-​transition”. “The striking correlation between transition’s demise and the flash’s rise may be as much coincidence as causation”, he concedes, “but it at least suggests that the advent of post-​transition was conducive to, perhaps a stimulus for, the flash” (See Chapter 4). In a similar vein, Andrew van der Vlies’s Present Imperfect (2017) and Kerry Bystrom’s Democracy at Home in South Africa (2016) suggest that negotiations of queer identities in short stories by Medalie and Wicomb disrupt proleptic, heteronormative conceptions of the national family. A new emphasis on sexual pleasure and the exploration of queer and transgender identities (Hoosen, 2019; Murray, 2019; Dhliwayo, 2020a; Nkutha, 2020a) also serves to trouble dominant notions of the heteropatriarchal family (see also Chapters 5, 6 and 8 in this volume). Several queer stories in

12  Corinne Sandwith et al. 69 Jerusalem Street by Lindiwe Nkutha (2020a), for example, both invoke and destabilise the conventional queer tropes of loss, suicide and religious angst. In “Confessions to Karoline”, for example, a conflicted religious confession becomes an account of intense sexual pleasure. Others such as “The Rock” and “Black Widow” depart from the mode of the anguished spectacular by offering quieter, more understated stories of untraumatic queer life and reconfigured families. Stories in Exhale: Queer African Erotic Fiction by HOLAA! (Hub of Loving Action in Africa, 2020) also centre on untrammelled pleasure and include several contributions that imagine sex work (“Everyone We Love Can’t Be Saved” by Kabelo S. Motsoeneng (2020)) and BDSM (“She was Made of Sunlight” by Tshegofatso Senne (2020)) not through a lens of the oppressive and ‘freakish’ but as generative of deep, mutual relations of care. Next to these formal innovations, the realist short story continues to offer writers a platform to express social criticism through the exploration of a murky social terrain that eschews grand narratives with a clearly defined moral plane. Writers such as Jo-​Ann Bekker (2019), Fred Khumalo (2019, 2021), Siphiwo Mahala (2011, 2019), Reneilwe Malatji (2012), Mohale Mashigo (2018), Niq Mhlongo (2016), Keletso Mopai (2019a), Lidudumalingani Mqombothi (2020 [2016]), Sifizo Mzobe (2020), Lindiwe Nkutha (2020a), Jolyn Phillips (2016) and Meg Vandermerwe (2010) employ the form to comment on various aspects of postapartheid society such as gender inequality, homophobia, land ownership, xenophobia, corruption and leadership, racism and economic disparities. The short story’s ongoing propensity to engage with socio-​ economic questions is evident in the continuing resonance of the urban ‘hustler’ figure in the postapartheid economy as well as the appropriateness of the crime story format, and its local adaptations, as a means of addressing postapartheid inequality and marginality. In Sifiso Mzobe’s collection Searching for Simphiwe (2020), the crime story takes shape as both gritty police procedural (a mini-​cycle of stories focusing on a single female figure, Detective Zandile Cele) and stories revolving around a range of reluctant hustler figures, pushed into crime and jail time by joblessness, family demands and the pressures of township life. In several stories in Niq Mhlongo’s collection, Joburg Noir (stories by Fred Khumalo, Siphiwo Mahala and Niq Mhlongo, in particular) the art of hustling is rendered as endemic to postapartheid urbanity, evident either in more benign, everyday examples of ‘hustling-​to-​get-​by’ or in the more menacing, violent forms of tender corruption, drug-​trafficking, murder and robbery (see also the interview with Niq Mhlongo in Chapter 14 of this volume). Next to engagements with crime, same-​ sex sexuality and transgender identity, the transnational migrant has become a prominent figure in recent short story writing, illustrating the propensity of the short story to introduce marginalised figures and subject matters into the literary mainstream or give centre stage to characters who occupy a minor role in other literary forms.

Introduction  13 Building on earlier depictions of cross-​border migration and mobility –​such as Miriam Tlali’s short stories about the gendered experience of train travel between Lesotho and South Africa in Footprints in the Quag (1989) and Nadine Gordimer’s juxtaposition of the colonial adventure of the African safari with the plight of Mozambican civil war refugees fleeing across the Kruger National Park in “The Ultimate Safari” ([1991] 1989) –​newer short stories by writers from South Africa and the (intra-​)African diaspora address increasingly diverse forms of migration from the entire continent to South Africa post-​1994. These stories probe South Africa’s post-​1994 promise of a life of plenty and promise of a home to a new intra-​African diaspora while at the same time engaging with the brutal exploitation of, and xenophobic violence against, migrants –​across the continuum of forced and voluntary –​ from other parts of the continent. Published in South Africa by diasporic writers, collections such as Shadows (2013a) by Zimbabwean-​born Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Bringing Us Back (2020a) by Mercy Dhliwayo, who grew up in Zimbabwe and completed her studies in South Africa, and The Briefcase (2021) by Angolan-​born Simão Kikamba Luyikumu, reject the nationalist underpinnings of the earlier proleptic designation and situate themselves within larger discursive circuits of diaspora and transnationalism (see also Chapter 3). As such, these collections call for an expanded conception not only of South African short story writing but also of the African diaspora beyond its conventional focus on the global North. Formal features of the short story cycle –​its characteristic tension between coherence and fracture –​in Tshuma’s Shadows serve as apt means to depict the search for new forms of community in the diaspora and the characters’ simultaneous dislocation and alienation from both their home and host communities. In “Crossroads” (2013b), Tshuma exploits the symbolic resonance of shadows to examine the clandestine lives into which some Zimbabwean migrants, wanting to cross the Beitbridge border, are pushed by an increasingly ruthless border regime but also their exploitation by a shadow economy of smugglers at the border. A range of stories engages with perilous border crossings of migrants without official papers from countries such as Zimbabwe and Mozambique to South Africa –​Mercy Dhliwayo’s “Exodus” (2020b), Jane Bauling’s “Stains Like a Map” (2010) –​drawing on but also contesting the register of the spectacular in which these are often framed in local and international media. Notably, “Exodus” and “Crossroads” employ the unusual second-​person form to highlight the dislocation of the migrant subject next to appealing, in a more performative act, to readerly hospitality and solidarity through the inherent relationality of the second person. Reneilwe Malatji’s “Vicious Cycle” in Love Interrupted (2012), a story about absent fathers and the aloofness of academia, features the increasingly common figure of the international student from elsewhere on the continent, in part to satirise rivalries between local and ‘foreign’ black masculinities in public discourse. Other stories explore more precarious lives of transnational migrants in volatile postapartheid urban settings where they are pushed into

14  Corinne Sandwith et al. prostitution (Mopai’s “Baba’s Jwansburg” (2019b)), forced to work in low-​ paying jobs regardless of their qualifications (Mahala’s “African Delights” (2011)) or driven into extreme forms of hustling as killers and organ traffickers (Kikamba’s “The Briefcase” (2021)). In Kikamba’s story, written in what the publisher describes as “true fiction” (2021: ii), the solemn reflections by an unemployed asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo on her life after her arrival in South Africa soon spiral into a gory thriller with a melodramatic anti-​climax, echoing the racy, agitated style of Drum-​era short stories and their tendency for reportage. Such reworking of earlier forms of the short story is visible in a range of collections that foreground performative aspects of storytelling rooted in oral narratives as Mahala highlights in Chapter 11. Nakanjani G. Sibiya’s The Reluctant Storyteller (2020), the award-​winning writer’s first collection of stories in English, for example, returns to the figure of the village storyteller and advocates for a decolonial reading practice in which the stories are “imagined as performances: acted out in gestures and intonations to fascinate a listening audience” (Gagiano, 2021: 70). In the metafictional opening story, the village narrator reminds academic readers that “dead philosophers and theorists […] have no relevance in [his] storytelling since they have never set foot in my birthplace, Gcotsheni, where the stories germinated” (Sibiya, 2020: 2). The collection leaves behind the urban settings of most recent short story writing and invites readers to “the percussively throbbing heart of rural Kwa-​Zulu Natal today” (Khumalo, 2020: v) as Fred Khumalo writes in the introduction. Departing from the fast pace and concentrated form of earlier short fiction, the stories take on the pace of village life where “everything, including storytelling is performed at a leisurely pace” (Sibiya, 2020: 7), feature teacherly incursions found in the oral tale and mostly end with a predictable ironic twist to challenge the established social order. States of alienation and anomie (as well as tentative healing and renewal) are also the concern of a number of recent stories focused on the traumatic experiences provoked by a violent, unequal society and the weight of a violent past. Mapule Mohulatsi’s “Moonlight Sonata” (2020), for example, employs multiple, fragmented narration, numbered sub-​division and unexplained gaps in order to heighten its exploration of female dislocation and marginality. Several such engagements with states of unease –​Mishka Hoosen’s “Before we Go” (2019), Songeziwe Mahlangu’s “The Healers” (2019) and Mapule Mohulatsi’s “The Wisdom of Sunday” (2019) –​are centred on the trope of hair as a compelling metonym of both social/​individual malaise and cautious redemption. As suggested, contemporary short stories engaging histories of violence, altered states and alternative forms of healing tend to exemplify these concerns through disconnected, fragmentary form, narrative ellipsis and multiple narrative perspectives, thus further undoing conventional oppositions between the modes of social critique and formal experimentation. This is also a feature of the contemporary short story more generally which tends

Introduction  15 to eschew earlier preoccupations with a single exemplary event towards proliferation of narrative strands, irresolution and heteroglossia. An emphasis on polyvocality also features in a range of intertextual dialogues across generations, which are particularly visible in contemporary rewritings of Can Themba’s “The Suit” by Zukiswa Wanner, Siphiwo Mahala and Makhosazana Xaba, attesting to what Evan Mwangi (2009) calls Africa’s “writ[ing] back to self ” in its treatment of gender and sexuality (see Chapters 5, 6, 10 and 11 in this volume). In Red Apple Dreams (2019), Mahala traces a genealogy of reading and literary influence (and pays homage to earlier storytelling traditions) through a series of reprints –​Themba’s “The Suit”, Njabulo Ndebele’s “The Test”, James Matthews’ “The Park” and Zukiswa Wanner’s “The Dress that Fed the Suit”. In this collection, intergenerational dialogue takes shape as both subtle textual echo (as in “Mpumi’s Assignment”) as well as direct interpolation (as in the case of “The Park Revisited”). In all cases, the act of ‘revisiting’ opens up an earlier tradition of short story writing to the influence of more contemporary concerns such as HIV/​AIDS, male sexual predation and ‘New South African’ families. It is through this ongoing conversation with former short story writers that the post-​2000 short story takes stock of the contemporary moment. What is also evident is increasing experimentation with short story length, which sees the story reaching for the more expansive space of the novella, thereby introducing less teleological story rhythms and a more wide-​ranging narrative arc (see Sibiya, 2020; Mhlongo, 2018). In Lindiwe Nkutha’s “Jocasta’s Hairballs” (2020b), expanded length and more experimental treatment are closely tied to the story’s engagement with patriarchal violence: in this instance, the story of femicide is approached through disjointed narrative and the fractured narrative perspectives of multiple characters. Recent collections and stories, such as Phumlani Pikoli’s The Fatuous State of Severity (2018 [2016]), Tiffany Kagure Mugo’s “Letting Go” (2019) and Sally Ann Murray’s “At Length, Hair’s Breadth” (2019), also demonstrate willingness to experiment with font styles, word placement, the interpolation of a variety of texts including Christian phraseology, poetry, digital languages and genres such as whatsapp exchanges, as well as intermediality through the inclusion of drawings and comic strips. Digital publishing platforms such as The Johannesburg Review of Books and Kalahari Review have further spurred the short story’s rise in popularity in recent years (see Mahala, 2021: 116). These online spaces are “levelling the playing field for African writers, editors and publishers in a medium less bound by inequalities in access to capital and means of production than print publishing” (Jaji, 2013: 128), allow for more immediate forms of writer-​reader interaction (Adenekan and Cousins, 2013: 202; see also the interview with Mhlongo in Chapter 14 of this volume) and often understand themselves as pan-​African publishing forums “[t]‌elling new stories from everyday African life as told by the people that are living it” (Kalahari Review, 2016).

16  Corinne Sandwith et al. The short story in postapartheid South Africa continues to be a viable genre for the depiction of transitional moments. While earlier short story collections and anthologies marked the hopeful vision of democratic multiplicity of the early 1990s, post-​2000 short stories are characterised by increasing generic diversification as well as a range of aesthetic practices, including oral forms, social realism, “true fiction”, temporal disjuncture, fragmentation and liminality, all of which become symptomatic of the thwarted promises of the country’s political transition. It is to this troubling of both aesthetic form and political certainty that many of the chapters in this volume are addressed. In Chapter 2, Kirby Manià’s “Translated from the Dead” turns to the recent collection of short stories, 101 Detectives by Ivan Vladislavić. Manià reads the collection in terms of the broader debate about writing crime and violence in postapartheid South Africa and proposes an analysis of selected stories in terms of the genre of “anti-​detective” fiction. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which the stories defeat the expectations of the detective formula through the failure of interpretation and the absence of both narrative closure and social reordering. As such, the chapter proposes a reading of the limits of crime writing more generally, arguing that if crime and violence can be represented in textual form, they are not thereby made decipherable. Extrapolating from the idea of the failure of detection, the chapter goes on to argue for a reading of the short story collection itself not as a coherent set of clues pointing to a determinate resolution but rather as “a loose affiliation of intensive fragments” (Chapter 2), one that resists both containment and coherence. In Chapter 3, Aretha Phiri analyses Zoë Wicomb’s short story “Raising the Tone”, published in South on South: An Anthology Devoted to the Humanity and Narrative of Migration (2011). Inserting her decolonial reading of the story within a larger discursive framework of African migration and diasporic narratives, Phiri probes the narrow geographical boundaries of dominant Wicomb criticism, which studies the author’s work mainly through the ethno-​ nationalist dualism of South Africa and Scotland. She argues that the short story’s “polyphonic ‘discordance’ to the singular authority of the novel’s central voice” allows Wicomb to question spatially bound, exclusive notions of colouredness through a counter-​discursive forging of inter-​and trans-​continental ties while simultaneously interrogating homogenising ideas of ‘Africa’. Peter Blair, in Chapter 4, looks to the wider short story landscape in order to address the recent efflorescence of flash fiction in South Africa, exploring its historical antecedents, the history of its inclusion in general anthologies, and its particular resonance for the South African context. Aside from noting the distinctive characteristics of “hyper-​compression”, intertextual allusion and interpretive gaps, Blair also reads flash fiction as troubling the conventional dualism of surface and depth. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of several examples of the post-​transitional flash, including work by Tony Eprile, Michael Cawood Green and Stacy Hardy. Noting the relative scarcity of flash fiction in South African short story anthologies, and its absence from

Introduction  17 major literary-​historical surveys, Blair makes a compelling argument for its wider literary-​historical value as important distillation or refraction of contemporary literary-​critical concerns. In Chapter 5, Cheryl Stobie shifts the focus to the question of textual rewriting through an examination of the afterlives of Can Themba’s iconic story, “The Suit”, first published in Drum magazine in 1963. Giving brief attention to “androcentric” and “feminine” rewritings in short stories by Siphiwo Mahala and Zukiswa Wanner, the chapter gives central place to Makhosazana Xaba’s refashioning of Themba’s story from a queer, postcolonial perspective in two stories, “Behind ‘The Suit’ ” and “ ‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side”, both published in the collection Running and Other Stories (2013). Stobie invokes Adrienne Rich’s concept of “revisioning” (1972) in order to highlight Xaba’s practice of re-​reading a canonical text from new critical vantage points, a form of rewriting which both illuminates historically occluded and stigmatised relationships and disrupts hegemonic norms. Working with the notion of “queer temporalities”, Stobie explores the ways in which Xaba’s queering of a canonical text allows for affective connections across time and space, the creation of queer genealogies and the possibility of reimagined futures. Sally Ann Murray’s contribution in Chapter 6, “Queerying Examples of Contemporary South African Short Fiction”, takes as its starting point Axel Nissen’s observation that “maybe short story theory has something to learn from what is known as ‘queer theory’ ” (2004: 181). Examining expressions of queer sexuality in a range of recent stories by Jane Bennett, Shaun de Waal, Wamuwi Mbao, David Medalie, Sally Ann Murray, Dolar Vasani and Makhosazana Xaba, she suggests that these short stories not only draw attention to marginalised sexualities, but they also demand a reading of the short story itself as a queer genre. The short story, similar to queer sexualities, persistently disrupts that which is deemed the norm and, as “an outsider, even guerrilla” genre, privileges the margins and the ex-​centric. Contemporary anthologies such as Queer Africa (Martin and Xaba, 2013), following the traditional preoccupation of the South African short story with the liminal, consistently undermine heteropatriarchal boundaries and at the same time also transgress the limits of the national, highlighting their authors’ growing participation “in pan-​African writing cultures”. In Chapter 7, Christiaan Naudé amplifies the discussion of the short story form by offering a close reading of two of Mohale Mashigo’s short stories, “Manoka” and “The High Heel Killer” (from Intruders, 2018) through the lens of the therianthrope. According to Naudé, the therianthrope –​a half-​ human, half-​animal hybrid figure, referencing both folkloric and speculative traditions –​facilitates Mashigo’s striking hybrid aesthetic, in particular the unexpected combination of speculative imagining and historical-​realist modes. By bringing together tropes of genre fiction and more realist preoccupations, Naudé argues, Mashigo’s stories open up new possibilities for the depiction of South African gender politics and female empowerment while

18  Corinne Sandwith et al. also setting the contemporary short story in dialogue with earlier precolonial representational traditions. As Naudé goes on to argue, Mashigo’s aesthetic of hybridisation and ‘re-​mixing’ –​rhetorical, generic and cultural –​is also apposite to an understanding of some of the “recombinatory tendencies” of contemporary South African short story writing more generally. In Chapter 8, Jenny Boźena du Preez turns to queer African erotic short fiction to examine the ways in which selected short stories negotiate the legacies of the colonial hypersexualisation and subsequent desexualisation of Black women’s bodies in postcolonial contexts to forge new languages of desire outside the constraints of such representational economies. Examining the use of spectacle in three short stories from the South African-​produced collections Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (Schimke, 2008), Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (Martin and Xaba, 2013) and Adults Only: Stories of Love, Lust, Sex and Sensuality (Hichens, 2014), Du Preez shows that the stories set out to counter colonial, heteropatriarchal depictions of Black queer women’s sexuality through the exotic erotic and land/​body metaphors by asserting their protagonists’ sexual pleasure and agency. In their attempt to do so, the pleasure politics of their narratives, however, at times remain steeped in the binarist workings of spectacle, demonstrating the charged discursive terrain that African queer erotic fiction has to navigate. Du Preez further argues that the short story as a form of both “mass and minority culture” (Awadalla and March-​Russell, 2013: 4) lends itself to the reworking of erotica genres in African contexts, not only because the short story has always been considered a useful form to introduce hitherto marginalised, new and controversial subject matters, but also because its brevity and density allow for a narrative centring of the erotic encounter. Chapter 9, Aghogho Akpome’s contribution, “Imagining Africa’s Futures in Two Caine Prize-​winning Stories”, tackles generic boundaries between the short story and the novel by examining the two winning entries of 2008 and 2011, Henrietta Rose-​Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”. Against the background of recent critiques of the prize for its alleged emphasis on “poverty porn”, he examines the alternative ways in which the two authors use the genre of the short story to imagine African futures. The two selected short stories, he suggests, call for critical engagement with the porosity of genre boundaries through their employment of key features of the African novel, engendering a dialogue between the two forms. Makhosazana Xaba’s Chapter 10 is a multi-​faceted reflection on the inter-​ relatedness of reading, writing and being read, one which also includes discussion of the academic and popular reception of her short stories as well as the frustrations and possibilities of the editorial process. Xaba’s account of the journey from reading to writing –​and the multiple influences and provocations which shape this process –​includes early childhood reading of images and colours in popular magazines, childhood story-​making and games with texts as well as high school and university reading. The chapter explores a range of reading practices: reading for an MA in creative writing, reading for form

Introduction  19 and structure rather than plot and, crucially, reading against the grain. The chapter shows how the latter reading practice –​based on breaking established rules of short story writing and re-​centring marginalised experience –​have become key aspects of an aesthetic practice geared in part to responding to and rewriting both canonical forms and dominant norms. Also key to the discussion of a writing and reading life are the often-​fraught processes of editing and publishing. Against both Eurocentric frameworks and racist paternalism, Xaba the chapter makes an important case for the development of an “empowering and writer-​centric” editorial practice while also reversing the normative critical gaze through commentary on the critical reception of her own stories. In Chapter 11, “Short Stories Born from the Womb of the Past”, Siphiwo Mahala points readers to a wider historical lens by examining intertextual dialogues between writers of different generations to highlight temporal entanglements between different eras in South Africa’s rich short story tradition. Taking his cue from Oliphant’s observation that the present is “a direct consequence of the past”, the chapter returns to the genre’s roots in Southern African oral narratives and argues for a complex imbrication of the old and the new that manifests in the use of oral narrative elements by contemporary short story writers as well as their reimagining of stories by their literary predecessors. Mahala illustrates this intergenerational conversation through an examination of his own reworking of Can Themba’s “The Suit” in “The Suit Continued” and the various literary and critical responses spawned by his story. In Chapter 12, “ ‘Concrete Fragments’: An Interview with Henrietta Rose-​ Innes”, Graham K. Riach comments on Rose-​Innes’s writing in its entirety, but focuses on her use of the short story form. Riach holds that it is the intensity of focus and compression that makes the short story her form of choice. Both its agility and its ability to allow for a quick response to events are, for her, the major attractions of this form of writing. The interview also reflects on the role of short story competitions as a means of gaining a foothold into a writing career. The short story form is conceived as a natural fit for a particular kind of writerly perspective, one which comprehends “the world in concrete fragments, singular images and intuitive flashes, rather than in terms of overarching narrative or abstract scheme” (Chapter 12). Chapter 13 presents an interview with Kgauhelo Dube, the director of a Tshwane/Pretoria-​based arts consultancy Kajeno Media, and reflects on the broader material and institutional contexts of reading and literacy in South Africa through an account of a reading and literature project called “LongStorySHORT”. Inaugurated in 2015, the project aimed at promoting a vibrant reading culture among black people, in particular, school children, from underprivileged areas. It addresses the structural inequalities that manifest in the absence of libraries in most black rural and township schools, the invisibility of African literature in schools, and a publishing context which is skewed towards writers from the US and the UK. This project ensured exposure to African literature through a combination of live readings by well-​known theatre performers and TV presenters, which were recorded and

20  Corinne Sandwith et al. packaged into podcasts that could be easily accessed by the public as free downloads. The interview thus reflects on the significance of orality and performance for the genre of the short story as well as on the importance of innovative new digital engagements with the written text. In the final interview, presented in Chapter 14, Niq Mhlongo addresses the role of the short story throughout his writing career, commenting on prominent short story writers who have influenced his work, the short story tradition in South Africa, his practice as a writer, teacher and marketer of the short story genre, the reception of his stories in various geographical contexts as well as the increasing significance of book clubs, social media and digital publication platforms. Mhlongo goes on to describe how he conceives his short stories around a key theme or idea that speaks to contemporary South African socio-​political realities. Experimentation with conventions of the short story genre for Mhlongo is driven by his efforts to detail the complexities of a theme rather than by a mere desire for textual play with form and language. As such, Mhlongo rejects observations about the modernist short story and its inchoate, fragmented and disjointed nature as suitable means to approach the postapartheid moment in favour of a poetics that re-​validates relatability, accessibility and everyday speech. During the course of the interview Mhlongo also highlights his approach to marketing and facilitating access to his work in an effort to forge and sustain black reading communities across South Africa and other parts of the continent.

Funding This research gratefully acknowledges funding from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria.

Notes 1 Writing on the use of the short story in postcolonial contexts, Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-​Russell observe: “The short story’s inversion of discursive hierarchies is not, of itself, dissident: dissidence arises from who and what the short story focuses upon. The form’s potential capacity for dissidence is magnified by its ambiguous cultural position: on the one hand, a visibly commercial product residing in popular magazines and sub-​literary genres, and on the other hand, an artistic medium praised by writers for its technical difficulty and associated with small press, avant-​garde or countercultural titles. Simultaneously a product of mass and minority culture, the short story defies categorization” (2013: 4). 2 In her introduction to Short Story Theories: A Twenty-​First-​Century Perspective, Viorica Patea writes that “[o]‌ne of the newest and most interesting twenty-​first-​ century manifestations of the short story comes with the emergence of minifiction and minifiction sequences, which expand even further the original hybridity of the genre. Oscillating between modernist forms of writing and postmodernist ones, minifictions mark a new phase in the evolution of the short story. Flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, micro-​story, short short, postcard fiction, prosetry

Introduction  21 and short short story are new forms that distinguish themselves by extreme brevity […]. Situated at the boundary between the literary and the nonliterary, narration and essay, narration and poetry, and essay and poetry, minifictions also integrate extraliterary elements and so demand a reformulation of canonical genre boundaries and definitions. Hybrid, protean and fragmentary, minifictions introduce a new simultaneity of genres and have been read alternatively as prose poems, essays, chronicles, allegories or short stories” (2012: 20). 3 In Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing, Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann contend that “[s]‌ome literary genres are constitutively close to processes of transition, threshold situations, and questions of liminality. […] To a higher degree than the novel, the short story can be considered the liminal genre par excellence. The short story occupies a middle ground in many respects as it develops out of, and mediates between, essay and sketch […], poem and novel […], narration and discourse […], and elitist and popular culture […]. The poetics of the short story thus reveals itself as a poetics of liminality” (2015: n.p.). 4 Chapman’s conception of the short story here is already present in a number of earlier anthologies, many of which demonstrate their distance from a racist settler/​ frontier tradition (intent on constructing an heroic past) by advancing the modes of realism and social documentary as a distinctive South African aesthetic (Wright, 1960; Hooper, 1963; Miller, 1964). They privilege a conception of the anthology not as cultural archive but as a tool of interpersonal reconciliation. This view arises from an understanding of South African society as marked by “mutual misunderstandings and injustices” (Wright, 1960: x), one which looks to a surface patina of interpersonal tension rather than engaging with the structures of an oppressive economic and political context. In this sense, the collection is conceived as a project of understanding and reconciliation; the short story anthology as an analogue of social diversity is advanced as a force for moral and social good. 5 The hitherto three South African winners of the Caine Prize are Mary Watson for “Jungfrau” in 2006, Henrietta Rose-​Innes for “Poison” in 2008 and Lidudumalingani Mqombothi for his short story “Memories We Lost” in 2016. 6 Since 2012 Black Letter Media have published the annual volumes The Short Story Is Dead, Long Live the Short Story! Recent winners of the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award have been Nakanjani Sibiya for The Reluctant Storyteller (2021) Fred Khumalo for Talk of the Town (2019) and Niq Mhlongo for Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (2018). The Congress of South African Writers published numerous short story writers since it was launched in 1987. On Nadine Gordimer’s birthday in 1990, COSAW introduced a short story award in honour of her contribution to the short story genre (Oliphant, 1992).

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2  “Translated from the dead” The legibility of violence in Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives Kirby Manià

As various scholars and authors have suggested,1 state-​sponsored violence was embedded within the very structures of governance during apartheid and, with its collapse, this violence was sublimated into the civic body, making for an exceedingly violent and disordered transitional society. As prolific South African crime writer and commentator Margie Orford notes, “Crime and excessive violence have largely come to define post-​apartheid South Africa” (2013: 220). Perhaps in response to this, South African crime writing –​as many scholars do not hesitate to point out –​has exploded2 in the period of post-​transitional national letters across the gamut of genres: non-​fiction, literary fiction, creative self-​fiction and genre-​heavy fiction (such as crime and detective novels). Commenting on the sudden burgeoning interest in crime writing in South Africa, Orford explains that “the writing of crime fiction seemed to offer a way to contain … fear and to make sense of the obliterating chaos of violence” (2013: 220). The crime novel then becomes a way in which to “contain” and “make sense” of the chaos that is engendered in these moments of rupture. The crime novel occasions a space through which to “negotiate[e]‌social anxiety”, “learning how to interpret the grammar of the language of violence as it ‘speaks’ us, as much as it speaks to us, in South Africa” (Orford, 2013: 221). Fundamentally, for Orford, it is through fiction that crime can be accorded legibility. This chapter, in its consideration of Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives, challenges the degree to which language through literature can negotiate the excessive violence that has come to define post-​apartheid South Africa. I argue that, in departing from more traditional manifestations of crime writing as articulated by Orford, 101 Detectives works to subvert the notion that violence can be contained or rendered legible to the reader. Instead, the stories I have chosen to examine –​namely “101 Detectives”, “The Fugu-​ Eaters”, “The Reading”, as well as the “Deleted Scenes” addendum –​work to resist closure and containment, thereby deferring restoration of the narrative’s social order. It is especially within the realm of language that these stories erode the comforts of genre, revealing literary detection as a narrative endeavour destined for failure. The anti-​detective –​a figure and mode promoted by Vladislavić’s work –​stands in opposition to its reasoned, DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-2

“Translated from the dead”  29 conventional counterpart who traditionally “reads” the crime as if it were a text in order to gain mastery over a narrative of temporary disorder. Instead, the anti-​detective reads against the grain, and in doing so, disassembles language in a Derridean process devolving certitude, which in turn unravels the ability to interpret the “grammar” of violence (Orford, 2013: 221). This chapter will investigate how the selected stories challenge the conventions of legibility in representing crime in post-​apartheid South Africa by placing particular emphasis on how Vladislavić’s experimental use of both the anti-​ detective genre and the short story form assaults the tropes of popular crime fiction, recasting violence as something inherently illegible. This chapter takes the position that while violence and crime are not unrepresentable per se, the degree to which they can be “managed” or “contained” by language or fiction is limited.

Writing crime: Detection and legibility Based on his own perceptions of South African fiction, Vladislavić comments that: A lot of fiction at the moment is shot through with violent imagery … but how could it not be? It’s a question of how one deals with these things, why you’re writing about it, what you’re trying to do with it. And whether you’re able to write about it in a way that gives people fresh insight into the situation. But to expect that hijackings and violent crime are not going to come up in our fiction all the time I think is … it would be disturbing if it didn’t. (Miller, 2006: 123) As Vladislavić puts it, it is not surprising that violence features prominently in much of the fictional output of local authors’ work. At the level of content, it is not merely a manifestation of “writing what you know”, but also operates as a literary means of processing South Africa’s high rate of violent crime. Before considering what kind of possible “fresh insight” Vladislavić offers to the exercise of representing violence, it is crucial to consider how traditional manifestations of popular crime writing use narrative and language to contain and make sense of violent acts. The popularity of the crime novel genre with local South African publishers and readers alike seems to evince what Leon de Kock has described as “an all-​consuming preoccupation” with “criminality and its detection” (2015: 1). He also asserts that crime fiction engages in “acts of exhaustive social detection” (2015: 2). This mode of literary detection –​the mode in which much post-​apartheid literature is written, according to De Kock (2015: 3) –​becomes a way in which to manage and track a “dangerous and empirically unknowable world” (2015: 4). Christopher Warnes (2012), drawing on the work of Dana Brand, remarks that the worldwide contemporary popularity of crime fiction can

30  Kirby Manià be traced back to the nineteenth-​century origins of the genre (2012: 983). Brand postulates that Edgar Allen Poe’s famous detective, Dupin, “extends and revises the role” of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur (Brand qtd. in Warnes, 2012: 983). Like the flâneur, the detective is “obsessed with reading the city” in order to make sense of the modern metropolis which is “menacing, dangerous, and unknown” (Warnes, 2012: 984). This detective-​flâneur fosters a spectatorial subjectivity capable of establishing epistemological and aesthetic control over an environment commonly perceived to be threatening and opaque. By reducing the city to a legible model or emblem of itself, and by demonstrating his control over his reduction, such a subjectivity assumes a paternalistic or heroic role in relation to an urban literary audience. He comforts city-​dwellers by suggesting that the city can be read and mastered, despite all appearances to the contrary. (Brand qtd. in Warnes, 2012: 984) Warnes homes in on this “legibility as an antidote to anxiety” (2012: 984) and asserts that the figure of the detective in crime fiction is “an antidote to disorder, violence, and uncertainty” (2012: 986), who –​through a methodical approach to deciphering clues and filtering evidence –​promotes “modes of knowledge and control” that become crucial resources “in the fictional management of threat” (2012: 989). Legibility ultimately brings about “closure and the symbolic restoration of the moral order”, which the criminal act had temporarily disturbed (Amid and De Kock, 2014: 53). This matter of legibility is important. In its classic manifestations, the detective narrative renders the crime legible to the reader, translating the “grammar of violence” (Orford, 2013: 222) into the “text of everyday reality” (Hühn, 1987: 456). The two side-​ by-​side stories that characterise the popular and traditional detective novel, as famously outlined and classified by Tzvetan Todorov (1977) and later refined by Peter Hühn (1987), finds the first story –​that of the crime –​coming to be told through the second story: the investigation thereof. It is thus through language, where both fictional detective and reader “read the crime” to solve its mystery, that order can finally be restored. Fundamentally, the crime novel or the detective story functions through the hermeneutics of detection. The ability to detect and deduct, through a mode of sleuth-​driven ratiocination, symbolises a process by which a semiology of clues leads to the production of facts. These facts ultimately arrive at the “unassailable” truth that occasioned the commission of the criminal act. It is thus through an adequate reading of the crime (Hühn, 1987: 45), sustained by the detective’s reliance on a “hermeneutic circle” where “detection means selecting and grouping signifiers and assigning various signifieds to them” (1987: 455) that the detective is able to exhibit or uncover what was previously absent (the hidden causation of the crime), manifesting its logic into presence in the present narrative of the investigation (Hühn, 1987: 455; Todorov, 1977: 44–​46). It is narrativity, grounded on the bedrock of language

“Translated from the dead”  31 (which purportedly promises a dependable correspondence between signifiers and signifieds) that equips the detective with the tools to restore order. It is through the telling the story of the crime –​at least in classic iterations of the genre –​that the detective as reader, and at a further remove, the reader as detective, affords the crime its legibility. Thus, in essence, the detective needs to be equipped with a clear and stable semiology. It is through the vehicle of language, and also via the narrative formula associated with acts of detection, that the crime’s temporary disruption to the order of society is ultimately restored.

“Lost Detectives”: Language and the anti-​detective It is, then, quite telling that the eponymous detective in Vladislavić’s story, “101 Detectives”, Mr Joseph Blumenfeld –​who attends the 101 Detectives: Sub-​ Saharan Africa convention –​fails spectacularly at finding a language through which to engage his vocational exploits of detection. He wonders: “What kind of detective am I? Eardrum or tympanum? Gullet or oesophagus? Pussy or pudenda? A Detective needs a language almost as much as a language needs a Detective” (2015: 34).3 The avowal of language as an integral element in the pursuit of “truth”, becomes one of the many occasions where Vladislavić’s story begins to unstitch the seams of certainty that hold the hardboiled genre together. The story is riddled with synonyms and puns: “Private (eye) function” (32); “A down-​at-​heel-​gumshoe” (36); “Norwegian salmon? Guatemalan devilfish. Herring” (37). This wordplay works risibly to chafe the generic conventions of the classic detective narrative. A proliferation of synonyms dogs Blumenfeld’s quest to ascertain what kind of detective he thinks he might be: he is a “Penniless” detective, but also “Penurious. Impecunious. Parsimonious” (36). This inability to fix and locate a single semantic site of meaning, signals the story’s broader subversion of Cartesian stability and consistency in both identity and sociality. Certainty, in this text, is anything “but” –​incidentally, also the last word of the story, as well as the narrative’s chief concern: a conjunction which augurs no connection, merely hanging in the air like a dangling modifier. As seen in many of his previous works –​ A Labour of Moles (2011a) being the most prominent e­ xample –​this story becomes an exercise in confronting the paradox that language presents in its dual processes of the deferral and proliferation of meaning. Like the Derridean concept of différance, which denotes two meanings in French, namely “to differ” and “to defer”, language does not simply present seemingly taut connections between signifiers and signifieds (Derrida, 2004). Wordplay is an example of the way in which linguistic semiologies can be subjected to a complex matrix of difference, where meaning can be at once deferred or complicated by a chain of semantic plenitude (2004). Profusion also meets its opposite, when at times, even the simplest of words fail Blumenfeld. On multiple occasions he, through focalised narration, inserts “what” (in italics) as a placeholder for more precise meaning: “huffing

32  Kirby Manià on their smartphones and polishing them on the linings of their what?” (44); “He unfolded the wings precisely. There was still time to find the what?” (46); “A what in the snuffbox?” (46). Feeding into the need to reimagine himself –​ his “brand” of detective –​he ruminates over what kind of copy should appear in his new business card: “Joseph Blumenfeld. Bespoke Detective. Esquire? Nope, old hat. Your Boutique Agency for pop-​up surveillance. For made to measure security solutions. For artisanal what?” (44). This faulty patois borrowed from the millennial hipster movement satirically exposes the ways in which language is mercurial and can be laughably fashioned to accommodate consumerist fantasies. However, language is also slippery, ambiguous and subject to the ineffable … what? He notes with substantial anxiety that “His language was acting up and it scared him” (40). The idea of language as a vehicle in the detective novel, to secure, lock down, to render manifest and summon truth is called into question here. Blumenfeld draws upon the polyvocality of detective taglines and slogans to find a language in which to inhabit, to summon forth a new identity, a new truth: He looked for words. For a precise phrase to make something happen. Here he comes now. No. Here come [sic] trouble. Who the hell speaks like that? What have we here. No, it was all wrong. Fuck me George. Better. Sonofabitch. One word. That’s the ticket, trick, technique. Few words as possible. Fuck. Hey. Yo. But no one came. (41) Perhaps this linguistic failure is symptomatic of a larger crisis: This lack of knowing, or rather this lack of a need to know, made him feel like less of a Detective. And the feeling rankled because he was unsure what kind of Detective he really was to begin with. (31) Throughout the story the reader is offered a detective that is the very opposite of the assured, in-​control sleuth that dominates pop cultural representation. Moreover, it is a story devoid of a corporeal crime that can be solved –​ perhaps the transgression, if any, is of a metaphysical kind. Blumenfeld is a detective embroiled in his own existential crisis: “What kind of Detective am I? … Am I that kind of Detective?” (34). For readers attuned to detectives that will deliver a stable ratiocination, mediated through the language of reliable detection as a means by which order can be restored to the mysterious and uncertain world, this story dissolves this cheap comfort. Instead, language is shown to be shifty and equivocal, misleading and contingent. It is anything but dependable or reliable. Language cannot deflect or “contain” a threatening reality; instead language reflects it, being both produced and authored by ontological uncertainty and ambiguity. Similarly, Bennett Kravitz, writing

“Translated from the dead”  33 about “a conspiracy of language” in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy –​in many ways, the literary progenitor of “101 Detectives” –​notes that “Language can neither supply the key to reality nor make sense of the world” (2013: 50). Rather, “because of its elusive nature”, language “conspires actively against us by obscuring the meaning of things” (Kravitz, 2013: 50). The relationship between language –​the narrativising of crime and violence –​and the restoration of order are hallmarks of gumshoe fiction; yet in Vladislavić’s story this is destabilised. Blumenfeld is merely one of a hundred other detectives making up a convention that sounds less like a “sleuth of detectives” (if that may serve as a collective noun), and more like the awkward lovechild of Paul Auster’s nihilistic detectives and Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. Alternatively, could Blumenfeld be enrolled in coursework, reading Detective Studies 101 in order to pinpoint a methodology that will serve him in his future exploits in the field? However, that Blumenfeld’s faulty detection takes place in the absence of a crime is significant. In this context, crime is abstracted from methodology: crimes and infractions are insinuated purely through narrative tone –​recognisable solely through the parody of genre, rather than in narrative content. Detection seems to occur for its own sake, entirely divorced from a crime, and also perhaps from what Mark Seltzer describes as the “pathological public sphere” (1997: 4). And then finally, social diagnosis and detection as a means to cure the pathological body politic, is playfully flaunted in “101 Detectives” through Blumenfeld’s rejoinder that “there is more to life than Detection” (Vladislavić, 2015: 36). This signals a disruption of the “consolations of genre” (Titlestad and Polatinsky, 2010: 270) afforded by traditional detective fiction, which usually makes capital out of the “comforts of a formulaic entertainment” (2010: 269). Accordingly, “101 Detectives” stages a post-​apartheid rendering of what has been called the anti-​detective mode. This self-​reflexive, meta-​fictionally rich genre upsets and derides the “politics of generic style” (2010: 259), which “disturbs” the reader, “unsettl[ing] our expectations” (2010: 265). Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, in their introduction to The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999), define the anti-​ detective story (what they term the “metaphysical detective”) accordingly: A metaphysical detective story is a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-​story conventions –​such as narrative closure and the detective’s role as surrogate reader –​with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot. (Merivale and Sweeney, 1999: 2) In distinguishing between the traditional and the anti-​detective genres, Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory observe that

34  Kirby Manià The detective and the anti-​detective, then, seek different answers which suggest the differing epistemological assumptions of the ages in which they were produced: One looks to eliminate the temporary disruption of an ordered universe, the other for an arbitrary fictional pattern that will not explain away mystery but will enable him to live with it. (McCaffery and Gregory, 1979: 40) Where does this leave the reader in a work of anti-​detective fiction? Ostensibly, like the traditional detective, the reader tries to connect narrative dots and work backwards from the scene of the crime in order to construct a coherent sense of the textual landscape. If the anti-​detective tale features the frustrating “(de)feats of detection” (Black qtd. in Merivale and Sweeney, 1999: 10) –​that subvert fantasies of closure and control –​does this transform the reader of a text into an anti-​reader? Does the reader then share in the ignominious business of a “failure to identify individuals, interpret texts, or, even more to the point, solve mysteries” (Merivale and Sweeney, 1999: 10)? Since the technology of reading is indivisible from the hermeneutical act, are readers in the anti-​detective text presented with jumbled textual fragments that disintegrate before a fictional pattern can emerge? How does this affect the broader project of legibility, which the conventions of crime fiction and the detective novel usually render evident? To what extent does the form of the fragmentary, experimental short story, when paired with the anti-​detective mode, attenuate the prospect of narrative coherency and closure –​those “comforts of a formulaic entertainment” (Titlestad and Polatinsky, 2010: 269) usually manufactured by the traditional detective narrative? In subverting the conventions outlined by Merivale and Sweeney, such as narrative closure as well as the role of the detective as “surrogate reader”, Vladislavić tenders a number of intriguing experimental disruptions to form in this collection of short stories. Under the heading, “Special Features”, at the bottom of the book’s contents page, are two sections: the “Dead Letter Gallery” and “Deleted Scenes”. Turning to the “Deleted Scenes” section is akin to enjoying the bonus material added to a DVD. This signifies something very interesting: the borrowing from digital technologies to revise and update literary practices. Arguably, short form fiction defers the comforts of closure. Vladislavić achieved something similar in The Loss Library by exploring unfinished narrative fragments –​what he calls “unsettled accounts” (2011b: 7) –​and offering them for publication in their par-​baked form. In this way, The Loss Library plays with literary possibility by gathering the raw edges of various vignettes sourced from Vladislavić’s notebooks and then pursuing where these “failed stories” would take both author and reader (2011b: 9). The result is a modest renovation of the frontiers of fiction. The “Deleted Scenes” of 101 Detectives achieves a homologous result, shifting perceptions of narrative finality. The presentation of “deleted scenes” to a reader of detective fiction intimates a lack of narratorial reliability –​as is evident through Blumenfeld’s focalisation in “101 Detectives”. All the clues have

“Translated from the dead”  35 not yet been revealed to the reader, and there is more to the plot than the main narrative arc suggests. This glimpse behind the scenes of the texts’ construction thus effectively destroys any trust the reader might have in the narrator to present all the facts and restore order in the end. This postmodern technique works to disrupt conventional reading habits: beyond formalistically resisting plot closure, the “Deleted Scenes” is a writerly strategy that insists that there is no total or final experience in the act of reading a text (Barthes, 1974). Its inclusion suggests that a story is never quite finished and is always in a state of revision. Applied to a collection where the title story is devoted to the figure of a detective speaks volumes about how ratiocination through language is doomed to fail. This impish device, arguably more comfortably housed in a short story collection than a novel, defies the generic diegetic formula applied to detective and crime fiction. Inverting the central tenets of the genre, the stories selected for analysis do not attempt to deduce and solve, but rather open up their narratives to divergent plot and interpretive possibilities. If we are to take the anti-​detective as a figure that reads against the grain, does the anti-​reading modus operandi of the anti-​detective mode extend beyond the titular story of Vladislavić’s collection? The added material in the “Deleted Scenes” section unsettles interpretive finality and forces the reader to read again –​rather than inferring anti-​reading as a form of negation or nihilism, it signals the need to read against one’s initial reading. It may then seem rather contradictory that a writer whose work is celebrated for a minimalist and precise style (see Gaylard, 2005, 2011; Morphet, 2011) can in the same breath be said to show how language is unreliable as a mode of containment. What may provide a clue, however, is how other stories in the collection confront the act of reading and the production of legibility. Both “The Fugu-​ Eaters” and “The Reading” feature intertexts, or meta-​texts, that double back on what to make of the project of reading and language-​making in the anti-​ detective genre.

“Best Kept Alone”: Reading and legibility In the very first story in the collection, “The Fugu-​ Eaters”, the reader encounters policemen, Bate and Klopper, who are ensconced in a hotel room in the middle of a stakeout. The non-​linear and fragmented narrative switches between two asynchronous settings: the hotel room and a farm, where a bonfire of evidence is ordered to be set ablaze by Klopper’s superior, the Captain. The complexity of these two temporalities and settings within a single short story facilitates the sense of discomfort perpetrated by the anti-​detective mode. The title of the story, “The Fugu-​Eaters” refers to an intertext provided by a Reader’s Digest article on the Fugu –​the poisonous pufferfish consumed in Japan as a delicacy. Bate reads the article to Klopper to pass the time in the hotel room. Bate explains to Klopper that Fugu has to be prepared by carefully trained chefs, who –​after many years of experience –​know how to

36  Kirby Manià remove the toxic organs. However, mistakes are often made, and every year people in Japan lose their lives to the fish. The two tales are juxtaposed with no overarching continuity or connection. In piecing the narratives together, is the reader, like Bate –​who appears to be the inferior “detective” (actually a sergeant, as he makes great pains to point out) –​primed as the one hundred and second detective, learning the ABCs of the gumshoe trade? Bate, conscientiously, tries to fall back on his training (and we might think we could learn something useful from this, too): A scrap of his training floated into his mind: Surveillance. In certain circumstances, you see better out the corner of your eye. Something to do with the rods and cones. There was something about listening too … you heard better … with your mouth open. The cavity of your mouth created a sort of echo chamber. (15) After deciding that it would be prudent to follow these instructions, Bate (who is a bit of an empty vessel), turns his face away from Klopper, his mouth gaping open like a comic puffer fish. As such, he embodies the meta-​textual Fugu. In response, Klopper naturally demands of Bate, “ ‘What the hell are you doing now?’ ” (16) The reader wonders too. Methodology seems of little use to Bate –​and reader –​in deciphering the convoluted contingencies of the world. The Reader’s Digest Fugu fish reading –​which works as a meta-​text to the story –​while seemingly innocuous (the image of open-​mouthed Bate still fresh in the mind), drives home a more menacing prospect. The more we reflect on the different meals being consumed in the story (whether the Neapolitan ice-​cream and “Russian and chips” in the hotel room, or the farm braai), the more we realise that all of them have toxic potential (14). What is suggested is that Bate and Klopper’s stakeout might have deadly consequences. When Klopper, in the juxtaposed narrative (i.e., the one set on the farm), reflects on the events that led up to the bonfire, the reader feels safe in the assumption that the bundle removed from the bakkie is a dead body (after all, what is a detective story without a victim?): When they untied the groundsheet Voetjie didn’t bat an eyelid, and Klopper guessed that he’d already sniffed out what was concealed underneath it. The two of them dragged the bundle off the tailgate, stretched it out on the ground next to an overgrown irrigation ditch, and piled logs over it. It was like building a campfire, Klopper thought. (13) Earlier, we have been warned by the Captain that: “ ‘What’s buried can always be dug up again’ … ‘But what goes up in smoke is gone for good’ ” (12). In a South African context, this excerpt strikes a nerve. With history as a reading aid, the reader cannot help but think of places like Vlakplaas. However, instead of a corpse, what is being burned is a body of evidence: dockets and

“Translated from the dead”  37 statements, leather-​bound duty books and logbooks, bundles of invoices and receipts. Our readerly detection has been shown to come up short. Klopper, the Captain, and Voetjie then proceed to make a smaller fire next to the bonfire to cook their chops and wors. Mollified by their casual attitudes (except, perhaps, when it comes to the Captain’s second-​class treatment of Voetjie), we, as reader, are relieved to discover that the bundle is not a cadaver. However, despite the subversion of expectation through deft narrative-​ teasing and understated humour, we know that via the hints provided by the Fugu fish intertext, things are not quite what they seem, and Bate and Klopper are still dangerous men with violent intent. In the “reading again” required by anti-​reading in the anti-​detective mode, this becomes apparent in the “Deleted Scenes” section of the collection. The deleted scene counterpart of “The Fugu-​Eaters”, called “Best Kept Alone”, obliquely reveals that the man that Bate and Klopper are waiting for is not going to meet a happy end. Is the man across the street a perpetrator or victim? Bate’s surname takes on fresh significance –​is he the lure, the bait, to reel in the deadly fish? Or are Bate and Klopper the ones that will be serving up the deadly meal? The story was written in 1997, around the time of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings (but likely set a few years earlier, in the turbulent years of the country’s transition to democracy).4 This context is not explicitly addressed in the story, but it nonetheless haunts the corners of the page.5 In light of this, the Captain’s erasure of a body of evidence could possibly be just as incriminating as the disposal of a rotting corpse. What indeed are they trying to cover up and hide? It is a chilling realisation. Through immolation, the evidence of (what must constitute) their wrongdoings has been rendered illegible. This is a poignant critique presented obliquely in Vladislavić’s story. The violence here, the pathology, is not public, nor legible –​it is now unseen. A decimated body of evidence, records which could have incriminated by virtue of their inherent capacity for readability, have been destroyed. There is no longer anything to be read. The past is made silent. These detectives/​policemen are likely agents of the apartheid state –​they are not in the business of restoring order; instead, they are the architects of disorder. We anticipate in our reading that they are the ones about to commit an atrocity, the perpetration of a criminal act. After all, the stakeout does not bode well for the man on the street. Thus, within the broader frame of 101 Detectives, this particular manifestation of the anti-​detective story takes on a different timbre. While the story “101 Detectives” roguishly challenges the conventions of the traditional detective narrative through a postmodern defamiliarisation of linguistic certainty, “The Fugu-​ Eaters” subverts the genre at the plot level by precluding the comfort of resolution. The result is a menacing one. Like the Fugu fish of the story’s intertext, these men are “best kept alone” –​away from the rest of their species as they will only cause harm. Both the ending of the main story and its accompanying deleted scene have Bate and Klopper continuing to hover over the inevitability of their violent act, which for the reader, is always yet to begin. The reader anticipates

38  Kirby Manià a moment of violence which does not take place on the page, thus rendering this plot detail literally illegible. Yet, the intimation of Bate and Klopper’s potential violent deed extends beyond the fictional parameters provided. Accordingly, Vladislavić’s narrative cannot “contain” or “make sense” of what is likely bound to happen: the act itself escapes the bounds of his fiction. In this way, Vladislavić is able to suggest –​through his use of late (what read as) apartheid-​era cops –​that these supposed custodians of law and order are in fact its biggest threat. The structural and political dimensions of this story dovetail with this forestalling of narrative closure. The ambiguity of this story’s ending, coupled with its accompanying deleted scene, thematically and formalistically finds the narrative teetering on the precipice of the violent act’s moment of rupture. In its display of the anti-​detective mode, “The Fugu-​ Eaters” unsettles its reader by sustaining an ongoing sense of peril, offering no cathartic resolution to “manage” their fear of the impending “chaos of violence” (Orford, 2013: 230).

“Reader, open your eyes”: Trauma and translatability While only two of the stories, “The Fugu-​Eaters” and “101 Detectives”, present literal embodiments of detectives or police in their respective narratives, other stories in the collection hint at hardboiled themes through motifs or through episodes of intimated, and sometimes abject, violence. The “Deleted Scenes” counterpart to “The Reading” presents formalistically an annotation entitled “Locked-​Room Mystery” (197). This single paragraph starts by describing how the snow in the empty square outside the Literaturhaus “lay crisp and even” (197). The translator, Hans Günther Basch, thinking of his “dog-​eared Ellery Queen on his bedside table”, equates the scene of blank snow outside with “the enduring appeal of the locked-​room mystery” where either the presence or absence of footprints would be telling indicators of how best to answer the riddle (197). However, he concedes that “A locked-​ room murder did not always happen behind closed doors, of course. More often than not, it was out in the open and in full sight of the world” (197). This observation is telling in that it revises one’s reading of the accompanying story. We are forced to read again. In it, the reader –​not the reader of the text, but the woman who reads from her novel at a literary event –​is not murdered but is subjected to a different kind of violence “in full sight of the world”. In this narrative, a young writer’s tragic experiences are not shown to be ineffable, as many scholars have argued before. For instance, Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985) argues that trauma is ultimately unspeakable; that endurance of extreme pain unmakes language. Instead, in the young writer’s reading, her experiences are stoically effable (“without a trace of self-​pity” (118)) but, what is significant, is that they are not legible to others –​whether in her native language or in translation. Instead, her experiences, while articulable, are not actually translatable. Her translator, Basch, muses, “It was as if she had told the story and kept it to herself at the same time. As if she had

“Translated from the dead”  39 concealed it precisely by sharing it” (118). “The Reading” presents a moment in the collection where the sly and postmodern satire, so typical of the other stories (and ones published in previous collections), recedes into the background to make way for an affectively charged postcolonial statement. In “The Reading”, set in the Literaturhaus somewhere in Germany, a young Ugandan woman, Maryam Akello, reads from her novel, Sugar, in her native Acholi. It is telling that although it has been translated into English, French and now German, her novel has not yet been published in the original. No one except her guardian, Florence Lawino, can understand the reading.6 The audience incline their heads politely and remain still, poised in the performative pretence of listening, but do not or rather cannot meaningfully engage. The narrative point of view moves across the room, shifting from listener to listener and then to the translator of Sugar (or Zucker as it is called in German): Basch. Significantly, the only person’s point of view we are not granted access to is Akello’s. She intends to read from the English translation, but is encouraged by the German academics to read in Acholi because it was an opportunity for her to use her own language … to speak in her own voice. It was important for the audience too, hearing the cadences of the original would open their minds to another world. She would be free to speak in English afterwards, of course, when she took questions from the floor. Nearly everyone in Germany spoke English. (114–​115) Yet, by reading in her own language (and not the English translation), she is rendered silent and voiceless –​her tribulations fall on deaf ears. The attendees think about their own mundane complaints and anxieties. By way of illustration, a budding poet capitalises on Akello’s impenetrable monotone to fashion out his own skein of verse, while the events co-​ordinator finds herself preoccupied by the vulgar squeaking noises made by attendees’ rumps on ill-​ advised plastic seat covers. After Akello sits down, and without waiting to listen to the translation, a number of patrons hastily leave; one has already “decided he’d had enough listening for one day” (123). When the translator stands up to read from the German version of Sugar, we as readers once removed (and incidentally accessing the entirety of the story in English –​ another European tongue mediating and silencing Akello), anticipate that the horrific events experienced and described by Akello will rupture the audience’s First World complacency. But still this does not happen. Sugar is about Akello and her sister’s abduction by Joseph Kony’s infamous Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, and describes their plight as they are carried off into slavery in Sudan. Her story is one that diminishes any sense of, or striving for, hope: unparalleled brutality that encompasses deprivation, beatings, rape and the eventual, merciless execution of her sister, Anya. Understandably, the translator cannot help but succumb to the tears welling up inside him as he reads about the tragic events that beset Akello. However, the audience

40  Kirby Manià continues with its disinterest until Basch starts to sob. The audience is now suddenly more intrigued by this spectacle: the translator’s outburst mortifies the reading’s organisers who hurriedly try to shut down the event and have the cameraman recording it switch off his device to avoid further embarrassment (unperturbed though, the cameraman –​with his lens trained on Basch –​keeps filming). The astonishing reaction to Basch’s breakdown (which is a reasonable response in light of Akello’s experiences, although her calm forbearance should give the reader pause) is awkwardly heightened when we learn that one man in the audience is trying to hide the stirrings of an erection! At the beginning of the story, the Literaturhaus audience is told by Professor Horst Grundmann that Akello’s story must be heard because there is a “… need, in our post 9/​11 world, to celebrate difference and support dialogue, to create networks of understanding and solidarity” (110). Yet the story is ultimately about failed dialogue, about silences and indifference. No network of understanding is created in this sickly body politic. It stands as a trenchant and moving critique of the lip service paid to the postcolony; a discourse that is revealed to be pococurante. The story exposes a failure to engage meaningfully with the subaltern and, through the tragic but stoic guise of Akello, Spivak’s treatise that the subaltern cannot speak is ever so slightly revised. Akello can speak. It is just that no one listens. Her reading, as well as Basch’s, fall on deaf ears. Her trauma is makeable in language, but ironically unreadable. Her story cannot be “Translated from the dead” as if, Basch notes, “death itself were the language, the source of language …” (119, original emphasis). “The Reading” explores a different kind of violence to those invoked in the previous stories. On the face of things, there is a glib assuagement of guilt where the affluent Global North gives “Writers under Fire” a platform to speak truth to power. Yet, beneath this façade, structural violences embedded in the fault lines that determine the First World’s relationship with Africa continue to be perpetrated. Akello becomes a stand-​in for all poor, suffering Africans, an opportunity for the audience to use her as a manuscript for their own colonial fantasies –​flattening continental complexity into worn stereotypes. One woman dons a safari suit (purchased not in Uganda, but Cape Town); the priapic young gentleman dismisses the human tragedy at the core of Akello’s narrative by first wondering whether there are wildlife reserves in Uganda, and then, later contemplates whether the waves in Zanzibar are suitable for surfing: “Perhaps he would ask her during question time. She was from that part of the world” (128). Africa is a country, after all! Akello is reduced to a “brave girl … pretty too” (123) and is objectified in a horrifying return of neo-​colonial appropriation –​she is a commodity to be marketed and traded for European profit: To himself, Theo noted that people in Europe were tired of stories like this, sad as they were, and wondered whether his friend Rolf [the

“Translated from the dead”  41 commissioning editor from Kleinbach] might not find it easier to market someone who gave the impression of being less resigned to her fate. (123) Akello’s “floury” (111) reading prompts Professor Ziegler to think about American playwright, Edward Sheldon and how, when his arthritis rendered him immobile, he invited his night nurses to read to him in a “blank monotone that allowed him to apply his own emphasis” (112). She figures Maryam Akello is this “kind of reader” (112). But without knowledge of the language [Acholi], it was impossible to add a single bright thread of your own to her white linen. In fact … you could not even be sure it was linen. Or white. (112–​113) Vladislavić makes capital out of Ziegler’s prioritising of form over content. One is invited to read “white” in both a tonal and racial sense. It prefigures a frame of reference, a form, which effaces content. It is a prickly industry to unpack the way in which language both mediates and obscures our ability to connect –​whether that engagement is through reading, listening, translating, or (re-​)writing. The ethics and difficulties of “translat[ing] from the dead” (119), the finding of the right/​write language to speak about violence is shown, sadly, to be a “(de)feat of detection”. The grammar of violence speaks the postcolony, but it is not a language readable to others. “The Reading” challenges language’s ability to render crime and violence legible to others, to contain and manage threat. Akello is able to write her story of violence and represent the narrative of her wounded body, but the degree to which her story can be truly “read” by the audience is limited. Unlike the faulty and inconsistent language used by Joseph Blumenfeld, Akello’s is direct and affecting. However, her book falls flat as a way to track a “dangerous and empirically unknowable world” (De Kock, 2015: 4). It is thus a fantasy that the writing and the reading of crime can offer an antidote to the pathological public sphere. Akello is granted agency in the conventional sense, by being an active participant as a writer in her own right. She performs her own reading. However, her wounds and her trauma –​despite her ability to relate her subjection to violence through literacy –​lack translation; they are unreadable to the others gathered to “listen”. The so-​called legibility of violence is thwarted because of its inability to be translated by others, on a superficial level into German from English (and, in turn, from the original Acholi), and then on a deeper, more semantic level, in terms of her audience, as future readers, lacking the ability to “decipher what they were witnessing” (137). The audience’s proficiency in readerly detection is tragically forestalled. At the end of the story, the attendees focus on the spectacle of Basch’s secondhand pain, rather than its source: Akello. Akello’s trauma remains undeciphered. Rather,

42  Kirby Manià she is subjected to the perpetration of another kind of violence “in full sight of the world” (197), where her inscription has been summoned from the language of the dead and, as such, is illegible to the living.

Conclusion While it might be noted at this juncture that the collection (when taken as a whole) lacks a cohesive context –​and, in some cases, even a recognisable context –​the allegory, the pointed satire, and the playful experimentalism maintains a certain consistency in tone throughout. While at least three stories are not set in South Africa –​Germany in “The Reading”, Oklahoma City in “Hair Shirt”, and Mauritius in “Lullaby” –​this should not dissuade readers from appreciating Vladislavić’s taut glocal insight. He demonstrates the ability to subject his content to the crucible of immediate, pressing South African realities and, more broadly speaking, contemporary postcolonial African experiences derived from living in a globalised world. Even in those stories set in the US or Germany, either South African or African characters turn the experience of the transnational into poignant commentary on the local or the conditions of the Global South. Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys (2006) is widely recognised for its hallmark disruptions to genre and form; however, the short story collections, Missing Persons, Propaganda by Monuments (1996), and The Loss Library (2011) could be seen as even more radically experimental in narrative and technical terms, given their proclivity for allegory, surrealism and the bizarre. It would seem then –​to any reader familiar with Vladislavić’s literary corpus –​that his most radical form-​rending moments spring from his short stories. In this sense, 101 Detectives appears to carry on the tradition established in the earlier collections. What this argument also points to is the particular resonance of the short story for the anti-​ detective mode itself, staging as it does the figure of the anti-​detective who is “never able to unravel the conundrum” or “bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion” (Kravitz, 2013: 45, 47). Vladislavić’s treatment of writing crime and violence, particularly via the experimental platform provided by the anti-​detective mode and the form of the short story –​albeit mirroring the exigencies of a violent country (and world) –​allows him to “give people fresh insight into the situation”. 101 Detectives explores this particular turn in writing violence, trauma and crime. A collection of short stories suggests a loose affiliation of intensive fragments: when taken as an ensemble, individual, disparate stories do not lend themselves to be read as clues that create completeness or finality. With the addition of the allusive “Deleted Scenes” section, the stories make capital from states of disorder and incongruity by foregrounding the contingency of both language and narrative. Neither language nor narrative function successfully as modes of containment. Read in this way –​although only a few specific stories explicitly present the modes of anti-​reading and anti-​detection in the content of their narratives –​the overarching form of the story collection

“Translated from the dead”  43 could be taken as emblematic of the formalistic devices and style associated with the anti-​detective mode. 101 Detectives engages in a reading of discomfort. While many of the recent popular novels written in the crime or detective genre, from the likes of Deon Meyer and Alexander McCall Smith to Margie Orford, provide for the “negotiation of social anxiety” (Orford, 2013: 221), Ivan Vladislavić’s fiction troubles and upsets the “comforts of a formulaic entertainment” (Titlestad and Polatinsky, 2010: 269). Despite the ascendency of allegory, surrealism and satire in his work, it may just be that Vladislavić’s writing of crime and violence, through the anti-​detective lens and via the short story form, proffers an approach comparable with the phenomenology of its experience. This writing then poses a riposte to Michael Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky’s claim in that “contemporary South African crime writing is inclined to reduce the complex questions regarding the elusive nature of historical truth to generic devices” (2010: 259). As a writerly collection of texts, 101 Detectives challenges the conventions of popular crime fiction (and the other conventions of writing violence, more broadly), thus embracing what Titlestad and Polatinsky call the “complexities of (permanent) transitional politics” (2010: 270). Through postmodern and formalistic techniques that subvert Cartesian stability, that deconstruct the putative immutability of language and challenge our reading practices to upset closure, an intricate exploded view is produced that not only resists simple classification but also raises questions about the ability as well as the ethics of rendering criminal acts, or violence more broadly, as inherently legible. Danger is not mediated or managed by language but is shown instead to lack decipherability –​it is beyond ratiocination and catharsis. The stories discussed in this chapter call for reading against the formula, but nonetheless reveal the incapacity of language through literature to restore order to an otherwise anxious, chaotic, and violent society. Language as a mode of detection falls short in achieving mastery over a threatening world. The stories in 101 Detectives, discussed herein, render violence illegible in language. Reading and ratiocination provide no certitude or moral authority as an antidote to the rupture it causes.

Notes 1 See Margie Orford (2013: 221), Jonathan Amid and Leon De Kock (2014: 56), Leon De Kock (2015: 2), Christopher Warnes (2012: 982). 2 Although Elizabeth le Roux’s methodical and well-​ researched literary bibliography in “South African crime and detective fiction in English: A bibliography and publishing history” (2013) makes a compelling case that crime fiction is not something new on the local literary scene. 3 Subsequent references are to this (2015) edition of Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives, and will be cited parenthetically by page numbers in the text. 4 At the trade launch of 101 Detectives (held at Love Books in Melville on 6 May 2015), Vladislavić, whilst in conversation with the novelist Dominique Botha, mentioned that the story was written in 1997.

44  Kirby Manià 5 While tending the fire, Klopper imagines that “the burning” will not take longer than half an hour, giving them enough time to catch Due South on the television back at the house (14). On its own, this narrative hint provides a temporal marker for the setting of the story as this show ran from 1994–​1997. Due South not only provides a temporal clue, it also proves to be an intriguing intertext. Set in Chicago, this Canadian crime drama follows the adventures of a punctilious Canadian mounty, Constable Benton Fraser, while he solves crime and exposes an environmental corruption scandal with his partner, Detective Raymond Vecchio. What inferences can be drawn from this intertextual reference? Could the crimes and corruption scandals explored in Due South be an ironic parallel of events as they unfold in “The Fugu-​Eaters”? 6 The viscerality of the experience is embodied by Florence Lawino (Akello’s guardian, who is actually younger than her charge), whose own traumatic memories of her abduction are triggered by the tracing of the “livid blanket stitch of scar tissue” beneath her blouse (120).

References Amid J and De Kock L (2014) The crime novel in post-​apartheid South Africa: A preliminary investigation. Scrutiny2 19(1): 52–​68. Barthes R (1974) S/​Z (Trans. Miller R). New York: Blackwell Publishing. De Kock L (2015) Post-​liberation writing plays hide-​and-​seek with plot. The Mail & Guardian, 23 April. Available at: http://​mg.co.za/​arti​cle/​2015-​04-​23-​post-​lib​erat​ion-​ writ​ing (accessed 5 December 2021). Derrida J (2004) Différance. In: Rivkin J and Ryan M (eds) Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 278–​299. Gaylard G (2005) Postcolonial satire: Ivan Vladislavić. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 17(1): 129–​148. Gaylard G (2011) (ed.) Marginal Spaces: Reading Ivan Vladislavić. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Hühn P (1987) The detective as reader: Narrativity and reading concepts in detective fiction. Modern Fiction Studies 33(3): 451–​466. Kravitz B (2013) Thoughts on the anti-​detective in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Adam Ross’s Mister Peanut, and Martha Grimes’ The Old Wine Shades. Studies in Popular Culture 36(1): 45–​61. Le Roux E (2013) South African crime and detective fiction in English: A bibliography and publishing history. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25(2): 136–​152. McCaffery L and Gregory S (1979) Major’s reflex and bone structure and the anti-​ detective tradition. Black American Literature Forum 13(2): 39–​45. Merivale P and Sweeney SE (1999) Trail of the metaphysical detective story. In: Merivale P and Sweeney SE (eds) The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1–​26. Miller A (2006) Inside the toolbox: Ivan Vladislavić in interview. Scrutiny 2 11(2): 117–​124. Morphet T (2011) Words first: Ivan Vladislavić. In: Gaylard G (ed.) Marginal Spaces: Reading Ivan Vladislavić. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 202–​210. Orford M (2013) The grammar of violence, writing crime as fiction. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25(2): 220–​229.

“Translated from the dead”  45 Scarry E (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seltzer M (1997) Wound culture: Trauma in the pathological public sphere. October 80: 3–​26. Titlestad M and Polatinsky A (2010) Turning to crime: Mike Nicol’s The Ibis Tapestry and Payback. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45(2): 259–​273. Todorov T (1977) The Poetics of Prose. New York: Cornell University Press. Vladislavić I (1996) Propaganda by Monuments. Johannesburg: David Philips. Vladislavić I (2006) Portrait with Keys: Joburg and what-​what. Houghton: Umuzi. Vladislavić I (2011a) A Labour of Moles (The Cahiers Series, No. 17). Sylph Editions. London: The American University of Paris. Vladislavić I (2011b) The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories. Cape Town: Umuzi. Vladislavić I (2015) 101 Detectives. Cape Town: Umuzi. Warnes C (2012) Writing crime in the new South Africa: Negotiating threat in the novels of Deon Meyer and Margie Orford. Journal of Southern African Studies 38(4): 981–​991.

3  Coloured by history, shaped otherwise A “decolonial” reading of Zoë Wicomb Aretha Phiri

Introduction: Wicomb and her critics In his review of a recently published collection of essays, Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal: Writing Scotland & South Africa (Easton and Attridge, 2017), Minesh Dass (2019: 115) states that, while the singular focus on Wicomb’s fiction is useful and overdue, the book’s deployment of dense theory and varied interdisciplinary methodology to illuminate its translocal emphasis might prove “intimidating” and “too narrow” for undergraduate university students. The collection, he suspects, is intended for “more established scholars” and has the added limitation of featuring predominantly established Wicomb critics, none of whom, he aptly notes, currently resides in South Africa. While Dass’s view here might appear uncharitable, it does capture a salient and recurring feature of Wicomb scholarship. As one of South Africa’s most accomplished and celebrated writers whose fiction forms an intricate, if provocative, part of the country’s literary landscape, her canonicity has also ironically rendered her work more inaccessible to many mainstream, ‘popular’ readers.1 Notwithstanding evidence in her fiction of her academic erudition, the ways in which her critics read her and insist upon her being read contribute much to this sense of exclusivity.2 Not unlike J. M. Coetzee scholarship, conventional Wicomb criticism is typically subject to dense theoretical evaluations which, while addressing and reflecting her complex and intricate fictional and critical engagements with South African racial, gender, class and socio-​political relations, seems designed also to obfuscate.3 Comprised of an ostensibly alienating, academised discourse, this postmodern/​poststructuralist school of Wicomb scholarship could be said to perpetuate an exceptionalism premised on, and embedded in, the conceptual boundaries her critics purport to problematise. Where my own review of Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal expressed hope that the volume might ultimately pave “the way for further expansive readings of this (South African) literary force” (Phiri, 2019: 506), Dass’s further observation that it is “slightly unfortunate that the editors could not find a scholar based in South Africa to contribute to the project” (119) is instructive. His apprehensions regarding the apparent monopolisation of Wicomb scholarship by (established) DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-3

Coloured by history, shaped otherwise  47 academic expats ironically speak to and affirm continued, if not entrenched, territorial(ised) readings of Wicomb as a quintessentially South African writer. This goes against the grain of the author’s professed unintentionality, despite her confessed inclination for cultural and historic specificity demonstrated in her fiction’s predominant South African (and Scottish) settings. In conversation with Derek Attridge (2017: 214), Wicomb explains: “I find it impossible not to append a national or cultural label to myself as a writer. It would feel curiously like writing in a vacuum, but being a South African writer is not a default position since writing does come out of that social, geographical, historical context.” But in a piece recorded on an online platform –​2paragraphs. com –​she states: I squirm at the question “who do you write for”? I suspect it of nudging me into the nauseating reply of “for my people, my kind”. No, I say without hesitation. I write for nobody, since the process of writing –​of struggling not only for words but also with how to shape fragments or inchoate ideas into a story –​precludes the question of reason or readership. Not even for myself do I write: an impossibility, since in confronting the blank page there seems to be no pre-​existing self. (The self I know would rather slouch in a hammock, sipping something or other.) Rather, eerily, in that process of forging a narrative, of discovering what I am writing, a strange self seems to wonder at the text that is painstakingly being formed. If writing is something you do, have to do, it seems to balk at being harnessed to a prepositional phrase like “for …”. (Wicomb, 2013) While acknowledging the idiosyncratic demands for authorial identity that form part of the machinations of the literary industry itself, Wicomb also paradoxically problematises the efficacy of authorial intentionality and a concomitant instrumentalisation of writing. That her itinerant fiction so readily ironises –​in order to undermine –​national boundaries, and her critical commentary so often critiques –​in order to destabilise –​the reductive and prescriptive imperatives of nationalism, is underlined in her pointed essay “Tracing the Path from National to Official Culture” (1991; see Wicomb, 2018a). Here she laments, at the dawn of an officially democratic, post-​apartheid South Africa, “the shift from national culture, an imaginary entity that fires our will to be free, into an official culture that is an ossification, an attempt to fix certain forms, to authorize and validate them as the desirable, correct forms” (2018a: 46). Elsewhere, as with her fiction, Wicomb would seem to deride, if not finally dismiss, the notion of an established national tradition –​literary or otherwise: “What would be the South African tradition? It would, like any culture, be a mixed bag, with little to hold it together other than geography, precisely because no ‘nation’ is cohesive, and affiliations of gender, race and class will always woof across such national traditions” (Meyer and Olver, 2002: 189).

48  Aretha Phiri This is not unlike the protagonists of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and Playing in the Light (2006), Frieda Shenton and Marion Campbell respectively, whose intersectional –​race, class and gender –​positions and geographical dislocations underwrite a nationally disruptive portrait that appears to mirror Wicomb’s own personal, creative and critical life. Yet dominant readings of her fiction’s “ability to imagine histories across hemispheres” (Easton and Attridge, 2017: x) seem to follow a particular and somewhat determinative trajectory –​they invariably attempt to trace and establish the associative historical links between (pre-​)colonial and (post-​)apartheid South Africa (primarily the Western Cape) and (post-​colonial) Scotland (primarily Glasgow).4 Albeit contributing meaningfully to globalised, diasporic understandings of both nations and the significance of the author’s work therein, these particularised spatiotemporal and geopolitical paradigms appear also to be (unwittingly) rehearsed in Wicomb criticism. That is, while such readings are not incorrect considering her own fictive and critical occupation with these spatiotemporal and geopolitical dynamics, the persistent paradigmatic focus and accent here aligns and locks interpretations of the author and the South African nation with(in) established, colonial antecedents. Not only does this betray the “self-​obsession” that animates so much South African scholarship, it contributes to the often-​decried myth, also in literary circles, “of South African exceptionalism” (Lazarus, 2004: 610, 611).5 Here, the nation and its writing are often viewed as external to, and apart from, the (socio-​political affairs of the postcolonial) African continent, despite intimations of a post-​apartheid, unifying ‘African Renaissance’.6 This is not incommensurate with the ways in which Wicomb and her fiction have been co-​opted into the country’s critical scholarship on Colouredness or Coloured ethnicity.7 Notable here are Zimitri Erasmus’s ground-​breaking study, Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (2001) and Mohamed Adhikari’s revisionary interpretation of Coloured (modalities of) self-​definition, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (2005). Albeit also the demographic focus of Wicomb’s own fiction and instructive of the particular challenges that attend Coloured communities’ occupation of an intermediate status, the continued scholarly emphasis on South African Coloureds as representing a uniquely marginalised identity within the country’s socio-​ political and socio-​ economic landscape serves (unwittingly) to reinforce and render unchanging historically hierarchised Manichean binaries and racial demarcations. More significantly, such analyses serve “only to accentuate Coloured exceptionalism and reify the identity further” (Adhikari, 2004: 169). This is despite Wicomb’s own academic critiques of such potentially essentialising positions and a fiction that determinedly works to politicise rather than merely affirm (the discourse of) race-​specific cultures. She notes in her 1993 essay, “Culture beyond Color? A South African Dilemma” that “the New South Africa is too much like the old and is therefore necessarily a racial

Coloured by history, shaped otherwise  49 affair … Our new society remains umbilically linked to the matrix of apartheid so that parturition is a slow affair.” She argues further that to “speak of the politics of culture is to speak of the ways in which the culture represents itself, the structures that privilege certain forms of representation and the means by which such forms are legitimated” (2018c: 59–​60). Notably, in her essay “Shame and Identity: the case of the coloured in South Africa” (1998: 92), she examines and posits the formative postcolonial condition or “ethnographic self-​fashioning” of Coloured South Africans as premised on and governed by the hauntalogical shame of miscegenation and concupiscence. Discussing David’s Story (2000) in conversation with Hein Willemse (2002: 144), she decries her protagonist David’s “ludicrous notion of pureness which seems to me to resonate with some of the New South Africa speak, also to do with the new notions of ‘colouredness’ and ‘essentialism’ ”. For Wicomb, and as is demonstrated in her writing, colouredness is envisaged/​ configured as not so much a natural, fixed (historical and contemporary) identity or ‘culture’; it is an itinerant ontology or way of being that is undoubtedly coloured (discursively) by spatiotemporal history but also shaped otherwise.8 In particular, it is her turn to, and proficiency in, the short story form that advances “a conflictual model of society where a variety of discourses will always render problematic the demands of one in relation to others and where discursive formations admit cracks and fissures that will not permit monolithic ideological constructs” (Wicomb, 1990: 36).

Raising the tone: Wicomb and the short story form In her discussion on the relevance and efficacy of the short story form to South African literature, Sue Marais (1995: 29) maintains that: As a form positioned somewhere between the coherence of the novel proper and the disconnectedness of the ‘mere’ collection of the autonomous short stories, the short fiction cycle evinces a dualism which renders it particularly well suited to the representation of that tension between centripetal and centrifugal or entropic impulses which obtains in any society. Where Marais focuses on You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town to underline her argument, her analysis is also applicable to Wicomb’s second short story collection, The One that Got Away (2008). Here the entropic impulses lie in the collection’s peripatetic structure –​which mirrors the numerous intercontinental and transnational journeys that populate the text –​and in the polyphonic, even contestatory, narratives and transhistorical/​transgenerational metaleptical segues in characterisation. But, again, in both collections the dualities that attend the short stories are registered primarily in the centripetal and centrifugal tensions between South Africa and Scotland. As such, the persistently parochial, nationalist

50  Aretha Phiri underpinnings that characterize even her short story collections invite the question Wicomb poses in her own essay, “Nation, Race, and Ethnicity: Beyond the Legacy of Victims” (1991, 1992): “in what sense can the concept of nation be refurbished?” (2018b: 53). Further to this and elsewhere she asks: “How will we transform that chant, invent a new language for constructing ourselves to replace the fixed syntagms” of national identity (2018b: 59)? Perhaps the answer lies in an apparently little-​known single short story written by Wicomb and published in South on South: An Anthology Devoted to the Humanity and Narrative of Migration (2011). In line with its pointed title, she here contributes to a broad selection of short stories that are committed to exploring and delineating the experiential narratives of global migration. In particular, the caveat South on South registers the anthology’s political intentionality as a decolonial text whose focus on (writers from) the global South is an attempt to decentre –​through a border-​crossing gnosis and poetic –​an established, primarily Eurocentric Western episteme whose universalism obscures the historic ideological and material contributions of former colonies to global modernity. The inclusion of Wicomb’s short story in this collection, then, presumes a critical engagement with these particular thematics of global South, postcolonial diaspora whose cosmopolitan provisionality affords alternative, counter-​hegemonic “privileged insight into the workings of the world at large” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2014: 2). Entitled “Raising the Tone” and detailing the peripatetic relationships, encounters and thoughts of the restive focaliser, Miriam, the story would appear, in its overwhelmingly wry tenor –​a tone buttressed by the presence of an omniscient narrator –​to amplify the “specter of incommensurability” (Scully, 2011: 310) that haunts and problematises the ‘enlightened’ certainties of positivist national history. Certainly, the short story form is tailored, in its brevity and disavowal of the traditional linear structure and plot that typify the novel genre, to destabilise and undermine the notion of historical progress and subjective coherence. As a form that is hospitable to the exploration of the mutable idiosyncrasies of identity and/​or subjectivity, the short story’s multiplicity of voices –​implied and overt –​that comprise the narrative, provide a polyphonic ‘discordance’ to the singular authority of the novel’s central voice. Such discordance is enhanced in “Raising the Tone” by the multinational, multi-​ethnic and multicultural motley characters that traverse the text’s urban spatial setting of Glasgow. In this way, the story aptly demonstrates the aesthetic workings in Wicomb’s fiction of the translocal as heterotopic “locality in transition,” whose heterogeneous spaces “of interaction and interrogation, irony and contestation, difference and multiplicity” transfer location or locatedness “into dislocation” (Driver, 2017: 10–​11). Significantly based within a specific locale, what is most striking about this story is its deviation from the traditional intercontinental/​transnational South Africa–​Scotland dualism through a more expansive purview which, while referencing South Africa, includes the nation as part of an itinerant network of global, particularly African, migrants.9 In this way, I suggest that the story

Coloured by history, shaped otherwise  51 itself could be read as ‘raising the tone’ conceptually of Wicomb’s own oeuvre of short stories and novels as well as the critical interpretations thereof. That is, in reframing scholarly interpretations outside of conventional territorial boundaries, I propose that “Raising the Tone” provides a counter-​discourse that advances ways in which the notion of South Africa (and Scotland) could be “refurbished,” re-​read (inclusively) as part of an extensive (Third World) African diaspora. This is not only in line with her own obvious but often downplayed familiarity with, and proficiency in, African history and politics (Phiri, 2018: 122–​123); it also underscores the story as a post-​apartheid, post-​ transitional revisionary text that acts as a temporal marker of newness and flux. Additionally enacting textual border-​crossing and intoning an ability to “reflect and question new/​ old and (extra)ordinary realities” (Marais, 2005: 31), “Raising the Tone” accentuates a more expansive, de-​territorialised “theoretical impetus towards ambiguity and transnational [dis]connectivity” (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010: 7). Interpreting her fiction within such a broadly diasporic paradigm thus provides more diverse ways of reading the author and advances further prospects for ‘alter-​native’ realities than is currently provided in typical Wicomb criticism.

Imagined communities, imagined selves With lines that read: “Miriam yawns, stretches, and chucks her pencil across the table. Boring, boring, boring” (26), the story’s prosaic in medias res opening signals its structural disruption of the originary linear trajectory of the novel form; it also sets the mood and tone for an asymmetrical metanarrative that provides an “echoic utterance” to ideologies that are “presented in order to be undermined” (Wicomb, 2018a: 41, 43). The ostensibly listless and nonchalant, (non)emblematic university student struggling to compose (the definitive first line of) her own (existential) ‘story’, Miriam draws attention to the predictably, if not tediously, iterative character of accepted history and its narrative form: “unable to think herself into a different story, it is always the same opening line, and in media res, since she knows that everyone she knows, knows her story … the only words that spring to mind: I am the subject of history. So disappointing –​she could flagellate herself –​so transparently a product of her class in Postcolonial Writing” (Wicomb, 2011: 26–​27). Her satirical self-​ reflexive posture here attests to the rote artificiality and unoriginal ventriloquism of established episteme and the ways that these influence subsequent accepted epistemologies. More significantly, in increasing awareness of “the ways in which both personal (hi)stories and regional or national narratives are constructed or ‘written’ ” (Marais, 2005: 31), it establishes both the textual and inter-​textual, border-​crossing nature of subjectivity (Marais, 1995: 38).10 This is registered in Miriam’s difficult relationship with, and disparaging views of, her mother, Cath, who, despite having emigrated from the (Western) Cape, South Africa to Glasgow, Scotland, and adorns a dubiously truncated name that suggests her cultural assimilation, persists with her intimations to

52  Aretha Phiri cultural authenticity. Picking up the shopping list her mother slips under the door, Miriam muses: “Everything about her mother is irritating, just look at that handwriting –​pathetic, like a child’s. Even a shopping list can’t escape the palimpsest of the old story of Africa: walking barefoot the five miles to school: and the well-​worn keywords of mieliepap, velskoen, sjambok, police dogs … etcetera, etcetera” (26–​27). Miriam’s infantilisation of her mother’s handwriting and disregard for (the accentuating highlights of) her life story are significant. Not only does this expose the inter-​/​trans-​generational tensions that attend diasporic familial relations, it also undermines and delegitimises the simultaneously authorising and authoritative ‘language’ or narrative of national history and cultural identity. Linguistic references to a simultaneously ubiquitous and particular(ised) (historical) South African nation and (Coloured) culture tellingly ridicule Cath’s “revolutionary credentials” (30) and the “mouldy story” of her years as a veteran of “The (Apartheid) Struggle” (32). Miriam’s mocking descriptions of “mieliepap, velskoen, sjambok, police dogs” are immediately followed by an elliptical and clichéd conclusion –​etcetera –​which unveils her dismissive contempt for such seemingly archaic and arcane indicators. Registering here a tension “between acceptance of the complex diasporic discourse of colouredness, with all its historical discontinuities and fissures, and the desire for a more cohesive sense of cultural identity drawn from some collective narrative of the past,” Wicomb also demonstrates how “for the diasporic coloured subject, any essential cultural identity, whether claimed in terms of blackness, whiteness or colouredness, operates as a strategic fiction” (Jacobs, 2016: 14). While descriptively equivocal, Cath’s strategically essentialist ‘cultural’ rhetoric seeks to mobilise, in the face of a shifting diasporic present, a (unique) political ethnic (group) identity that functions as an “already accomplished fact” (Hall, 1990: 222) and is premised on and embedded within an ostensibly inflexible, static past. Her nostalgic recollection, which conforms to a particularised ethno-​ national/​ -​ graphic script, operates, as Toni Morrison (1984: 385) has elsewhere maintained, as “a form of willed creation” –​a simultaneously imaginative and discursive act of embodiment. But wedged in this way between existential “shadow and substance” (Bhabha, 1994: 40) and in the textual absence of overt ethnic classification, the authoritative outline of Cath’s socio-​political/​cultural Coloured identity can only be implied –​ ‘coloured in’, as it were, by the reader’s own coloured cultural reserves. Unable to adequately accommodate its politically hybridised character/​body, then, “Raising the Tone” positions Colouredness as the “ideological middle” whose “fluid, contestatory, shifting political domain” (Farred, 2000: 12) is extended to include an existential paradigm. For all her middle-​class affectations –​her pretentions to social standing and propriety emulated and encouraged by her close friend and neighbour as well as sometime co-​conspirator, Mrs Dalhousie –​Cath lives with her daughter

Coloured by history, shaped otherwise  53 in the liminal zone where their modest tenements butt onto fancy town-​ house terraces on the eastern side, whilst on the west, just over the road, is the working-​class estate where six high-​rise blocks lean precariously against grey skies. The tenements aspire to the middle-​class condition of the terraces. It makes Miriam sick: middle of the road, cautious and quiet, fearful of attention and equally fearful of being overlooked, sitting tight in the middle lane of the motorway, hesitation, hedging their bets, fearful of being called upon to declare themselves, of declaring their opening sentences. (30) The historically prescribed ontological connection between language and self –​the ability to declare themselves in their ‘opening sentences’ –​is destabilised by their intermediate status, their occupation of a class and racial liminal zone which morphs into a precarious, largely unfulfilled –​“middle of the road” –​existentialism. As decent “darkies” who “speak proper” (30), they embody a constitutionally porous and alliteratively fragile existential semantics. This is because Colouredness is, as far as Miriam is concerned, embedded in a larger (non-​)descript(ive) signifier of blackness –​Africa. That is, not unlike the identitarian designates of its national counterpart, South Africa, the notion of an exclusive and exceptional ethnic designation is rendered soluble through a generalisation that dilutes its specificity while bringing the broader black continent into focus. Where this would seem to advance, in the context of migration, the notion of (counter-​)hegemonic inter-​and trans-​continental affiliations, it also brings into question the ethnically homogenous representation and uniquely representative notion of Africa in ways that are contrary to accepted postcolonial, pan-​Africanist interpretations.11 Commenting on the growth and prominence of writing by young female writers in the diaspora “who are more nuanced in their approach to race, whether refusing to address it in their writing, or humorously question the idea of Africanicity through the ‘lapsed African’, or boldly represent what is ugly and unpalatable in African society,” Wicomb herself remarks on the problematics of transatlantic pan-​Africanist political modes of solidarity. She states: “Whilst historically pan-​Africanism was a radical notion, I fear that nowadays its cultural manifestations too often fetishise tradition and global blackness. Too sentimental for me and, like colonial discourse really, freezes an ‘authentic’ blackness in a distant pre-​colonial past, often imagined” (in Phiri, 2018: 123). Not only is Cath’s “high-​pitched voice” derisively and loosely labelled “African,” Miriam’s description of their Glasgow flat is instructive in its flippant exposition of the narrow and particular –​fundamentally ethnic –​ significations of black Africa:

54  Aretha Phiri the dreadful flowers made out of coloured telephone wire that Cath brings back from home, as she still calls the Cape. Their flat is cluttered with ethnic artefacts –​the rubbish drawings in felt-​tip pen, rustling little bicycles and carts made of wire, weird things with bottle tops, corks and bits of glass that her mother loves, and beadwork everywhere. Why would anyone want to cover a gourd with beads? Christ, did those people not learn anything from history? From the exchange of beads and buttons for land? It’s enough to make you want to shoot them all over again. (29) The motley and mongrelised, rudimentary continental ethnic artefacts which include Cath’s “beaded Zulu blanket” (32), suggest her attempt to recuperate and replicate –​to nostalgically and artificially re-​member –​within her tiny flat an expansive and largely imprecise notion of “home” –​the Cape –​based on inexact, fluid cartographic racial coordinates. That her signified ethnic identity does not necessarily correlate, and is possibly incommensurate, with the lexical signifier that is represented by her range of artefacts, registers the arbitrary nature of the processes of identification. The compound ‘entanglements’ of home are further highlighted in Miriam’s diminutively alliterative and ironic inference –​“beads and buttons” –​ to their (pre-​)colonial referents. While demonstrating a subject who is “Stuck” (26) in history, Cath’s performative transposition and translation –​including ululating and “toyi-​toyi[ing] African style” (38) –​of the geo-​historical past through “a tangled archive of repeatedly sifted, recycled, and adapted inheritances” (McDonald, 2017: 30) also enacts a “condition of being twisted together or entwined” in “complicated and ensnaring” global, transnational permutations (Nuttall, 2009: 1). Through a process of “ethnographic self-​ fashioning” (Wicomb, 1998: 92), hers is an attempt to establish a cultural genealogy in order to inscribe herself into a provisional present reality which negates her picture/​outline of (ethno-​spatial) rootedness. Significantly, as that ubiquitous ‘African’ migrant, Cath makes up a social ‘underclass’ of marginalised, de-​centred subjects whose societal positioning is symbolised in the German supermarket chain at which she shops, Lidl:12 “Lidl is pretty good as far as supermarkets go. The Third World shop, Mrs Dalhousie called it when it first opened, by which she meant that it is overrun with immigrants –​Eastern European gypsies, Zimbabwean asylum seekers and such … In Lidl you do have to keep a close eye on your handbag” (27–​28). The pejoratively derogatory and disparaging labels –​“Eastern European gypsies [and] Zimbabwean asylum seekers” as well as “Pakis, gypsies, Jewesses” –​ which conflate conveniently into that subaltern, postcolonial “Third World shop,” indicate universally ‘foreign’ Others who are inscribed through a (linguistic) process of racist ethno-​nationalism. This necessitates their surveillance and renders them subject to systematic raids by immigration officers and police. Ironically, the community’s defensive actions also enact and become a part of the disabling asymmetries of power. Including the daily dawn patrols

Coloured by history, shaped otherwise  55 and telephonic alarm systems designed to thwart the officials, these acts signal a Foucauldian (1979: 146) “network of [power] relations” and signify the comprehensive panoptic, disciplining criminalisation of alterity. Indeed, it is telling that, as the proverbial contemporary subaltern population which is “bussed into places like these, pegged into estates where natives have left holes” (33), their underclass ‘conditionality’ is captured in the texture of their domestic habitats –​the derelict Burnside council estates of high-​ rise flats/​tower blocks. With names that ironically conjure up the “Scottish romance of lochs and mountains” (33), the dilapidated buildings –​set in an equally aestheticised, park-​like landscape –​register their submersion beneath an established but ultimately failed utopian Scottish working-​class lexicon which, embedded in a transatlantic, British colonial (slave) history, has itself been foiled by (contemporary) English economic imperialism –​Thatcherism.13 Their degenerate behaviour is also indicative. In one of the tenement lifts, Miriam describes a “pale, ginger-​haired” family which crowds into the elevator with her: The children press up against her, and the smell of alcohol and pee makes her stomach heave. The woman, who has no top teeth, says something that Miriam doesn’t understand … the man, also afflicted with a speech impediment addresses her. Fockin’ this and fockin’ that, he hisses through blackened stumps of teeth; his manner is hostile; he seems to hold her responsible for something or other. Loony, for sure. (34) Dickensian in outline, their ontologically vernacular threat to acceptable social mores marks the “transgression of notions of ‘communication’ and ‘identity’ –​or the lack thereof ” (Marais, 1995: 32), not just within the broader (human) society but within essentialised, homogenised marginal classes. Indeed, that Miriam “doesn’t understand” their speech and that they might themselves “mistake her for an asylum seeker” (34), attests not just to the heterogeneity/​diversity of othered, migrant populations but rather to the lack, as with ethnicity, of an assumed solidarity. In that they appear to Miriam to have an “impediment” and to “hold her responsible for something or other,” accentuates her own ironic enactment, even embodiment, of the asymmetric relations and power differentials that define hierarchised societies and that attend globalisation’s (implicit) designs to manage and coordinate an established world order (Mignolo, 2000: 721).

The art of identification It is telling and not without irony, then, that in romanticising their material and existential ‘poverty’ Miriam, through conflictual processes of associative disassociation/​dissociative association, exposes her own hegemonic liminality. Recalling her fraught relations with those immediately surrounding her, she

56  Aretha Phiri muses while sitting in the estate park about her ability here to “meet different kinds of folk … No need for them to have definitive opening lines, there are the living images, expression of raw feelings and desires” (35). Her description of this “real community” of “folk” (35), which contrasts to the strait-​ laced “sterility of Holyrood Street with its shaved privet hedges and lack of garden” (35), is premised on and reinforces the clichéd, romantic stereotypes that attend a hierarchical Enlightenment rhetoric. Disqualified from received processes of civilisation –​they have no need for “definitive opening lines” –​ and in line with her ostensibly oxymoronic delineation of them as “living images,” Miriam’s intimation of their viscerally primordial, pre-​discursive and pre-​linguistic existence is further symbolised in their ‘artwork’. Discovering at the base of a tower called LO-​ON-​some steel-​rimmed panels situated below the ground floor windows and which are entirely covered with paintings, she ­figures that: These are clearly the works of foreigners: stylized landscapes with weird flora; seascapes with strange oriental-​ looking boats; an exotic black woman whose elaborate headdress has taken over, expanded into abstract patterns that fill the entire frame; a copy of one of Hokusai’s Mount Fuji views … How on earth had the artist managed to make his mark on the very fabric of the building? A bold gesture, speaking as much as longing for another place, as inserting himself here in Glasgow into the history of LO-​ON-​. (33) On the one hand, Miriam’s delineation of the paintings suggests an artist attempting to insert and assert –​to transpose and translate –​a heterogeneous ‘self’ into or within present history. The marking of the artist’s presence here serves, not unlike Cath’s own similar attempts at self-​inscription, to politicise time and space. But on the other hand, Miriam’s own aestheticised readings of the images coalesce into a kind of enigmatic, incomprehensible monument –​a testament to a time and place elsewhere and beyond (conventional spatiotemporal modalities). Punctuated by adjectival descriptors –​ weird, exotic, elaborate –​the paintings signify, like the inhabitants of Burnside, an incongruous abstraction that lies –​in line with classical Japanese artwork –​ outside of civilized and dynamic, Eurocentric Western history and purview. In this way, she enacts, and is herself complicit in, an orientalising cultural imperialism of the foreign Other. In a short story occupied with representational politics, Miriam’s own observation of the ways in which “the representational intentionality of monuments is always subject to slippage and to the ironies of changing historical contexts” is compounded by the reader’s recognition of her as a focaliser who is herself implicated in interpretive techniques that are “intensely bound up with the politics of representation itself ” (Kossew, 2010: 572, 578).

Coloured by history, shaped otherwise  57 Where there is a cognitive and imaginative attempt at border-​crossing, her overwhelming desire to interpret and re-​present her perceptive –​sometimes “it is a matter of guessing” (33) –​and historically prescribed experiential reality of the Others that populate the narrative also reaffirms their marginality. Where “Raising the Tone” outlines a cosmopolitan effort at inclusively understanding “humanity in all its guises” (Nussbaum, 1996: 9), the focalizer’s abstract rendering of its workings also highlights a “problematizing cosmopolitanism of the abject” (Nyers, 2003: 1075) that finally privileges and legitimates hierarchized representational structures. As the necessary project of an increasingly transnational (and postnational) world, Miriam’s apparent exercise at “border thinking or border epistemology” would appear to fall short of its transformative impulse as “the alternative to separatism … the recognition and transformation of the hegemonic imaginary from the perspectives of people in subaltern positions” (Mignolo, 2000: 724, 736). “Stuck,” not unlike all the characters that pervade the story, she, too, is fated to reiterate history’s prejudiced, organising dictates. As such, while acknowledging global, human interconnectedness, “Raising the Tone’s” aesthetically self-​reflexive irony also probes its inherent organicity and questions its prospects in the face of historically entrenched ideological and structural barriers and inequities. Bell hooks notes how in engaging (sympathetically/​empathetically) with the marginalised and/​or oppressed there is a danger also of appropriative (fictional) discursive violence that effectively mutes the Other. Speaking retrospectively, she muses about the encounter between the (privileged) self and (abject) Other: No need to hear your voice, when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-​ writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still [the] colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk. hooks (1990: 243, original italics) Miriam’s focal re-​presentation similarly enacts a simulative colonising process that ultimately renders her author of and authority over the (historically prescribed) narratives of the Other. Hers is fundamentally an attempt, not unlike Cath and in line with Wicomb’s own critiques of (South African) national and (Coloured) cultural exceptionalism, to inscribe, that is, authorise, a (liminal) self. But her process of rendering herself a (particular) “subject of history” –​her concern with her own “personal arrangements” (27, 37) –​is relationally referential and profoundly inter-​textual. That is, not only does she rehearse established history; such history, as the pervasive omniscient narrator also implies, is intricately and complexly connected to, and interweaved with, the Other’s (narrative/​narrated) history.

58  Aretha Phiri

Conclusion: No end to history It is not surprising, then, that despite her efforts to write her self into history, Miriam, the symbolic artist figure and emblem of (higher educational) enlightenment, is confronted, finally, with a blank page (31).14 Ironically named and undermining the divine interventions of her biblical namesake, she is denied that existentially “poignant opening line” (27).15 Mirroring her spiritual and ideological restlessness and aligned with her existential rootlessness (in identity and place), with no profound epiphanies or resounding conclusions, the only achievement history affords Miriam is a pathetic “doodling in the margins” (31). As with the unsatisfactory characters and in line with the disavowal of traditional linear structure and plot that constitute “Raising the Tone,” her inability to narrate the definitive story echoes an existential metanarrative of multifaceted and conflictual indeterminacy (Wicomb in Meyer and Olver, 2002: 194). Not unlike the story’s in media res opening, this is underlined in Miriam’s prosaic conclusion which, characterised by the cacophonous domestic scenes and polyphonic sounds (38) of her neighbourhood, underscores its exploration of subjectivity’s mutable idiosyncrasies and complex incoherencies. Wicomb’s refusal to provide ultimate meaning at her story’s end signals her suspicion, and finally rejection, of narrative’s capacity to act as transcendent existential signifier. Intricately connected to the ability to inscribe the self and conventionally posited as a linear progress narrative –​an inevitable achievement of history, identity’s finally ineffectual rendering in “Raising the Tone” underwrites migration as its central peripatetic trope. Unveiling thus a formal “poetics in disjunctures rather than continuities” (Stephanides and Karayanni, 2015: xviii), this signals identity as an inevitably incomplete and finally impotent process. Continuously navigating and negotiating history’s spatiotemporal and ideological boundaries, the story occupies a heterotopic, ambiguous space that profoundly troubles and unsettles inferred, reconciliatory “transitive and connective” grammars of identity (Clingman, 2009, xi). Admitting in this way “cracks and fissures that will not permit monolithic ideological constructs” (Wicomb, 1990: 36), “Raising the Tone” provides a “refurbished” language that aims “to replace the fixed syntagms” of ethno-​ national modes of identification (Wicomb, 2018c: 59). That is, in employing a critically diasporic rubric that presents prospects for “rethinking time and space, alongside a reassessment of nationalism and Pan-​Africanism and the excavation of [ethnic] histories long suppressed,” the story also puts “interpretive pressure on the concept of diaspora itself … not only as a description of people and worlds generated by displacement, but as a concept, method, and reading practice” (Goyal, 2014: x). In deploying a hermeneutics of dispersal and dissonance –​a border-​ crossing gnosis and poetics –​“Raising the Tone” signals more diverse ways of reading Wicomb’s oeuvre than is currently proffered and advances further prospects for ‘alter-​native’ realities than is presented in established national

Coloured by history, shaped otherwise  59 discourse. Advancing an “ethics of form” (van der Vlies, 2018: 269) in this way, “Raising the Tone” further underlines written narrative’s own opacity and multivalency, its “struggle over the [transcendent] sign, and over the authority that stands over meaning” (Driver, 2010: 541). Embedded –​“Stuck” –​within history’s interpretive designs, the story simultaneously enacts and effects an unflinching engagement with, and illumination of, the world’s ideological and material idiosyncrasies, including its historically entrenched inequities and continued prejudices. Colouring in the outlines of a grey and predictable world order in this way, “Raising the Tone” gestures at the realisation, otherwise, of more colourful existential prospects.

Notes 1 Wicomb has six published works of fiction to date, including two short story collections. These are: You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David’s Story (2000), Playing in the Light (2006), The One That Got Away (2008), October (2014) and Still Life (2020). Her critical essays have recently been collected and edited by Andrew van der Vlies in Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990–​2013 (2018). Her fiction has been the subject of three journal special issues (including the Journal of Southern African Studies, Current Writing, and Safundi), and she has been shortlisted for the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize (2015) and the Commonwealth Prize (2009). In 2012 Wicomb was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize of Literature and was awarded the M-​Net Prize in 2001. Where there is no obvious link to a publication, the page citations are attributed to the short story, “Raising the Tone”. 2 Wicomb has taught at the University of the Western Cape and has been Professor Extraordinaire at Stellenbosch University (2005–​2011). She also holds honorary doctorates from Open University in the United Kingdom (2009), University of Pretoria (2016), the University of Cape Town (2016) and holds an Emeritus professorship at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. 3 Coetzee’s literary fame and critical scholarship exceeds any other South African writer to date, entrenching him as part of a South African (and global) literary canon. 4 Resident in Scotland since the 1970s, Wicomb has, somewhat wryly, described her own migratory, diasporic state as an “an accident of history” (Meyer and Olver, 2002: 182). 5 South Africa has its own comparable canon of literary criticism with notable names including Derek Attridge, David Attwell, Leon DeKock, Andrew van der Vlies, Rita Barnard and Sarah Nuttall. 6 South Africa’s second democratically elected president, Thabo Mbeki (1999–​ 2008) famously disseminated the political and cultural rhetoric of an ‘African Renaissance’. See his famed speech “I am an African” at www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=​r7VX83JXnbo 7 Formalized in Apartheid’s Population Registration Act of 1950, the term Coloured is a (multi-​) racial designation that applies primarily to the Cape’s indigenous Khoisan peoples, European settlers and people from southern Africa and Southeast Asia who were enslaved on the Cape Colony. Where the term is capitalized this implies its political, identitarian referents. Where it is not capitalized, this refers to its ontological/​subjective modalities.

60  Aretha Phiri 8 My chapter title borrows from Erasmus’s seminal text but expands the phrase “coloured by history” to imply the ways in which history’s influence, while indubitable, is not static and does allow for a degree of contextual subjective agency. 9 “Raising the Tone” here echoes Brian Chikwava’s rather discombobulating novel, Harare North (2009) which, set in London, details the peripatetic, unsettling lives and encounters of African, particularly Zimbabwean, illegal migrants/​ asylum seekers. Wicomb has herself written on the heterotopic aspects of the text in her essay, “Heterotopia and Placelessness in Brian Chikwava’s Harare North,” published in The Globalization of Space: Foucault and Heterotopia and edited by Mariangela Palladino and John Miller (Routledge, 2015: 49–​64). 10 In its inferences to other texts and allusions to places and times elsewhere, “Raising the Tone” itself exhibits a similar inter-​textuality. 11 Where Emmanuel Ngwira (2017: 287) provides a novel, comparative reading of Wicomb as a transnational Afrodiasporic writer, his suggestion that she focuses on the lives and experiences of “ordinary African women as migrants” misses the complex use of irony in her work which undermines the notion of ‘ordinary’ women as well as problematizes easy ethnic essentialisms. 12 Lidl is a German supermarket chain whose aggressively competitive pricing and more diverse ‘ethnic’ products has appealed to the British ‘underclasses’ and to the very many (European) immigrants that populate the country. Lidl is thus representative of the limits of (British) nationalism as well as the disorderly and threatening de-​centering impulses of twenty-​first century globalization. 13 Thatcherism refers to the largely unpopular political and economic policies/​ ‘reforms’ of former British Conservative (Party) Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (1979–​1990), which included the privatization of nationalized industries and regulation of trade unions. 14 The title of my conclusion puns on Francis Fukuyama’s linear theorization of the ascendency of liberal democracy and the end of ideological and socio-​economic history post Cold War (1945–​1991) in his iconic text, The End of History and the Last Man (1992). It is also hard not to make, in Miriam’s symbolic characterization, a postcolonial literary connection with the Irish novelist James Joyce’s artist figure, Stephan Dedalus, in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916). 15 That the biblical, Hebrew origins of Miriam’s name are undermined in this short story –​she is no prophetess –​signals another instance of the failures of signification.

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4  Hyper-​compression and the rise of the deep surface Flash fiction in “post-​transitional” South Africa Peter Blair As two recent anthologies demonstrate, flash fiction has deep historical roots and flourishes in many countries. Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-​Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms (Ziegler, 2014) includes writers from 38 countries. Flash Fiction International (Merrill et al., 2015), which favours recent decades but goes back to Ancient Rome, features 50. The English-​language flash thrived in the USA, under the umbrella-​term “short-​short story”, from the 1920s, waned in the 1950s, but enjoyed a resurgence from the mid-​1970s (Casto, 2008; Masih, 2009). In 1986, the first of five “sudden fiction” anthologies, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas, was published, defining “sudden” as 1500 or 2000 words maximum (1986, 1989, 1996, 2007; Shapard et al., 2010). The term “flash fiction” was subsequently popularized by an eponymous anthology, which set a limit of 750 words (J. Thomas et al., 1992). While flash now encompasses a wide variety of inventively named subgenres, often with lower arbitrary word limits or gimmicky fixed-​lengths, there are critical consensuses about quantitative and qualitative definition: “flash” fictions are stories of up to 750 (or at most 1000) words; good flashes are generally feats of “compression”, often entailing subtle intertextual allusion, that stimulate an implied reader to fill narrative “gaps”; and they tend, as a consequence, to be particularly rich (relative to longer stories) in “implication” or inference (Blair, 2013; Chantler, 2008; Holdefer, 2014; Nelles, 2012; Thomas, 2014; Trimarco and Hurley, 2008; T. Williams, 2014). Flash fiction is nevertheless scarce in the numerous anthologies of South African “short” stories, including the most comprehensively diachronic. The Best of South African Short Stories (Turner, 1991), a Reader’s Digest compendium for the nascent post-​apartheid nation, boasted “over seventy illustrated stories of our land and its people” (1991: 3) from the 1880s to the 1980s by “over sixty authors” (1991: 5); yet only three pieces might, at a push, pass as flashes: “The Cannibal’s Bird” (1938), a “traditional Nguni story transcribed by Frank Brownlee” in about 750 words (89); and RRR Dhlomo’s “The Death of Masaba” (1929) and Mothobi Mutloatse’s “Honest Gladys” (1982), each around 900 words. Flashes are similarly rare in Michael Chapman’s Omnibus of A Century of South African Short Stories (2007), which collates Jean DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-4

64  Peter Blair Marquard’s A Century of South African Short Stories (1978), Martin Trump’s revised edition (1993), and his own The New Century of South African Short Stories (2004). In his Introduction to The New Century, Chapman asks “How long or short may a story be?” (2004: xiii); but of the Omnibus’s 121 stories, only a few pre-​twentieth-​century translations (from San, isiZulu and Dutch/​ Afrikaans), Brownlee’s “transcription” (which Chapman also includes), and Liz Gunner’s “The Mandela Days” (2007/​1992) might qualify as flashes, while the Dhlomo story again represents the 750–​1000-​word grey area. Amongst the next-​shortest are two from Maureen Isaacson’s Holding Back Midnight (1992), which Zoë Wicomb praised for its stories’ “racy super-​shortness” (2001: 163); but these are merely “sudden”. That these anthologies’ shortest pieces are folktales is at least germane, given that flash has antecedents, perhaps roots, in oral tradition. More recently, the publisher’s blurb for Twenty in 20: The Best Short Stories of South Africa’s Twenty Years of Democracy (Langa et al., 2014), which it promotes as “a longstanding reference for South African literary posterity”, hails Chris van Wyk’s “Relatives” (1995) as a “miniature masterpiece”; but this is towards the upper limit for a “sudden”, a category into which the anthology’s shortest piece, Wamuwi Mbao’s “The Bath” (2013; around 1250 words), more comfortably fits. Only a story inset within Van Wyk’s “miniature” might be considered a flash. Nor is flash fiction discussed in the major post-​apartheid literary histories (Attwell and Attridge, 2012; Chapman, 2003/​1996; Cornwell et al., 2010; Van Wyk Smith, 1990). The South African flash has not been regarded as a serious form; but it is also the case that most of these landmark anthologies and histories were compiled too early to catch its remarkable burgeoning from the mid-​2000s. Anthologies at least reflect a long-​standing tendency towards brevity, with South African stories often falling within the “sudden” limit. This is particularly true of those written for periodicals, epitomized by Herman Charles Bosman’s 60 Oom Schalk Lourens tales (1930–​1951) and 80 “Voorkamer” conversation pieces (1950–​1951) (Bosman, 2007, 2011); and over 90 stories by black writers, mostly South Africans, published (1951–​1958) in Drum (Chapman, 1989). Some Drum stories, such as Casey Motsisi’s anti-​apartheid anthropomorphisms “Johburg Jailbugs” (1989/​ 1957) and “If Bugs Were Men” (1989/​1958), are well within the “flash” limit. Nadine Gordimer features in Sudden Fiction International (Shapard and Thomas, 1989), which also includes South African emigrants Bessie Head, Denis Hirson and Barry Yourgrau, and in New Sudden Fiction (Shapard and Thomas, 2007) and Crafting the Very Short Story (Mills, 2003). South Africans appear, too, in overseas flash anthologies. Yourgrau, a US-​naturalized writer of often-​surreal flashes, is the sole representative in Ziegler’s Short, but appears with Damon Galgut (whose novel The Quarry (2004/​1995) has many flash-​like chapters) in Peter Wild’s The Flash (2007). Wild also includes Patrick Neate’s 100-​word “Jo’burg” (2007: 25), which skewers white racism and post-​apartheid political correctness, as well as the needy posturing of visiting liberals. In Flash Fiction International, South Africa is represented by emigrant Tony

Flash fiction  65 Eprile and immigrant Karina M. Szczurek. Flash: The International Short-​ Short Story Magazine, edited by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler in the UK, has, since its foundation in 2008, published 44 flashes by 17 South Africans, including Elleke Boehmer, Michael Cawood Green, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Liesl Jobson, Shubnum Khan, Kobus Moolman, Sally Ann Murray, Kelwyn Sole and Szczurek. Within South Africa, three anthologies wholly or partly devoted to local flash have appeared, the first two arising from women’s writing workshops: Women Flashing (Fisher, 2005), which includes 55-​word stories (known as “55 fiction”); Writing the Self (Schuster et al., 2008), which includes 100-​word stories (known as “drabbles”); and My Holiday Shorts (Mabaso, 2013). Fiction of flash-​length regularly appears in domestic literary magazines like New Contrast, and at least two stories have appeared under the heading “Flash Fiction” in English Academy Review, the peer-​reviewed journal of the English Academy of Southern Africa (Gardiner, 2010; Gottschalk, 2013). Two notable single-​author collections have been published by Johannesburg’s Botsotso: Horwitz’s Out of the Wreckage: Dream Parables (2008), which mixes flashes and suddens, and Jobson’s 100 Papers: A Collection of Prose Poems and Flash Fiction (2008). Recent collections of longer stories often include flashes: Stacy Hardy’s Because the Night (2015a) includes eight, Nick Mulgrew’s Stations (2016) two. While Jobson’s 100 Papers is predominantly “flash fiction” rather than “prose poems” (in which the emphasis is on language and imagery, instead of character or narrative), Sole’s Land Dreaming: Prose Poems (2006a) includes pieces closer to flash; two were reprinted in Flash magazine, which has also published flashes by Moolman that appear in his poetry collections (2007, 2010, 2013). Lava Lamp Poems (2011) by Colleen Higgs, who appears thrice in Women Flashing, includes crossover pieces that read like flash memoir. The best-​known South African who might be considered a perennial writer of flash fiction and nonfiction is Ivan Vladislavić. Missing Persons (1989), Vladislavić’s debut story collection, includes two flash cycles –​ “Sightseeing” and “A Science of Fragments” –​composed of nine and ten individually titled flashes. Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006) is comprised of 138 “linked vignettes (essays, short stories)” (Titlestad, 2012: 687) of flash and sudden lengths. “Itineraries”, an appendix that “traces the order of the previously published cycles and suggests some other thematic pathways through the book” (Vladislavić, 2006: 191), encourages reading each of the numbered vignettes as part of multiple alternative series, as recommended by author or improvised by reader, and of none. Oddments and offcuts from Vladislavić’s most recent books also have the makings or finish of self-​contained flash fictions. The dated headnotes and notebook “scraps” (17) of the 11 “failed stories” (9) that comprise The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories (2011) –​the first aptly inspired by Swiss “microscript” writer Robert Walser (2010) –​often go beyond abstract outlines into evocative adumbrations, while the 11 “Deleted Scenes” featured

66  Peter Blair in 101 Detectives: Stories (2015: 195–​204) could stand alone as fully fledged flashes. Some factors that fuelled the flash’s global rise might help explain its South African efflorescence. As Women Flashing and Writing the Self indicate, the flash’s brevity suits workshopping, popular with community writing groups and the standard pedagogy of Creative Writing degrees, which in South Africa started in 1985 (Pieterse, 2013); Jobson’s 100 Papers was, indeed, originally part of a Master’s dissertation (2006). The flash is often associated with (post)modernity, and the US turn and return to very short stories arguably reflected the social fragmentations of the interwar period and late capitalism, and the urgency of lives menaced by world wars, nuclear proliferation, and the AIDS pandemic; for some, society felt too atomised, life too brief, for grander, longer narratives (see Chappell et al., 1986). These factors are broadly applicable to contemporary South Africa, where gross inequalities persist, while neoliberal individualism has eroded (anti-​)apartheid solidarities, where the AIDS pandemic (exacerbated by denialism) is most acute, and where violent crime also heightens fear of premature death. “The undisputed genre marker for the short story is the imminence of the end” (Lohafer, 2003: 146), and the existential implications of narrative brevity are most obvious in flash, where the end is well-​nigh; in one-​page stories, it is visible from the outset. The short story has been ascribed a particular cogency in what Loren Kruger (2002) has called “post-​anti-​apartheid” culture. Chapman (2004: xi) posits that “the big narrative of the novel perhaps was the most appropriate response” to the “big theme” of apartheid, whereas the short story, which “favours flexibility, ellipses, surprise, emotion, implication”, is best suited to the complexities of post-​apartheid; and Michael Titlestad suggests that the unresolved suspension characteristic of the modernist short story is apt to South Africa’s ongoing transition (2010: 190–​191). Certainly, the short story is “less subject to the pressure of being interpreted as national allegory (or at least, state-​of-​the-​nation report) than the novel” (Barnard, 2012: 666). While it might equally be argued that these very characteristics suited the short story to multifarious subversions of apartheid’s grand narrative, Chapman’s and Titlestad’s contentions are further complicated by periodization of the after-​apartheid into two phases: a “transitional” period encompassing the “pre-​post-​apartheid” negotiations of 1990–​1994 (Clingman, 2012: 647) and a “post-​apartheid” decade of declining optimism; followed by a “post-​transitional” ( Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010), or “post-​postapartheid” (Chapman, 2009), period of disillusionment emerging from the early 2000s as “transition” increasingly looked “a rhetorical strategy […] to positively connote an evolution and to mask and justify a social, economic, or political ‘lack’ ” (Popescu, 2010: 161–​162). For Leon de Kock, this was “plot loss writ large: most obviously, the loss of what had been celebrated so widely as the rainbow nation, or the miraculous Mandela revolution, or even just a half-​decent, nonpartisan democracy administered by accountable civil servants” (2015: n.p.); and this profound sense of losing the national plot tended writers to extremes, “either

Flash fiction  67 towards a playing up of plot (genre on the one hand, and incident-​heavy nonfiction on the other), or a downplaying of it, a kind of under-​plotting that was most evident in literary fiction” (2015, n.p.; see also De Kock, 2016). If the novel was perhaps appropriate to apartheid, and the short story to transition, the flash –​a minimally plotted narrative that maximises implication –​ is therefore apt to the under-​plotted indeterminacy of the post-​transition. The striking correlation between transition’s demise and flash’s rise may be as much coincidence as causation, but it at least suggests that the advent of post-​transition was conducive to, perhaps a stimulus for, the flash. The flash is also a manifestation of what Sarah Nuttall has called the “rise of the surface” (2012; see also 2009: 83–​107), the valorisation of “surface” and its affect associated internationally with the “reality hunger” (Shields, 2010) of contemporary multimedia societies insatiable for “NOW moments” (Margolin, 1999). For Nuttall, “rediscovery of the surface” (2012: 410) entails rejecting “symptomatic reading” –​reading with a hermeneutics of suspicion to expose the repressed psychology, political ideology or lacunae lurking deep in the texture of literary texts; and this rejection marks a local generational rift between an apartheid-​era, largely white canon of the symptom and a revisionist post-​ apartheid art of the surface. It thus implicitly revises Njabulo Ndebele’s (1986) seminal call for a “rediscovery of the ordinary”, rehabilitating “surface” from his critique of a “largely superficial” (Ndebele, 1988/​1984: 329) black “protest” literature mired in a documentary “tradition of almost mechanistic surface representation” (1988/​1984: 333) and a demonstrative “convention of the spectacular” (Ndebele, 1986: 150). De Kock, however, critiques Nuttall’s binary between reading “across” and reading “down”, arguing that “literature may yet be seen to have within it both the urgency of the ‘surface’ and the ‘real’, and the supposedly older forms of thick texture” (2012: 7). This is especially true of good flash fiction, which in its quick delivery of a concentrated “single effect”, often onscreen, offers an urgent surface real to be read across; and in its reliance on (rather than repression of) implication, its requirement that readers fill in gaps, prompts depth reading. The ascendency of the flash might therefore be thought of as the rise of the deep surface. This chapter will undertake close readings (or decompressions) of three exemplary post-​transitional flashes, each under 450 words, that take key aspects of the (post)transition as their subjects: Tony Eprile’s “The interpreter for the tribunal” (2007a), which evokes the psychological and ethical complexities, and long-​term ramifications, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Michael Cawood Green’s “Music for a new society” (2008b), a carjacking story that invokes discourses about violent crime, alterity and the “ ‘new’ South Africa”; and Stacy Hardy’s “Kisula” (2015b), which maps the psychogeography of cross-​ racial sex and transnational identity-​ formation in an evolving urban environment. It suggests that such flashes might be considered “hyper-​compressions” in that they compress and develop, or distil and refract, complex themes with a long literary history and a wide contemporary currency. They can be distinguished from several other forms of

68  Peter Blair encapsulation: serious literary histories, whether narrative or encyclopaedic; such parodic précis as Twitterature (Aciman and Rensin, 2009), Condensed to Flash (Budman and O’Niell, 2015), and “digested reads” (on J. M. Coetzee, e.g., see Crace, 2005: 18–​19; 2010: 350–​354); and Henrietta Rose-​Innes’s (2014) 417-​word “Once upon our time”, “a gloomy tale made up of the [50] first lines of each of the Twenty in 20 longlist”. Flash fiction is inherently metonymic, offering a brief narrative as a part that suggests the whole implied story; and the flashes discussed below are also suggestive of, and allusive to, a broader literary culture. Given the post-​apartheid burgeoning of “South African literature” and the impossibility of comprehensive close reading –​which led De Kock (2009) to consider Moretti’s (2000) alternative of “distant reading” –​ the hyper-​compressive flash, while no substitute, offers a tantalizing shortcut to a literature it also significantly augments.

Flashback: Tony Eprile’s “The interpreter for the tribunal” (2007) The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been approached in a plethora of generically diverse texts, the best known including Ingrid de Kok’s poems in Transfer (1997) and Terrestrial Things (2002), Antjie Krog’s memoir Country of My Skull (1999/​1998), Sindiwe Magona’s epistolary Mother to Mother (1998), and Gillian Slovo’s thriller Red Dust (2000). In Country of My Skull, victim testimony is presented as reported speech, transcript and even poetry. For Shane Graham, this formal variation between and within texts is an attempt “to avoid the anaesthetizing effect of being presented with one horrifying tale after another” (2009: 84). Tony Eprile, South African-​born US-​domiciled author of “Temporary Sojourner” and Other South African Stories (1989), has defamiliarised the TRC in two further forms that mitigate against psychological numbing: The Persistence of Memory (2004), a three-​part Bildungsroman that dissects the habitual complicities of a “liberal” (2004: 170) national serviceman, which result in him becoming accessory to war crimes on the Namibia–​Angola border; and “The interpreter for the tribunal”, a flash published in three versions (2007a, 2007b, 2015) of just over 400 words, “a technical tour-​de-​force” (Baker, 2015: 79) that presents only the interwoven words of a political abductee and his torturer, voiced by their TRC translator. Whereas the Bildungsroman culminates in the set-​piece Amnesty Committee hearing on which it is predicated, the flash concentrates not just on a hearing but on a condensed moment extracted from it. It dispenses with extrinsic Bildung, and with such intrinsic procedural aspects as chairperson, legal counsel, third-​party witness statements, and psychiatric reports in order to distil the TRC’s essence: the encounter between perpetrator and survivor. Eprile’s flash was commissioned in August 2006 by Esquire, the American “general-​interest lifestyle magazine for sophisticated men” (Hearst, 2016), whose Napkin Fiction Project invited authors to complete stories on white cocktail napkins measuring 10-​inches square when unfolded. Eprile’s story, written, signed and dated 28 September 2006 in non-​cursive black ballpoint,

Flash fiction  69 fills one unfolded side. The photographed napkin was published online, with transcript, on 20 February 2007 (Eprile, 2007a), and is digitally archived with around 130 others (Esquire, 2007/​2008). Eprile’s resembles a primary source, as if hastily jotted by a notebook-​less reporter at a TRC hearing, or afterwards from memory in a bar. Seriousness is compromised, however, by the Project’s construction as a commercial gimmick that exploits the cult of the (urbane, inspired) author. The napkins bear a red Esquire insignia in their bottom right-​hand corners, inside the thin paper’s coined edges, pre-​branding disparate narratives with a homogenising corporate logo; and Eprile’s handwritten phrases “I just wanted” and “who I am” abut the faux calligraphy of the “Esquire” that twice breaks his final sentence like an interpolation or marginalia, rewriting physical and psychological desperation as consumerist aspiration. This commodification is exacerbated by the website environment, which juxtaposes stories with frequently refreshed advertisements and article links, distracting attention elsewhere and refocusing it in curious ways; in August 2016, Eprile’s traumatic history was leavened, absurdly, by pain relief and pension plans, “timeless, easy-​to-​wear watches” and “chakra healing”. A revised version appeared in Eprile’s essay “On justice, memory and compassion” (2007b), a “position paper” written for the symposium “Justice –​one or many?”, held 7–​13 May 2007 in Greece, and published online in an “electronic book” (University of Iowa, 2007). The revisions are extensive (every sentence has been edited, and several subdivided), but not substantive; they enhance rather than alter the story’s “single effect”. The interpreter for the tribunal Interpreter for Amnesty Applicant Major J Herzbreek –​Mr L.M. Speke Interpreter for Witness Mr Y Inkululeko –​Mr L.M. Speke I was hiding in my friend’s garage, a place no one would think to look. I had my informants, you see. We were boys together and I knew he’d never betray me. I waited until the time they usually brought him food and when he opened the door to my whistle, I was on him like a pack of wild dogs. He ground my face into the concrete, shouting horribly in my ear. The pain was terrible. I did not know what was happening. The trick is to disorient the prisoner right away. Get him off guard and he’ll tell you anything you want to know. My arm was twisted behind my back and I could feel the ligaments tearing. I did not struggle but he kept twisting, his knee my knee in his back you bastard you’re done now he screamed I was thrust from the darkness into the light, then into the darkness again like a sack of potatoes I threw him into the trunk of my car, I’m that strong. I could hear him thumping in the trunk as I drove and hit the brakes taking the corners hard I bashed my head against something hard and was thrown helplessly into the light of a two-​thousand candlepower torch right in the eyes hitting him all the time the fists coming from nowhere

70  Peter Blair and I felt a rib breaking, my nose breaking. The blood ran down his face and he didn’t even lift a finger to wipe it off my glasses had come off when they got me and I had no idea where I was on the ground of that hut, and yes I sat on his back and pulled the sack over his head, the wet sack like I was drowning I could not breathe. He could not breathe, I pulled it off now you will tell me what I want to know because otherwise I could not breathe I told him everything it did not take long to get the names my friends who betrayed me the friends I did not know what I was saying what he was saying those were hard times and we had to be hard to live in them I just wanted the pain to stop but I have to live with who I am now who was I then it is too terrible to speak of it at all is to go mad. (Eprile, 2007b) Eprile’s “position paper” advocates “idealistically” that “retributive justice” be replaced with “restorative justice”, exemplified by the TRC. It argues that offenders are themselves victims of a society similarly in need of reform; but is less certain about the process’s benefits for offenders’ victims, quoting TRC testimony that questions whether a bereaved mother “was better off before she told her story than she was after telling it”. Eprile’s flash, however, “arose out of a statement [he] had heard Desmond Tutu make […]: that many of the interpreters for the TRC suffered mental anguish and breakdowns from having to speak in the first person for both violator and victim”. Krog similarly notes the impact on “a young Tswana interpreter”: “ ‘It is difficult to interpret victim hearings,’ he says, ‘because you use the first person all the time. I have no distance when I say “I” […] it runs through me with I. […] After the first three months of hearings, my wife and baby left me because of my violent outbursts’ ” (1999/​1998: 195). De Kok’s poems “The transcriber speaks” and “The sound engineer” describe the strain on other professionals who recast oral TRC testimony, into complete written and edited aural forms: the transcriber is “the commission’s own captive”; “The sound engineer hears /​ his own tympanic membrane tear” (2002: 32, 33). But, like De Kok’s “What kind of man?” (2002: 25–​27), Eprile’s “translated” story also evokes (albeit implicitly) the high-​profile amnesty case of police captain Jeffrey Benzien. Krog saw Benzien’s July 1997 hearing as a watershed that “seizes the heart of truth and reconciliation –​the victim face to face with the perpetrator –​and tears it out into the light” (1999/​1998: 109), and described the “spectacle” of Benzien demonstrating “the wet bag method” on a black volunteer as “one of the most loaded and disturbing images in the life of the Truth Commission” (1999/​1998: 110); Graham notes that it “became an iconic moment”, with the case “becoming a kind of tabula rasa on which observers inscribe their own feelings about the TRC’s work” (2009: 23). Eprile inscribes on it a double concern –​with restorative justice, and the second-​ order trauma of its facilitators –​that he addresses in two fictional modes. His flash provides the essay’s last words since he prefers the “ambiguity and nuance […] of fiction” to a “position paper”; but he twice describes it as a “brief fable”, one of

Flash fiction  71 fiction’s less ambiguous, more positioned forms, defined by Abrams and Harpham as “a short narrative […] that exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behavior” and usually concludes with “the moral in the form of an epigram” (2005: 7). As a “fable” that concludes “it is too terrible to speak of it at all is to go mad”, the flash confirms Tutu’s “statement” about second-​order trauma. It also constitutes a meta-​engagement with the ethics of writing, and reading, about atrocity (explored by Coetzee, 1986, 2003), suggesting that brevity might not mitigate its hazards. But ambiguity about these final words’ attribution, and nuances throughout, problematise Eprile’s “position” on offender victimhood and victim catharsis. Whereas a fable is monological, subordinating characters’ voices to their author’s purpose, “The interpreter for the tribunal” is comprehensively dialogical. Its three “voices” are not only in dialogic interaction with social discourses and textual representations of the TRC, but also with each other. Every utterance is double-​voiced, in that the words of perpetrator and survivor are reported, in translation, by the interpreter (the de facto narrator). Some are effectively treble-​voiced, when ownership of a reported phrase is initially unclear or remains debatable. And the mediated “voices” of perpetrator and survivor are themselves polyphonous. This polyphony of and within voices is reflected in Eprile’s invented names (searches of the TRC website return no matches). “Speke” puns on “speak” and invokes Victorian explorer John Hanning Speke, best known for “discovering” the source of the Nile; this is apt for the interpreter whose voicing dis-​covers obscure sources, but also perhaps locates the origins of human rights violations in colonial history and posits the TRC as a putative end-​point. The other names indicate race and language: “Herzbreek” being white, an Afrikaner, speaking Afrikaans; “Inkululeko” being black, a Zulu or Xhosa, speaking isiZulu or isiXhosa. They also encapsulate key ambiguities. Major J Herzbreek (German herz +​Afrikaans breek) might be translated as “major heartbreak” or, loosely, “major change-​of-​heart”, suggesting his roles as heartbroken (damaged and/​ or distressed) heartbreaker and putative reformee. Inkululeko (isiZulu and isiXhosa) means “freedom” or “independence”, but is also ironic, questioning whether the survivor is free: his initial, “Y”, could stand for an affirmative “yes”, but the pun on “why” queries liberation’s point. These ambivalences generate a dynamic conflict within and between unequal “voices”, as Inkululeko and Herzbreek strive for self-​control and for control over their shared story. Each of the first ten sentences, of short and medium lengths, is devoted to one voice, and it is clear who “speaks”. Each of the final four, longer sentences contains at least four units of speech, alternating between speakers who become increasingly entangled. The story could be considered a prose sonnet, with a volta initiating a final quatrain –​reminiscent of Christopher van Wyk’s much-​quoted and anthologized sonnet “In detention” (1986/​1979), an escalating satire of state explanations for detainee injuries and deaths. Inkululeko attempts to construct a denotative, factual account, listing assaulted body parts (face, ear, arm, back, ligaments) and

72  Peter Blair telling rather than showing suffering (“The pain was terrible”). But in the final four sentences, bodily details (head, eyes, rib, nose) are overtaken by vivid evocation as he struggles to chart location (from “friend’s garage” to lightless car trunk to breathless hut floor) and becomes re-​immersed in disorienting trauma. Inkululeko’s attempt to narrativize the experience is an attempt to regain agency and work towards closure, transforming “hot memory” into “cool memory” (Mengel et al., 2010: vii). But his telling exposes aporias (“a place no one would think to look”) and lacunae (“I did not know what was happening”, “I had no idea where I was”, “I did not know what I was saying”) that only Herzbreek can explain (“I had my informants, you see”; “The trick is to disorient the prisoner”). As Graham notes: the imperative to convey the survivor’s subjective experience of trauma also contains an internal paradox: to narrate a story requires an agent, but in testimonial literature the narrative describes the destruction of the author’s agency. In this sense, the true agent of a torture victim’s story is the torturer, a fact that threatens to exile the victim to the margins of his or her own tale. (2009: 29) Herzbreek’s indispensable testimony is tainted, moreover, by personal vanity (“I’m that strong”), by contempt (“he didn’t even lift a finger”), and by professional pride and derision (“it did not take long to get the names”). There are also hints (the slippage from singular to plural in “I was on him like a pack of wild dogs” and Inkululeko’s “they got me”) that he is shielding co-​ perpetrators. Herzbreek’s agency problematises his blaming of himself on history (“those were hard times and we had to be hard to live in them”), suggests his motivation was not exclusively political, and questions his contrition and commitment to full disclosure. Inkululeko’s dependence on the equivocal Herzbreek suggests that his own re-​telling might reinforce rather than dissipate trauma. Being pulled from “hiding” and “darkness” and “thrown helplessly into the light of a two-​thousand-​candlepower torch” seems an apt but ironic metaphor, with undertones of Christian salvation and millennial fresh starts, for the TRC: the traumatic eliciting of Inkululeko’s story creates uncomfortable affinities between the TRC’s gentle probing and his torturer’s interrogation. Like Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001), it questions the therapeutic value of re-​opening old wounds, which in Dangor’s novel leads to family breakdown and murderous revenge. Eprile’s entangled “voices”, each unresolved, are ultimately irreconcilable, which produces an open-​ended discourse rather than an epigrammatically conclusive fable. This openness was increased when “The interpreter for the tribunal” was anthologised in Flash Fiction International (Eprile, 2015). The body of the “On justice” version is reproduced unchanged, but both “Interpreter for” lines have been omitted.1 The author’s name appears in their place beneath

Flash fiction  73 the title, sacrificing the flash’s verisimilitude as historical document. Also lost are the lines’ epigraph-​like functions. The deletions remove the potential distraction of the puns, but at the expense of their broad allegorical connotations. Anonymising the “voices” might facilitate extrapolation to other contexts, but sacrifices important racial and linguistic specificities, the inference that two languages are being translated, and clarity that a high-​ranking officer acted as state agent against a private citizen. It also removes identification of the interpreter’s gender. The absence of “Amnesty Applicant” and “Witness” obscures the tribunal’s particularity as a defined part of a unique process, even risking it being misconstrued as retributive-​ justice trial rather than restorative-​justice hearing. Much of what is lost is to be inferred from “SOUTH AFRICA”, which, printed in capitals above the title, stands as explanatory key or a priori determinant, like a “made in” or “product of ” stamp. But this grand narrative overshadows the scrutiny of individual agency, introducing the story as the tragic result of a flawed national history. These textual erasures and paratextual additions inflect the remembering of a process that was variously regarded as excavation or burial, as instructive reminder or repository for amnesia. The story’s re-​presentation might be considered an update, as detailed memory of apartheid and the TRC dwindles, particularly overseas. Flash Fiction International’s one other story from “SOUTH AFRICA” is Polish-​born Szczurek’s “Not far from the tree” (2009, 2015), in which the lonely wife of a business traveller decides to commit adultery. The conjunction of these flashes –​public and private, racial and sexual, political and domestic –​reflects the contemporary image of South Africa in the “global imaginary” (De Kock et al., 2001), bifurcated between, in Ndebele’s (1986) terms, fading “spectacular” past and supposedly “ordinary” now.

Flash noir: Michael Cawood Green’s “Music for a new society” (2008) Graham notes that such “emblematic moments” from the TRC “focus our narratives of the past on certain ‘gross’ violations, while ignoring other profound material and psychological effects of apartheid and colonial rule” (2009: 30). Michael Cawood Green, whose long historical novel For the Sake of Silence (2008a) recreates a Trappist mission in colonial Natal, explores the post-​apartheid legacy of these “profound material and psychological effects” in a 360-​word flash published in the inaugural issue of Flash: The International Short-​Short Story Magazine: Music for a new society It was as if the wall of glaring whiteness he had thought could never be climbed was suddenly something he could just walk through. Changes of which he was half-​aware –​newspaper-​headline changes, triumphant, distant, changes meaningful for others, not for those like

74  Peter Blair him, but changes nevertheless –​made the magic that had kept the wall in its place lose its power, undoing the artifice sustaining it. Now those once behind the wall stood exposed, quivering in their vulnerability, ordering those who would still serve them to create higher, thicker walls out of the far less effective mediums of concrete, brick, stone, wire, steel. The things they owned waited for him. Taking them was the revolution that they were told had never happened. Not the things, but the taking. He could depend upon their lingering sense of invincibility to betray them: dogs, alarms, bars bypassed, he slipped ineffably as the future into their sleep-​warm houses. Then he stood above them, breathing in their dreaming before doing whatever it occurred to him to do. Tonight, not even that much effort: a car pulled over just as the first heavy drops fell from the darkness through which he strode, humming, sure in his own strength. A child, two or three years old, let out to urinate, its mother hovering, irritated. So easy, for the figure coming out of nowhere: the flash in the driver’s window, the jerk and spattering too little warning for the stark white face turning at the passenger door. The pale damp vision coming apart, the body folding in slow motion to the scrub and litter that lined the tarmac as it held on grimly to the last of the day’s heat. Easy, too, the dragging out and tossing of the driver over his mate. The satisfying work finally coming with taking the frozen child from the back seat and placing him next to his brother, short pants still down at his knees. Leaving them standing beside the leaking bundles of smart casual wear as he drove away, letting the play of guilt and blame become stronger than any illusion of a wall. (Green, 2008b) The story centres on a crime for which South Africa is notorious, prominent in such novels as Michael Williams’s Hijack City (1999) and Christopher Radmann’s Held Up (2012), and films including Hijack Stories (Schmitz, 2000) and Tsotsi (Hood, 2005), in all of which the car is not just portable property but a potent symbol of affluence and agency. To the extent that Green’s story is crime fiction, it is South African noir, territory serially traversed by Deon Meyer’s Afrikaner detective Bennie Griessel (Infanta, 2004; translated as Devil’s Peak, 2007) and Margie Orford’s psychologist Dr Clare Hart (Like Clockwork, 2009/​2006), rather than the cosy-​crime realm of Sally Andrew’s amateur sleuth, agony aunt Tannie Maria (Recipes for Love and Murder, 2015). In flash noir, however, there is no room for the complexities of the plot-​driven police procedural steered by an emotionally damaged investigator. Nor is there resolution: this truncated crime-​narrative is also –​to repurpose David Gaffney’s (2006) term for a 150-​word flash –​a “sawn-​off tale”, ending with the explosive incident and forgoing any reassuring restoration of order. Nevertheless, the absence of a case-​solving detective does not

Flash fiction  75 preclude social detection, the revelation or diagnosis of society’s ills that is particularly marked in South African crime fiction. “Music for a new society” is not a whodunnit or a howdunnit, or even a will-​he-​get-​done-​for-​it, but a whydunnit. The story proceeds from whydunnit backstory to what-​was-​done moment, inverting the crime–​ investigation chronology of most detective fiction and the action–​ epiphany sequence common in short stories. The backstory, more “spot of time” than Bildung, reflects the general agreement that “crime in South Africa is ineluctably historical” (Barnard, 2012: 692). In Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog (2004), with expectations raised by the 1994 election, the black student narrator-​protagonist Dingz muses: “Everything is ‘affirmative’ nowadays […] Shoplifting is called ‘affirmative transaction’. Carjackers make ‘affirmative repossessions’ ” (79). In Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Lurie rationalises theft as the “schematic” redistribution of “things”, including his car, in “a vast circulatory system” (98), and diagnoses the vengeful “personal hatred” his daughter saw in her unknown rapists as “history speaking through them […] A history of wrong” (156). A more subtle determinism is posited, as literal thesis, early in Orford’s Like Clockwork: Hart’s doctorate, “Crimes against Women in Post-​ Apartheid South Africa”, argues that “because we averted a civil war […] the ‘unspent violence was sublimated into a war against women’ ” (2009/​2006: 21–​22). In “Music for a new society” the writer-​ as-​detective constructs a psychological profile that similarly suggests that the violent “taking” of “things” is an affirmative substitute for the denied “revolution”. This profile is focalised mostly through the taker, whose epiphany “suddenly” reveals apartheid’s “wall of glaring whiteness” as an ideological construct of “magic”, “artifice” and “illusion” founded on “power”, and exposes whites’ post-​apartheid “vulnerability” behind mere material “walls […] of concrete, brick, stone, wire, steel” and “dogs, alarms, bars”. He divides blacks into elite beneficiaries and marginalised poor (“changes meaningful for others, not for those like him”), and the black poor into servile (“those who would still serve”) and criminal (who pursue his retributive, redistributive “revolution”). The casual violence –​“whatever it occurred to him to do” during home-​invasions, the carjacking’s “easy” murders and “tossing” of a body –​is enabled by depersonalisation of whites, reduced to an amalgam of position (“those once behind the wall”, “driver”), racialised phenomena (“stark white face”, “pale damp vision” –​manifestations of “glaring whiteness”), animal (“body”, “mate”), and class-​signifier (“bundles of smart casual wear”). The sparing of the boys might offer hope of redemption, as the nurturing of a carjacked baby does in Tsotsi; but “taking” one of the young heirs from the car, and the car from them, arranging them into a roadside tableau of dispossession, is “satisfying work” that seems to eclipse “taking” possession of the vehicle. It is also uncertain whether “the play of guilt and blame” he finally admits to is a mental game or serious proto-​epiphany, which makes the profiled “other” ultimately unknowable and begs questions about the moral

76  Peter Blair standings of history’s damaged criminal, complicit beneficiary and young inheritor. It reconfigures TRC debates about whether human rights violations can be blamed on history rather than individual agency, and problematises property rights too. “Music for a new society” thus ends on a bleak impasse between ineluctable past and “ineffabl[e]‌[…] future”, also implied by the title’s multiple ironies. The “music” is not a celebratory symphony or inaugural anthem but a disharmony, audible as the assured “humming” of the carjacker; no other sound is referred to in a story that moves from interiority to filmic “slow motion”, which registers a gunshot only as a visual “flash”. “New society” is an echo of the much-​vaunted “New South Africa”, the human and potentially optimistic “society” being a sibilant four-​syllable substitute for the geographical colonial name. South Africa’s “new” democracy is celebrated in Gardiner’s flash “The new candidate: Durban” (2010) and Higgs’s “Jeppestown, 1994”, the first of five distinct prose narratives that form her reflective “Notes from a New Country” (2011: 49–​55); but the sequence’s initial exhilaration is tempered by “The Mount Nelson Hotel, 2006” (53), which scrutinizes commodification of impoverished women’s anti-​ apartheid struggle, and “Centurion, 2007” (55), which notes the ruling party’s “friendly yet menacing goodwill”. The full-​blown post-​transitional irony of Green’s title implies that the “new” is inextricable from the old, and “society” is broken. If even single-​ word nicknames can be stories (see Nelles, 2012: 101n9), “South Africa” and, especially, “the ‘new’ South Africa”, which quickly acquired the double scare-​quotes, are remarkable flash fictions. Green’s “Music for a new society” might thus be read as an updated version, and retrospective vindication, of the 1980s “literature of dread” (Van Wyk Smith, 1990: 67, 97, 123, 131), as an example of the post-​apartheid “liberal funk” (see Marais, 2001) of those whose “lingering sense of invincibility” has been eroded, leaving them “exposed, quivering in their vulnerability” –​a fearful insecurity, and impetus for white flight, explored by journalist Kevin Bloom’s Ways of Staying (2009). This implication is bolstered by the only part of the story focalised through a victim: “the figure coming out of nowhere: the flash in the driver’s window, the jerk and spattering too little warning” for the mother. “Music for a new society” represents the post-​apartheid criminal “other” with qualified understanding and unqualified dread. Whereas Green, who has noted “the dangers of appropriating the voices of ‘others’ in any particular construction of what the ‘new’ South Africa will be” (2007: 54), here avoids the first-​person, Kelwyn Sole’s “Respect”, a one-​page piece in Land Dreaming (2006b: 66), presents a carjacker’s voice. Appropriation is avoided, however, by its presentation as a prose dramatic monologue addressed to a paying auditor, presumably a journalist or sociologist, which problematises the voice’s authenticity and so pre-​empts criticism. Kwaaiboy, whose slang-​Afrikaans name translates literally as “ ‘Angry’ (or ‘Nice’) Boy” (116n), performs his gangster identity for the auditor, just as he describes doing for his gang:

Flash fiction  77 My name is Kwaaiboy but my guys call me Respect. […] When we are all into the car to do a job, I load my piece so’s they all can see –​like this, né? –​and shout: “My name is Kwaaiboy, son of no one. Today I’ll teach them to respect. I’ll teach them to shit when they hear my name!” (Sole, 2006b: 66) Kwaaiboy styles his carjackers as “car dealers” who “don’t do petty crime”, but bravado gives way to pathos. His defiant self-​creation acknowledges the formative influence of family breakdown (“son of no one”) and a township environment blighted by poverty, intra-​and inter-​gang violence and AIDS. “Thug life” seems predestined and inescapable, and premature death inevitable: God “always takes my guys”. It is not propertied victims, but gangsters whose days are explicitly numbered. Kwaaiboy’s criminality is motivated by desires for “respect” (the story’s title, and his storied nickname) and “money” (the story’s raison d’être, and its bottom line): “When you have money though you can do anything.” But this conclusion seems as desperate as it is defiant, as hollow for someone entrapped by his environment as it is true for many outside it. Sole’s story is less explicitly historicised than Green’s, but it likewise presents crime as rooted in the material deprivations and psychological damage inflicted by apartheid; and consequently as motivated by desire not just for “money” and “things”, but also for the empowering experience and symbolism of taking them, whether in pursuit of “respect” or “revolution”.

Flash forward: Stacy Hardy’s “Kisula” (2015) Stacy Hardy’s Because the Night contains 21 stories, eight of which are under two pages, including five that each fit on one page. As Jobson (2015: n.p.) notes, “The shorter stories constitute ‘flash fiction’ due to their potent compression, rapid recoil and the collaboration required of the reader”. “Kisula”, the second-​shortest story, at 317 words, uses compressive techniques common in flash: first-​person narration, which economically combines character and narrator; a minimal number of characters and locations, deftly evoked; beginning late, in medias res; and ending early, on an implied epiphany.

Kisula They’d already started when I got there. The usual crew, the usual subject: BC. How come Black Consciousness guys always have white girlfriends? The whole table looked from me to Andile. I said, forget it. I’m not his girlfriend we just fuck sometimes. Everyone laughed except Andile. He looked sad then he raised his beer, a salute. The bottle was nearly empty. It caught the sun and made circles on our table. I felt dizzy, skin tingling, gripping too tight. I didn’t want to drink anymore so I left without paying. The street smelt like fish. The beer swilled in my stomach and my armpits itched. My building is an old office block converted to

78  Peter Blair residential. The doors are glass, wood panelling floor to ceiling. I sit in the cool of the lobby and watch soccer with the Congolese security. He is a refugee. He calls himself Gary, even though his real name is Kisula. I think Kisula is prettier. I ask him to say it. I like how it sounds, round and low in his mouth. K-​i-​s-​u-​l-​a. He tells me to shush. On the TV it is France vs Chile. Kisula is backing France. I think that’s fucked up. I say, how can you support them after what they did to your country? He shrugs. They have the best team. He says, look. The French are taking a penalty. The stadium goes silent. Everything is frozen and throbbing like something stretched taut. The ball slices the screen, a single white orb, a streaking comet –​whoomp! –​and everything explodes. Next to me Kisula is shouting. He stands and raises his arms, his muscles turning and tilting in the light, angles and shadows, his eyes shining. I stand too. I dance on the spot with my hands in the air. We both dance. We dance and laugh together like we share something deep and real and eternal. (Hardy, 2015: 33) “Kisula” falls into two main parts and settings, juxtaposing the narrator-​ protagonist’s interactions with Andile’s “crew” and Kisula, the first narrated in past tense, the second in present. The in medias res opening inserts her, as well as the reader, into the midst of an already-​commenced activity, reinforcing her uncomfortable marginality, which Hardy has described as a reflection of her own “sense of being other” when in “anti-​white conversation” (Gray van Heerden, 2015). The discomfort is also boredom, enacted by the second sentence’s repetition of “usual”, particularly with Black Consciousness, whose familiarity is indicated by the initialism “BC”; and the post-​apartheid persistence of this anti-​apartheid political philosophy (which dates from the late 1960s, and was most prominent in the 1970s) is indicative of broader post-​ transitional disillusionment. What the story explicitly takes issue with is the cliché that “Black Consciousness guys always have white girlfriends”, and the implication that even post-​apartheid cross-​racial relationships –​sometimes dubbed “ ‘affirmative romance’ ” (Mhlongo, 2004: 79) –​cannot be extricated from South Africa’s history of anti-​miscegenation laws and mythologies (see Blair, 2003b: 583–​588; 2012: 480–​481, 485–​486). As the narrator-​protagonist of Hardy’s “My black lover” observes: “We joke about it but we both play the roles: him as all darkness, danger and downward trajectory, me as repressed little white girl rebelling against privileged upbringing, the private schools and fancy university education” (2015c: 89). In this four-​page story, role-​playing is undercut by reality –​“When we do actually get round to fucking it’s not like the fucking I imagined” (2015: 91) –​and in “Kisula” such roles, and their political overtones, are wearily dismissed: “I said, forget it. I’m not his girlfriend we just fuck sometimes.” The stale repetition is figured by the near-​ empty beer bottle with which a “sad” Andile offers a valedictory “salute”: it produces “circles” on the communal “table”, the narrator’s “dizzy” head (and “swilled” stomach), and a sensation that her “skin”, primary marker of race,

Flash fiction  79 is “gripping too tight”. This prompts her to leave “without paying”, metaphorically for the apartheid past, attempting to break free from the relentless historicising of desire. This past-​ tense portion of the story ends with the briefest of street passages, which bridges the main settings: “The street smelt like fish.” This olfactory impression of an implied journey in an unidentified, perhaps coastal, city is hardly the flânerie of Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys (2006) or Mark Gevisser’s Lost and Found in Johannesburg (2014), both of which undertake detailed peripatetic mappings, but the switch to present tense introduces the common metaphor of urban environments as palimpsests (see Graham, 2009: 195n2): “My building is an old office block converted to residential.” This suggests wider inner-​city regeneration, while the wood-​panelled lavishness implies the repurposing of a rundown Central Business District abandoned by big business. The deft slippage in the present tense from the expression of a condition now existing (“My building is”) –​which initially seems embedded in the past-​tense narrative –​to the description of an action now occurring (“I sit in the cool of the lobby”) functions as a double-​stitched seam that both joins and separates recent past (in which identities diverge) from immanent present (in which convergence is improvised). (On ideas of the “seam”, see De Kock, 2001.) The setting moves indoors to the liminal space of a threshold place where the affluent meet those who protect their privilege –​where the disenchanted narrator seeks refuge, ironically with “a refugee” who has suffered greater displacement. The flash’s brevity precludes anything approaching the detailed migrant-​ story of Jonny Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope (2015), which reconstructs a Somali’s real journey from Mogadishu to Cape Town and eventually the USA, but Hardy similarly broaches ethical questions of agency and appropriation. While the first part of “Kisula” invokes the cliché played out in Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature (1987) in Hillela’s role as handmaiden to a succession of African(ist) revolutionaries, the second recalls its post-​apartheid revision in Gordimer’s The Pickup, in which Julie Summers, affluent “acolyte of the remnant hippie community” (2002/​2001: 197) which constitutes “The Table” at Johannesburg’s “L.A. Café”, meets an immigrant Arab car mechanic who calls himself Abdu, before emigrating with him to his unidentified country, where his real name, Ibrahim ibn Musa, is revealed (see Blair, 2003a). Hardy’s “Congolese security”, who “calls himself Gary, even though his real name is Kisula”, is as much a palimpsest as the “converted” building he guards; and his name-​changing invokes a common trope that is also suggested by Sole’s Kwaaiboy styling himself “Respect” before a paying auditor. In Gordimer’s July’s People, for example, it takes a revolution to reveal to July’s employers of 15 years what their servant “really was called”: “Mwawate” (1982/​1981: 120). This Man Friday convention of a subaltern adopting a single English name for the convenience of white employers was satirised in an early post-​liberation Madam & Eve cartoon (or graphic flash), in which Madam remains ignorant, having mistaken Eve’s feted surname “Sisulu” (invoking struggle veteran

80  Peter Blair Walter Sisulu) for a sneeze (Francis et al., 1998: 24). Moolman’s flash “All girls’ school”, which evokes the experience of an employee at a desegregated school who is addressed by white teachers as “Philemon” and by black pupils with variants of his “real name”, offers a more subtle meditation on naming and identity (2007: 39). In “Kisula”, however, it is the employee who “calls himself ” by a Western name, and the white narrator’s appropriation of his prerogative to self-​making by favouring his “real name” (also valorised in the flash’s title) is implicitly rebuked: “He tells me to shush.” A broader implication is that the trope itself, however revisioned, is as hackneyed as the miscegenation cliché the narrator wants to “forget” and the Jim-​comes-​to-​Jo’burg narrative, or transnational Gary-​comes-​to-​town variant, she largely omits. The ostensible reason for the shushing is Kisula’s absorption in live television coverage of an international soccer match.2 When the narrator protests Kisula’s support for France as “fucked up”, Kisula “shrugs” off colonial history and pragmatically backs “the best team”. His choices of name and team act on what Graham refers to as “the amnesiac impulses of globalization” evident in “the post-​apartheid, postmodern city” (2009: 4). In the opening scene of Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome To Our Hillbrow (2001), Johannesburg immigrants are invited to share in anarchic celebrations of the home nation’s triumph in soccer’s 1994–​1995 African Cup of Nations. But Kisula –​like the male title-​character of Hardy’s “My Nigerian drug dealer” (2015d: 45–​48), who sits in the infatuated female narrator’s Cape Town home “watching the European Club Finals drinking a beer” (2015: 47) –​is consumer of a globalized commodity rather than affiliated to a national team, with no apparent aspiration to belong to “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983) of origin or (notwithstanding his name-​changing) destination. In the story’s visual final third, which follows Kisula’s instruction to “look”, the focus narrows to the concentrated moment of penalty and celebration. The football’s “single white orb” is an apt image of globalization, and likening it to “a streaking comet” links it to a conventional harbinger of epochal change wrought by colliding worlds (as Halley’s Comet is in Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930)). The shushed South African lobby presages the “silent” French stadium, and geographical distance is aurally and visually dissolved with an onomatopoeic “whoomp!” as “[t]‌he ball slices the screen” and “everything explodes”. Kisula’s celebratory dance links him to the distant crowd, and the narrator mirrors him so that, in the last two sentences, the “I” and the “he” become, tentatively, “we”. Her “dance on the spot” is both movement and stasis, however, and the characters’ connections with the global and with each other are qualified by the final sentence’s simile: “We dance and laugh together like we share something deep and real and eternal” –​the implication being that the “something” shared may be superficial, illusory and transient. This refusal to satisfy the narrator’s epiphany-​hunger acknowledges the story’s erotic subtext, as “throbbing like something stretched taut” gives way to “streaking” and climactic explosion, and the white female gaze objectifies the black male body –​already tagged with the “prettier”-​sounding name –​“turning and tilting in the light”. The

Flash fiction  81 “like something” simile is explicitly sexual, but the relationship mooted by the concluding “like we share something” simile is doubly tentative, having the tentativeness inherent in simile comparisons but lacking their usual specificity. The “something” the narrator twice imagines between herself and Kisula is libidinal and may or may not be more, but its inchoate provisionality is preferred to the certain dead-​end of the repeated “usual”. On its simplest level, then, “Kisula” is a love story about a jaded woman who walks away (literally, and perhaps metaphorically) from a stale relationship and rebounds towards a potential new lover. But it is also a peripatetic mapping of urban space, historical time and literary history. As Barnard notes, “cities generate an improvisational mode of being and belonging, quite different from that proposed by nationalism” (2012: 669), and both Kisula and the narrator implicitly reject the “imagined communities” of nations to adopt this individualistic “improvisational mode”. The narrator’s walk away from the retro pressures of the “table” (rendered in past tense) to the contemporary “cool of the lobby” (expressed in present tense), from uncomfortable margin to thrilling threshold, archives a backward-​looking nationalism, in which identity is fixed, and writes a forward-​looking transnational cosmopolitanism, in which identity is multiple and exhilaratingly ad hoc. Hardy’s flash thus acknowledges the historical “entanglements” of people and the temporal “entanglements” of past, present and future (see Nuttall, 2009: 1–​12), but also tentatively embraces an impulse to “forget”, “shush”, and “shrug” off the legacies of colonialism, to deliberately lose the national plot, and to revision its literary tropes.

Conclusion Like Eprile’s “The interpreter for the tribunal” and Green’s “Music for a new society”, Hardy’s “Kisula” is an exemplary hyper-​compressive flash whose deep surface and complex implications are richly evocative of post-​transitional South Africa. Each flash is rooted in the psychological and material legacies of apartheid and compresses and develops contemporary themes with a substantial literary history: the TRC as an intensely problematic “restorative” process; violent crime as historicised social phenomenon and fearful preoccupation; cross-​racial sex, transnational migration and the psychogeography of the Africanized city under globalisation. Each is implicitly concerned with the ethics of voicing or representing others without compromising or appropriating their agency. And each is unresolved, ending in the suspension characteristic of the modernist short story, but also incorporating pre-​closure “gaps” for the implied reader cognitively to fill, often with recourse to contextual and intertextual knowledge. As these three hyper-​compressions suggest, the best of the flash fiction that has thrived during South Africa’s post-​transition is of literary-​historical significance –​not just as an inherently metonymic form suggestive of, and allusive to, a broader literary culture, but as a serious genre in its own right.

82  Peter Blair

Acknowledgements For helpful feedback on this chapter, my thanks to the book’s editors, the anonymous peer reviewers, Ashley Chantler, Melissa Fegan and Clara Neary. Tony Eprile’s “The interpreter for the tribunal” and Michael Green’s “Music for a new society” are reprinted by kind permission of the respective authors; Stacy Hardy’s “Kisula” is reprinted by kind permission of the publisher, Pocko Editions.

Notes 1 The omission was Eprile’s decision, rather than the editors’: “I wanted to allow the story to be about places other than South Africa (and though I enjoyed making the puns in the various names, I wondered whether that might not distract from the story being told)” (Eprile, 2018, personal communication). 2 The match, or at least the scored penalty kick, seems to have been invented for thematic resonance and dramatic effect: since the end of apartheid, France and Chile have twice played International Friendlies in France (1994 and 2011) and once in Chile (2001); France scored in all three matches, but never a penalty (Association of Football Statisticians, 2018).

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5  Queer temporalities in two short stories by Makhosazana Xaba The afterlife of Can Themba’s “The Suit” Cheryl Stobie

[A]‌ll futures are bred in the bellies of their pasts. (Xaba, 2013a: 8)

The year 2017 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of legendary Drum journalist and author, Can Themba. His iconic short story, “The Suit”, published in the literary magazine The Classic in 1963, recounts the tale of a devastating punishment visited upon an adulterous wife, Matilda, by her formerly uxorious husband, Philemon. After being informed about the affair by a fellow inhabitant of Sophiatown, Philemon returns home and affects not to see Matilda’s lover, who dives out of the window, leaving his suit behind. Philemon devises a scheme to enact his revenge by making his wife treat the suit as an honoured guest, serving it food at every meal and on one occasion taking it for a walk through the streets. Matilda attempts to regain some self-​ respect by joining a married women’s group, and decides to host a party for the women and their husbands. Philemon demands that she place food before the suit while the company is assembled, and in humiliation she commits suicide. This brief story is far more complex and nuanced than the above bald summary might suggest. The setting is Sophiatown, a multiracial but mainly black cultural hub which was demolished by the National Party government between 1955 and 1963, despite spirited protests. This was a place of sharp contrasts, encompassing danger, poverty, oppression, respectability, religious fervour, conviviality and creativity. Racial oppression common to Sophiatown residents features in Philemon’s consciousness, demeaning his humanity and calling into question his masculinity. Initially he is shown to idealise Matilda, viewing her sleeping form as a “matutinal miracle” for whose “pure beauty” he offers a “wordless Te Deum” (Themba, 1963: 6). Unusually for a husband at that time, he makes her breakfast, which he enjoys serving to her “in his supremest immaculacy” (8). This emphasis on cleanliness, purity and husbandly devotion is shown to be a reaction to soul-​destroying racism, which stereotypes blackness as dirty. Philemon congratulates himself on not being DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-5

90  Cheryl Stobie “one of those who believed in putting his wife in her place even if she was a good wife. Not he” (8). This strikes an ominous note, as he is taking the moral high ground in not disciplining a “good” wife, while custom would certainly dictate that a “bad” wife deserves punishment. Philemon’s thinking is characterised by binaries, and when he discovers his wife’s infidelity he undergoes a mental metamorphosis from idolising her to threatening to kill her if she does not abide by his punishment; in psychological terms, shifting from masochism to sadism. This transformation graphically illustrates the Madonna/​whore dichotomy, a practice of categorising women in religio-​ mythic terms as the sinless Virgin Mary (suitable wife material) or the temptress Eve (desirable sexual partner). As Philemon’s revulsion at the “miasmata of sweaty intimacies” (8) reveals, his sexual nausea is an objective correlative of his new view of Matilda as soiled goods. Elizabeth Grosz offers illuminating observations that assist in evaluating the relative subject positions of both characters within their historical context, as well as the achievements of Themba in portraying them: Bodies are always irreducibly sexually specific, necessarily interlocked with racial, cultural, and class particularities. This interlocking, though, cannot occur by way of intersection (the gridlike model presumed by structural analysis, in which the axes of class, race, and sex are conceived as autonomous structures which then require external connections with the other structures) but by way of mutual constitution. Moreover, if subjectivity cannot be made to conform to the universalist ideals of humanism, if there is no concept of “the human” that includes all subjects without violence, loss, or residue, then the whole of cultural life, including the formation and evaluation of knowledges themselves, must be questioned regarding the sexual (and cultural) specificity of their positions. Knowledges, like other forms of social production, are at least partially effects of the sexualized positioning of their producers and users; knowledges must themselves be acknowledged as sexually determinate, limited, finite. (1994: 19–​20) At the beginning of “The Suit”, Philemon’s masculine textual body negotiates between the public zone of work and the domestic domain, while Matilda’s feminine body is confined to the domestic realm. The two characters are interpellated differently under pressure from the paired oppressive ideologies of apartheid and patriarchy. Matilda is positioned by her husband as a salvation from the indignities he suffers, leading him to venerate her “sexually specific” (19) body by responding to the stereotypes associated with the female sex and therefore seemingly denying her the full expression of her sexuality. It could be deduced that this denial might have led her to “experiment with adultery” (Themba, 1963: 11). Matilda’s ‘fall’ in Philemon’s eyes leads to his overt assumption of power over her, including psychological cruelty and

Queer temporalities  91 the threat of the ultimate violence, murder. While the structural violence of misogyny is agonisingly detailed in the short story, I would argue that it is not authorially endorsed, but criticised, as Themba provides us with a clear view of Matilda’s abject humiliation and her horror at Philemon’s “evil” (10), “sheer savagery”, “brute cruelty” and “demoniacal rage” (12). The text also shows her economic dependence on her husband, and her lack of any alternatives to remaining with him, thus arousing sympathy on the part of the reader, an effect which is intensified in the portrayal of her corpse: “There she lay, curled as if just before she died she begged for a little love, implored some implacable lover to cuddle her a little […] just this once […] just this once more” (16). Here Themba is certainly evoking sympathy for feminine subjectivity in a context where “the universalist ideals of humanism” (Grosz, 1994: 20) have been violated. Looking at other stories by Themba, Michael Chapman pays tribute to his use of emotion and compassion (1989: 22) and the “social import” of his “unalloyed humanism” (23). In this case, the very title of “The Suit” connotes the auratic concepts of “residue”, “loss” and implicit “violence”, which Grosz alludes to as calling into question “the whole of cultural life” (1994: 19). As the short story raises such potent issues about a particularly poignant exemplar of the heterosexual contract in a resonant place and time, it is unsurprising that it has been reprinted numerous times. The tragic tale has also been successfully adapted for the stage by Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon, being produced in centres including Johannesburg, Paris (in French translation), London and New York, where it was directed in 2013 by the legendary Peter Brook and his collaborator, Marie-​Hélène Étienne. In an article that touches on the 1994 Johannesburg production at the Market Theatre, Loren Kruger draws attention to the implications of “the retrospective view of the present-​day audience”, commenting that it offers “not a past or future perfect but a subjunctive mood” (1995: 67). A short film made by Kitso Lynn Lelliott (2011), as part of her MA degree, foregrounds this subjunctive mood by privileging Matilda’s point of view, while a more traditional approach is adopted in the short film, “The Suit”, directed by Jarryd Coetsee (2016), starring Phuthi Nakene, John Kani and his son, Atandwa Kani. Three South African authors have recently explored the domain of this retrospective subjunctive in five short stories as a response to certain perceived lacunae in Themba’s original tale: Siphiwo Mahala in two stories, “The Suit Continued” and “The Lost Suit”, and Zukiswa Wanner in “The Dress that Fed the Suit”, published together in Mahala’s African Delights (Mahala, 2011a, 2011b; Wanner, 2011); and Makhosazana Xaba in two stories, “Behind ‘The Suit’ ” and “ ‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side”, published in Running and Other Stories (2013a, 2013b). “The Suit Continued” is related by Terence, Matilda’s lover, and is characterised, notes Rob Gaylard, by a “note of righteous indignation, as well as [an] appeal to the reader (who is assumed to be sympathetic)” (2013). Terence’s rampant sexism is revealed by his not knowing Matilda’s name; he

92  Cheryl Stobie refers to her as “the woman” or “the girl”. Women in general are portrayed as having more power than men, as they are the seducers: Mahala represents Matilda anachronistically as wearing an alluring red mini-​dress. In addition, Terence’s wife, Grace, is portrayed as crueller than Philemon when she makes Terence appear in public in his underwear because his suit is missing. At the end of the story he goes to Philemon and Matilda’s house, where he sees Philemon crying over her body. Instead of feeling remorse, Terence worries that he will be viewed by the community as “an adulterer, a killer and a devil” (Mahala, 2011a: 26). While the egregiously misogynistic opinions expressed by Terence may be intended to signal satire on the part of the author, the prevalence of such everyday sexism and a popular tolerance towards male chancers result in the endorsing of reactionary gender views. Margaret Lenta’s comments in her discussion of Mahala’s novel When a Man Cries (2007) apply equally to this short story: both “portray male centrality and power in a way that seems to assume that they are unchangeable” (2009: 66). The story “The Lost Suit” is related in first-​person narration by another character invented by Mahala, Terence’s brother Stompie, a thief, tsotsi (flashy gangster) and incorrigible womaniser, who congratulates himself on “landing a hot child” at a shebeen; however, she turns out to be a ghost who tricks him and leaves him naked. Aside from this otherworldly seductress, the female characters are portrayed as shrewish, stupid, fat, grotesque, dirty, unappealing, greedy and opportunistic. The stereotyped ‘humour’ of the story, combined with the reference to the mutual support of brothers that suggests a cosy world of masculine camaraderie, works in opposition to any implied social criticism. Similar to the framing of “The Suit” from Philemon’s masculine perspective, Mahala’s two androcentric stories form bookends to the feminine perspective provided by Zukiswa Wanner, in “The Dress that Fed the Suit”, which is written in epistolary form by Tilly to Phil as she is about to commit suicide. Wamuwi Mbao observes that Wanner’s “act of creating a life for the character is an elegant riposte to the swaggering misogyny Mahala and other writers of his ilk too often call on” (2011). Tilly’s use of affectionate abbreviations for names indicates her desire for informality and warmth, which she finds in short supply with her husband. He is portrayed as serious, scholarly and dependable, but sexually unadventurous (in keeping with Themba’s dramatisation of the Madonna/​whore dichotomy) and unaware of the lonely tedium of her role as a housewife. Terry represents an escape valve and the fulfilment of her sexual curiosity, sparked by comments about sexual bliss made by other women. Wanner criticises assumptions by Terence in “The Suit Continued” by having Tilly crisply note the economic disparity in the time and place of the setting, “[w]‌here the black man is oppressed, but the black woman even more so because she cannot own or rent property” (2011: 27). Tilly’s cri de coeur is that of a woman who is stultified by the need to conform to social codes, and who expresses her polyamorous love for both the men in her life, although her pregnancy raises the spectre of the uncertain

Queer temporalities  93 paternity of the child, thus contributing a specifically gendered aspect to her decision to commit suicide. While both Mahala and Wanner re-​tailor “The Suit” from specific gendered viewpoints, Makhosazana Xaba offers a salutary queer element to this collective literary revision. “Behind ‘The Suit’ ” is written in epistolary form by Philemon’s dying male lover, Mondliwesizwe Mbatha, to his daughter, thus queering the narrative and suggesting different mores possible in a new generation. “ ‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side” is recounted in first-​person narration by Matilda, uncannily after her suicide. It delineates the affair between Matilda and another woman, Gladys, and their plan for Matilda to fall pregnant by Gladys’s colleague Terence, so that Matilda can leave Philemon and the two women can set up home together with the baby. Further queer temporalities are added in this story. Xaba’s re-​ visionings, to use Adrienne Rich’s term, are significant, as they provide a window on to historically occluded and stigmatised intimate connections and practices. Re-​vision –​the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction –​is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-​knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-​destructiveness of male-​dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see –​and therefore live –​ afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order re-​assert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (1972: 18–​19) In the South African context, “the assumptions in which we are drenched” that Xaba’s two stories radically critique are patriarchy, heteronormativity and homophobia. She reveals that despite these oppressions, people in the past established loving same-​sex connections and supportive sub-​cultures. The position of freedom and social assertiveness from which Xaba can publish these stories derives largely from the constitutional rights accorded to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. These rights have been embodied in a range of protective legislation, resulting in a sense of self-​esteem, dignity and agency in LGBT people. Moreover, as Constitutional Court judge Edwin Cameron notes regarding the upholding of these rights, “South Africa has served as a beacon to the rest of the world, including Africa” (2016: 21).

94  Cheryl Stobie It is gratifying to note that in 2014 the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights adopted the landmark Resolution 275, condemning “violence and other human rights violations […] of persons on the basis of their imputed or real sexual orientation or gender identity”, and calling on states to assume an active role in ending such abuse (Resolution 275, 2014). In recent years, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and Seychelles have decriminalised homosexuality, and Kenya may follow suit in future (Dubuis, 2016). However, it is disturbing that both in Africa and globally anti-​LGBT legislation is rife –​often as a result of colonial-​era legal impositions. In Africa, homosexuality is illegal in 34 of 54 nations. The Kaleidoscope Trust notes that 40 of the 53 Commonwealth states have laws criminalising same-​ sex relationships to varying degrees (Speaking Out, 2015), and the Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Trust, John Fingleton, quantifies this: “More than 90% of Commonwealth citizens live in a jurisdiction where LGBTI [the I standing for Intersex] are criminalised” (2016). One way in which South African citizens can act as “a beacon” by promoting the rights of LGBT people is by producing and analysing literary and cultural artefacts, such as Xaba’s stories, made possible in this spatial and temporal context. Earlier I quoted Elizabeth Grosz’s comments on the interlocking of sexually specific, racial, classed and culturally positioned bodies, within a context of subjectivity and human rights (1994: 19–​20). While her comments provide an underpinning for my analysis of Xaba’s two re-​fashionings of “The Suit”, Grosz concedes that her central theoretical metaphor of the Möbius strip is “not well suited for representing modes of becoming, modes of transformation” (210), which are necessary when charting progressive changes from the past to the present and imagining further changes projected into a future characterised by social justice. A theoretical perspective that does allow for speculation and shifts of perception is that of queer temporalities, which I turn to in my subsequent discussion. Xaba adroitly revisits Themba’s foundational text and time, and uses Mahala’s work as an intertext (Wanner’s appeared after Xaba wrote “ ‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side”). In addition, the reader encounters Xaba’s two Suit stories at either end of her book of short stories, requiring the slotting together of the narrative jigsaw puzzle across the space of the other stories which enact “Running”, the title story of the collection which typifies all the tales, suggesting movement, escape, activity, progress and becoming. Donna McCormack provides a useful theoretical lens through which to view “Behind ‘The Suit’ ” and “ ‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side”: What are the possible differences between performativity as a description of the workings of colonial and familial power and performativity as a disruption of the very structures that make life unbearable and unlivable for so many; and, what is the role of testimony in both opening up the present to unimagined possibilities and realizing something in excess of normativity? In order to address these questions I turn to the fleshy body

Queer temporalities  95 –​to multisensory embodiment –​and I suggest that the intimate and collective process of embodied witnessing, where listeners take responsibility by attempting to translate into narrative form these unarticulated histories, is integral to the possibility of seeking out non-​violent belonging, intimacy and friendship in the performative assemblage of power. (2014: 5) McCormack thus draws our attention to the ethics of writing and analysing alternative queer histories. Lest this perspective appear too idealistic, however, it is vital to bear in mind Lee Edelman’s salutary caution against a drive towards a mood of celebratory optimism: “If queerness marks the excess of something always unassimilable that troubles the relentlessly totalizing impulse informing normativity, we should expect it to refuse not only the consolation of reproductive futurism but also the purposive, productive uses that would turn it into a ‘good’ ” (Dinshaw et al., 2007: 189). What needs to be further pointed out is that, like queerness, “reproductive futurism” is not necessarily simply consolatory, nor need it conform to a totalising heteronormative script, as Xaba reveals in both of her stories under consideration. Three of her four main characters engage in what Chung-​Hao Ku terms “instrumental bisexuality”. As he notes, Bisexual temporalities do not iron out or distill people’s sexual practices, fantasies and subjectivities to honor a “true” straight or gay identity. Nor do they verify bisexual subjects by gender attraction to both genders. Given that people may have sex with both genders for reasons other than sexual orientation, bisexual temporalities embrace what would be dismissed as contradictions or exceptions in linear, transitional, monosexual takes on individual sexual histories, making room for sexual partiality and multiplicity. […] [B]‌isexual temporalities do not erase a gay-​identified man’s heterosexual histories or a straight-​identified man’s homosexual encounters. (2010: 309–​310) Instrumental and other forms of bisexuality have been, and still are, common in African countries, including South Africa; ignoring or misnaming these erases a significant component of queer African experiences and subjectivities, while fictionalising them acknowledges the complex dynamism possible between positions on the sexuality continuum (see Stobie, 2007). In an interview, Xaba explains that one of her intentions in writing her revisions of “The Suit” was to challenge the misogyny of the Philemon character by offering a motivation for his extreme actions: “He had something to hide and was going to go to any lengths to achieve that. […] [I]‌t made sense to introduce the twist of sexual orientation that the writings of the Sophiatown period are silent on” (Beautement, 2014). Although Cape Town has been called “the real epicentre of black gay and lesbian culture”,

96  Cheryl Stobie Sophiatown was also known to be a centre of queer life (Chetty, 1995: 117). In “Behind ‘The Suit’ ”, Mondliwesizwe Mbatha, an 80-​year-​old man who was formerly Philemon’s lover, is approaching death and writes a letter of testimony consisting of three “bare bones” (Xaba, 2013a: 1) to his daughter. The letter-​writer, on the cusp of becoming an ancestor, attains a tone of oracular gravitas. He is a “future dead person” writing himself out of his time “while time is running out” (Frecerro in Dinshaw et al., 2007: 184). The first revelation that Mondliwesizwe makes concerns his daughter’s genealogy on his side. His own maternal grandfather died underground in the gold mines, his body never being recovered for proper burial. Xaba thus touches on a background of racial oppression under colonialism and capitalism. Mondliwesizwe’s mother was a traditional healer, descended from five generations of healers. Because of her calling she was expected not to marry. As Mondliwesizwe’s father was a Motswana, he is the product of people of two nations, cultures and languages; however, he bears his maternal surname, countering the custom of patrilineal naming. The letter emphasises reverence for tradition through its references to respect for age, the ancestors and the healing offered by sangomas; further, tradition offers spaces for gifted women to be independent and influential. The second fact that Mondliwesizwe shares with his daughter is the story of her conception –​a bisexual coming out. He and her mother were anti-​ apartheid activist comrades in Swaziland when they received news of the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, and in comforting each other “We each experienced our firsts: me with a woman and she with a black man” (Xaba, 2013a: 4). This consummation resulted in the woman’s pregnancy. In line with Ku’s notion of bisexual temporalities, the primarily man-​loving Mondliwesizwe’s heterosexual liaison is honoured in recounting this narrative. He adds that while he was enchanted with the baby, on being told of her birth, Philemon, his lover at the time, felt jealous and betrayed. Polyamory is thus revealed to be a perilous domain, especially where social scripts endorse asymmetrical gender relations and homophobia, and reproductive futurity threatens conceptions of same-​sex monosexuality. The third narrative disclosed by Mondliwesizwe again concerns bisexual temporality and polyamory. This account, which he is ashamed to relate, occurs prior to the second story, and is set in Sophiatown, where Mondliwesizwe’s mother fully accepts Philemon as, in her view, the ancestors endorse their relationship. Having discovered the suit, he is furiously agonising as to what action to take. This angry attitude strikes Mondliwesizwe as “inappropriate, an overreaction and hypocritical” (6), and in jest he advises Philemon to “make her feed the suit” (6). Mondliwesizwe is appalled when he discovers that his lover has followed through on his flippant suggestion, resulting in the familiar suicide of Matilda, and later, in Xaba’s account, in Philemon’s suicide. In this version, patriarchal control is toxic to self and other, and avoidable, given some humour and humanity.

Queer temporalities  97 Mondliwesizwe’s adored mother is credited with the aphorism: “all futures are bred in the belly of their pasts” (8). The letter from a father to a queerly conceived grown child of mixed racial and religious heritage presents the reader with an alternative vision of gender and sexualities in Southern Africa, and a tender connection across the ocean between the father’s home in South Africa and the daughter’s in the United States. In contrast to the Western names of Matilda and Philemon in Themba’s original story, Xaba uses a resonant indigenous name for the father: Mondliwesizwe Mbatha, Mondli meaning “the one who rears and brings up” (Kalumba, 2012: 162), and wesizwe meaning “of the nation”, while Mbatha is a clan name referring to a twin, and has historical associations with sangomas (Mbatha Surname Origin, 2013). He also informs his daughter that it was his desire to call her Fakazile, which means “one who has witnessed. Probably regarding the validity of the relationship between the mother and the father” (Kalumba, 2012: 60). Being co-​witness of the slice of personal history described from a queer postcolonial perspective positions the reader as the recipient of an invitation: “a demand and a responsibility […] to respond and thus act upon the narrative” (McCormack, 2014: 5). The turn towards temporality in postcolonial historical and literary analysis permits “other modes of consciousness to be considered seriously” (Dinshaw in Dinshaw et al., 2007: 178), such as the insights of sangomas or the presence of ghosts. Xaba mentions in her interview with Tiah Beautement that one of the ways in which she intended to counter misogyny in her final story in Running, “ ‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side”, was by “making Matilda speak for herself as the narrator from the other world, as a powerful spirit/​ancestor-​voice/​ character; make her a more rounded human being with her own ideas, her own decisions, her own world; introduce another powerful woman character, again with her own complete sense of self ” (Beautement, 2014). This story dovetails with “Behind ‘The Suit’ ”, with Matilda describing in first-​person narration the love affair that begins between her and an alluring singer and teacher, Gladys, after her marriage to Philemon. Unlike Themba’s Matilda, who is merely shown in reaction to Philemon’s actions, her own motivations being opaque, this version of the character displays interiority and subjectivity. Placing her narration from the perspective of the afterlife “proposes queer spectrality as a phantasmic relation of historicity that could account for the affective force of the past in the present, of a desire issuing from another time and placing a demand on the present in the form of an ethical imperative” (Freccero in Dinshaw et al., 2007: 184). Matilda begins her story with the words: “It’s time” (Xaba, 2013b: 139). Part of the demand she presents to a contemporary reader is an acknowledgement that theatrical adaptations of Themba’s story have been biased against the partial representation of her character. The present moment is a conducive one for Xaba’s version of the character to “come out and speak

98  Cheryl Stobie for myself. […] That way, the world will know the truth and I can finally rest” (139). The coming out referred to is simultaneously an exploration of feminine agency and a disclosure of the complicated bisexual connection between five characters. The start of the relationship between Gladys and Matty (as Gladys calls Matilda), during “the night of the deep blue sky and seeing stars” (143), is presented in luminous terms as profoundly pleasurable and life-​changing. Gladys inducts Matty into passion and the safe space of a queer subculture within Sophiatown where queer desire can be enacted. Matty confides in Gladys that sex between her and Philemon has only ever been performed anally, as he is uncertain about the prospect of fatherhood. Gladys then illuminates Matty as to the significance of Philemon’s sexual preferences, and when he later comments that he can see that Gladys makes Matty happy, she responds that she can see that his journalist (Mondliwesizwe from the previously discussed story) makes him happy too. After this understanding is reached between them they no longer interact sexually. A year later Gladys starts pressing Matty to disclose their relationship more openly, and suggests that she seduce Gladys’s colleague, Terence, so that she can fall pregnant and leave Philemon, after which the two women can set up home together with the baby in Durban. This fantasy of a queer family is to be brought about by instrumental bisexuality. However, as in the original tale, Matilda’s affair with a man is exposed, and in Xaba’s version, fearing the exposure of his own secret, Philemon enacts his revenge with the suit as dramatic prop. When Gladys starts distancing herself from Matty, the latter concocts a plan to reclaim her, and joins the married women’s club. Gladys seeks membership of the club, pointing out that a women’s club should not exclude unmarried women. She is arguing for communal solidarity between all women: married or single, mothers and non-​mothers, of any sexuality. Matty supports her, asking her fellow committee members: “ ‘What would it take to change this?’ ” (150). The proposed change is then supported and does occur. In a recently rediscovered essay, WEB Du Bois (2000 [1905]) discusses two rhythms in human existence: a primary rhythm that is inexorable, and that he correlates with the death rate, and a secondary rhythm, an incalculable one embedded with the seeds of change, that he associates with chance. The concrete example he provides of this secondary rhythm is “a woman’s club” (44). Although he does not provide further details, Elizabeth Freeman speculates that he is referring to “one of many progressive-​era gatherings of black women who aimed to educate themselves, advocate for reform, and help their poor” (2010: 171). Clubs such as these, and the one in The Suit stories, offer personal development and creative forms of affiliation that allow for change and work against the grain of the inexorable primary rhythm of culture. Xaba’s Matty attempts to use the women’s club instrumentally to win back Gladys by impressing her at the party she throws at her home for the club members, but Gladys uses this occasion to bid Matty farewell, as she is leaving South Africa. This puncturing of Matty’s fantasy of a life with Gladys

Queer temporalities  99 leads her to choose the inevitable rhythm of death, which she refers to as her “transition” in preference to the term “ending” (Xaba, 2013b: 153). From its vantage point on “the other side” of temporality and the afterlife, “ ‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side” queers marriage by dramatising instrumental bisexuality and polyamory; shows the dynamic interplay between inexorable rhythms and contingent, malleable ones; and presents the reader with two women characters with agency, one of whom succumbs to but transcends her fate, while the other embraces change by escaping from the frame of the story. Both of Xaba’s Suit stories allow the reader to connect affectively with the past, re-​visioning fictional events through the lens of the subjunctive. Xaba portrays desiring bodies that are, as Grosz suggests, “always irreducibly sexually specific, necessarily interlocked with racial, cultural, and class particularities” (1994: 19) from a human rights perspective. Both stories are concerned with the transmission of queer knowledge situated in the past that is made possible by the changes that have occurred between the past and the present. Xaba calls upon readers to witness the testimonies of two queer narrators whose voices are given particular power by their speaking from the purview of the ancestors. Time is rendered metaphysically resonant and open to connection and intervention. The two stories are situated “along the seam of [their] becoming-​historical” (Nealon in Dinshaw et al., 2007: 189), which propels them out of their time of writing into the future, where the possibility exists of crafting “a feminist, transnational and queer genealogy that could speak […] loudly and across […] many centuries” (Freccero in Dinshaw et al., 2007: 187). Both “Behind ‘The Suit’ ” and “ ‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side” critique heteropatriarchy; they queer marriage, procreation, Sophiatown, black communities and the South African nation; and they contribute meaningfully to present and future postcolonial queer writing and reading.

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100  Cheryl Stobie Dinshaw C, Edelman L, Ferguson RA, Freccero C, Freeman E, Halberstam J et al. (2007) Theorizing queer temporalities: A roundtable discussion. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12(2–​3): 177–​195. Du Bois WEB (2000) [1905] Sociology hesitant. Boundary 2 27(3): 37–​44. Dubuis A (2016) Kenya could become the next country in Africa to legalize homosexuality. Vice News. Available at: https://​news.vice.com/​arti​cle/​kenya-​could-​bec​ ome-​the-​next-​coun​try-​in-​afr​ica-​to-​legal​ize-​homose​xual​ity (accessed 6 May 2016). Fingleton J (2016) Why Commonwealth countries need to wake up to LGBT rights. World Economic Forum. Available at: www.weforum.org/​agenda/​2016/​ 01/​why-​commonwealth-​countries-​need-​to-​wake-​up-​to-​lgbt-​rights/​ (accessed 14 January 2016). Freeman E (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Gaylard R (2013) Ode to rich tradition in black SA writing. The Sunday Independent Books. Available at: http://​sund​ayin​dybo​oks.blogs​pot.co.za/​2013/​08/​ode-​to-​rich-​ tradit​ion-​in-​black-​sa.html (accessed 2 May 2016). Grosz E (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Kalumba PS (2012) Jabulani Means Rejoice: A Dictionary of South African Names. Cape Town: Modjaji Books. Kruger L (1995) The uses of nostalgia: Drama, history, and liminal moments in South Africa. Modern Drama 38(1): 60–​70. Ku C-​H (2010) The kid is all the rage: (Bi) sexuality, temporality and triangular desire in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Journal of Bisexuality 10: 309–​349. Lelliott KL (dir.) (2011) The Tailored Suit. South Africa: Wits Schools of Film and Television. Lenta M (2009) Expanding “South Africanness”: Debut Novels. Current Writing 21(1 and 2): 59–​77. Mahala S (2007). When a Man Cries. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-​ Natal Press. Mahala S (2011a) The Suit Continued. In: Mahala S (compiler) African Delights. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 15–​26. Mahala S (2011b) The lost suit. In: Mahala S (compiler). African Delights. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 33–​60. Mbao W (2011) An unexpectedly prescient prism. Slipnet. Available at: http://​slip​net. co.za/​view/​revi​ews/​an-​unexp​ecte​dly-​presci​ent-​prism/​ (accessed 2 May 2016). Mbatha Surname Origin (2013) Amambatha. Available at: https://​amamba​tha.wordpr​ ess.com/​2013/​04/​04/​mba​tha-​surn​ame-​ori​gin/​ (accessed 13 May 2016). McCormack D (2014) Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Resolution 275 (2014) Resolution on protection against violence and other human rights violations against persons on the basis of their real or imputed sexual orientation or gender identity. African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Available at: www.achpr.org/​sessions/​55th/​resolutions/​275/​ (accessed 9 May 2016). Rich A (1972) When we dead awaken: Writing as re-​vision. College English 34(1): 18–​30. Speaking Out (2015) The rights of LGBTI people across the Commonwealth (2016) Kaleidoscope Trust. Available at: http://​kaleid​osco​petr​ust.com/​speak​ing-​out-​rep​ ort-​2015/​ (accessed 14 January 2016).

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6  Queerying examples of contemporary South African short fiction Sally Ann Murray

Re: orientating What might it mean to begin to orientate myself, as a critic, towards queerness in contemporary South African English short fiction? What might such an “orientation” make possible, bring to light, cast doubt upon? As both a scholar and a writer of short fiction, how do I identify and query the “controversial orbit” of “queer”, the “ ‘messiness’ of it all” (Holland, 2005: x), where identity politics, intellectual projects and creative impulses flounder towards finding points of shared expression even while allowing for dissensus? If the short story form has historically been a marginalised genre, what are the implications for its depicting of queer identities considered minor, or on the margins? In glancing at the scene of local stories in English, post 2000, I am influenced by Sara Ahmed’s “question of what it means to ‘orientate’ oneself […] towards some others and not other others” (2006: 68), a convoluted prompt which shifts attention from familiar South African historical discourses of racialised otherness towards the wide variety of supposedly non-​normative expressions of gender and sexuality that are habitually othered by heterosexist culture. Ahmed’s thinking of “queer” in relation to “orientations” reminds me that if orientations point us to the future, to what we are moving towards, then they also keep open the possibility of changing directions and of finding other paths, perhaps those that do not clear a common ground, where we can respond with joy to what goes astray. (2006: 178) Ahmed’s critical tactic, influenced by an embodied phenomenology, allows me to avoid either facile binaries or insistent linearity when responding to queer impulses in local short fiction. Instead, I am enabled to appreciate wayward entanglements and detours and impasses as excellent opportunities for “thinking through queer” in current South African short stories, giving substance to the uneasy containment of the acronym LGBTQIA+​. The South African short story in English, post 2000, remains a predominantly heterosexual affair, since heterosexuality remains the familiar, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-6

Queerying contemporary short fiction  103 proximate given. However, disorientations have begun. While examples of local queer short fiction are not yet prolific within the dominant heterosexual matrix, stories may perform “queer work” as textual objects that query the assumed narrative experiential field of the South African short story as a structure that has produced the effect of the non-​normative in the process of being established. This chapter begins to locate “a specific strand of […] literary tradition that has a history –​peripatetic and liable to erasure, but a history nonetheless” (Munro, 2017: 190). At the same time, though, “the question is not so much [about] finding a queer line” (Ahmed, 2006: 106) in contemporary South African short fiction, as something distinct and separable. If I am interested in a critical turn towards queer stories with a view to altering the nature, extent and value of a local literary “inheritance”, my claim is not for queerness as idealised counter-​canonical voicing, or an “alternative space” of rebuttal (2006: 106). Rather, I consider moments where queer short fiction uneasily (mis)aligns with heterosexuality’s contouring of what constitutes the “habitable space” of literary output (2006: 106).

Queer/​y/​ing the short story Axel Nissen proposes that there is “something queer about the short story” (2004: 181) as a notoriously otherwise genre, recalcitrant as it is when it comes to categorical fixity, and disruptive of conventional aesthetic norms and proprieties. For Nissen, the value of the short story lies in its radical “perversity”, a creatively disobedient claiming of “deviance” or “abnormality” as both intractably capricious and obdurately unyielding. This is a contradictory intransigence that contributes to the short story’s being widely stigmatised as “the fictional ‘other’ of prose narrative”, burdened with the obligation to “continually justify its existence, worry about the circumstances of its being and becoming, agonize about its value and identity” (2004: 181). “[T]‌he short story”, he writes, “not unlike homosexuality […] was born into the world as a generic problem, a problem that required a solution, or at least a definition” (2004: 181). While I am uneasy about some of his premises (perversity, for one), I appreciate Nissen’s understanding that the push for categorical certainty in respect of “the” short story, as with “queer”, has proven valuably elusive. As he recognises, this creates a useful space in which elements of “short storiness” can be re-​thought through the faceted lens of queer theory, each cluster finding its oblique relation in sharing “wilfully eccentric modes of being” (Halberstam, 2005: 1) that “cannot be given a priori” (Nissen, 2004: 182). Sara Ahmed similarly endorses a use of “queer” to designate forms and behaviours –​like the short story –​which are “oblique” (slant, diagonal, out of line) and the practice of non-​normative sexualities. She insists on her right to “slid[e] from one sense to the other” (2006: 161). Similarly, I find it “important to make the oblique angle of queer do this work, even if it risks placing different kinds of queer effects alongside each other”, for this brings to light the necessary co-​relation and contingency of “sexual disorientation”

104  Sally Ann Murray and “social disorientation” (2006: 162), unsettling a received repertoire of how people, things and relations are arranged. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner also counsel against “queer” as “a stable referential content and pragmatic force” (1995: 344), the false coherence of “a single discourse” or “propositional program” (1995: 343). This is inspirational advocacy for my queer thinking around local short fiction in English, thinking that is provisional and welcoming of “unpredictability” (1995: 344). My queerying of queer in contemporary South African short fiction bears upon the co-​elusive notions of short story, queer sexualities and queer commentary as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning that occur when the constituent elements […] do not signify monolithically” (Sedgwick, 1993: 8). For every short story writer who has favoured “the traditional […] form with its five-​ part structure of situation, generating circumstance, rising action, climax and denouement”, there are those who have opted for “some queer genre far removed” (Dillingham, 2008: 6). Rough anecdote. Surreal image-​scape. Prose poem. Documentary account. Fait divers. Speculative fantasy. Over the years, fixations on genre have relaxed; theorists of short fiction have begun to look askance at passé, inherited categories which insist on oppositions between “tale” and “story”, or “short story” and “sketch”. In this situation, the short story as a genre seems itself to constitute an attractive, consanguine figuration of the diversely queer forms that queerness may take.

Margins and centres Some aver that if the role of the short story “has primarily been to act as the novel’s other, as the homosexual has been the heterosexual’s other” (Nissen, 2004: 181), this othering has also been enabled to short fiction’s advantage. The short story is not bound to the received time frames and unfolding chronologies that tend to govern the realist novel, for e­ xample –​this last being the historically dominant representational mode for imagining South African life. Instead, as Brenna Munro points out in her extensive research into the work done by the category “queer” in South African and African literary–​cultural imaginaries, the short story favours “fragments of time over epic historical sweeps”, and avoids “the production of endings that draw all the possibilities of the plot to a close” (2017: 189). For Munro, such formal figurations offer a strategic opportunity to writers of queer African short fiction, for the “as-​yet-​to-​be determined nature of queer African lives suits the temporalities of the short story” (2017: 189). Additionally, Munro argues that the short story “lends itself to trying out ideas” (2017: 189), presenting a valuable opportunity for queer African writers, on a continent of still predominantly homophobic states, to engage with controversial, indeed taboo, issues in an intensely compressed and potentially powerful representational space.1 Importantly, if the short story has often been relegated to a minor, marginal, second-​class, non-​normative form, overshadowed by the novel’s impressive

Queerying contemporary short fiction  105 capacities for narrative sweep and depth, its powerful combination of cultural totality and individual psychology, in cultural and geographical contexts on the margins of mainstream cultures and worldly affairs the adaptability of the short story as an outsider configuration has served it well, and seen it foray into service for multiple imaginative engagements with marginality. In South Africa, short stories have carried the fractured narration of colonial experience, “marginal with respect to some metropolis” (Pratt, 1981: 187); the particularities of a regionalism or a (sub)cultural identity which exists at a remove from the centre of influence; the marginalised identities of race, class and gender; and (more recently) the “writing in the margins” entailed by the minority practices of linguistic–​narrative experimentalisms that flout stylistic norms. Amenable to such a range of irruptive practices, enabling alternatives to standard historical logic and the doxa of a moral–​cultural majority, the short story clearly offers excellent opportunities, in South Africa, as a flexible, capacious genre apposite to the representations of atypical sexualities (see Sheik, 2015; Trengove Jones, 2000). There is a history in this respect, for as Mary Louise Pratt remarks, “the short story was often the genre used to introduce new subject matter and stigmatized subject matters into the literary arena” (1981: 187); it is a form that “breaks down taboos”, including those “on matters of sexuality” (1981: 187).2 Additionally, there is the entangled question of queerness, story and nation. In their research on Australian queer fiction, Damien Barlow and Leigh Dale note that queer activism and associated critical scholarship has constructively energised a “set of complex questions about definition, position and canonicity” –​and yet challenges remain. For if “ ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘writing’ are all contested categories, so too is ‘Australian’ ” (2007: 445). If the “problem of definition looms large” in respect of “queer” and “short story” (more on that later), it does so too in defining national boundaries in relation to short stories (2007: 445). Sue Marais explains that “[d]‌espite the fact that the modern short story is frequently viewed in national terms (American, Irish, South African), the genre evinces significant transnational tendencies” which render it alternative, even alternational (2005: 14). Thus, if we’re wanting to imagine that there is “something queer about the short story” (Nissen, 2004: 181), then it’s also necessary to concede “the nation” as a skewed form and category which only ostensibly serves the collective good. “The nation” is often at best suspicious of “aberrant” queer lives and at worst legally proscribes and punishes queerness. Queer identities are troubling anomalies in the duplicitous national discourse, for they are obliged to bear, in their embodiments and orientations, the rhetorical and material violence which latently subtends the normative, systemic authority required to present the coherent face of even democratic nationalism. In terms of boundaries, the very adjective which designates nationhood is invariably imprecise. South African, for example, imputes a geophysical singularity defined by clear boundaries, rather than acknowledging the more porous human relation of adjacent countries and cultures. This mistake is then compounded, being taken for the singular,

106  Sally Ann Murray coherent narrative history of nation-​based exceptionalism. Brenna Munro cites Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-​Russell in arguing that “the short story has provided a literary home for identities and experiences that do not easily belong in the imagined communities” of even postcolonial nationalism (2017: 189). Volumes such as Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas’s Queer African Reader (2013), and David Foster’s Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-​critical Sourcebook (1994) imply that queer/​ing short fiction from South Africa must work between passport control and inter-​ nationalism. “South African” is a queer rather than a (de)finite category; a relational entity, composite yet incomplete, a construct that comes into being contingently, across thresholds. Given local writers’ increasing involvement in pan-​African and diasporic writing cultures, and in a globalising world literary system, “South African” is a category in excess of what it self-​evidently appears to designate. This becomes clearer when we delve into queer local short fiction. Possibly the best-​known and most widely reviewed anthology of queer short fiction in South Africa is Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (Martin and Xaba, 2013). The volume collects queer stories from Zimbabwe, Botswana, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa. The contents are deliberately in excess of bounded, heterosexist preference and proscription, but also refuse the limits of national defensiveness. Queer Africa is a GALA (Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action) activist and advocacy platform, mooting the idea that short fiction “offers an imaginative space that allows for a range of possibilities and ways of seeing and being” because “[i]‌t bridges gaps” (Salafranca, 2014: n.p.). Among these is not only the focus on queer short fiction which contributes to making queer, specifically, more visible, in all its varied orientations and sexualities, but also the importance of creating links among the queer short fiction being written by South Africans and by writers from the rest of the continent. Such collaborative conceptualising is generative, both in the context of persistent continental homophobia, and democratic South Africa’s still unrealised need to give material effect to the rights of queer people as discursively affirmed in the Constitution.

Content and discontent Not unexpectedly, some contemporary South African short fiction takes up queerness as content, subject matter. There are stories which address divergent sexualities, written by writers who identify (though differently) as LGBTQIA. With the liberated possibilities of a constitutional democracy, South Africa has seen more short stories which are “sexually explicit”, and more stories that trace “the painful self-​acceptance of gay identities” (Stobie, 2009: 320). In her work on queer texts, Cheryl Stobie observes “a cluster of attributes” associated with a queer inclination in fiction, among them “queer sexuality viewed with interior depth”; the “coming-​out narrative, the normalization of queer, progressive engagement with gender issues, and technical innovation”

Queerying contemporary short fiction  107 (2009: 320). She tallies the number of queer characters and scenarios, but more astutely goes on to propose that even content-​based depictions of queerness may serve an important “speculative” purpose, linking past and present with a future in which queerness is not stamped as stigma. The difficulties of life in South Africa –​though the implied chronology of “transition” could prove suspect for a queer commentary –​might drive queer writers, like any writers, to depict the troubled shapes of crime, corruption, dreams deferred and political disillusion. Understood through queer commentary, however, a (queer) short story writer’s emphasis on estrangement and morbidity –​“the dark landscape of confusion, loneliness, alienation, impossibility and awkwardness” (Halberstam, 2011: 97) –​can also be read as implicated in the normative signifying system which so persistently marks queer identity as abnormal, death-​driven and worthless. At the same time, there is no essential connection of gay, lesbian and trans-​identifying people to such forms of privation and distress (2011: 97). So, in my queerying of recent local short fiction, if I anticipated examples which illustrate the quotidian precarity of queer life, I was also hoping for stories which boldly re-​narrativise abjected desire and ostracised identity, re-​ casting the more habitual heteronormative figurations which seem to insist on queerness as deviance, deficit, subversion, transgression, trauma, injustice, melancholy, grief, loss, death. I found myself longing for writers who limn “queer” by imagining and writing into being a complementary erotohistoriography of bliss, hope, joy and gain (Freeman, 2010). I also hoped to find stories of queer ordinariness and companionship, in which a writer shifts the emphasis from “sex or romantic intimacy to the emotional time of being with, time where it is possible to value floundering around with others” (Berlant, 2011: 85, original emphasis). Additionally, I wanted myself to understand that a queer-​inflected reading of the short story form would need to appreciate queer temporality, possibly embodying “the passage” of time as queer –​twisted, braided, split; time looked at askance, rather than head-​on. A short story may have the capacity to carry narrative as a variety of compressions, elisions, expansions and gaps, rather than masking or marking time as an ostensibly seamless progression towards life’s logical, causal development as pre-​determined by the preferred patterns of the status quo. Such temporal-​conceptual ambiguities are a valuable discursive potential of short storiness understood as queer. To adapt Katherine Bond Stockton’s idea: short stories “are fictions that imagine and present what sociology [sic], Law, and History cannot pierce” (2009: 10). In “their inventive forms”, they “are rich stimulators of questions public cultures seem to have” scant “language for encountering” (2009: 10). When placed in relation to queerness as represented in short fiction, such potentials may intensify and diversely ramify, inclining towards the ludic, for example, or the traumatised. Consider Shaun de Waal’s playful story “Private Reserve” (2003), where queerness is not, on the surface, represented as especially deep, or difficult. For the most part, the story presents some easy-​going fun, spinning out a narrative of four

108  Sally Ann Murray friends on a bushveld weekend escape. Using a straight couple and a gay couple as narrative devices, the writer strategically sets up camp, then crosses the binaries by establishing alliances across neat “camps”, undermining the polarities of queer and hetero, playing out the very etymology of the word “queer” as “across” or “aslant”. The textual space of an ostensibly easy-​read story nudges a reader to understand the “fantasy of a natural orientation” as in fact “an orientation device that organizes worlds around the form of the heterosexual couple, as if it were from this point that the world unfolds” (Ahmed, 2006: 85). Within this frame, the story toys with the triteness and/​ or truth of received, popular assumptions about what it means to be gay or straight, when one is markedly male or female. While “the boys” (one straight, one homosexual) head out on their manly wilderness adventure, “the girls” (a biological female and a biological male) domesticate the camp site with intimate gossip, food preparation and shared emotional anxiety about their partners’ increasingly long absence. Where are the men? What are they doing? What disaster has befallen? The story veers between performing a space for accommodating emotional intimacy, even confession, and a sardonic parody on romance and the love relationship as a social requirement of “intelligible subjectivity” (Ahmed, 2006: 85). It manages to be both a droll tale of queer and straight, love and libido, while also casting a melancholy light on the normative linear time frames of “reproductive futurism” (Edelman, 2004: 4) associated with the pressure to have children. All’s well that ends well, however, and the punch line (“Fucking heterosexuals” (De Waal, 2003: 36)) takes arch pleasure in turning the tables on the normative stigma. In comparison, Jane Bennett’s (2008) emotionally gruelling story, “Michael”, speaks to the difficult necessity of queer “floundering”, an urgent need in a divided South Africa. The story tentatively creates a space in which entrenched categorical differences can be tested, elided or suspended, and people gather into an open-​minded willingness to share in the unfolding of the unknown, without prejudicial premonition of outcome. Bennett traces queerness mutably as both loss and resilience. “Michael” is a strange, perilous story, striated with unfulfilled longing. Familiar South African truths of gender violence and racial politics are brought into jarring relation with queer sexuality, in an unstable narrative structure that throws a reader off-​balance. The story evolves between two female co-​workers who, over time, have established a tentative friendship. The evidently wounded Michael offers incidents from her life, revealing the deep formations of “herself ”: love of language –​and of women; an impatience with the abstractions of literary criticism; and a self violated by the casual brutalities of gang rape. Michael, so vulnerable, voices “the memories of what living in a body could mean” (2008: 93). Her main narration is interspersed with her colleague’s internalised, italicised reflections –​sometimes affirming, sometimes dissenting, creating a dialogical expanse of actual conversation and imagined exchange. In the wake of her trauma, Michael (reduced to “a thin hunk of reddened muscle” (2008: 93)), retreats from “the arts” into the university science library, immersed in the

Queerying contemporary short fiction  109 pure mathematics of “coefficients and calculus” (2008: 92). Each day she promises herself that “if I could follow […] one new line of calculation, then being skinless didn’t entail losing my mind” (2008: 92). Bennett’s story is a damaged, unpredictable narrative in which the two women and the readers experience the burdens and the possibilities of “coming to know”, of intimacy ventured though not necessarily gained. The story is marked by disjunctive split narration and pronominal shift: a disturbing combination of emotional fragility and calculated control, circling around Michael’s physically and mentally traumatic fracture and the long, surreal “afterwards” in which she reaches towards (re)new(ed) feeling. The secondary narrator struggles to “orientate”, saying, “She has changed back into the third person –​Michael has –​just as she starts talking about loving women” (2008: 93): If I am to be the next lover I can see I am going to have to understand this thing about pronouns –​where she actually is, how many of her there are, which one is hiding something, which one is the poet. Or perhaps, I will simply love her. She, me. (2008: 95, original emphasis) Questions of sexuality and (trans)orientation blur, the will to define and fix co-​existing precariously with the desired (though elusive) simplicity of something called “love”. The ending –​“She, me” –​is simultaneously fragile, and assertive. It wills two women together in the hope of some queer futurity, yet remains tenuous, underrealised. If this attests to the challenges of living the conviction of orientation with certainty, it also grants the necessary fluidity of relinquishing an obsessive need to assert boundaries of definition and experience, and to know, ahead of time, what will be. Such a story gives beautiful, risky embodiment to questions of trans and the transitional, as both orientation and as interregnum.

Queerly affective, queerly erotic? There are several post-​ 2000 South African anthologies that bring queer and straight short stories into shared space, among them Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (Schimke, 2008), featuring some stories of same-​sex desire. Here, “the erotic” rubric works as the over-​ determined signifier of the illicit and the controversial, partly relieving “the queer” of that cultural–​political burden, but still the shapes of queer intimacy in contemporary South African queer short fiction are marked by the truism that “what makes some people queasy, others call sexy” (Berlant and Warner, 1995: 343). Such stories have the potential to illustrate the fraught, embodied politics of queer sociality. Two stories make my case. In Dolar Vasani’s “All

110  Sally Ann Murray Covered Up” (2013), we encounter the titillating lesbian sexploits of “Dr Carmen”, a Swiss-​resident Tanzanian Asian woman who is on a business trip to Zanzibar. Vasani is an Indian writer with Ugandan roots who has pursued careers in both South and Eastern Africa. She is thus not strictly South African. However, with a growing international market for queer erotica and romance stories, lesbian desire is increasingly worldly and well-​travelled in its flights of imagination and transgression of borders, and Vasani’s story makes travel, adventure and the (inter)national worlding of gay identity integral to the narrative. Yet I am not convinced that Vasani’s narrative is aware “that imagining lesbian desire is bound up with articulating the experience of transnationalism under the shadow of imperial histories” (Munro, 2017: 187). Nor (again adapting Brenna Munro’s ideas from her discussion of lesbian short fiction by contemporary African female writers) do I find that Vasani consciously re-​works the “figure of the homosexual [that] has long been deployed to stand for colonial penetration of Africa and cultural inauthenticity” (2017: 187) by focusing on her characters’ lesbian encounter. To my mind, the story does not use lesbianism as a “trope to address the globalized nature of contemporary life, with the woman who desires women as a sympathetic point of identification for the reader and a symbol of human vulnerability, resilience, and complexity” (2017: 187). Instead, Vasani’s piece carries the hallmarks of formulaic plotting, with “endless flirting and innuendos” (2013: 74) in a lush island locale conveniently stripped of history, in the service of the erotic. When the narrator meets Fatma, the young local woman tasked as her guide, the “word escort stirs [her] imagination” and she “wonder[s]‌if this is what Zanzibari hospitality means” (2013: 69). Eventually, after some routine business of narrative foreplay and delay, Fatma “pulls me towards her and whispers, nibbling my ear, ‘I don’t want a drink, Carmen, I want you’ ” (2013: 75). Pumla Gqola considers the story “incredibly political in what is disrupted, played around with and teased out”, a “sexy, sensual encounter across religion, where barriers are both as large as a world and as thin as a buibui” (2013: 6). I relish Gqola’s phrasing, and yet I struggle to concede her point. I do appreciate Susanne Juhasz’s reminder that since the gamut of needs, purposes, fantasies and desires which inform plot “are aspects of psyche”, any narrative, formulaic or otherwise, has the capacity to “render alternative paradigms” (1998: 68), forms of queerness among them. I understand that, in this light, Vasani’s story might be considered a provocative, postcolonial, gender non-​conforming narrative that performatively camps the tired clichés of hetero romance: hunter/​prey, silky cinnamon body, sexy lingerie, breasts like mangoes, and the hyper-​ventilated embodiment of hardening arching squealing swelling gushing pulsating. But I cannot ignore the sobering possibility that such platitudes, even in the context of queer romance or erotica, serve as “a trope for the sex-​gender system as a whole” (Blau DuPlessis, 1985: 5). They do not automatically disrupt normative vapidity by dragging it playfully against the antic raunch of queer desire. Yes, a writer may make

Queerying contemporary short fiction  111 this attempt, but she or he runs the risk of reprising oppressive hierarchies of power that remain entrenched in the wider structures of social reality and serve to construct orientalising margins and marginality in the service of centrist, heteronormative, exoticising fantasies. A far more effective, intimately affective mode motivates Wamuwi Mbao’s “The Bath” (2013), a post-​2000 South African queer short story that has already proven influential, having been anthologised as one of the top 20 contemporary South African examples of the short story form. Grieving her dead girlfriend, Olivia lies in a full bath and waits for the poisonous vapour from a small gas canister to take effect. It doesn’t. Despite the combination of interracial lesbian love and suicide-​attempt-​in-​progress, the story refuses the spectacular. Nothing dramatic occurs. The device of “the bath” creates an immersive narrative interval, slowly releasing the recollections that help to keep the narrating consciousness conscious, and telling the story, as she dips into her dead girlfriend’s diary, drifting between pained reverie and increasingly bathetic present reality. Throughout, time, cause and effect waver, leaving a reader uncertainly placed between mawkish love and morbid threat. As it happens, we might process the failed suicide as a queer success, a plotting outcome that endorses queer arts of failure. The cause of the girlfriend’s death is vague –​some physiological abnormality of “the heart” and/​or body, implied by mention of a pacemaker, visible under her skin, and the suggestion of unusually short stature. Nothing is chronologically laid out, or coherently explained. There is no lyrically affective epiphany. Readers are left to discover an emotional logic in the symbolically freighted pathology of “a heart defect” and the writer’s delicate queerying, against entrenched assumptions of queerness as taint, of queer questions of “the heart”. And yet the piece is not sentimental. While the dead girl’s parents have (belatedly) reconciled to their deceased daughter’s orientation, and offer emotional support to her desolate young lover, the narrative intimates that the difficult parental love of fundamentally good people has come at a high, misplaced price: the loss of a child. Would the father, in particular, normative black man that he is, eventually have come around, in time, to paternal tolerance of her queerness? How long would the queer child have had to wait for acceptance? And: is it preferable that the narrative has her die from personal health problems, rather than any social trauma attributable to her queerness? In a curious way the narrative demands her ordinary, unspectacular death precisely in order to purge from the story the long, forbidding shadow of homophobic violence against lesbians in South Africa, especially so-​called corrective rape. And in this sense the story subdues a more socially inflected consciousness of the constant threat, especially to queer women of colour, that living their orientation represents. Mbao traces a difficult line; he is neither in denial, nor in thrall. The surviving girl, Olivia, is a vexatious remainder. She is not sacrificed as an anomaly to society’s inevitable logic of heterosexual desire, which requires the “necessary” demise of the transgressively queer. Still, her girlfriend’s dying –​of whatever cause –​interrupts the disruptive

112  Sally Ann Murray potential of ongoing queer love; her death secures, enables, the semblance of heteronormative life, normatively continued, that the parents have all along preferred. The difficulties that Mbao risks are part of the story’s queer affect, its explorations of the unsettled, relational nature of queerness, self and otherness in what Brenna Munro designates the “queer family romance” (2012: 173).3 Most strikingly, “The Bath” is moved by an attentiveness to queer empathy, a wish to shift a queer erotics towards moving human affect and away from hackneyed notions of “queer” understood as scandalously other, non-​normative sex.

Indirectly: Queer Q and A The implication is that local writers of queer short stories sometimes favour an unexceptional ordinary, eschewing the burdens of queerness as strategic political category and the attendant demands of explanation and being “representative”. Queer may be changeably foregrounded when placed in relation to shifting markers of group identity, whether of sexual orientation, or national belonging. This seems apt, given the unhomeliness of queerness even in constitutional democracies such as our own. It also raises a provocative queery: is the exceptionalising of queer as the subject of short fiction ameliorative, helping to create a sense of imagined community, or at least focus a visibility? And/​or can it play into the hands of the homophobic, righteously secured in their conviction that queer stories are irrelevant, even deviant accounts, from which the rightly normative majority has nothing to learn, and which, in the interests of morality, are best sequestered from the rest? It’s not clear, either, that all queer writers will necessarily want a “special” category of short fiction, a sub-​sub-​genre similar to the black holes which pit South African history, an expedient homeland with all the panoply of a supposedly independent state and status, but little in the way of authority. The editors of Queer Africa admit a perplexing lack of response to their call for submissions: were authors wary of ghettoised marginalisation? Sceptical of outing or otherwise aligning their identifications with still pariahed orientations? Or, turning this abruptly aslant: in what sense might straight authors write queer stories? Cheryl Stobie’s preferred phrasing –​“authors who are personally invested in queer issues” (2009: 320) –​and her examples, imply that such authors are necessarily queer-​identifying. But straight short story authors may have more than a passing interest in queer, confounding notions of queer as necessarily attached to an individual’s sexual non-​conformity. “How to Carry On” (Murray, 2015), for example, while written in an apparently nonthreatening, easily assimilable realist mode, performs an expression of mind and empathy, of phenomenological “orientation” (Ahmed, 2006), towards queerness. The story complicates the assumed poles of queerness and normativity via the ordinary battles of a mother who attempts to nurture her disruptively queer child in/​to a hostile wider culture, part of which is a residential neighbourhood where narrowness prevails, manifesting as violent

Queerying contemporary short fiction  113 intolerance of otherness. (I wrote the piece as part of a fictocritical presentation for a 2015 “Slow Violence Colloquium” held at Stias, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.) In an exploratory gesture of “queer ecology” (Morton, 2010: 173) that seeks to imagine forms of difficult relation among life forms, the narrative blurs the power dynamics of several margins in extremis, as they come under pressure from various assertions of authority: aggressively gender fluid child, conservative suburban neighbourhood, frazzled mother, stigmatised municipal dump, unhomed but ebullient rescue dog, vulnerable masquerading stroller. The emotional landscape and perspective of the narrative is volatile, veering intemperately between descriptions of wounded (and wounding) environments, and paroxysms of internalised rage, fear, love, despair. The narrative arc bends and swerves: projecting outwards, clawing inwards, needing to press ahead, to arrive somewhere unknown, but fearing the shape that this arrival might take, when, by all accounts, death is the socially designated end of all that is determined to be different. By the end of the story, one grittily defiant life has been irrevocably “resolved”, while a similarly different life continues to struggle into being. Initially titled “How to Carry On When”, the story appeared in the 2015 Short Sharp Stories competition anthology under the more predictable title, “How to Carry On?”. The concessionary edit “normalized” the deviance which had disconcerted some adjudicators, pre-​publication. Yet the “when”, as a part of speech, was deliberate: deliberately difficult to classify in the unfinished context of the title, it signalled the skewing of timelines, the emotional muddling of arduous “now” and questionable futurity. In the challenges that queer time locates within normative chronologies, “when” poses an unanswerable provocation. In the story, too, queer sociality crosses categories, without overtly invoking the fixity associated with popular notions of “trans”. It “is precisely in the loving […], conflicted […] ways that” the mother “speaks of and acts alongside her” differently queer child “that we get a sense of queerness as belonging to more people than the queer subject proper” (Martínez, 2011: 236). The narrative voice, characterisation and treatment of setting, evidence my writer’s “commitment to […] [the] resocializing of queerness” as “intersubjective” (2011: 244, 236). The story insists on the polymorphous, entangled responses, indeed responsibilities, of vulnerability and resilience, questioning and questionable, in the forms of relation that always exist between “queerness” and “normativity”, however much we may have been schooled to deny such reciprocity.

Queer(y)ing time Ahmed notes that “[q]‌ueer orientations might be those that don’t line up, which by seeing the world ‘slantwise’ allow other objects to come into view” (2006: 107). This “object” may be time itself, already peculiar in being evanescent yet relentless, abstruse yet corporealised, a rhizomatic enigmatic which normative chronology tends to straighten out. Many South African queer

114  Sally Ann Murray stories illustrate the writers’ interest in queerying normative time, part of which means deranging, or intersectionally rearranging, the country’s historical emphasis on racial inequality as the most urgent category of address. In David Medalie’s collection The Mistress’s Dog and Other Stories, in the “Wheel of God” (2010), a white lesbian adoptive mother of a black boy returns to the conservative small town of her dead wife’s girlhood, at the request of this woman’s mother. Her dead partner’s mother, herself ill, has belatedly experienced a change of heart and wishes to bequeath to her dead daughter’s adopted son an inheritance. The relationships are complicated, and the story purposefully disorders time in presenting the claims of several mothers, the figures of various children, some now adults. The distant childhood of the dead woman carries the uncertain knowledge of “before” queer, “already” queer, and “always” queer. Additionally, the black birth mother of the adopted child is a spectral presence in the narrative, subtly cutting across the rights, claims and family lines on which the story focuses. The narrative deliberately works in between life-​stage identities, and also, lightly and briefly, casts an unsettling, queer look upon the long shadow of racial politics, which politics, in turn, stare back, questioningly, creating a textual space of gaps through which the lives at the centre of the story are subtly decentred. There is a labour “of narrative unsettlement attempted” in this short story (Bystrom, 2016: 129), in respect of received family roles, parental authority, and both biological and social reproduction. Medalie’s depiction of conventional and queer families interrupts the valorised, inherited heteronormative time frames of “appropriately” sequential life stages associated with heterosexual subject development –​childhood, growth, marriage, reproduction, the “logic of achievement, fulfilment and success(ion)” in which heterosexuality “is rooted” (Halberstam, 2011: 94). In the surviving lesbian mother’s trying sense of frustrated displacement in her lover’s childhood home, the story prompts an understanding that all lives, all loves, all sexualities, are made legible through moments of deviation and adherence, but the narrative does not devolve into a failed imitation of middle-​class normality. The financial “trust” that the dead woman’s ailing mother proposes to the boy’s surviving mother for securing the child’s future is also a narratively (re)marked lack of trust, in that her fears see her hoping to stymie what she anticipates will inevitably be his deviant mother’s misappropriating of “ ‘the’/​‘her’/​‘his’ ” money. The grandmother attempts to bestow a financial gift for the child, her future-​binding version of the “present”, upon her daughter’s sceptical widow, but she fails to grant the complex claim of the gift as an assuaging of her own guilty conscience. However, the story does not permit the ailing old woman to step over the demands of the present into a reassuring future where her suddenly tolerant generosity enables her to die knowing that she has compensated for having in the past rejected her daughter’s queer, racially intransigent family. Medalie disallows the old woman this comfort. The child is also HIV positive, which further confuses the progressive prognoses of hetero-​time: he is depicted as living

Queerying contemporary short fiction  115 with the infection, not as dying. These simultaneous times remain contiguous; they do not neatly settle into one or the other, or even another.

Queering the canon Another version of queering time occurs in queer rewritings of canonical stories. An excellent example here is Makhosazana Xaba’s “The Suit Continued: The Other Side” (2013), a re-​casting of Can Themba’s 1963 short story, “The Suit”. Xaba motivates the original story’s psychological drama of desire, where a wife’s adultery provokes perverse result: an instance of the spectacular strain in black South African fiction, the husband insists that his wife serve, every day, the suit her lover, in his haste, left behind. Under such a preposterous, relentless edict, the traumatised wife kills herself. Xaba interrupts the agonistic matrimonial dyad of heteronormativity, gendered in the familiar, and unequal, dynamic of (cuckolded thus righteous) husband, and (cheating thus punishable) wife. She queers, and ideologically queries, Themba’s disturbing narrative logic, deepening the dissatisfying gaps of the story’s perfunctory emotional landscape into more complex reckoning with a secret psychosocial intimacy. “The Suit” is a South African perennial, a classic story much anthologised and much taught, despite its patent domestic violence and suicidal trauma. When she first encountered “The Suit”, presented as a play, Xaba was so troubled that she sought out Themba’s original story, hoping for less chauvinist aggression. But she was “shocked at the misogyny” (Beautement, 2014),4 and pushed the story out of mind. Then Xaba read Siphiwo Mahala’s “The Suit Continued” (2011), in which the humiliated lover contends that the woman had enticed him, a respected schoolteacher, who had no idea she was married. Such expediently threadbare logic galvanised Xaba’s queer intertext of Themba’s and Mahala’s stories. Xaba not only aims for depth of female characterisation, she also breathes uncanny life into the dead wife, Matilda, as a woman with same-​sex desires. Matilda “speak[s]‌for herself as the narrator from the other world as a powerful spirit/​ ancestor-​ voice”. Xaba pointedly complicates Matilda’s “otherness”, channelling spirit form and queer orientation to release otherworldliness and otherness into tense encounter: the ancestral, often accorded positive valence in African cosmologies, and the homosexual, frequently considered negative and “unAfrican”. Via Matilda’s authority as a medium, Xaba “introduce[s] the twist of sexual orientation that the writings of the Sophiatown period are silent on” (Beautement, 2014: n.p.), and perhaps even repress. She disrupts canonicity from within, bending South African literary history away from periodised genealogy (“the Drum decade”) and inviting in queer marginality. Xaba also writes a second retelling of “The Suit” from the point of view of Philemon’s now octogenarian lover, again conjuring disorientating back stories that hint at the existence of othered lives, and an othered literary archive.5 By queerying, in story form, the archive as always-​unfinished potential in

116  Sally Ann Murray formation, Xaba as creative writer performs a version of the interventionist agency more usually associated with queer criticism, such as Brenna Munro’s South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come (2012). Part of Xaba’s skill has been to recognise Themba’s highly successful story as a productive failure. She “make[s] the connection between failure and queerness”, intuiting “a narrative that runs along the mainstream” (Halberstam, 2011: 89). As Carla Freccero might explain: if it seems “odd”, or “at odds”, to read Themba’s story metaleptically –​after all, Xaba “turns” on his Drum era narrative an anachronistic queer lens that is a “wilful perversion of notions of temporal propriety” (2006: 2) –​she does this in order to out elements of a story that the author did not see, possibly could not see, in the especially gender-​hierarchical, heteronormative context of early apartheid.6

Queer forms? Diverse “members of (ambiguously) non-​hegemonic social groups” –​black people, women, queers (and intersectional combinations of these) –​may, in seeking forms of imaginative representation able to explore relations of subordination and authority, be “driven to use structural, rhetorical and epistemological tactics that run counter to normative ones” (DuPlessis, 2006: 27–​28). This leads to the consideration: while technical–​linguistic innovation is not synonymous with queer-​ friendly politics –​and nor is realism inherently (hetero)normative –​does the post-​2000 queer South African short story in English also, at times, take unusual forms, aligning an oblique, experimental style with the invitation to queer hospitality? Cheryl Stobie’s use of the slashed “queer/​alternative writing” (2009: 320) implies a tentative “yes”, even if the slash is contentious in associating dissimilar categories. Her awkwardly a/​bridged phrasing is undeniably useful in signalling the potential relation between queer matrices and other unusual forms of aslant writing. In contemporary South African fiction, Stobie has found that, “in terms of style, there is a higher degree of experimentation amongst the women authors who raise queer issues than among their male peers” and there is also “a high degree of critical self-​reflexivity” (2009: 331). Jane Bennett’s collection Porcupine (2008) is a good example, with its versatile foray across lyrically irreal strategies and graphic realist detail, a combination that carries the writer’s intersecting interests in unsettling language and convention, in depicting queer orientation and also, simultaneously, in queering interrelated race, class and gender orthodoxies, many of them entailing violence and the exercising of unequal power. Here, the insistence is that form is no indulgence, or an add-​on afterthought to the more serious matter of explicitly queer content. Instead, it “offers a way to talk about the patterns that provide the stuff and structure of sexuality”, relationally “documenting how they come together and how they fall apart” (Glavey, 2016: 3). “Porcupine” is a story of sharp linguistic playfulness, but also of racial anger, brittle cultural impatience, racial ventriloquism and dissatisfied same-​sex

Queerying contemporary short fiction  117 physical relations. All of these co-​exist in the single narrative body, uncertain impulses that might, or might not, merge, or pull apart; a queer quirkiness that repudiates the desire for clear, uncomplicated stories. “Porcupine” is placed roughly in the middle of Bennett’s collection of the same name, Porcupine (straight/​slant; doubling but with difference), and in this approximate “halfwayness”, a reader happens on this strange being, “an enormous porcupine with a mohawk of spines [that] scurries across the floor”. Is this real? Is it a queer conceit, a ludic version of the more commonplace “elephant in the room”? Bennett does not pin this creature down, simply acknowledging that “I have all these stories […] I have other stories” (2008: 72), and they scurry into peculiar life, refusing both the designation “abnormal” and the predictable normality of either this or that. Another innovative angle of interest is signalled by the anthology Yes I Am! Writing by South African Gay Men (2010), a book conceptualised as “a collage” of small life stories rather than “short stories” (Junkets Publisher, 2010: n.p.). The brief was not literary genre (“the short story”), but self-​ expressive need, which led to an apt generic indeterminacy. “[S]‌tories, poems, letters, diary-​entries, SMSes and emails”; monologues, visual essays, blog posts, graphic stories: these are popular, informal, intermediated text types which are not inherently inimical to short story forming, though they do fall outside the habituated framing of “the short story” as understood in literature. However, they might have more quotidian traction with queer communities outside the academy than “the short story” per se. The point is that we cannot pre-​emptively know the shapes that queer stories might take, as verbal and visual texts, just as we cannot have predicated how “the short story” has burgeoned into a variety of avatars, modes with protean, vibrantly uncertain designation: sudden fiction, flash fiction, nano fiction, the shortshort, micro fiction, postcard, quick fiction, blaster, snapper, mini, fast fiction, skinny fiction.7 You name it. “The short story” willingly expresses non-​normative fictional identities, some forms of which have yet to be locally recognised, being still unrecognisable. Queer stories may also exist where queer is not announced as sexual orientation. Such stories are queer in refusing to bracket off “how oppressions and sublimations around sex and sexuality meet up with other kinds of violence and oppression –​with exploitation, racial formation, the production of feminine subjectivity or of national culture” (Berlant and Warner, 1995: 347). Indeed, a question worth asking is whether “the very distinction between the sexual and the nonsexual matter[s]‌to queer thinking?”; and can literary material “be regarded as queer if it’s not explicitly ‘about’ sexuality?” (Halley and Parker, 2011: 2). A more queerying eye on local short fiction in English than is possible in this chapter might find queer relations in unexpected places, since “queer offers new ways of responding to alterity” (Stobie, 2009: 234), even making “alterity” newly visible (see Bystrom’s comments on the problematic “symbolic association of ‘migrant’ and ‘queer’ bodies” (2016: 121)). Approached obliquely, many more South African short stories, by many more

118  Sally Ann Murray than queer identified or queer allied writers, might be considered part of an emergent queer archive –​this without denying the significance of short fiction that is queer by virtue of expressly engaging variant sexual identities and orientations, and being written by queer writers. Perhaps it is queer reading as a strategy that could find the shifting intersections between previously “separate and distinct” foci in South African criticism? As Donna McCormack argues, for “postcolonialists, the focus tends to be nation and diasporas, with assumed heterosexual and dyadic gender norms. For queer theorists, gender and sexuality tend to dominate and structural racial inequalities are often simplified or ignored” (2014: 7). Instead, she calls on scholars to address interdisciplinary and intersectional analyses, relations and histories, modes variously “complementary and antagonistic” (2014: 7), so as to do queer differently.

Denouement: Still (under)performing queerly? It could be thought rather late for me to begin thinking queerly about South African short fiction. Has the moment not passed? Already back in 2012, after all, Duke University Press was said to have signalled the death of queer theory by discontinuing its influential “Series Q” imprint. This implies the sense of an ending. However, if “queer” thinking is associated with lateness, with endings, it remains a vital force in South African literary culture, constantly (re)configuring in formations which, as in work by Brenna Munro, carry within them traces of other, previous incarnations, forms of queer afterlife coming into being that disturb chronological time and geographical separateness. In a South African context, it might be that “queer” as critical lens, as representational field, and/​or orientation must claim a resilient “unfinishedness” that works constantly to bring to mind the necessity of adapting, and changing as differently queer stories come into being, taking forms that are recognisably aligned to “the short story”, but also decidedly other, whether as experiment or as experience. To adapt Neville Hoad’s remark: there is no comfortable “post-​queer”, only “a doing and redoing of queer theory” which entails “the invigorating intransigence of continuing to work on a set of questions” (2011: 138). In drawing on “queer’s verbally and adjectivally unsettling force against claims for its definitional stability” (Freccero, 2011: 17), for example, is it feasible to think of “the short story” as a modal cluster of queer narrative performativity which can represent “queer” as expected, but also more queerly? I am not sure. However, this admission of uncertainty seems an imperative, not a weakness. When it comes to discussions of “queerness” and “the short story” in the context of current South Africa, “[I]‌like to imagine that my work is ‘part of a much smaller project,’ one that asks little questions, settles for less than grandiose answers, speculates without evidence, and finds insights in eccentric and unrepresentative archives” (Halberstam, qtd. in Dinshaw et al., 2007: 182). Finding my affiliation with a range of contemporary queer scholars, I recognise that since “the straight world is already in place, and that queer moments, where things come out of line, are fleeting”, an

Queerying contemporary short fiction  119 appropriate critical response to questions of queer/​ing short storying “need not be to search for permanence […] but to listen for the sound of ‘the what’ that fleets” (Ahmed, 2006: 106). The what: this is suitably open-​ended. That fleets: this encompasses not only the familiar stories of violated queer bodies in flight, but the deft possibilities suggested by fleet of foot, the capacity for inspirational imaginative leaps. And all of these might be orientations that, in time, prompt scholars to make good on the strengths of the important minor literature that is contemporary South African queer short stories.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/​or publication of this chapter: This research is part of a wider project on sexualities in African fiction, supported by funding from Stellenbosch University’s Research SubCommittee A.

Notes 1 Catherine Jonet’s work on the depiction of queer female lives by writers of the Caribbean diaspora similarly suggests that the short story as a form is well-​suited to confronting “difficult subjects”, the lives of “marginalized groups”, and cultural taboos (2013: 152). 2 If ‘the short story’ is historically a minor genre and literature, it is also often imagined as an immature, apprentice form. What of queer short fiction and queer children who are minors with compounded minority status? Where is their literature? Will South African literature, in any genre, ever be queer enough to validate the lives of these stigmatised children? 3 Munro traces this lineage, for example, in reference to Nadine Gordimer’s work, comparing the “multiracial lesbian family through adoption” (2012: 186) of None to Accompany Me (1994), with the suffering, “proto-​lesbianism” and “grotesque affectation” that features in Gordimer’s (1980) story “Siblings”. 4 Factual details in this section are drawn from Beautement’s (2014) interview with Xaba. 5 Mark Gevisser’s Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir (2014) has a section on the secret parallel lives of elderly black married homosexuals in Soweto. 6 See also Cheryl Stobie’s 2017 article, which appeared when this chapter had already been submitted for editing but is highly germane here: Re-​tailoring Can Themba’s “The Suit”: Queer temporalities in two stories by Makhosazana Xaba. Current Writing 29(2): 79–​88. 7 Liesl Jobson must be credited, in collections such as 100 Papers (2008), for accustoming the local literary scene to unusual story forms of flash fiction and prose poem.

References Ahmed S (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

120  Sally Ann Murray Barlow D and Dale L (2007) Australian gay and lesbian writing. In: Birns N and McNeer R (eds) A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900. Rochester: Camden House, 445–​458. Beautement T (2014) Q & A with Makhosazana Xaba. Quotidian, 13 January. Available at: http://​tia​hbea​utem​ent.type​pad.com/​quotid​ian/​2014/​01/​qa-​with-​makh​ osaz​ana-​xaba.html (accessed 9 July 2018). Bennett J (2008) Porcupine. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Berlant L (2011) Starved. In: Halley J and Parker A (eds) After Sex: On Writing Since Queer Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 79–​90. Berlant L and Warner M (1995). What does queer theory teach us about X? PMLA 110(3): 343–​349. Bystrom K (2016) Democracy at Home in South Africa: Family Fictions and Transitional Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. De Waal S (2003) Private reserve. In: Chislett D (ed.) Urban 03: Collected New South African Short Stories. Claremont: Spearhead/​New Africa Books, 22–​36. Dillingham W (2008) Melville’s Short Fiction, 1853–​1856. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Dinshaw C, Edelman L, Ferguson RA, Freccero C, Freeman E, Halberstam J, Jagose A, Nealon CS and Nguyen TH (2007) Theorising queer temporalities: A roundtable discussion. GLQA Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 13(2–​3): 177–​195. DuPlessis RB (1985) Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies Twentieth-​ Century Women Writers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. DuPlessis RB (2006) Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Edelman L (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ekine S and Abbas H (eds) (2013) Queer African Reader. Dakar: Pambazuka Press. Foster DW (1994) Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-​critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Freccero C (2006) Queer/​Early/​Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freccero C (2011) Queer times. In: Halley J and Parker A (eds) After Sex: On Writing Since Queer Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 17–​26. Freeman E (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gevisser M (2014) Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Glavey B (2016) The Wallflower Avant-​ Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis. New York: Oxford University Press. Gordimer N (1980) Siblings. In: Gordimer N (ed.) A Soldier’s Embrace: Stories by Nadine Gordimer. New York: Viking Press, 31–​39. Gordimer N (1994) None to Accompany Me. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gqola P (2013) Introduction. In: Martin K and Xaba M (eds) Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction. Cape Town: MaThoko’s Books, 1–​7. Halberstam J (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam J (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halley J and Parker A (eds) (2011) After Sex: On Writing Since Queer Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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7  Therianthropic power in Mohale Mashigo’s speculative short fiction Christiaan Naudé

Introduction: transmuting genre Mohale Mashigo began her writing career by creating fan fiction of Sweet Valley High, a young adult saga of golden-​haired Californian twins. Along with her friend and co-​writer, she plucked the blue-​eyed teens from their American idyll and rewrote them as “racially ambiguous teenage girls” who were now living in “our world –​Soweto and Yeoville in Johannesburg” (Mashigo, 2016a: vii). This literary remixing presages the hybrid style of Mashigo’s subsequent prose-​fiction: her debut novel, The Yearning (2016a), and her collection of stories, Intruders (2018a). The Yearning brings together an account of quotidian familial and romantic intimacy, a subtly speculative and utopian engagement with Nguni folklore, and a precipitous descent into the darkest reaches of sexual pathology. The novel offers an aesthetic that draws together these disparate experiences –​of the ordinary, of history and of the preternatural –​to represent modern South African life. Intruders carries forward these themes, but is more explicit about staging a generic shake-​up. As this study goes on to show, the argument of Mashigo’s foreword –​that “Afrofuturism is not for Africans living in Africa” (2018a: x) –​occasions a moment of generic self-​reflexivity, which has prompted this reading of Intruders as an intervention into, and a barometer of, the contemporary short story in Africa and South Africa, particularly in its speculative guise. This analysis of Mashigo’s short fiction, and of the evolving genre of which it forms a part, organises its argument around a central image: the paradoxical figure of the therianthrope, a half-​human, half-​animal hybrid which appears in The Yearning and Intruders. This amalgamative entity figures the conjunction of speculative envisioning and historical situatedness in Mashigo’s writing, a dialectic of imagination and history which this analysis elaborates through a close reading of two stories in Intruders, “Manoka” and “The High Heel Killer”. In general, this reading is interested in the ways in which Mashigo’s therianthropism facilitates a kind of generic mixing, bringing together tropes of genre fiction and more realist preoccupations in a way that apprehends the recombinatory tendency of the post-​2000 SA short story. In particular, the analysis charts how the therianthropes in Mashigo’s stories present diagnoses DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-7

124  Christiaan Naudé and possible transformations of gender politics in South Africa, thus coalescing a mode of engaged writing with more vernacular styles of domestic and fantastic fiction. On the whole, one may say that therianthropism develops the racial ambiguity of Mashigo’s early fan fiction into a trans-​species ambivalence with ramifications for micro-​politics, aesthetics and ethno-​culture. To think through these ramifications, this reading offers the therianthrope as a metaphor through which to articulate three overlapping concerns: the collocation of historical consciousness, domestic solidarity and folkloric preternaturalism in Mashigo’s writing; her aesthetic of fragmentation and ethic of recuperation; and the evolving, hybrid quality of the short story in Africa in general and South Africa in particular. Scholarly and writerly interest in the speculative fiction of Africa is burgeoning, and this study aims to supplement (in both senses) some of the themes that have emerged within this eclectic field. First, the argument given here is inspired and informed by the imaginative valence of southern African therianthropic art and lore. The imagery and ontology of this local archive (especially that of the San) are under-​explored in Anglophone literary-​critical discourse and tend to disappear from view in descriptions of African speculative literature emanating from the Global North. Second, this study claims that the aesthetic and political value of Mashigo’s fiction resides in its anti-​apocalyptic tendency. Her close engagement with contemporary spaces and quotidian situations highlights the simultaneously dystopian and utopian potential within the present, but without devolving into apocalyptic sentiment or wish-​fulfilment. As such, the stories discussed here offer an alternative to the chronotope of catastrophe already well-​represented within speculative fiction (see Akpome, 2020; Nabutanyi, 2020; Titlestad, 2015). Finally, gender and queerness are major topics in sub-​Saharan African discourse, and these concerns extend to speculative literature (see Burger, 2020). In this respect, this chapter analyses Mashigo’s deft coupling of femicide to notions of feminine monstrosity, whereas the subject of queerness is subsumed within a consideration of the ontological mutability of genre. Both discussions of gender and queerness are anchored in a close scrutiny of the rhetorical patterns that express Mashigo’s ethic-​aesthetic of hybridity.1

“Epigenerics”: literary form in flux Mashigo’s provocative disavowal of Afrofuturism tacitly places Intruders in the lineage of the realist short story in South Africa, even as it takes up the themes elaborated by the relatively long-​standing tradition of science fiction in the country.2 This curious double-​movement towards a more vivid fabulation and a closer engagement with an African cultural-​historical ‘real’ embodies something of the shifts taking place within the broader publishing landscape in sub-​Saharan Africa, characterised as it is by a burgeoning of amalgamated literary styles.

Therianthropic power  125 The polemical and, in some ways, contradictory nature of Mashigo’s preamble –​titled “Ayashis’ Amateki”, after an 80s pop hit by South African singer Mercy Pakela about ill-​fitting shoes which prevent the singer from dancing –​may be read as part of a larger intra-​Africa negotiation of inherited modes of representation. Inasmuch as this disavowal of Afrofuturism writes against a genre central to the African diaspora, it is also an instance of Africa writing to itself.3 Mashigo avers that “Afrofuturism is not for Africans living in Africa” (x)4 and exhorts ‘us’ to “use our folktales if need be –​use them to imagine us being fantastical in this Africa we occupy right now” (xv). To justify this claim, she invokes a phenomenology of “actually liv[ing] on this continent, as opposed to using it as a costume or a stage to play out our ideas” (xi). She therefore offers an archive of African mythology as a portal to Africa as it is experienced “right now”, thus framing her own appropriations of these visionary cultural texts as making possible a closer engagement with the material exigencies of her own part of the continent, South Africa. In concert with this localising impulse is Mashigo’s seemingly incongruent call to writers to imagine “a future that is free from white supremacy” (xii), pointing out that “there needs to exist a place in our imaginations that is the opposite of our present reality where a small minority owns most of the land and lives better lives than the rest” (xi). Peculiarly, she supports her case by citing a 1988 interview with Miriam Tlali –​the first Black South African woman to publish a novel in English, and a renowned exponent of an urgent, politically attuned realism –​who noted that I don’t think I should, at this time in our history, be involved in a lot of talking and dreaming about the beautiful skies and the moon, and so on, and dreaming about ideal situations when we don’t have them. (xi) We are confronted with a paradox: a manifesto for engaging with the conditions of our “present reality” (xi) and a preamble to a collection of fantasy stories; a call for an African particularity that rejects Afrofuturism. Moreover, Mashigo’s fiction neither is about white supremacy nor does it escape its effects. Is Mashigo, then, calling for a flight into fabulation, or for a more politically conscious rhetoric that was the preserve of the South African short story during the twentieth-​century states of emergency? Ironically, given Mashigo’s call for Afrocentrism, this rebalancing of the imaginative and the political has been central to the thinking of Afro-​diasporic writers who are interested in having it both ways.5 Corresponding with the attempt at generic reconfiguration in Intruders is the collection’s participation in a trans-​media, digital/​print mode of publication and promotion. As such, Intruders is of a piece with a diversifying literary and readerly market in sub-​Saharan Africa, a textual geography characterised by an increasingly heterogeneous publishing environment in

126  Christiaan Naudé which one can observe various convergences of literary and popular styles. This vernacularising trend is registered acutely by short fiction and especially by the “hyper-​compressions” of flash fiction (see Blair, 2020). Intruders (and Mashigo herself) operates in this digitised mediascape, with the foreword to the collection featured in the online Johannesburg Review of Books in 2018 (Mashigo, 2018b) and “The High Heel Killer” first appearing on the Mail & Guardian site in 2016 (Mashigo, 2016b). However, seen strictly as a single-​ author printed volume, Intruders is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to disseminating speculative fiction on the continent. Analogous to the way in which short stories tend to be marginal or “ex-​centric” to national canons (Fasselt, Sandwith and Soldati-​Kahimbaara, 2020: 5), speculative fiction in (and of) Africa circulates in a similarly fugitive fashion. Issued by an increasingly sophisticated online network, these fictions float around the margins of the literary-​academic complex in much the same way that they skirt the boundary of literary realism.6 Scholars of the genre will agree with Joanna Woods’ observation that “it is becoming an interesting challenge to keep up with the turnover of emerging African speculative fiction writers and their works” (2020: 5).7 As a writer, Mashigo bridges the virtual home of science fiction with the more classically book-​centric world of South African literary-​scholarly interests, extending to the, at-​times technologically conservative, academe an invitation to cross over to a much vaster universe of fantastic fiction. Given the way in which Mashigo shuttles comfortably between print and screen, her transition from her largely realist debut novel to a more overtly fantastical style in Intruders seems apposite. This generic shift runs parallel with the tendencies of post-​2000 SA short stories and anthologies, many of which evince a “notable emphasis on the popular, rather than a shift towards a more modernist aesthetic”, and whose “authors use and adapt various forms of the genre for a range of political interventions which move beyond a strict bifurcation of the short story into either more political/​popular or avant-​gardist iterations” (Fasselt, Sandwith and Soldati-​Kahimbaara, 2020: 13). Intruders thus sits comfortably within a literary market characterised by a range of more commercial-​popular ventures (2020: 11).8 Coupled with her laid-​back, accessible style, Mashigo moves her writing away from the gravid apocalypticism that tends to govern proleptic discourse in South Africa (see Titlestad, 2015), thus converging with a more conciliatory aesthetic movement in which the old antinomies between materialist, imaginative and popular concerns wane in relevance.9

Critical enfreakment The generic hybridity of Intruders is figured by the therianthrope, a creature which brings together the motifs, themes and techniques of characterisation by which Mashigo intervenes into Afrofuturism and the short story form. As a folkloric and speculative entity in Mashigo’s writing, the therianthrope is a

Therianthropic power  127 symbolic nexus that entangles the past and the present, the ancestral and the modern. In The Yearning, the therianthrope is held out as an emblem of a powerful Bantu cosmology, allowing the protagonist to place herself within a potent shamanic lineage as a way of recuperating from trauma. In Intruders, the story “Manoka”, in particular, reiterates this narrative but in a more abstract form, drawing on transcultural mythology as much as Nguni lore. At the same time, the collection takes advantage of the concentrated form of the short story to intensify the political valence of the therianthrope, centring it within an implicit critique of the sexual violence that pervades South Africa. In terms of this speculative engagement with gender, the therianthrope in Intruders serves a dual purpose: as a symbol of a transformed sexual politics, and as an indictment of recalcitrant gender stereotypes in South African discourse. In the latter sense, the collection appropriates paranoiac tropes of women’s explosive sexual energies, protean ‘nature’, and suspected uncleanness: images that ostracise but also encode transformative political potential. Intruders literalises such notions of feminine monstrosity and invests the motif of the ‘intruder’ with sardonic irony: the therianthropic women in the collection are ‘freaks’ who intrude upon respectable society. Threatening and shunned, these characters are marginalised by choice or social exigency, rendered intruders in the eyes of a largely unsympathetic public. Yet it is precisely the enfreakment (Hevey, 2013) of these characters that is the source of their autonomy: their animal qualities afford them the ambivalent pleasure of becoming predators in their own right and allow them to move through or away from the constrictions of the city, and even of continental boundaries. Although this interstitial ontology into which the characters are inducted may be freeing, it is ultimately fantastic. By positing feminine agency as a speculative phenomenon, Intruders delineates a lack of such empowerment in contemporary South Africa on which it offers a slanted perspective.

Archaic ontology Although therianthropic creatures in many cultures around the world perform an admonitory10 function that polices the boundaries of propriety –​for example, Lilith, the ur-​seductress who has been depicted with wings or serpentine features –​they are also emblems of potency (indeed, Lilith has been appropriated as a feminist symbol). To emphasise this empowering aspect, this reading frames the stories in Intruders within the archaic therianthropic tradition of San rock art of the Kalahari, Drakensberg and the Karoo, a painterly archive which dates to at least 27,500 years before the present (Guenther, 2020: 103). For Mathias Guenther, “[t]‌herianthropes display ontological ambiguity to the greatest degree –​of flamboyance, profusion and diversity –​in San rock art” (2020: 15), which celebrates a “cross-​species blurring of identity and alterity”, and expresses “a cosmology within which ontological boundaries between human and non-​human are porous” (2020: 4–​5). Consciously or not, Mashigo’s interest in therianthropes places her firmly within the San cultural

128  Christiaan Naudé universe, even if only because Nguni or Sotho speakers’ cosmology of interconnectedness was itself possibly influenced by the First People of Southern Africa (2020: 4). Because the main characters of “Manoka” and “The High Heel Killer” assume aquatic and avian forms, respectively, the class of therianthrope germane to this study is that of the San “mermaid”. These creatures, painted inland in the Western and Eastern Cape, combine human and aquatic morphology, but are sufficiently ambiguous to have led some archaeologists to interpret them as avian beings (Hollman, 2005: 85).11 The portrayal of possibly aquatic beings in the arid Karoo region of South Africa is particularly tantalising to the science fictional imagination, given that this part of the continent was covered by a shallow sea 280 million years ago.12 Because of these avian-​piscine touchpoints, Intruders shows a distant relationship with a mode of representation from Southern Africa’s “deep time”, whereby human–​animal affinities are concretised in symbols of potency and even liberty, inviting one to interrogate our alienation from such affinities in the present.

Intrusive visions: “Manoka” and “The High Heel Killer” Intruders collects stories that are generically diverse, each showing its own degree of affiliation with techno-​centric science fiction, magical realism or fantasy. This reading centres on two stories that may be seen as thematic nexuses in the collection: “Manoka” and “The High Heel Killer”. Through the mode of speculative fiction, each story suggests a diagnosis and transformation of the problems of gender violence in South Africa, and of questions of sexuality more generally. Moreover, “Manoka” and “The High Heel Killer” are clear examples of the interests and formal techniques (especially past-​present interpolation) that distinguish Mashigo’s incipient oeuvre. Indeed, these stories demonstrate something of the structural tension of the volume as a whole. Motifs –​of odd couples, odd friendships and odd combinations effected by therianthropic transformation –​create points of connection across the stories in the volume. The collection is divided into three sections –​“The Good”, “The Bad” and “The Colourful” –​although several standalone stories with little thematic or characterological commonality with their respective sections introduce further disjuncture. The dynamic of unity and difference expressed in “Manoka” and “The High Heel Killer” thus mirrors the way in which Intruders sits in an ambiguous space between the patterned “story sequence” and the more disparate “framed miscellany” (Reid, 1977: 50). “Manoka” “Manoka” is the temporally disarranged story of Manoka Mashile, a single mother who lives with her infant daughter, Nkaiseng, and her grandmother,

Therianthropic power  129 Koko. On a church outing to Durban, Manoka meets a member of the church youth-​group, Ndumiso. During a sexual rendezvous on the beach, Ndumiso is killed inadvertently when Manoka’s lower body transforms into a set of tentacles and crushes him. The shocked Manoka confesses the accident to her grandmother, who informs her that she herself, Manoka’s estranged mother, Lipuo, Manoka and Nkaiseng are part of a matrilineal race of shape-​shifters, which Manoka tentatively calls “[m]‌ermaids” (Mashigo, 2018a: 23). Fearing retribution, Koko instructs Manoka to take Nkaiseng with her into the sea, to “go away and learn our history and be safe from this world” (23)13 in what she calls “our world”, where Lipuo may be waiting (24). The story’s title encapsulates the blend of local and ‘world’ aquatic mythology that drives the narrative. As shown below, the word “Manoka” alludes to (South) African folkloric traditions of therianthropism, and the story goes on to explore such traditions’ intercultural connections by drawing on the symbolism of the octopus and the mermaid, both transcultural figures. The title of the story and name of the protagonist, Manoka, translates into “snake” or “snakes” (from the root word, nyoka, shared by –​among other languages –​Swahili, Shona, Xhosa and Zulu). The invocation of the snake brings with it a panoply of serpentine and aquatic cultural entanglements. One thinks, for example, of the inkanyamba, the legendary “snake in the sky”, the tornado spirit that takes the form of a snake, also associated with violent storms. The inkanyamba is one among other supernatural snakes depicted in Nguni rock art. Though all “are beings of tremendous power”, some “indicate the potential for nonthreatening, deeply mystical interactions”, such as the “rainmaking snakes [which] play a crucial, life-​giving role”. However, “the inkanyamba is a violent, frightening presence, expressive of a sense of terror and vulnerability in the face of mysterious forces of supernatural might” (Wood 2005, 349). The image of the nyoka therefore connotes both life-​giving water and destructive tempests, in the same way that Manoka is simultaneously a devoted daughter, caring mother, and a destructive force. Indeed, the oceanic world of Manoka and her kind is a place of maternal nurturing, as Koko observes: “Women like us only have three chances to live where we come from: when we are born, when we are breastfeeding or being breastfed, and when we die” (24). However, a measure of ambivalence keeps these roles from devolving into a Madonna–​whore binary. “Manoka” shows that romantic affection, sexual assertion, motherly care and violent strength exist at different points on the same gamut. The boundaries that separate these actions collapse when Mashigo merges two different times and spaces (the beach and the guesthouse) by denoting at once the literal and figurative sense of the phrase, “You’re killing me, Manoka” (17): Ndumiso tried to push me away. […] I had never heard bones breaking before but I immediately knew what was happening. Panic set in and I killed him. […] “You’re killing me, Manoka.” I loved the way he said

130  Christiaan Naudé my name; the boy from KZN twisted it in his mouth and made Manoka sound like music. […] We were sitting on the step outside the house. (17–​18) This mingling of pleasure, power and fear is shown again when Manoka’s transformation is retold in a different scene: Ndumiso’s arms were trying to push me away but he couldn’t move. He was scared. […] The tentacles were twisted around his torso. I didn’t mean to hurt him. It didn’t even occur to me that I was squeezing him to death. How could I have known that I was transforming into something so powerful? (21) Ndumiso’s subjection to Manoka reverses and reprises the stereotypical symbolics of sexual encounter: in this scene the intruded becomes the intruder –​the penetrated the penetrator –​but the unequal power dynamic remains the same, and equally disturbing. Manoka’s character tightly integrates images of ancient lineage, therianthropism and the folkloric valence of water. Where The Yearning offers the aquatic therianthrope as a source of shamanic healing power, the therianthrope in “Manoka” is not as strongly tethered to Nguni symbolism. Even so, Manoka’s oceanic descent into “Our world” (24) recalls the assumptions that underlie the practice of intlwayelelo, “a propitiatory ritual” (Hirst, 2005: 3) performed as a “tribute to ancestral spirits who may manifest as ‘River People (Abantu Bomlambo)’ or ‘Sea People (Abantu Baselwandle)’ ” (2005: 12). Nongqawuse (b. 1840), the Xhosa prophetess (another woman imbued with supernatural power and later regarded as a harbinger of destruction), is said to have seen ancestral spirits in or near the Gxara river, where they promised her that they would emerge and cast the white settlers into the sea. “Manoka” advances an understanding of water as the medium that submerges yet grants access to a powerful ancestral world, acting as a window that, like Nongqawuse’s prophecy, “offers a vision of the future as a return of the past embodied in the ancestors” (Ashforth, 1991: 586). Over and above these folkloric resonances, Manoka’s octopoid form keys into a world of feminine therianthropes, from mermaids –​whose cultural ubiquity is attested to in the Penguin Books of Mermaids (Bacchilega and Brown, 2019) –​to the serpentine daughter of Satan in Paradise Lost (Milton, [1667] 2003), a woman who, through Milton’s rhetoric of abjection, is made to embody sin itself. Another literary octopus particularly salient to this reading is the one that appears in Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. Hugo’s novel proffered a tentacular spin on the vagina dentata myth, showing how its sailor-​protagonist is nearly annihilated by the “overpowering suction” of a giant, feminised octopus (Cohen-​Vrignaud, 2012: 31). Spawning the trope of the “octopussy”, Hugo’s novel caused a cultural frisson that catalysed

Therianthropic power  131 “ideological anxieties about female ‘looseness’ and [cathected] such affects onto a frightening monster […], a figure that integrated misogynistic repulsion and erotic fascination” (Cohen-​Vrignaud, 2012: 32).14 Mashigo’s “Manoka” shows the process of this enfreakment from the perspective of the enfreaked. Yet, despite the tremendous strength of Manoka’s octopoid form, it is a representation of enfreakment that refuses to offer itself as a neat model for emancipation. Indeed, for Meg Samuelson, “mythological figures such as the mermaid […] are ultimately damaging to women, refusing their mobility and silencing their voices; they too […] are disciplinary and cautionary figures who ‘patrol’, while appearing to transgress, borders” (2010: 556). Manoka appears ambivalent about the ancient power foisted upon her, and she is driven reluctantly into the undersea matriarchal realm that will accommodate her and Nkaiseng. When her grandmother accompanies Manoka to the coast, she warns her that “These people will kill you” (19), referring to the xenophobic denizens of the terrestrial world. Manoka is thus inducted into a dissident world that represents an exile, yet is the only place where she and her daughter will be able to live in safety. Her amphibian form is assumed through a painful inter-​species transformation, allegorising the difficulty of inhabiting an identity that cuts across the constraints of gendered expectations. This metamorphosis is described as “excruciating”, “like glass slicing skin” (20): A searing pain cuts into my sides. My mouth fills with water as I try to scream. I am going to drown. I have never been underwater. But the water doesn’t fill my lungs. It feels cold inside my chest and then it passes through the sides of my t-​shirt. (24) This traumatic transmutation contrasts with the painless shape-​shifting of Nkaiseng, Manoka’s infant daughter, who becomes a symbol of a hopeful, hybrid future. Nkaiseng’s transformation clearly shows her to be much more at ease in the water than Manoka: “Nkaiseng hiccoughs. Her brown skin is changing colour. She is glowing, a luminous blue. […] Nkaiseng’s little tentacles grab onto my arm” (20). This innocent, hopeful luminosity is accompanied by her jellyfish-​like form, recalling Manoka’s own tentacled appearance, but made more potent by the addition of her stinging venom. Nkaiseng’s abilities are at first known only to Manoka’s grandmother, who is responsible for bathing the child: “We all take on different shapes. You have those long things.” Koko smiled. […] “Nkaiseng? What does she…?” “She is a little like you but hers sting.” I tried to imagine my small baby all soft and cuddly but with tentacles, like a jellyfish, below the waist. (23)

132  Christiaan Naudé This story thus goes beyond a purely local bestiary, given that Manoka’s enfreakment and power intensify as she connotes the tentacled apparitions of Lovecraftian cosmological horror and the tentacle-​fetishism displayed in certain forms of Japanese manga. Thus coupling an aesthetics of enfreakment with questions of women’s autonomy in the form of the speculative short story, Mashigo fortifies her engagement with South African history, rather than diluting it. “Manoka” also draws on pan-​African symbolism, which is evident in the way that the story shares tropes with Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic fantasy, Lagoon (2014). Mashigo’s speculative stories, like Lagoon, meld “indigenous cosmologies together with the idea of the scientific novum” and so “troubles the prescriptive distinction between genres”. Like the alien visitor Ayodele in Lagoon, Manoka is distinctly “suspended between indigenous cosmologies and marine collectivity” (Jue, 2017: 173–​174). The Afrofuturist trope of the marine civilisation present in both texts draws on the transatlantic spirit of Mami Wata, a tradition connected “to an originary divine African Mother, who manifested to Africans as ancient water deities”, and on “Dogon tales of the Nommos, an amphibious people originally from the Sirius star system” (2017: 178, 184).15 Such an unavoidable comparison with the writing of Okorafor, who is a citizen of the United States, shows that Mashigo’s attempt to depart from the African-​American legacy of Afrofuturism in fact reaffirms the trans-​oceanic themes of this genre. In “Manoka”, the scenes on the beach depict a “coastal porosity” open “to planetary horizons that admit unfathomable and nonhuman dimensions”, “wavering between interior and exterior, revealing the mutability and mutual permeability of Africa and the world rather than marking the boundary between them” (Samuelson, 2017: 17–​18). The littoral that, in “Manoka”, lies between the city of Durban and the deep sea is the symbolic correlative to the phenomenon of therianthropism: “Neither a border nor a frontier, it is an elastic, fluctuant and permeable zone that shifts and changes in accordance with the tides, as well as through erosion and sedimentation” (2017: 17). But the sea is more than a symbol of intercontinental connection, being a place that has claimed the lives of Black women like Manoka. The sea has, and for many continues to be, a place whose “[s]‌ea-​crossings suggest flux and movement, but they can equally be the site of fragmentation of black women’s bodies” (Samuelson, 2010: 548). In “Manoka”, the sea is shown to be a place where the body is not only fragmented, but also reconstructed in the form of the therianthrope, a being that undoes the Enlightenment antinomies of culture and nature in service of a more autonomous and environmentally harmonious individual. The final feature of “Manoka” considered here is one that that has so far distinguished Mashigo’s oeuvre: the equipoise of realism and domesticity on the one hand, and magic and spectacle on the other. This juxtaposition of the magical, the horrible and the dignified, in fact, constitutes a realism suited to

Therianthropic power  133 expressing the material facts of life in South Africa. Elevating the commonplace above spectacle, “Manoka” devotes less space to the scenes of Manoka’s enfreakment and killing of Ndumiso than to descriptions of the sympathetic grandchild–​grandmother relationship (6, 8–​10), post-​natal exhaustion, (9–​11, 16–​17), music lessons (12–​14) and sexual listlessness and re-​awakening (4, 14–​ 15, 16). Crucially, this domesticity is decoupled from a heterosexual celebration of monogamy, motherhood and nurturing. Mothers and fathers, “Manoka” suggests, are surplus to requirement. Manoka’s own father is unknown and her mother unapologetic about her absconding: Nobody knows who my father is, though not for my lack of trying. I just had one of those mothers who was hard-​headed, sharp-​tongued and not interested in explaining herself. They must have asked her the question of my paternity until they grew tired of being insulted very personally. My mother walked out one day after declaring that I had “had enough breast milk to be strong”. (6) In an echo of Lady Macbeth, Manoka’s mother “pulled her breast out of [her] mouth and walked out of [her] life. Never came back” (6). What the story shows is that Manoka and Koko have supplanted the classical mother–​father roles with a relationship based on equitable caregiving. As for the matter of Nkaiseng’s father, Manoka is more interested in pursuing sexual satisfaction than the man responsible for her pregnancy: My grandmother always complimented my eyes. They were the reason I was so smart in school, cooked the best morogo she had ever tasted and found her house keys when she couldn’t. My eyes also got me into trouble. “You don’t even know who the father of your child is because your big eyes can’t focus. You look at all these boys and think you can have them all. […]”. (8) This reconfiguration of conventional family life leads to a more intriguing idea in “Manoka”: the reinvention of a heterosexual relationship in drastically new terms, through the power of Manoka’s ancient bloodline: As we get lower, I spot something I recognise: red takkies. It is Ndumiso –​ lifeless. A second tentacle reaches for him. His body weighs me down a bit but I remember Koko’s words: “Accidents happen when a cursed woman loves a man. If he dies in water, you can get him back. Not the same as before but he will understand you better. That’s what I’ve heard. Maybe there’s some truth to it.” (25)

134  Christiaan Naudé In Manoka lies the power of resurrection, particularly ironic given how important Ndumiso’s Christian faith is to him (18). This closing scene rewrites a standard plot found in European tales of land-​bound men taking mer-​ wives: the “mermaid is beautiful, and men yearn to possess her, but it must be on their terms and not the mermaid’s” (Bacchilega and Brown, 2019: xviii). Ndumiso evidently will have to be the one to adapt to Manoka’s world, and perhaps his new self will assume the rather queer form of the merman? This final scene is a ‘marriage’ of incongruities similar to that depicted by Manoka’s body: of the dead Ndumiso, a tragic reminder of the conventional, land-​bound existence from which Manoka has been exiled, and of the new underwater life that awaits. Although they are placed under the circumstances of banishment and death, Mashigo’s characters, at the end of this story, find themselves on the cusp of revival. This open ending promises Manoka a future that is reconciled with the past, one that reaches “deep” into time and space. By alternating present-​and past-​tense perspectives in quick succession, the story entangles supposedly discrete periods of time in the same way that animal and human characteristics combine in Manoka and her child. Ending with its characters in a littoral zone, a transitional place between the modern cityscape of Durban and the mythological world of mer-​ folk, the story gestures towards a resolution of two much longer time-​scales, represented by a meeting of two seemingly opposing cultural universes. “The High Heel Killer” “The High Heel Killer” may be read as a speculative homage to Miriam Tlali’s much-​anthologised 1989 short story, “Devil at a Dead End” (2017). Tlali’s story charts the quotidian perils of travelling across late-​apartheid South Africa as a Black woman, and Mashigo takes an analogous route by exposing the hazards of her protagonist’s long commute. “Devil at a Dead End” begins at Ficksburg railway station, where the unnamed “girl” has arrived after being carried across the Caledon River from Lesotho by “curious youths who obviously found it amusing and gratifying –​the experience of coddling ordinarily inaccessible parts of the anatomy of a partially clad woman!” (Tlali, [1989] 2017: 137). As the girl makes her way by train to Johannesburg, she suffers the penetrating, disdainful gaze of an Afrikaner booking clerk, and wards off a sexual assault by a white train guard by claiming to be afflicted with syphilis, calling herself “unclean” ([1989] 2017: 146). Even though the story includes some of the spectacular antinomies that Njabulo Ndebele criticised in “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary” (1991) –​devilish whites who clash with comradely Black characters –​“Devil at a Dead End” is important for showing the intimate, bodily experience of travelling in a time saturated by the aggression of the apartheid police-​state. The “furious eyes” (Tlali, [1989] 2017: 144) of the booking clerk recur as a motif to suggest the traumatising effect of the male gaze, and the end of the story shows a paradoxical moment in which the girl lies about having a venereal disease –​presenting herself as a quasi-​biblical

Therianthropic power  135 ‘fallen’ woman –​to ward off a much worse kind of abasement at the hands of the train guard. In Mashigo’s story, the unnamed narrator, known only as the High Heel Killer after goring a hectoring street-​hawker with one of her stilettos, likewise appropriates a conception of feminine “uncleanness” or enfreakment. But rather than deploying it as a shield, she uses it as means of self-​assertion. Indeed, when a “clerk at the court spat ‘monster’ when [the narrator] walked past her (in handcuffs)”, the narrator avers that “I am a monster. A beautiful monster with wings and no fear for the first time in my life” (Mashigo, 2018a: 149). Unlike the girl in Tlali’s story, who is “conscious of her high platform shoes” ([1989] 2017: 138), the narrator in Mashigo’s story refashions this piece of apparel from an emblem of vulnerability into a lethal weapon. At the end of “The High Heel Killer”, one reads of the birth of an avenging angel who keeps watch over a sordid city. This birth is one that is “bloody and painful”, but brings about a transformed woman, “standing on the roof of a city as something new” (Mashigo, 2018a: 150). She has “[f]‌irm, shiny, black feathers like a cape on [her] shoulders and back” (149),16 and vows to be “the enemy of cruelty”, daring “those down below to open their mouths and tell another tired, underpaid woman that she deserves the cruelty of the city” (150–​151). Though this scenario is reminiscent of a comic-​book origin story, particularly Batman’s, it arises out of a problem similar to that explored in “Devil at a Dead End”: the mental stress that results from sexual aggression. However, the story suggests that the narrator’s avian transformation, and the freedom it allows, might be only a fantasy of a mind pressured and hemmed in by the antagonism of the city. Again, Mashigo makes use of a disordered chronology to convey “the temporal dislocation that is associated with trauma” (Murray, 2017: 2), though this trauma arises from a kind of ‘slow violence’ rather than a single event. The narrator’s homicidal fury against the street vendor, known as Ray-​Ban Guy, is shown to be the result of an accumulation of sexual jibes during her commute through the city: Weeks. Months. Years. How long had I been following a map of confusion, fear and anger? Three years. I spent those years walking myself into the concrete and tar of the city. How many steps did I walk trying to get to the taxi rank, to work, from work, from work to a taxi, from that taxi to another taxi rank and back home again? (142) When asked by her mother why she has killed Ray-​Ban Guy, she traces her motive as far back as childhood: [A]‌hand from a sea of bodies in town touched my breast. I was 12. She [the mother] asked angrily if I recognised the person who did it. We were in the CBD [Central Business District], people were pushing past us and

136  Christiaan Naudé I knew the person who did it was walking away happily unpunished. ‘Did he hurt you?’ I looked at my feet. (143) In the present, the narrator abruptly gets out of her colleague Phillipa’s car, who tries to justify inappropriate comments made by a male co-​worker: “He says things like that all the time to the women at the office. He means nothing by it. You’ll get used to it –​I did. He’s married anyway” (144). Getting off at the wrong stop causes her to take a taxi “headed in the opposite direction to where I needed to be” (143). After she is ejected from the taxi, she teeters back to the taxi rank, and hears “two male voices” appraising her behind her back: It wasn’t menacing at all; their voices were casual: “Those thighs … I’m going first … Let’s see how far she goes … Ha, probably walking to her car … Two for one.” Why did I turn around and look? They both smiled, laughed and then crossed the road. The tall one turned back: “Ne re dlala, sester.” A joke… (144, ellipses as original) Having “walked six blocks in new shoes”, the city takes on an ever more hostile form, and the narrator regards it as “the city that hated me, assaulted me with its sound, violence and smells” (148). What finally triggers her murderous reaction is a taunt by Ray-​Ban Guy when she trips and falls in a puddle of pavement water: Ulayekile! [Zulu for “serves you right!”] That’s what he said before I fell. Who was he to determine what I did and didn’t deserve? The same city that reduced him to a con artist had beaten me and he thought I deserved it. He laughed and said “ulayekile”. He shouldn’t have said it. (150) She takes her shoe and lands “sharp blows with the heel” (150) with “so much force” that the heel “pierced the soft skin of his neck and he bled all over me and the pavement. […] People around me screamed and gasped, others ducked to avoid the blood spray and some were frozen in shock” (148). The prominence of blood in “The High Heel Killer” highlights the protagonist’s therianthropic rebirth, but also signals a theme of Mashigo’s social satire in Intruders: the enfreakment of women who commit violence against men. Reflecting on the scene of Ray-​Ban Guy’s murder, the narrator notes: “Blood is surprisingly thin. The kind I’ve been dealing with since I was 12 is thick … but Ray-​Ban Guy’s blood was thin, messy and unexpectedly hot” (141). The blood that she has been dealing with since the age of 12 refers to her menstruation, “which came with its luggage and strict instructions from Mme [Mother] who treated me like a frail prisoner” (145). If this kind of blood marks a process of maturation, then it is telling that her transfiguration

Therianthropic power  137 into a winged avenger is equally “bloody and painful”, causing, as she pictures herself, “the backs of her shirts” to be “always bloody” (147). Given that the blood of a man accompanies the narrator’s transformation into a powerful and liberated ­figure –​as is the case in “Manoka” –​is Mashigo prescribing a Fanonian revolution against male oppression to restore coherence to the female subject through violence? Mashigo’s treatment of male killing elsewhere in Intruders suggests something different. For example, the story “On the Run” is presented as an interview between a journalist and Nolwazi Botha, who had been imprisoned for what is ironically called “Domestic Androcide” (94). Nolwazi, who has enhanced strength because of experiments conducted by an apartheid scientist, had achieved celebrity after being broken out of prison by a group of similarly enhanced individuals. As with Manoka and the High Heel Killer, Nolwazi kills (her husband, in this case) only because of an access of passion and unexpected super-​human strength. Her description of her husband’s death echoes, and inverts, the testimony delivered by the athlete Oscar Pistorius at the widely reported trial for his killing of Reeva Steenkamp, whom he had shot through a bathroom door: He just wanted to keep arguing and I kept asking him for space. We were standing in the passage and I opened the bathroom door to get away from him. […] I shut the door in his face and everything else is a blur. It was like there was a ringing in my ears, but really loud and sore, you know? […] I couldn’t see properly and it looked like the veins in my arms were bulging. […] I don’t know what happened but I knew immediately that I had done something terrible. I was covered in blood. […] I actually threw up when I saw one of Eugene’s [the husband’s] legs in the passage. […] They say I was hysterical but I don’t remember that. MF [the interviewer]: The police report said your neighbours heard you screaming … for what sounded like a long time. (101–​102) The ensuing media spectacle that engulfs Nolwazi is reprised in “The High Heel Killer”: “ ‘The High Heel Killer.’ What a stupid name. I hate it. These media clowns aren’t even trying” (141). Far from an implicit advocacy for “androcide”, Mashigo’s female characters kill only by accident and because they do not yet understand their superhuman strength. The latter fact draws attention to the relative paucity of femicide’s opposite in actual South African society. The fictional media spectacles intensify the absurd and fantastic quality of the events depicted in Intruders, because news in South Africa is dominated rather by reports of violence against peri-​urban Black women or high-​profile cases of (frequently white) husbands who have their spouses killed to claim their insurance policies. In Intruders, feminine power is cathected into pure fantasy, making Mashigo’s social critique by negation all the more excoriating.

138  Christiaan Naudé This deferment of women’s empowerment into the realm of fantasy is enacted as an event in “The High Heel Killer” itself. During her trial, the narrator mentions that her “brain had become a sieve. There was some mention of me never having broken any laws, psychiatric evaluation and assurance that I would not kill anyone else (my interpretation)” (141). The narrator’s mother, who “works at the canteen of a psychiatric hospital” (147), wants her to see the psychiatrist who was going to testify that I had had some kind of mental break. “She says you have never done anything like this before. […] My mother’s aunt was sick. She can help prove that you’re sick too.” (147) In fact, the narrator can see herself being institutionalised, and being gossiped about by her mother as the “one who murdered a guy at a taxi rank” (147). It is conceivable that the narrator –​as she awaits her hearing while out on bail in her small “back room”, “one of three rooms in an old lady’s backyard” (149) –​unfurls her wings in a flight of fancy, embracing an enfreakment that is wholly imagined. The wings allow her an upward escape from the drudgery of her horizontal commute through the antagonistic city. The vista opened up by this avian form of therianthropism allows her to become the hawk-​like “enemy of cruelty” that had been absent in her own life. “The High Heel Killer” thus enters into the tradition of the short story as a means to accommodate the ‘freak’: that itinerant, vulnerable and psychologically stressed individual who is criminalised by the mainstream. The therianthrope may be proffered as their totem, as it converts their social ostracism into a superpowered agency. The indictment here is clear: as with Tlali’s “Devil at a Dead End”, the woman has to “enfreak” herself to ward off predation in the course of travelling (for Tlali, the sites of danger were the train and railway platform; for Mashigo, it is the streets of the post-​modern city). Mashigo amplifies the ability of the short story to express marginal subjects by counterposing depictions of a hostile public and the private experience of social ostracism and suggests that the most feasible way to survive the antagonism to which the female body is subjected is to engineer an imaginary escape. Mashigo’s exploits in the ‘interior’ world of speculation thus draw attention, by implication, to the social and imaginative deficits of mundane South African history.

Conclusion In Intruders, Mohale Mashigo practises the hybrid mode of the South African short story in diverse ways: rhetorically, generically and culturally. Her therianthropes are an emblem of her aesthetic hybridity and offer a metaphor to understand the evolution of the South African short story. The centripetal–​centrifugal energy of the therianthrope which roams Mashigo’s writing captures not only the odd assortment of styles and allusions in her writing,

Therianthropic power  139 but also something of the historical ironies brought to the fore by the speculative short story. The abridged form of short stories offers time-​constrained writers a laboratory in which they can experiment with history by taking normative agendas to their logical conclusion, or, conversely, remix proleptic narratives so that a hybrid and interstitial designation comes to define the future itself. Such a reinscription of the past, present or future, which perhaps finds its fullest expression in speculative literature, constitutes a (temporal) therianthropism that has been at the heart of the San connective cosmos for millennia. Mashigo’s use of past-​present interpolation in her writing is not merely aesthetically interesting, but also engaged with the real experiences of the Black women who are represented by her texts. Disjunctive and non-​linear chronologies preserve the intimate, muddled feeling of time as it is lived, thus repudiating the way in which “[p]‌rogress and apocalypticism both conceive of time as linear and repress psychosocial dynamics of recovery, re-​articulation and re-​organization of the past in the present in order to (re)imagine a future” (Titlestad, 2015: 39). Mashigo’s rhetoric of temporal disruption, well suited to representing the disturbing experience of trauma, is sensitive to the ways in which “bodies retain and speak traumatised experiences in ways that defy abstract, linear and masculine hegemonic time” (Murray, 2017: 7). Mashigo expresses this sense of fragmentation formally and thematically by way of therianthropy. However, far from casting the therianthrope as something merely abject, this figure opens up a new world of feminine power and physical mobility. In other words, while employing an aesthetic of fragmentation, Mashigo holds out the possibility of recuperation. Mashigo’s ethic and aesthetic is therefore to embrace enfreakment as a valid destiny for her characters: rejecting shame, she privileges the pleasure, force and physical mobility enabled by her characters’ metamorphoses. In framing enfreakment via therianthropism as a positive, utopian modality, she “boldly re-​narrativize[s]‌abjected desire and ostracized identity, re-​casting the more habitual heteronormative figurations which seem to insist on queerness as deviance, deficit, subversion, transgression, trauma, injustice, melancholy, grief, loss, death” (Murray, 2020: 82). However, that such a liberating assertion of the body can seemingly happen only in speculative fictional worlds is itself a form of social consciousness: the generic choice of speculative fiction as a medium of women’s empowerment brings into relief the structural (that is, economic and historical) shortcomings of the South African polity. Even so, speculative short fictions can momentarily open a vista that lies beyond these earthly constraints, flashes of illumination that Mashigo has pursued through an “endarkening” of science fiction in Intruders.

Notes 1 Nedine Moonsamy, one of the most prolific readers of African speculative short stories, examines ideas such as utopia (2016), ecoambiguity (2019a) and Africa–​ China relations (2019b) through the prism of science fiction. These works are

140  Christiaan Naudé













aligned with a poststructuralist ethos, in which African sci-​fi becomes a means to complicate the dichotomies prevalent in discourses about Africa’s future. My focus on therianthropism accesses a similarly ambivalent worldview, but by way of archaic southern African cosmologies. 2 In 1933, Eugène Marais published what is likely the earliest apocalyptic South African short story in Afrikaans, “Ondergang van die Tweede Wêreld” (“Demise of the Second World”) (1984, 944–​967). This story depicts a global environmental disaster that precipitates a calamitous racial conflict in South Africa. See Andries Visagie’s finely tuned analysis of this story (2015). 3 I allude to Evan Mwangi’s study of intra-​Africa literary dialogue, Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (2009). 4 Sole page numbers refer to Intruders. 5 Mashigo’s intervention into Afrofuturism resembles other writers’ use of this genre to explore underrepresented experiences and geographies. For writer-​critics such as Hope Wabuke and Nnedi Okorafor, the terms “Africanfuturism” or “Africanjujuism” describe a hermeneutic and a poetics critical of Afrofuturism. The former modes “center Blackness” in counterpoint to the “consistent erasure of Blackness in Western American-​and European-​authored science fiction” of which Afrofuturism forms a part (Wabuke, 2020: n.p.). Wabuke offers the category of “Black Speculative Literature” to encompass Afrofuturism and its successors. 6 A vast number of African speculative fictions are published as e-​books or hosted on platforms such as Probe, the fanzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy South Africa, a society founded in Pretoria in 1969 (SFFSA, 2020); Jalada (see Samatar et al. 2015); and Omenana (see DianaAbasi, 2020). When these short fictions do precipitate in printed volumes, they tend to take the form of edited collections such as LAGOS_​2066 (Arigbabu and Ashiru, 2013), Terra Incognita (Dorman, 2015), AfroSF (Hartmann, 2012, 2015, 2018) and Dominion (Knight and Oghenechovwe, 2020). This digital publishing infrastructure comes with its own awards scene, exemplified by the Nommo, bestowed by the African Speculative Fiction Society (n.d.), and the NOVA, a short fiction prize awarded by Science Fiction and Fantasy South Africa since 1971. 7 Complicating this situation further is the emergence of comic books and graphic novels as major media for exploring Afrofuturist themes. Mashigo is no exception to this trend, as she is a writer on the team behind the Kwezi comic books (see Mkize and Mashigo, 2019). For a helpful outline of developments within this medium, see “Beyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism is Booming in Comics” (Ito, 2021). 8 The dethroning of the modernist hegemony is further emphasised by the at-​times bizarre commingling of consumer brands and literature in South Africa. A number of instalments in Spearhead publishers’ Urban series of short story anthologies were sponsored by instant coffee conglomerate Nescafé, with the “Message from our Sponsor” in Urban03 (Chislett, 2003) reading: “We like to believe that sometimes a strong cup of Nescafé helped inspire [the authors] as a kick-​start in the morning or a relaxing cup after a hard day at the keyboard”. Furthermore, book reviews are offered on the website of optometry franchise Specsavers (2016), and the funeral insurance provider, AVBOB, holds an annual poetry contest adjudicated by local academics and poets (AVBOB Poetry Project: n.d.). 9 Although it is true that South African short stories gave twentieth-​century writers a literary form by which to subvert the dichotomy of artistic freedom and political responsibility, canonical stories that have attempted to do so via a speculative

Therianthropic power  141 mode are dystopian. See Christopher Hope’s “Learning to Fly” ([1976] 1994) and Maureen Isaacson’s “Holding Back Midnight” ([1992] 1997). Ivan Vladislavić’s “We Came to the Monument” and “The Terminal Bar” from his seminal 1989 collection, Missing Persons (2010), are exemplars of this dark tenor in SA short fiction. 10 The etymology of “monster” reveals a sense in which the word patrols the frontier between the present and the future: drawn from the Latin monēre –​“to warn” –​the word monstrum was used in the sense of “portent, prodigy, [or] monstrous creature” (OED, 2020). 11 For illustrations and analysis, see Jolly (2002), Hollman (2005), and the digital George Stow collection hosted by the University of Cape Town. 12 Adding to the mystery of the San “mermaid” is the persistence of the oral Karoo legend of the watermeid, a siren-​like “mermaid in the desert” (Wood, 2018: 67). 13 Sole page numbers refer to the story “Manoka” in Intruders. 14 Disney’s adaptation of The Little Mermaid may be viewed as a hangover of the octopussy trope, evident in its malign depiction of the patently queer Ursula the Octopus. 15 These beings give the African Speculative Fiction Society the name of its Nommo Award. This fusion of the deep-​sea and interstellar references in African cultures is expressed by the Detroit-​techno albums of Drexciya, composing a narrative of an underwater race born of pregnant Black women cast overboard during the trans-​Atlantic passage. Eventually, these high-​tech people leave the deep sea in a voyage to deep space. 16 Sole page numbers refer to “The High Heel Killer” in Intruders.

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Therianthropic power  143 Mkize L and Mashigo M (2019) Kwezi: Issues 10–​12. Cape Town: David Philip. Moonsamy N (2016) Life is a biological risk: Contagion, contamination, and Utopia in African science fiction. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3(3): 329–​343. Moonsamy N (2019a) Aliens and insecticide: Ecoambiguity in two stories from Dilman Dila’s A Killing in the Sun. English in Africa 46(3): 75–​92. Moonsamy N (2019b) Visions of China: Political friendship and animosities in Southern African science fiction. Journal of Southern African Studies 45(3): 543–​557. Murray J (2017) “I was a girl of my time”: A feminist literary analysis of representations of time and gender in selected contemporary South African fiction by women. Literator 38(1): 1–​8. Murray SA (2020) Queerying examples of contemporary South African short fiction. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55(1): 77–​95. Mwangi E (2009) Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Nabutanyi EF (2020) Queering the post-​apocalypse in three selected short stories by Dilman Dila. Scrutiny2 25(2): 82–​97. Ndebele SN (1991) Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Johannesburg: Ravan. OED Online (2020) monster, n., adv., and adj. Available at: www-​oed-​com.uplib.idm. oclc.org/​view/​Entry/​121738 (accessed 27 November 2021). Okorafor N (2014) Lagoon. London: Hodder. Reid I (1977) The Short Story. London: Methuen. Samatar S, Oduor O, Ali R, Adan A, Kimutai T and Moraa A (eds) (2015). Jalada 02: Afrofuture(s). Nairobi: Jalada Africa. Samuelson M (2010) Oceanic histories and protean politics: The surge of the sea in Zoë Wicomb’s fiction. Journal of Southern African Studies 36(3): 543–​557. Samuelson M (2017) Coastal form: Amphibian positions, wider worlds and planetary horizons on the African Indian Ocean littoral. Comparative Literature 69(1): 16–​24. SFFSA (Science Fiction and Fantasy South Africa) (2020) Our History. Available at: www.sfsa.org.za/​history.html (accessed 4 May 2020). Specsavers (2016) The Yearning by Mohale Mashigo. Available at: www.specsavers. co.za/​post/​book-​club/​the-​yearning-​by-​mohale-​mashigo (accessed 4 May 2020). Titlestad M (2015) Future tense: The problem of South African apocalyptic fiction. English Studies in Africa 58(1): 30–​41. Tlali M [1989] (2017) Devil at a dead end. In: Medalie D (ed.) Recognition: An Anthology of South African Short Stories. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 133–​146. Visagie A (2015) The function of genocide in post-​apocalyptic fiction: “Ondergang Van Die Tweede Wêreld” (“Destruction of the Second World”) by Eugène N. Marais (1933). English Studies in Africa 58(1): 92–​106. Vladislavić I (2010) Flashback Hotel. Cape Town: Umuzi. Wabuke H (2020, 27 August) Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the language of Black speculative literature. Los Angeles Review of Books. Available at: https://​lare​ view​ofbo​oks.org/​arti​cle/​afrof​utur​ism-​afri​canf​utur​ism-​and-​the-​langu​age-​of-​black-​ spec​ulat​ive-​lit​erat​ure/​ (accessed 14 December 2021).

144  Christiaan Naudé Wood F (2005) “The snake will swallow you”: Supernatural snakes and the creation of the Khotso legend. Indilinga –​African Journal of Indigenous Knowledge Systems 4(1): 347–​359. Wood J (2018) Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore. London: Bloomsbury. Woods J (2020) On contemporary speculative fiction in Southern Africa. Scrutiny2, DOI: 10.1080/​18125441.2020.1813193.

8  Navigating the spectacular in queer African erotic short fiction Jenny Boźena du Preez

Ainehi Edoro (2013a), writing for her blog, Brittle Paper, suggests that two rules have governed the inclusion of sex in African novels: to “leave it out of the story entirely”, or to handle it “as cautiously as possible by placing it within a moralizing context”.1 One potential reason for this caution is, as Desiree Lewis (2011: 205) points out, that African people “have been defined in terms of sexual excess, bestiality and bodily deviance” within the colonial imaginary. These discourses remain with us, surfacing even in depictions that are “presented as positive and ennobling celebrations of the black body”, such as “nationalist claims that African men are innately powerful and virile” (Lewis, 2011: 201). Despite the fraught history of the representation of sex and sexuality in Africa, the continent is seeing an increasing number of literary and other art forms being produced and circulated that contest the colonial framing and historical erasure of the subject of sexuality. In these works, the writers and artists grapple with how, through content and form, to subvert or evade degrading racist, patriarchal, heteronormative and misogynist colonial discourses that have seeped into the literary imagination. One interesting site for exploring this contestation is the growing body of South African-​ produced short story collections and anthologies that unabashedly include erotic, queer, women-​ authored and women-​ centric narratives. These works include single-​ authored collections such as Rozena Maart’s Rosa’s District Six (2006), Jane Bennett’s Porcupine (2008), Makhosazana Xaba’s Running and Other Stories (2013), and Lindiwe Nkutha’s 69 Jerusalem Street (2020); as well as edited anthologies: 180º: New Fiction by South African Women Writers (Moffett and Morris, 2005), Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (Schimke, 2008), Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (Martin and Xaba, 2013), Adults Only: Stories of Love, Lust, Sex and Sensuality (Hichens, 2014), and Queer Africa 2: New Stories (Xaba and Martin, 2017). Both Open and Adults Only specifically collect erotic stories, with Open focusing solely on women-​authored narratives. Together, these anthologies and collections showcase a wide range of explorations of African women’s sexualities and their erotic experiences. While all genres offer the potential for experimentation with erotic narrative, in South African-​produced fiction the short story is currently a DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-8

146  Jenny Boźena du Preez significant space for Black,2 queer erotic narratives. South African erotica novels are, as far as I know, solely authored by white women, and mostly focus on heterosexual desire.3 Although erotic stories by Black women appear in the short story form, they are still generally underrepresented, particularly in the volumes with a specific focus on erotic representation. In her introduction to Adults Only, Xaba (2014: 13) notes that, similarly to in Open, “there is a very small presence of black women writers” in the collection. She speculates that this might be “merely a product of the manner in which calls for submissions work” because they are often “limited to […] circles of acquaintances, familiarity and friendship networks” (Xaba, 2014: 13). This speaks to a continued legacy of apartheid segregation, and white dominance of the publishing industry. Other factors that might contribute to the particular lack of Black women’s erotic narratives include the (ab)uses of their sexuality in colonial narratives (see more on this in the next section) and the socio-​economic pressures they face, potentially making the production of erotic literature seem an unaffordable luxury. Considering the socio-​ economic disadvantages faced by many Black women in South Africa due to the legacy of the racist, patriarchal apartheid regime, the brevity of the short story, its most defining feature, might partly explain why Black women’s erotic narratives appear more frequently in this form than in the novel. Another reason could be the short story’s occupation of an “ambiguous cultural position”, at once “a product of mass and minority culture” (Awadalla and March-​ Russell, 2013: 4). Mainstream, popular erotica by women is currently synonymous with the novel, and Black women, even when producing massively popular art, still face a complex set of contingencies before being considered a safe bet for commercial success. For example, while many popular Black American women music artists are known for their hypersexualised image4 and lyrics, the film industry has long struggled to accept them as stars of romantic comedies.5 In South Africa, where erotica titles by local authors are still not firmly established, we might conclude that publishing houses are reluctant to pitch erotica titles by Black women because they are seen as unlikely to result in commercial success. The short story, however, like poetry, is considered a more niche genre, and thus massive commercial popularity is not an expectation. Unlike poetry, however, the short story is still narrative prose, and can thus play with conventions of the erotica genre. Its lack of commercial appeal, and the fact that it is a shorter, less time-​consuming form to produce, means that it potentially “lends itself to trying out ideas” (Munro, 2017: 189). Its brevity also means that it is arguably particularly “appropriate for […] brief emotional rides and physical encounters of foreplay, the sexual act and climax” as the “scenes, dialogue and narrative within the confines of a short story seem to facilitate clarity and urgency on matters sexual” (Xaba, 2014: 12). The weakness of many erotica novels, apart from heavy reliance on clichéd depictions of sexual intercourse, is the plot required to hold together a string

Navigating the spectacular  147 of sexually charged vignettes in novel form.6 The short story, in contrast, can focus solely on the erotic purpose of the narrative, without having to create contrived obstacles to delay satisfaction. Certainly, the stories analysed in this chapter share intensity and focus, even as they differ distinctly in style and effect. I have chosen three stories from three different anthologies –​“All Covered Up” by Dolar Vasani7 in Queer Africa (2013), “Coming Into Self-​Awareness” by Tiffany Kagure Mugo8 in Adults Only (2014), and “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus” by Suzy Bell9 in Open (2008) –​because they all employ one particular mode of representation that has long been used to depict queer Black women’s bodies and sexuality –​spectacle. All the stories are clearly intended to be celebratory of Black, queer women’s sexuality in opposition to colonial, patriarchal and heteronormative discourses, with women playing with spectacle for their own pleasures. However, the stories vary in the ways in which they treat spectacle and related tropes. My intention is to explore how effective, in my reading, these stories are in navigating the spectacular colonial imaginary and what this might tell us about the possibilities and pitfalls of searching for, to borrow a phrase from one of the pre-​eminent theorists of spectacle, a “new language of desire” (Mulvey, 1989: 16). Before delving into the analysis of the short stories, I trace the use of spectacle as a tool of objectification and dehumanisation of women, Black people and queer people, as well as spectacle’s, often concomitant, employment in the creation of erotic representation. I then consider the role of spectacle in each of the stories, analysing how they play with spectacular tropes, particularly those that are clichés of the colonial imaginary, such as the exotic erotic and the land/​body metaphor. I start with “All Covered Up” and its use of the exotic erotic. Then I move on to “Coming Into Self-​Awareness” and its construction of an escapist fantasy of sexual liberation. Finally, I turn to “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus” and the way in which it grounds the ‘spectacular’ in a sense of the ordinary. The argument is not structured according to the chronology of the publication of the stories, but rather according to my reading of their success in subverting problematic uses of spectacle as a mode of erotic representation. In fact, Bell’s narrative, where I find the most interesting subversion, is the earliest narrative, which troubles any teleological notion of ‘progressiveness’. I would suggest that this points instead to the messiness of the process of creation within a deeply unequal society and the pervasiveness of colonial tropes within contemporary society. It is this messiness that I wish to engage with in this chapter.

Sex, bodies and sexuality as spectacle The idea of spectacle is closely tied to the visual. More than merely any image, however, spectacle is in some way striking, dramatic, unusual or even “an object of curiosity or contempt” (Merriam-​Webster.com, 2021). Within

148  Jenny Boźena du Preez feminist theory, spectacle has most notably been associated with the power of the gaze and the dynamic of male agent and female object. Laura Mulvey famously theorised this dynamic in Visual and Other Pleasures, arguing: In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-​be-​looked-​at-​ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle […]. (1989: 19, italics in original) Mulvey’s argument is specific to mainstream Hollywood film, which was at the time predominantly white, straight and male-​centred, but the link between the erotic, woman as sexual object, and spectacle can be traced in other contexts and in other forms. One of these contexts is the feminist debate regarding pornography and erotica that was part of the American ‘Sex Wars’ of the 1980s. Gloria Steinem (1980: 37), for example, defined pornography as depictions of sex that are bound up in voyeuristic processes of objectification and are often about “domination and violence against women”. In contrast, she defined erotica as representation focusing on erotic experience in a way that foregrounds mutual pleasure, positive choice, sensuality and equality (Steinem, 1980: 37). This distinction between pornography and erotica remains part of the discourse on erotic representation today, as Karen Schimke (2008: viii) writes in the prologue to Open from within a contemporary South African context: “Porn is prurient. It is obscene, lewd, even gross. It is indecent. It exploits. Erotica is voluptuous, amorous, sensual. It arouses subtly, mysteriously.” I would suggest that central to this distinction is the idea of spectacle. In Steinem (1980), it is a distinction between women as displayed sexual objects to be viewed and acted upon versus subjects in their own pleasure. In Schimke (2008), it appears as a distinction between sex portrayed as excessive, even ‘freakish’, versus sex portrayed as a subtle play of feelings and senses. What we might also draw from these definitions is an understanding of spectacle not just as dramatic visual image, but representation that flattens subjectivity and nuance. As Audre Lorde (2007: 54), in her famous essay titled “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, first published in 1978, notes, pornography emphasises “sensation without feeling”. While the above focuses on the sexist and misogynistic uses of spectacular, pornographic modes of representation, these modes specifically serve “the imperatives of white male heterosexual desire” (Bensinger, 1992: 76, my italics). Due to the history of colonialism and imperialism in Africa, the portrayal of African sexuality and eroticism is “haunted by the passage of the African (female) body through colonial scopic regimes” (Coly, 2010: 256). Within these regimes, Black women have been “defined by colonial myths, by fictions about their hypersexuality, their physical degeneracy and their tantalising exoticism” (Lewis, 2011: 206), as part of the construction of

Navigating the spectacular  149 a racist “white/​ male/​ civilized and black/​ female/​ primitive” binary (Stott, 1989: 76). If white, straight men were conceived of as the meaning makers, the agents, the holders of rationality and civilisation in this imaginary, Black women were meant to signify their opposite. Black women were treated as the ultimate spectacle –​hyper-​sexualised yet de-​eroticised –​to be subjected to the gaze of every other group as the symbol of the dehumanised ‘other’. In this way, their inner lives were erased, or they were erased from the narrative altogether, especially if they were queer Black women. Since the depiction of African women’s sexualities is “particularly charged” (Lewis, 2011: 200) due to its discursive history, African erotica –​ especially that which contains explicit sex scenes –​has to negotiate the legacy of colonial representation and risk perpetuating this ‘othering’. To portray African female sexuality and the body openly is to risk playing into colonial discourses, or at least to be interpreted as doing so. Therefore, as Ayo Coly (2010: 654) points out, postcolonial narratives attempting to counter colonial objectification of Black women have tended “to cover up, de-​sexualise and de-​corporealise African womanhood”. Coly (2010: 255–​256) uses the example of Cameroonian-​French author, Calixthe Beyala, to illustrate the difficulties of trying to break with this kind of representation, as she is frequently accused of “pornographic and colonialist treatment of African women for the benefit of Western readership”. This criticism is also likely exacerbated by the fact that Beyala includes same-​sex sexuality and sex acts in her work.10 Therefore, this chapter explores how African women negotiate this tension in writing queer erotica. In the stories I have selected, the authors very clearly assert the sexuality and sexual pleasures of women in Africa –​refuting its historical erasure. In doing so, they play with different modes of spectacle frequently used within colonial representation –​particularly the exotic erotic and land/​body metaphors –​to more or less subversive effect.

The exotic erotic in “All Covered Up” The title of Vasani’s “All Covered Up” speaks to the story’s play with spectacle and the gaze. The story follows Dr Carmen Fernandez, a middle-​aged woman born in Zanzibar but living and working in Switzerland, as she returns to the country of her birth on a work assignment for the United Nations. The title references the dress of the women in Zanzibar who ‘veil’11 themselves with abaya, hijab and buibui; and alludes to Carmen’s fascination with the bodies that are hidden underneath. In Zanzibar, she encounters the flirtations of both her boss, Yasmin, and her guide, Fatma. The tension slowly builds, culminating in a joyful sexual encounter with Fatma that employs clichéd language and the colonial trope of body as sexual landscape to be explored. This imagery, the eroticised use of the ‘veil’ in the narrative, and the exotic depiction of Zanzibar (Carmen references “the mysteries of the ancient spice island” and observes that “swaying coconut trees in a sea of green vegetation, and the red earth, immediately infuse an air of exotic fantasy” (Vasani, 2013a: 67, 68))

150  Jenny Boźena du Preez means that the narrative evokes what might be termed, drawing from Yakini Kemp (2004), the “exotic erotic”. Vasani navigates the exotic erotic in service of a celebratory depiction of female same-​sex eroticism, but the story, as I will argue, remains entangled with many of the trope’s problematic implications. Carmen’s sexual desire for the Zanzibari women she meets is linked to their garments from the start, as her descriptions of the women frequently include observations about their style of dress. For example, in the airport on her way to Zanzibar, a “young woman with a black abaya and purple hijab […] catches [Carmen’s] attention” (Vasani, 2013a: 67, italics in original). Carmen’s interest is shown to be explicitly erotic when she meets Yasmin. Carmen begins to “wonder how her hair looks without the hijab” (Vasani, 2013a: 69, italics in original), and this, and Yasmin’s flirtations, lead her to consider the possibility of a sexual encounter in Zanzibar. The main erotic tension of the story, however, is with Fatma, who openly flirts with her. Carmen frequently makes references that tie her desire to the mystery of what is underneath the ‘veil’, such as when she wonders if Fatma’s “skin is also prickling under the abaya” (Vasani, 2013a: 71–​72, italics in original). For Dakoda Smith (2017: 107), Carmen’s descriptions of the clothing and accessories of the various Muslim women she meets are ‘painful’ because they express “her overwhelming fascination specifically with the pieces that can be exoticised”. Smith’s reading (2017) suggests that Vasani has not managed to escape the uncomfortable colonial implications of the exotic erotic, here depicted through the image of the ‘veil’. The play between what is revealed and what is concealed by ‘veiling’ is entwined with growing sexual tension. One night out, Fatma changes her style of dress and Carmen notes: For the first time, Fatma is wearing a tight-​fitting, short-​sleeved top, exposing her smooth arms and the defined curves of her body. Her head remains covered. She’s oozing sex appeal and I cannot stop ogling. (Vasani, 2013a: 72) Within these few short sentences, the erotic play of display and concealment is clearly linked to the gaze, with Carmen positioned as the bearer of the gaze and Fatma as erotic spectacle. The exotic aspect appears in the tension between exposure of the body (a site most often sexualised in Western cultures) and concealment of the head (a symbol of Zanzibari culture in the story). The eroticisation of the ‘veil’ continues as Fatma removes her hijab and exposes her hair to initiate the sexual encounter between her and Carmen. When Carmen undresses Fatma, noting that she had “never navigated a buibui before”, she even exclaims, “Gosh, Fatma, you are mysterious” (Vasani, 2013a: 76). This brings to mind colonial stereotypes of the Orient. As Meyda Yeğenoğlu (1998: 39) explains, the “veil is one of those tropes through which Western fantasies of penetration into the mysteries of the Orient and access to

Navigating the spectacular  151 the interiority of the other are fantasmatically achieved”. For Carmen, both the ‘veil’ and Fatma are ‘other’, to be navigated and explored. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that the story is told in the first person from Carmen’s perspective, reinforcing the sense that she is the agent in the narrative and possessor of the gaze. While Yasmin and Fatma are depicted as overtly flirtatious, with Fatma deliberately pursuing Carmen, the fact that they are not fleshed out beyond their sexual desire for her makes it seem like they are merely playing a part in an ‘exotic fantasy’. Just as Sally Ann Murray (2020: 85) argues that the “lush island locale [is] conveniently stripped of history […] in the service of the erotic”, so Yasmin and Fatma seem conveniently constructed, by both the author and Carmen, as sexually appealing and willing in order to satisfy both Carmen’s and the reader’s erotic desires. Thus, while Carmen, as a woman, is positioned as the “subject of desire” (Hollinger, 1998: 12) in contrast to the traditional formulation of male subject and female object, the narrative fails to extricate itself from the subject/​object binary. To elaborate, Karen Hollinger (1998: 12) argues that The subversive potential of the lesbian coupled subject position, as de Lauretis has theorized it, resides ultimately in its evocation of the lesbian look and in the investment of this look in two desiring women […] each of whom is simultaneously both subject and object of the look and consequently of female desire. If we follow this argument, the subversiveness of representations of women desiring women lies not in placing a woman in a ‘male’ subject position, but creating a representation of the desiring gaze that is reciprocal. Furthermore, making a woman the subject of the gaze does not address the colonial power dynamics at play. Although Carmen was born in Zanzibar, this does not ameliorate her tendency to exoticise the Muslim women in the story. This reflects Yeğenoğlu’s (1998: 3) argument that the category of the Western subject refers “to a position or positioning, to a place, or placing, that is, to a specific inhabiting of place”. Carmen, despite the fact of her birth, inhabits Zanzibar as a foreigner, as is clear from her construction of the country as a spectacular, exotic fantasy. There are hints of a potentially reciprocal gaze in some moments of the story. For example, Fatma does appear to resist Carmen’s interrogating gaze at times. Although her teasing playfulness with concealment and exposure mostly contributes to the erotic fantasy aspect of the story, there is subtle resistance to some of Carmen’s questioning. When Carmen asks Fatma about Yasmin and Abu, the man Fatma left with one night –​clearly probing for information about Yasmin’s sexual orientation and Fatma’s relationship to Abu –​Fatma’s laughing reply is: “You ask too many questions and read too much into things (Vasani, 2013 a: 77)”. This gentle rebuke critiques an Orientalist tendency of the Western subject to pursue “relentless investigation” (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 39)

152  Jenny Boźena du Preez of supposedly ‘exotic’ spaces, where anything might be a sign of lesbian eroticism. Fadwa El Guindi (1999: 32) outlines the way in which the Muslim world, with its institutions of the harem, women’s baths and veils, was constructed as a site of lesbian sexuality in the colonial imaginary and critiques the accuracy of claims made about “lesbian relations” and “sexual lewdness” in these spaces as another colonialist misreading of Muslim societies. In this moment, then, Fatma might be seen as resisting Carmen’s curiosity and asserting the sovereignty of her own subjecthood. Fatma also subtly displays her own ‘exoticisation’ of Carmen in a manner that problematises the assumption of a Western norm and an African/​Oriental ‘other’. Fatma’s observation that Carmen has “the most distinguished way of tying [her] hair” and her question about whether she ever wears it loose (Vasani, 2013a: 71) might be read as a subtle challenge to the sexualisation of the ‘veil’. In this moment, Carmen’s method of tying up her hair is ‘made strange’. The sexualising gaze is reversed and the ‘normal’ ‘Western’ mode of dress made ‘exotic’. The potential for reciprocity of the desiring gaze is further reinforced by the way Carmen and Fatma are described as starting “another round of mutual exploration” during their sexual encounter (Vasani, 2013a: 77). The colonial connotations of exploration are upset here as the hierarchy upon which the colonialist/​colonised relation is built is undermined through the invocation of mutuality. However, despite these promising invocations of a reciprocal gaze, the spectacular nature of the language, structure and perspective of the story limit the possibilities of meaningful disruption of the traditional dynamics of the gaze. The story plays with the genre of erotic fantasy and leans heavily on its tropes. Murray (2020: 9) describes them as “the tired clichés of hetero romance: hunter/​prey, silky cinnamon body, sexy lingerie, breasts like mangoes, and the hyper-​ventilated embodiment of hardening arching squealing swelling gushing pulsating”. Without finding new language or new modes of description for sex and erotic titillation, the story remains trapped in exotic erotic spectacle and its concomitant power dynamics. To return to Murray (2020: 9), Vasani “runs the risk of reprising oppressive hierarchies of power that remain entrenched in the wider structures of social reality, and serve to construct orientalizing margins and marginality in the service of centrist, heteronormative, exoticizing fantasies”. Based on my own reading, as well as Smith’s (2017) and Murray’s (2020), I would say that the story does inadvertently reprise some of these fantasies. The reader might be able to make out subversive hints of a reciprocal gaze amongst the spectacular conventions of hetero/​romance, but the story does not guide the eye in that direction.

Shifting gazes and sexual pleasure in “Coming into Self-​Awareness” Mugo’s “Coming Into Self-​Awareness” also draws on clichés and spectacle in its descriptions of sex and sexual desire. However, while “All Covered Up” focuses on the build-​up and fulfilment of an erotic, exotic fantasy, “Coming

Navigating the spectacular  153 Into Self-​Awareness” focuses on the fulfilment of learning about one’s own sexual pleasure. Although the protagonist of the story, Khanya, has two sexual partners in the story and takes part in a number of graphically described sex scenes, the narrative’s main concern is not the external objects of her desire, but rather the internal desire for her own pleasure. This is intertwined with the concept of Africa as a place of sexual discovery where –​unlike in Vasani’s story –​it is in returning home, to herself, rather than travelling elsewhere, that the protagonist is able to achieve sexual gratification. At the beginning of the story, Khanya is unsatisfied with her job in the United Kingdom and unsatisfied with her sex life because, despite having athletic sex with an East African man, she never orgasms. She returns home to South Africa in the hopes of carrying out more effective humanitarian work at a grass-​roots level, which coincides with the beginning of a sexual relationship with a woman named Vee. Although sex with Vee opens up a whole new vista of sexual experience, Khanya is still unable to orgasm until Vee shows her how to masturbate. Her climax is also the climax of the story, as she literally cums into self-​awareness; her new knowledge about her body and sexual pleasure conflated with her epiphany about the importance of African self-​ knowledge for solving ‘African’ problems. The graphic sex scenes with her two different partners and, eventually, herself, are not particularly ground-​breaking in terms of the language and imagery used to describe them. For example, one paragraph depicting Vee and Khanya’s first sexual encounter reads: Vee slowly peeled the underwear off her, pulling the panties down over her ass, her thighs, right down till Khanya could step out of them. In one fluid movement Vee parted Khanya’s thighs further and slid in her tongue and licked and then changed to small powerful sucks to her clitoris –​ Khanya’s knees buckle[d]‌and she tumbled to the floor. (Mugo, 2014: 35) The focus is on the actions of the sexual encounter and the pleasure is fantastically heightened. Khanya’s knee-​buckling reaction to Vee sucking on her clitoris is hyperbolic considering she has not even orgasmed at this point. This fits into the mode of erotic fantasy, where the point, as in Vasani’s story, is to arouse the reader rather than create a nuanced depiction of the odd realities of sex in its interior, sensual and mundane aspects. There is a spectacular slant to this kind of erotic depiction, as it ensures that the reader is able to easily conjure a visual image of the consorting bodies. In this way, the story plays with spectacle to create an erotic narrative. However, the story does not replicate the active male subject/​passive female object binary with a woman in the man’s position. Rather, designation of desiring gaze and desired object is constantly shifting from subject to subject, whether Khanya’s sexual encounter is with a man or a woman. With her East African lover, Khanya describes his gaze as similar to the sharp,

154  Jenny Boźena du Preez pleasurable sensation of rope burn as “his eyes [travel] down the length of her subdued body, all but exposed were it not for the rags of a ripped dress” (Mugo, 2014: 29). Then, on the night Vee propositions Khanya, it is Khanya’s turn to take ownership of the gaze, describing the sight of Vee as “optical inebriation” (Mugo, 2014: 34). In the final scene where Vee guides Khanya in masturbating, Vee becomes spectator –​“It’ll take all my willpower, but all I’m going to do is sit here and watch” (Mugo, 2014: 39). Her words guide Khanya to focus on the various parts of her body and ‘see’ them through her eyes. In this way, Vee creates a space in which Khanya can become both subject and object of her own desire as she realises: “She wanted to fuck herself ” (Mugo, 2014: 40). The story thus plays with reciprocal pleasures of looking and being looked at. Here, we find Hollinger’s (1998: 12) “two desiring women […] each of whom is simultaneously both subject and object of the look and consequently of female desire”. Mugo also uses visual imagery in a way that is subversive. For example, to highlight the pleasure of Khanya’s orgasm, Mugo (2014: 41) describes “her body contort[ing] into shapes that cast shadows throughout the room” so that she looks “like a work of abstract art”. Likening Khanya’s body to abstract art challenges the flattening effect of sexual spectacle. While her body is a striking image, it is one that cannot be easily read. It momentarily becomes an abstract depiction of pleasure and, cast against the walls, it is both produced by and visible to Khanya. This further contributes to the creation of a complex shifting of the gaze, escaping the rigid binary mode of erotic representation described by Mulvey (1989), and invoking a sense of reciprocity. Playing with the gaze in this way means creating shifting power dynamics. The idea of play with, rather than reification of, power relations emerges early on in the story in the description of Khanya engaging in rope play with her male lover. Here, Khanya’s body is “his to play with and he indulged” (Mugo, 2014: 30). The intimation of control over her body is reinforced through Khanya’s speculation about his incredible strength, as she wonders “just how safe she was […] but just as quickly not caring” (Mugo, 2014: 30). Her lover’s strength and ability to physically handle her is a source of pleasure for both of them. Although the possibility of threat does cross Khanya’s mind, alluding to the reality of patriarchal violence male strength has been used to perpetrate, the story offers a utopian vision of male/​female sexual relations where physical strength is a source of pleasure rather than threat for women. Mugo (2014: 30) also explores female power in this relationship as, “even though [Khanya’s lover] was stronger in limb, when he entered her she devoured him”. This image reflects, and may have been drawn from, Nkiru Nzegwu’s (2011) “Osunality (Or African Eroticism)”, a piece of scholarly writing that Mugo frequently refers to in her speeches and non-​fiction aimed at helping to liberate queer African women (and African people more generally) from damaging notions about sex.12 Nzegwu (2011: 258, 260) argues for the continued presence of an ‘African eroticism’ that “affirms the normality of sexual pleasure and the erotic” and “the right of women to enjoy

Navigating the spectacular  155 sex”. One image significant to the ‘African sexual ontology’ Nzegwu puts forward is the ‘devouring vagina’. While psychoanalytic readings, for example Barbara Creed’s (1993) analysis of the monstrous feminine in horror films, find a relationship between the vagina dentata and castration anxiety in mainstream Western culture, Nzegwu’s (2011) take on the image within an African imaginary offers an assertion of women’s sexual agency without invoking this anxiety. The conceptualisation she puts forward of the devouring vagina undermines the idea that power has to manifest in an overtly active image. As she explains “to devour or to eat something is to assert one’s power and will over it, yet that act does not deny power to that which is eaten, because what is eaten provides nourishment to the eater” (Nzegwu, 2011: 264). Considering that Khanya’s visual appreciation of Vee later on is described in terms of consumption (Mugo, 2014: 34), I would argue that, within the narrative, the gaze might be seen to function in a similar way. Although to gaze upon someone might be to assert power over them, in Mugo’s story it does not deny the power of the person who is being looked at. While Khanya’s sexual relationship with her male lover is depicted as full of reciprocal pleasures, it is also subject to critique. This critique dovetails with a critique of neo-​ colonial modes of humanitarian intervention in Africa, which Khanya finds herself taking part in when working in the UK. In making this critique, Khanya draws on the land/​body metaphor, so prevalent in colonial representation, comparing the approach of the humanitarian organisation for which she works with the sexual tactics of her East African lover: The problem was his approach. His tactics mirrored those of the organisation she worked for. Step one: land in a foreign land. Step two: gain no knowledge of the local context. Step three: throw brute force at the situation. Step four: pat yourself on the back on a job well done whilst the locals look dazed and confused. Repeat as needed. (Mugo, 2014: 31) Here, the link between African land and the female body is invoked to critique the treatment of both. This passage rejects the imposition of outside views of what is needed on both African countries and the individual female body. It also reflects the idea that vectors of oppression have “overdetermined similarities” in how they “resonate with and manifest as variants of each other” (Moore 2012: 11). Here, patriarchy and neo-​colonialism are shown to function along similar lines of logic. The solution the story offers is self-​awareness –​a shift away from the external to the internal –​demonstrated in the final masturbatory sex scene. It is notable that the story shows how Khanya herself is entangled in these logics. The trajectory of the narrative is about Khanya returning to South Africa to try a new, more self-​aware approach to solving ‘Africa’s problems’ and, concomitantly, coming to know her own body –​her local context –​in order to find her pleasure.

156  Jenny Boźena du Preez This kind of self-​awareness might be explained as a remedy for the internalisation of patriarchal and colonial ways of viewing the world –​where Africa and the African body become spectacle even to Africans themselves. This kind of awareness requires active engagement with, rather than simply existing in, a place. Simply ‘having’ her body is not enough for Khanya to know it fully; just as her move back to South Africa is not enough for her to know how to begin tackling the humanitarian problems she wants to fix. There is a difference between having a body and being truly embodied; between living in a place and belonging to that place. In Mugo’s story, the liberation offered by the West –​both sexual and humanitarian –​is shown to be disconnected from what is essential in order to achieve it. Focusing on a globally mobile character, Mugo figures a liberatory trajectory not as a flight from oppressive circumstances, but as a return home –​both to the continent and to the embodied self. This narrative with its utopian drive towards self-​knowledge is a shot of pure pleasure –​erotic, joyful, titillating and celebratory. It is an erotic fantasy that, unlike “All Covered Up”, is not interested in eroticising the ‘other’, but rather exploring the self. It critiques and engages, but does so in a glossy way, with plenty of humour and sex. This joyful approach is arguably a form of resistance. For example, Wanuri Kahiu (2018) argues that African art that focuses on the light, fun and joyous aspects of life on the continent is politically important due to the dominant narrative of Africa as a place of violence, suffering and trauma. Kahiu (2018) sees this kind of art as contributing to “joy cultures”, which refuse the spectacle of suffering to which Africa is often reduced. This idea resonates with Bibi Bakare-​Yusuf’s (2013: 37) argument about the importance of the stories we tell regarding African women’s sexual lives: Telling positive stories about women’s sexual lives matters because it helps to restore what previously has been maligned and objectified; they can empower and remind us that women’s sexual universe is not simply a litany of errors, negations, fears and terrors. The right to sexual pleasure, curiosity, exploration, joy, intimacy, reciprocity, love and longing are all part of what it means to be a sexual being. Sexual negation as the main sexual narrative of women’s experience must be resisted and challenged. We must always present it as a violating anomaly in our lived sexual universe, even if its occurrence has taken on the appearance of normativity. I would argue that “Coming Into Self-​Awareness” has the potential to fulfil these functions as it asserts the existence of Black queer women’s sexual joys and pleasures. Certainly, considering Mugo’s work towards empowering this group of women, it is likely that this narrative is intended to serve this function through a pleasurable reading experience with the potential to spark conversations and explorations of sexual pleasure.

Navigating the spectacular  157 At the same time, it is worth remembering Susie Jolly, Andrea Cornwall and Kate Hawkins’ (2013: 7) observation that “an uncritical celebration of pleasure can be just as damaging as a suppression of the possibilities for pleasure” because it can create “new expectations and standards that put pressure on people”. Mugo’s characters are globally mobile, athletic, beautiful, sexually active, and find themselves with the means to explore their options and self-​actualise. Despite the reference to the humanitarian crises in Africa, these realities do not seem to touch the characters. Indeed, although Africa appears as a concept in the story, it is never fully, tangibly realised as a setting. Although it eludes the problematic dynamics that entangle “All Covered Up”, “Coming Into Self-​Awareness” might also be described as an erotic fantasy. It is a fantasy of self-​fulfilment and sexual empowerment rather than sexual satiation of desire for the exotic, but it is still unmoored from the textures and specificities of place and body. In other words, in its language, imagery and character work, the story remains quite generic. The limitations of the narrative might be observed in the masturbatory climax. While Khanya is not described as passive erotic spectacle, her pleasure is still portrayed in spectacular terms. The scene is set with candles and the story details how she caresses and gropes her body, ‘tears’ off her underwear, and finally ‘explodes’. Although this celebrates female pleasure, it also potentially romanticises masturbation. Indeed, Vee identifies women’s orgasms as “something magical” (Mugo, 2014: 41). This is a strong assertion in the face of past erasure of women’s orgasmic pleasure, but it also plays into the myth that “women’s masturbation is supposed to be a spectacle” (Weiss, 2016). This reflects rather than disrupts recent mainstream ideas about female masturbation as a kind of performance. Suzannah Weiss (2016) highlights this when she says of her own masturbation: “I don’t get into sexy poses or make seductive noises. I don’t light candles or take baths. In short, I don’t go about the process differently from the way anyone else –​men included –​does.” This is the limitation of this kind of generic erotic fantasy –​it cannot encompass the ways in which women’s pleasures are (or should be) ordinary and everyday. The next story I discuss, however, offers an example of how an author might embed the joys of the erotic into representation of the everyday lives of women.

The erotic spectacle as ordinary in “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus” In my article, “ ‘Rediscovering the Erotic as Ordinary’ in South African Women’s Short Fiction” (Du Preez, 2020), I analysed “Mrs Habib’s13 Hypothalamus” in relation to Makhosazana Xaba’s “Inside”14 in order to explore their ‘rediscovery of the erotic as ordinary’. In doing so, I drew my understanding of the ‘ordinary’ from Njabulo Ndebele’s 1986 essay, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary”. In it, he (Ndebele, 1986) contrasts the ordinary to the spectacular, critiquing the reliance on the latter and neglect of the former in protest literature. Despite the very different subject

158  Jenny Boźena du Preez and context of Ndebele’s essay, I found his definition of the spectacular and the ordinary useful in examining what Xaba and Bell have achieved in their erotic writing. The aspects of the spectacular that Ndebele (1986: 147, 149, 150) outlines that are relevant here include “lack of specificity of place and character so that we have spectacular ritual instantly turned into symbol with instant meaning”, “preferring exteriority to interiority”, and a failure to provide “intimate knowledge” through representation. Ndebele (1986: 152) defines the ordinary “as the opposite of the spectacular” and it is thus, as I understand it, characterised by specificity, “necessary detail”, and a focus on interiority, which come together to provide the reader with a sense of intimate knowledge of the story’s character and world. My argument (Du Preez, 2020) was that Bell’s and Xaba’s stories are able to create a strong sense of the erotic without resorting to spectacular depictions of female same-​ sex sexuality. They achieve this by avoiding graphic sex scenes; creating an erotic experience inclusive of emotion, intellect and physical sensation rather than just bodily images; and showing sexual arousal to be intertwined with the mundane, everyday details of women’s lives. With this in mind, I think it is worth returning to “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus” because, like the other stories discussed here, it employs spectacle, including the exotic erotic and the trope of woman’s body as sexualised landscape. However, it does so in a way that creates an erotic fantasy still grounded in the mundane, which make Mrs Habib and her world feel fully developed. In my reading, rather than creating a comfortable position from which to consume the spectacle of sex, “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus” succeeds in immersing the reader in an erotic experience. The pleasures of this experience rest not on exerting the power of the gaze over an exotic, erotic spectacle, but on experiencing the erotic through the perspective of a character whose potential ‘difference’ is made familiar. Bell’s (2008: 21) story opens: “Mrs Habib’s hypothalamus was throbbing unusually strongly that Tuesday morning in Bo-​Kaap”. Like in “Coming Into Self-​Awareness” (Mugo, 2014: 31), ‘throbbing’ is used to describe sexual arousal or desire without fulfilment (yet). However, unlike in Mugo’s story, which climaxes with orgasm, “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus” chooses to linger in the space of arousal and desire. Opening and closing with reference to the throbbing hypothalamus, the story spends the in-​between narrative following Mrs Habib through a typical morning routine and then shifts to a flashback of meeting the “sensually hypnotic Miss Duval” (Bell, 2008: 33) who works in a bookshop in Bo-​Kaap. Thus, unlike both “All Covered Up” and “Coming Into Self-​Awareness”, where the story’s trajectory is towards orgasm, followed by a brief denouement –​perhaps mimicking the classic structure of a sexual encounter –​“Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus” takes the time to conjure an image of Mrs Habib and her life, and a sensual erotic atmosphere. Therefore, the story mobilises the unique attributes of the short story form, which, more easily than the novel, can eschew plot in favour of delving into one very particular moment or idea.

Navigating the spectacular  159 The first line also foregrounds Mrs Habib as the subject of desire and Bo-​ Kaap as the setting for this particular experience. This is notable, considering that it is the female subject and landscape that are most frequently treated as spectacle in the colonial imaginary and often tied together through use of the land/​female body metaphor. As I noted in my article on rediscovering the erotic as ordinary (Du Preez, 2020), both the narrative and Mrs Habib use this metaphorical language. Mrs Habib’s own body is described in terms of the mountainous landscape of Cape Town that she can see from her window –​ her belly “round as the voluptuous curve of Lion’s Head” (Bell, 2008: 24). Mrs Habib’s first erotic sight of Miss Duval leads her to make the same association, with Miss Duval’s “smooth, round, brown belly” looking “just like a mini-​version of her beloved morning view” (Bell, 2008: 27). My reading (Du Preez, 2020: 700) is that this use of the metaphor successfully subverts its colonial associations as, instead of erasing the reality of women’s bodies, it is used to affirm and celebrate their body shapes. Mrs Habib’s relationship with the land through the view of the mountains below which she lives also creates a sense of this landscape as familiar and everyday. Thus, while colonial use of the land/​body metaphor creates a sense of exotic ‘othering’, here the metaphor invokes a sense of recognition. When Mulvey (1989: 18) writes of spectacle and the gaze in relation to cinema, she makes a distinction between “pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation” through a “separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen” and the pleasure in identifying with an image “through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like”. In the film tradition Mulvey (1989) discusses, these two modes of pleasure play out along the active/​male, passive/​female binary. The male viewer is able to identify with an active male protagonist who is also the surrogate of the controlling gaze turned on the passive female spectacle. A similar dynamic plays out in the land/​body metaphor as employed in the colonial imaginary, with identification reserved for the white, straight, male explorer, and the object of desire being the land or body of the exotic ‘other’ stripped of agency. Bell (2008) collapses this binary and the associations that come with it. Due to the way in which Mrs Habib’s body is linked early on to the land in an affirming way, her viewing of Miss Duval’s body through the same lens does not read as objectification. While her body is appreciated by Mrs Habib and arouses her, it is through recognition rather than objectification. At the same time, the narcissistic implications of desire through recognition are avoided as the two have a spirited disagreement about literature. Furthermore, the land/​body metaphor and its deployment in the story has implications for the way the setting is imagined. Mrs Habib’s appreciation of the mountain view outside her window is described thus: The familiar outline looked like someone about to stretch into a Hatha Yoga child’s pose. It looked like a person with their chest on their knees, arms forward and forehead kissing the floor as if in eternal worship of

160  Jenny Boźena du Preez the setting sun over the icy seas of the Atlantic Ocean. It was also, she thought, similar in shape to someone performing ruku, as most of her Muslim neighbours did at Mosque when summonsed five times a day by the cry of the athaan. The view, though, meant more to her than ritual coupled with yogic prayer. It spoke to her in other ways too –​an umbilical cord that affirmed her chosen body shape. (Bell, 2008: 26, italics in original) It is familiarity (recognition) that is highlighted throughout the description, even as the prose references yoga and Islam, which would have conjured Oriental notions of ‘otherness’ and exoticism within the colonial imaginary. Here, however, the Muslim worshippers are Mrs Habib’s neighbours, not objects of mystery. Mrs Habib is at home in this place: “Even though [she] did not practice her centuries-​old faith, she prayed the developers would leave Bo-​Kaap as it was. Muslim” (Bell, 2008: 25). The story also plays with the possibility of queer spectacle, only to render it ordinary. For example, Mrs Habib describes Bruce Tait’s Kitsch & Collectibles’ proprietor as a “metal-​moffie” whose spectacular performance of “lewd, coarse banter and flashings of penis piercings” is used to hide his sensitive soul (Bell, 2008: 24, italics in original). The eclectic queer store and the Muslim Bo-​Kaap, both tempting subjects for spectacularisation, are instead historicised, their culture carefully and lovingly depicted, and rendered familiar through Mrs Habib’s eyes. The spectacle is the looming development of the area into “icy-​chrome-​cold apartments” imagined by Mrs Habib as a haven for the kind of sexual objectification Mulvey (1989) describes, with men flipping through magazines, pausing to masturbate over blonde, white South African models (Bell, 2008: 25). It is white, rich heterosexuality that is rendered as spectacle for the purposes of critique, rather than the queer, Muslim Mrs Habib with her rich erotic experience. This spectacle of heterosexuality and Western modernity is rejected as object of desire, just as the spectacular erotic mode that creates a subject/​object or self/​other binary is rejected. Mrs Habib’s narrative asserts herself and others like her as objects and subjects of desire. Desire is inspired in Mrs Habib by both herself and others, similarly to the way Khanya experiences desire in “Coming into Self-​ Awareness”. However, the story goes further than Mugo’s in that the person and body it celebrates as worthy of desire is not only woman, Black and queer, but also defies beauty norms in other overt ways. Mrs Habib’s bodily appearance is continually referred to in the narrative, including many details that are not, within current Western beauty standards, considered desirable. She has hairy legs that are “veined like the finest Simonsberg blue cheese”, “wrinkles and sags”, and a round belly (Bell, 2008: 23, 22–​23). She is “a big woman, with calf muscles as thick as her neck; […] fingers, swollen like baby marrows” and wheezes when she walks (Bell, 2008: 30, 31). She is the epitome of feminine excess, with her voracious appetite, and the kind of body

Navigating the spectacular  161 (old, Muslim, queer, woman, fat, hairy, desiring) that is considered abject.15 However, the readers are introduced to this body through Mrs Habib’s gaze as she frequently examines herself in the mirror, amused by her hair which makes her, in her own words, “look like the Lion King”, and glorying in what might be seen as “deterioration” because she sees it as a “miraculous metamorphosis” (Bell, 2008: 12, 22). The “abiding anxiety in relation to regulating the spectacle of the aging female body” is replaced here by a joyful erotic care, and the “realm of the visual […] in which women are pitted against each other” is reclaimed as a space for women’s erotic pleasures (Cahill, 2010: 48, 59).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown how Vasani, Mugo and Bell have been able to use spectacle for their own erotic purposes and examined how they attempt to navigate their way out of the legacy of the colonial imaginary. “All Covered Up” demonstrates how reliance on clichés and tropes without enough self-​ conscious critique and formal innovation can result in a narrative that might provide pleasure, but limited subversion. “Coming Into Self-​Awareness”, through its more critical approach and attempt to link erotic titillation to ideas about women’s self-​actualisation and the ways Africans might become subjects rather than just objects of humanitarian aid, does more to subvert the subject/​object binary. However, its glossy, glamorous approach to sexuality and its abstracted setting mean that it remains in the realm of escapist fantasy. “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus”, to me, offers the most interesting subversion of these tropes, as it moves beyond generic erotica clichés and graphic sex scenes to create an erotically charged atmosphere. Rather than a generic setting or stock characters, Bell gives us a detailed depiction of a character who would normally be de-​eroticised on multiple levels and celebrates, instead of erasing, her idiosyncrasies and supposed physical flaws. It is through specificity that Bell finds a way to repurpose old tropes and create an erotic narrative that has the potential to fulfil the reader’s desire for immersion in an erotic experience, and yet still feel grounded. In other words, the narrative is able to feel familiar even when what it depicts is outside of a reader’s experience. Bell’s story also speaks directly to the question of representing Africa. In the conversation between Miss Duval and Mrs Habib, which builds their erotic tension, they discuss Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness (1971),16 a novel frequently critiqued for its spectacular depiction of Africa and its people, who are reduced to dark shapes on the shore. Miss Duval puts forward this argument: “Conrad used stock metaphors and stock stereotypes throughout. He used colonial language and a sexualisation of the landscape. He even spoke of the ‘noble savage’ ” (Bell, 2008: 28). That is, some of the colonial tropes discussed in this essay. Mrs Habib, however, contests this reading, arguing that the novel is “deliberately full of stock metaphors and stereotypes” and actually “questions everything imperialism stood for” (Bell, 2008: 28, 27). Within the body of this short story, then, Bell puts forward

162  Jenny Boźena du Preez the tension I have been examining in this chapter. The contesting opinions of these two characters dramatise how the use of problematic tropes can challenge the dominant ideologies they normally support, but also how this tactic can fail. Depending on how it is read, Heart of Darkness might either reify or deconstruct the tropes of the colonial imaginary. As I have discussed, this tension appears in erotic fiction by African women authors, as they navigate how to portray celebratory erotic narratives about, and for, queer Black women within a literary tradition steeped in stock tropes, conventions and clichés that were constructed to serve an imaginary that dehumanised or erased them and their desires. To return to Mulvey (1989: 16) one final time, she argues that the alternative to the pleasures of mainstream Hollywood cinema is “the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire”. This chapter has explored some avenues for what a new language of desire might look like in queer, African short fiction by focusing on three stories from various collections edited and published in South Africa. While not all of these stories, in my reading, have succeeded in this pursuit, they provide interesting considerations of the challenges of grappling with a fraught literary past and the thrill that comes from finding a way to transcend oppressive tropes or articulate, even for a moment, a ‘new language of desire’. How we read that language is up to us.

Notes 1 There have, of course, been exceptions to these rules. On her blog, Edoro endeavours to bring these to her readers’ attention. Examples that she (2013a) discusses range from the 1950s Onitsha Market chapbooks to Buchi Emecheta’s novels. She also features (2016) a discussion about sex scenes by Ankara Romance Series writers and a review (2014b) of the online erotica collection from Jalada entitled Sext Me: Stories and Poems. Furthermore, Edoro (2013b, 2013c, 2014a) has posted sex scenes from Naiwo Osahon’s pornographic Sex is a Nigger, Mongo Beti’s Poor Christ of Bomba and Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migration to the North. Erotic short stories posted on the blog include “Unspeakable Joy” (2016) by Djarabi Al-​Misaawi and “Lesotho is Like Stepping into a Frosty Fairytale” (2015) by MV Sematlane. African fan-​fiction erotica written for Brittle Paper by Kiru Taye includes “My Lover is an Alien” (2016), based on Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon; “Lunch with Ifemelu” (2015), based on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah; and “Thighs Fell Apart” (2014), based on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. 2 In my use of ‘Black’, I follow Pumla Dineo Gqola (2010: 16) who uses “a capitalised ‘Black’ to refer to the anti-​apartheid definition of Blackness which emerges out of the Black Consciousness Movement. In other words, the capitalised Black refers to those people who would have been classified ‘Indian’, ‘coloured’ and ‘black’ under apartheid.” Beyond the inclusive aspect of this usage of ‘Black’, it is also meant to imply an assertion and reclamation of Black identity and subjecthood as a political move to counter white supremacy.

Navigating the spectacular  163 3 The novels I am aware of are: Folly (2013) and Switch (2014) by Jassy MacKenzie; the ‘choose-​your-​own-​erotica’ series, A Girl Walks Into a Bar (2013), A Girl Walks Into a Wedding (2014a), and A Girl Walks Into a Blind Date (2014b) by Helena S. Paige; and Karoo-​set Ecstasy of Brush Strokes (2018) by Rachel Haze. 4 See For Harriet’s (2020) YouTube video “WAP and the Spectacle of Sexual Liberation” for a topical discussion of this subject. 5 Soraya Roberts (2018), for example, points out that it “is interesting (see shitty, perverse) that despite the success of black romcoms and the growing number of TV romcoms with black casts (‘Insecure,’ ‘She’s Gotta Have It’) it took Crazy Rich Asians to convince Hollywood that a non-​white version of the genre could be commercially viable.” 6 Speaking of the differences between the novel and short fiction more generally, Asante Mtenje (2016: 227) argues: “Short fiction is aptly in tune with contemporary sensibility and experience; it is a flexible form, appropriately disjunctive and capable of dialogic contradiction; open to experimentation in terms of shape, ideas and voice. For this reason, the short story seems able to take risks with shape and form; it can be bolder in its brief, sudden forays into forbidden or reviled territories on the peripheries of polite society. This is in comparison with the well-​worn conventions of gradual, developing narrative burden that still often mark long-​ form novelistic prose, where expectations of believable depth, logical plot arcs and the protagonist’s eventual reconciliation into the status quo often still hold sway, despite many newer novelistic innovations.” 7 Vasani was born in Uganda and relocated to England when Idi Amin expelled the Asian Ugandans from the country. She has worked in international development and has lived in various places around the world, including Tanzania, South Africa and the Netherlands. Apart from “All Covered Up”, she has published Not Yet Uhuru: Lesbian Flash Fiction (2013b). 8 According to her Adults Only biography (Hichens, 2014: 42), Mugo is the director of a social media consultancy called Kagure Konceptions, as well as being one of the founders of HOLAAfrica. Still at the beginning of her writing career, she spends most of her creative energy blogging, but has also published a paper in Agenda about “how sexuality plays out on social media” (Hichens, 2014: 42). 9 Bell writes both short stories and poetry. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town and works as an editor with John Brown Publishing. She has also written for various South African newspapers as a columnist and arts critic. 10 This is not to say that critique of Beyala’s work is not warranted. For a more detailed discussion of her treatment of same-​sex sexuality, see Chantal Zabus, Out in Africa: Same-​ Sex Desire in Sub-​ Saharan Literatures and Cultures (2013: 218–​220). 11 The term ‘veil’ reflects the monolithic Western understanding of veiling as invoking “Islam and synonymous with female weakness and oppression” (El Guindi, 1999: 10). In fact, in Arabic, ‘veil’ “has no single Arabic linguistic referent” (El Guindi, 1999: xi). Instead, there are a plethora of Arabic terms, including hijab, abaya and buibui, which are used in “All Covered Up”. Fadwa El Guindi (1999: xii) contests the Western understanding of the veil, showing that “veiling is a rich and nuanced phenomenon, a language that communicates social and cultural messages,” and, in Islamic societies, is a “symbol of both identity and resistance”.

164  Jenny Boźena du Preez 12 See “Osunality: Sex Lessons from Africa” (2017) by Mugo, as well as “A History of Coochie Conversations” (2017), “How to Have a Healthier, Positive Relationship with Sex” (2018a), and “ ‘Your Kink is Not My Kink’: African Queer Women and Gender Non-​conforming Persons Find Sexual Freedom in Bondage” (2018b) by Mugo and Siphumeze Khundayi. 13 Notably, as one of the reviewers of this chapter pointed out, habib is an Arabic word that roughly translates as ‘my love’, ‘beloved’ or ‘lover’ (Dictionary.com, 2021; Wikipedia, 2021; Williams, 2019; WordHippo, n.d.). Thus, Mrs Habib’s very name foregrounds the idea of love, specifically that she herself is ‘beloved’. This choice by Bell highlights the heart of the story –​self-​love –​and the ways in which Mrs Habib embodies this love in the face of beauty norms, heteronormativity and other cultural and social norms that would reject her as lovable. 14 Collected both in Open (Schimke, 2008) and Running and Other Stories (Xaba, 2013). 15 See “ ‘Rediscovering the Erotic as Ordinary’ in South African Women’s Short Fiction” (2020) by Jenny Boźena du Preez for a more in-​depth discussion of this aspect. 16 The first version of the story was published as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on work from my doctoral thesis. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the input of my supervisor, Prof Lynda Gichanda Spencer, and the three examiners of the thesis. I would also like to thank the reviewers of the chapter for their input and insights. The doctoral research upon which this is based was funded by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with the South African Humanities Deans Association.

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9  Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-​winning stories Henrietta Rose-​Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” Aghogho Akpome

Introduction The annual Caine Prize for African short stories has assumed a dominant position on the continent’s literary landscape since it was established in 1999 by the British politician Emma Nicholson. Set up as a tribute to Sir Michael Harris Caine, Nicholson’s late husband who was a co-​founder of the Booker Prize, the prize has been hailed for the exposure it provides for its winners who are mostly up-​and-​coming young writers. Those who have received considerable acclaim include Nigeria’s Helon Habila, Sudan’s Leila Aboulela and Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo, whose debut novel We Need New Names (2013) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. The prize has also attracted stinging criticism, especially for what is perceived to be its valorisation of unfavourable and stereotypical narratives about Africa (see Bady, 2016; Ikheloa, 2011; Pucherová, 2012). Some critics have also highlighted the possible consequences of the fact that most of the prize’s winning and shortlisted writers live and work in the West where the majority of their works are published, circulated and read. In this regard, Nigerian critic Ikhide R. Ikheloa (2011) argues that many submissions may be deliberately skewed to impress Western audiences in general, and judges based in the US and the UK in particular. For her part, Duborota Pucherová (2012: 13) questions the role of the prize as a Western “institution” that operates as a “legitimizing agent” for African writing in English. She argues that the interplay between the political economy of publishing, marketing and the institutional dynamics involved in the legitimation of postcolonial cultural expression inevitably results, through the prize, in the promotion of African literature as “an exotic commodity and thus contribute[s]‌to its ‘othering’ while appropriating into the AngloAmerican cultural capital” (Pucherová, 2012: 21). A different view is offered by Lizzy Attree (2013), who was appointed as the prize’s administrator in 2011. Drawing on Habila’s (2011) introduction to DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-9

Imagining Africa’s futures  169 The Granta Book of the African Short Story, Attree notes that the majority of Caine Prize writers were born after the independence of many African countries in the 1960s. She argues that most of these writers, who live and work outside their native countries, are “unsurprisingly […] less concerned with nationalism than their [postcolonial] forebears” such as Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2013: 36). Rather, these younger writers innovatively articulate, in her view, “more cosmopolitan visions of the African condition, cultural production, and the subjectivities of gender, class, and sexuality” (qtd. in Habila, 2011: vii). This chapter simultaneously builds on and moves away from the foregoing arguments. I examine how the two winning entries of 2008 and 2011 use the short story to represent contemporary African realities and, in so doing, I reinforce the growing significance of the prize and the genre to modern African literary expression. I argue that, taken together, NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” (2010) and Henrietta Rose-​Innes’s “Poison” (2010 [first published 2007]) contribute to dominant problematic depictions of African futures. Bulawayo does this through her representation of slum life and dystopian childhoods in Zimbabwe while Rose-​Innes’s story speculates on the apocalyptic aftermath of a fictional chemical explosion in post-​apartheid South Africa. These two important stories also highlight the increasing role of the (postcolonial) city as a site from which apocalyptic and dystopian visions of society are generated. I begin by briefly tracing apparent links between the African short story and the African novel. I suggest that these links reflect Julio Cortázar’s (1999) postulation that the relationship between longer fiction and the short story is similar to that between a movie and a still photograph “which isolates a fragment from the whole” (qtd. in Patea, 2012: 11). In this regard, the career trajectories of all but one of the Caine Prize winners up to 2014 serve as a useful point of departure for exploring this relationship in recent African writing. As Aaron Bady shows: With the exception of the 2008 winner, Henrietta Rose-​Innes –​who may have found South Africa a more hospitable publishing climate, having already published several novels –​the list of winners tells the same, uniform story of How to Become An African Writer: write some stories, win the Caine Prize, then publish a novel. E. C. Osondu and NoViolet Bulawayo won in 2009 and 2011, and their first novels were published in 2015 and 2013, respectively; the other winners –​Olufemi Terry, Rotimi Babatunde, Tope Folarin, Okwiri Oduor, and Namwali Serpell –​all have novels in varying states of progress. (2016: n.p.) This is indeed not an entirely new trend among African writers. In a 1969 edition of the Kenyon Review’s symposium on the short story, Ezekiel Mphahlele (1969: 475) noted that Peter Abrahams’ novels “followed quickly”

170  Aghogho Akpome on the heels of Abrahams’ publication of a short story collection. Mphahlele also noted that writers from other parts of the continent usually wrote short stories before writing novels, even though publishers who targeted Western readers tended to publish the novels before the earlier written short stories. Discussing the economic contexts of publishing in the 1960s, Nadine Gordimer (1968: 461) similarly remarked that “publishers nurture[d]‌their short story writers mainly in the hope that they will write novels sooner or later”. She also noted that “almost all the interesting fiction written by local Africans (not white South Africans) has taken the form of short stories” (1968: 463, original emphasis).1 Furthermore, Phillip Holden (2007) has observed that Chinua Achebe’s highly successful early novels were in fact preceded by several short stories Achebe had published in a university journal in Ibadan a few years earlier. Holden highlights the thematic continuity (in regard to the portrayal of colonisation and the espousal of an emergent cultural nationalism) that marked the movement from short to long fiction in Achebe’s early career.2 This apparent historical pattern may be insufficient in itself to explain why the short story seems to be well-​suited to recent African storytelling. However, it may be linked to the growing significance of the Caine Prize and the controversial claim by its organisers that its “focus on the short story reflects the contemporary development of the African story-​telling tradition” (The Caine Prize for African Writing, n.d.: n.p.). The apparent connections between the African short story and longer fiction also draw attention to decades-​old debates on the possible links between African oral traditions and its modern literatures. Mphahlele (1969) stated that his interest in the short story was influenced not only by Scottish and English ballads (as well as the works of Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Nadine Gordimer, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright), but also by his fascination with the indigenous South African folk tales he had learnt as a child. Nevertheless, his description of the influence of indigenous oral traditions on contemporary African short fiction in general is particularly nuanced: Perhaps folk tales as an inherited social phenomenon have had something to do with the emergence of the short story everywhere in the world. But it cannot be said that where the oral tradition is still robust, even in urban life (as in West Africa), it has inspired or informed the short story there. (Mphahlele, 1969: 476) Craig Mackenzie takes this further in his exploration of the ways in which the African short story (the South African short story in particular) exhibits “the penetration of the literary forms by a residual orality” (2002: 347). He focuses on the works of four writers (A. C. Jordan, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Njabulo Ndebele and Bessie Head) to demonstrate how each author attempts “in different ways to assume the mantle of the traditional oral storyteller” in their short stories. But while Attree has repeated the claim that the focus of the

Imagining Africa’s futures  171 Caine Prize on the short story is its “most unique element” without explaining why this is so, she has rejected the idea that the prize links the African short story to indigenous oral traditions. She also rejects accusations that the prize’s association of “African story-​telling traditions” with the short story rather than the novel amounts to a paternalistic view of African literature: I would consider James Joyce one of the masters of the short story form and yet we know that he was also the writer of one of the most complex books of the modern literary canon. The short story functions in a different way to the novel, it has its own subtleties and complexities, and requires as much talent to pull off successfully as a novel, packing character, context, linguistic flare, and plot into under 10,000 words. Of course the Caine Prize encourages African writers to write longer works of fiction, but we have chosen the short story as a niche that isn’t filled by other prizes. (Attree, 2013: 12) Attree goes on to suggest that the short story form is peculiarly apposite in writing about the social and economic conditions in the continent’s fast-​ growing urban centres, a view that echoes Gordimer’s influential description of the short story genre as “an ideal vehicle for social critique” (qtd. in Huggan, 1994: 63). Similarly, Mphahlele has also linked social conditions and social change to the rise and utility of the South African short story as a preferred prose form during apartheid, arguing that the very physical presence of oppression made the sustained effort required for a novel almost impossible; and that the medium of the short story seemed suited for a fugitive urban culture such as the white society of South Africa had imposed on non-​whites. (1969: 474) Although the specific conditions under which Gordimer and Mphahlele wrote were different from those in the contemporary African literary landscape, there are compelling macrocosmic resonances between the two dispensations. These similarities are linked with the disjunctive social, political and economic changes that trigger and accompany unprecedented globalisation and urbanisation across Africa (see Appadurai, 1990). In this context, Gordimer’s (1968) half-​century old metaphor of “the flash of the fireflies” to describe how the brevity of the short story helps to capture swiftly changing social realities remains relevant to the postmodernist and postcolonial features of contemporary African writing. This underscores the argument by South Africa critics that the short story is especially well-​suited to post-​apartheid writing (Chapman, 2004; Titlestad, 2010).3 Along the same lines, Rose-​ Innes herself argues that the “brief, eclectic contributions [made by short stories] also feel like a natural and appropriate way to consider South Africa

172  Aghogho Akpome now, or perhaps any fractured, various, rapidly changing milieu –​particularly for someone who is wary of sweeping statements” (qtd. in Riach, 2016: n.p.). I therefore read “Poison” in allegorical ways as reflecting some of the important changes attending South Africa’s post-​apartheid socio-​political transitions and transformations. I argue that the protagonist’s uncertainties as well as the sense of impending gloom that pervades the story may be interpreted in terms of ambivalent visions of South African society that may be simultaneously apocalyptic and auspicious. As noted earlier, Rose-​ Innes represents a deviation from the apparent career trend of some notable African writers whose short stories precede their novels in ways that suggest links between the two genres. Yet, the release of “Poison” during a period of increasing interest in (post)apocalyptic Afro-​futurist4 novels set in urban centres (e.g., Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010)) might indicate a similar and contemporaneous correlation between short fiction and the novel. It is important at this juncture to stress the distinction between (post)apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, categories that are sometimes conflated. While the latter is associated with troubled socio-​political structures such as those in the postcolonial Zimbabwean society portrayed in “Hitting Budapest”, the former reflects future doomsday scenarios which may not necessarily involve politics as is the case with “Poison” (Claeys, 2010; Collins, 2014). The link between these two and their significance for this article is the way each is associated –​to different degrees –​with problematic and inauspicious visions of African societies. “Poison” is set in contemporary South Africa. The anonymous narrator of the story guides readers through the thoughts and experiences of Lynn, a young lady who is driving on a freeway away from Cape Town following an oil explosion that had happened in the city a few days earlier. The explosion has left a serious environmental hazard with a black oily cloud hanging over the city and acting as backdrop to a pervasive mood of uncertainty and impending doom throughout the story. Lynn stops on the outskirts of the city at a gas station where a motley crowd of travellers, also fleeing the city, are gathered due to what initially appears to be a scarcity of petrol. The people she meets there later find ways of getting petrol and eventually leave the station, but she refuses to join them. At the end of the story, she has been at the station for three days, hoping for the arrival of rescuers. First, I set out the ways in which this story lends itself to an allegorical reading. Although “Poison” is not nationalistic in outlook, and although the events in the story (the chemical explosion) could well occur in any part of the world, the story’s specific social and geographical settings conjure a unique post-​apartheid South African milieu. In addition to being set on the outskirts of Cape Town, the references to important South African spatial landmarks –​ including the N1 and N2 national roads –​have almost unambiguous interpretative signification in ways that are strongly allegorical and metonymic. These two roads are South Africa’s main land routes running through many major

Imagining Africa’s futures  173 cities and over much of the country’s extensive Indian Ocean coastline. In addition to Cape Town, the reference to Johannesburg and Durban completes the trio of South Africa’s most important urban and political centres. One of the effects of these is the evocation of an unmistakably national communal space, what Lindesay Irvine (2008: n.p.) calls “an eloquent vignette of the ‘new’ South Africa” that recalls Benedict Anderson’s (1983) influential theory on the links between narrative and the idea of nation. The author herself has stated that while she did not start writing the story with an express political theme in mind, she “was pleased that it developed an allegorical point” (qtd. in Irvine, 2008: n.p.). Although Anderson writes specifically about novels, his analytical framework can be equally applied to the portrayal of South Africa’s diverse society and to the public events and responses narrated in “Poison”. And indeed, Rose-​Innes explains elsewhere that the story “is not so much about the explosion –​on a deeper level, it’s a breakdown of traditional social divisions and social groupings” that characterised post-​apartheid transition (BBC, 2008: n.p.). Another instructive way in which “Poison” may be read as allegory and/​ or social critique5 is highlighted in Chris Thurman’s (2015) analysis of the significance of the protagonist’s presumed racial identity. Since the story does not identify Lynn with any actual racial descriptor, Thurman’s decision to describe her as white probably depends on circumstantial evidence –​her apparent socio-​economic privilege, poor command of Afrikaans and her tendency to focalise other characters along racial lines. It is indeed plausible in view of the author’s foregrounding of the transitional post-​apartheid context of the story and her description of Lynn as a version of herself –​a middle-​class woman in her thirties who has “lost her way” […] “She can’t stay in her old ways, symbolised by Cape Town which is now under threat, but she’s also not quite ready to take that step into the broader reality of the country with its dangers and opportunities.” (BBC, 2008: n.p.) Thurman (2015: 63) interprets the crowd that Lynn joins at the petrol station as representative of a multi-​racial “pressure-​cooker microcosm of South African society”. He goes on to suggest that the insignia on the pick-​up van, Adils-​IT Bonanza, may imply that its young driver is a Muslim and/​or coloured South African. From their description, the petrol attendants and taxi passengers are most probably black and coloured, while the Afrikaans “family” and Lynn appear to stand in for South Africa’s white population. Therefore, although the story may also be read outside a strict post-​apartheid South African spatio-​temporal context, the foregoing primary and secondary evidence validates the specific allegorical and metonymic reading offered in this chapter. Yet, this does not mean, as Pucherová (2012) suggests, that Caine Prize stories necessarily rehash a specific and totalised representation

174  Aghogho Akpome of Africa. What it does mean, however, is that the story gestures towards a representative African social consciousness. It is against the backdrop of the allegorical and metonymic signification of the spatial and social symbolisms in “Poison” that I explore the ways in which the protagonist’s sense of uncertainty and the story’s pervading hopelessness might respectively reflect South Africa’s socio-​political transition and a dystopian vision of the country’s future. The trope of movement is important in this regard, and functions, I suggest, as the dominant and most ubiquitous motif with which the story draws attention to the transitory nature of contemporary South African society. The motif of movement appears liberally throughout the story in both explicit and implicit ways. The most explicit form is of course the interrupted journeys of Lynn and the other characters who congregate at the petrol station in search of petrol. The apparent scarcity of petrol at the beginning of the story plus the desire of the travellers to get away from the environmental catastrophe in Cape Town can together be read in terms of the social and psychological ramifications of post-​apartheid transition: There were twenty-​odd stranded people, sitting in their cars or leaning against them. They glanced at her without expression before turning their eyes again towards the distant city. In a minibus taxi off to one side, a few travelers sat stiffly, bags on laps. Everyone was quiet, staring down the highway, back at what they’d all been driving away from. (Rose-​Innes, 2010: 199) It is this motley crowd, brought together by forces outside their power, that Thurman (2015) describes as being reflective of South Africa’s contemporary demographics. The particular circumstances of their coming together and the limited options of self-​help available to them force them into cross-​ racial alliances that bear an unambiguous post-​apartheid “rainbow nation” symbolism. Due to the shortage of petrol, they pool the little they are able to scavenge from all their vehicles together and fill up only two vehicles in which everyone but Lynn leaves. This collaborative project and the necessary partnerships that make it possible indicate the ways in which social exigencies in the post-​apartheid era make social realignments both imperative and possible. That the cause of the new alliances is an environmental disaster outside the control of any individual group is doubly significant. On the one hand, it might be used to suggest that developments that may ordinarily seem adverse may actually produce socially auspicious outcomes. This, in turn, may serve to undercut the story’s dominant apocalyptic orientation such that the possible futures it envisages can be understood in ways that are simultaneously adverse and auspicious. On the other hand, the circumstances that force these diverse social groups together suggest that South Africa’s unfolding social

Imagining Africa’s futures  175 orders are likely to produce new conditions in which historical advantages are neutralised. Perhaps the most important social symbolism of the motif of movement is the uncertain fate of the protagonist following her failure to join any of the groups of travellers leaving the petrol station and heading together towards an unknown future. Lynn’s decision to remain alone at the petrol station may be interpreted in different ways. As noted earlier, Rose-​Innes suggests that Lynn’s uncertainty reflects the disappearing “old ways” –​social compositions, alliances and privileges –​symbolised by the threat posed to Cape Town by the environmental disaster. It may also be interpreted, arguably, as a form of conscious or unconscious resistance to, or apprehension of, the changes and transformations brought about by the transitional order. The effects of such a decision, of “[s]‌tanding alone on the highway” so to speak, is a deep sense of disorientation and impending doom: Standing alone on the highway was unnerving. […] She had to stop herself looking over her shoulder, flinching from invisible cars coming up from behind. She thought of the people she’d seen so many times on the side of the highway, walking, walking along verges not designed for human passage, covering incomprehensible distances, toiling from one obscure spot to another. Their bent heads dusty, cowed by the iron ring of the horizon. In all her years of driving at speed along highways, Cape Town, Jo’burg, Durban, she’d never once stopped at a random spot, walked into the veld. Why should she? The highways were tracks through an indecipherable terrain of dun and grey, a blur in which one only fleetingly glimpsed the sleepy eyes of people standing on its edge. To leave the car would be to disintegrate, to merge with that shifting world. How far could she walk, anyway, before weakness made her stumble? Before the air thickened into some alien gel, impossible to wade through, to breathe? (Rose-​Innes, 2010: 203) Her sense of foreboding is reinforced by the worsening effects of the explosion as time goes on –​especially the loss of electricity and running water. When she goes to the toilet, she realises that she has probably become poisoned –​ her hair is grimy, her eyes pink, and there are black specks on her face. At the end of the story, she has been stranded for three days, and although the toxic storm has not progressed further, the closing scene is described as “the last” of a lingering sunset, “poison violet and puce” (2010: 208) from which she turns her face. The narrative significance of this ending is reinforced by the fact that the entire narrative is focalised through Lynn. By this means, readers are only provided access to the set of possibilities reflected by Lynn rather than the potentially more auspicious auguries symbolised by the other travellers who succeed in forming new social alliances and moving farther away from Cape

176  Aghogho Akpome Town and from the effects of the explosion. The focus on Lynn may thus be interpreted as a narrative move by which the uncertain post-​apocalyptic possibilities which she represents are privileged. Furthermore, in refusing to join the other travellers, Lynn may also reflect the difficulties of post-​apartheid national reconciliation and the problematical sceptre of an enduring racial schism. In this connection, Thurman argues that Lynn’s enigmatic attitude might reflect the social “passivity, indifference and discontent” which, in Thurman’s view, represents “internal” threats to “whiteness, Englishness and privilege” (2015: 65). It is in these specific ways that “Poison” contributes to the production of problematic African futures by skilfully sketching brief but pithy “flashes” of historical social divisions and the psycho-​social disorientation of an enigmatic character converging in a postmodern urban site that is itself set within a distinct South African spatio-​ temporal context. The discussion now turns to Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”, in which the difficult childhoods of the story’s protagonists reflect a dysfunctional African society and is used to articulate a dystopian vision for that society. Like “Poison”, Bulawayo’s story is set in an African city, and so follows the tradition of narratives that use African cities as sites where dystopian and (post)apocalyptic African futures are set. It is also significant that in We Need New Names, Bulawayo continues her focus on the development of the same child protagonist as in “Hitting Budapest”. In this way, the writer uses the novel to provide a more detailed exploration of the same set of major themes and the broad social, political and cultural contexts introduced in the short story. There is, therefore, a strong sense in which “Hitting Budapest” may be understood as a creative and utilitarian adaptation of a specific novelist sub-​ genre –​in this case what Ogaga Okuyade (2009) has called the “postcolonial African bildungsroman”. Okuyade proposes this as a postcolonial/​ African variant of the traditional bildungsroman, and as a distinct sub-​genre to theorise the increasing deployment of child and youth protagonists in recent African texts.6 In relation to the symbolisms of such protagonists, Madelaine Hron (2008: 28) has demonstrated the “hybrid spaces” which they occupy in postcolonial societies as well as their “nuanced and complex role” in contemporary African narratives. She elaborates on how these protagonists represent a “particularly apt vehicle” through which writers explore nuanced perspectives on postcolonial subjectivities in a variety of contexts, including “multiculturalism, globalization, and international human rights”. As Apollo Amoko (2009: 200) observes, the postcolonial African bildungsroman emerged, like its European predecessor, during times of “radical transformation and social upheaval when, in the wake of colonialism, the traditional ways of being were seriously undermined, if not forever transformed”. Similar scenarios form the historical and social backdrop to “Hitting Budapest”, a story that focuses on a single day in the lives of a group of neglected children from an impoverished Zimbabwean shantytown, ironically

Imagining Africa’s futures  177 named Paradise. The children, aged around 11, leave their homes in the slum, unnoticed by their indolent and negligent parents, to search for guavas in the nearby affluent suburb named Budapest where they briefly meet a London-​born young lady who takes pictures of them. On their way back home, they come across the corpse of a woman who had apparently died by hanging. Quickly overcoming their initial fear, they make a plan to steal the dead woman’s shoes and to sell them for money with which to buy bread. Although the character delineation, action and pithy dialogues are rendered in vivid detail, the episodic plot lacks a specific event in the story. This reflects Gordimer’s description of how short stories capture reality via “the light of the flash […] of the present moment” (1968: 459). One effect of this is that the reader’s attention becomes centred on the abject conditions of the characters. This leads Aaron Bady (2016: n.p.) to argue that “the most memorable thing about the story is actually a ‘non-​story’ detail (in that it does not stem from or produce any particular action or events in the narrative)”. This thing, which has attracted considerable critical attention, is the casually mentioned fact that one of the children –​the 10-​year-​old Chipo –​was impregnated by her grandfather. Bady argues that “Hitting Budapest” is: not a story in which we are encouraged to watch events, but in which we are shown a spectacle of non-​events, the spectacle of nothing really happening. Nothing is really at stake in the story, because it is precisely the point that –​ in the “normal” life of these children –​there is nothing much to be gained, nothing much to be lost. What happens is that nothing happens. (2016: n.p., original emphasis) The story’s key narrative mission, therefore, seems to be a focus on characters who dramatise the abject conditions that exist in an impoverished society as well as their dysfunctional and unequal social, economic, political and spatial orders. The vivid description of abjection in the story is perhaps responsible for making “Hitting Budapest” the most criticised of all Caine Prize-​winning stories so far. In his critique of the Prize’s 2011 shortlist mentioned in the introduction to this article, Ikheloa (2011: n.p.), who predicted that Bulawayo would win that year, describes the story as “fly-​ridden”. Though he praises the quality of Bulawayo’s writing, he attacks her for focusing on what he calls “Africa’s sewers”. These views are echoed in Habila’s review of We Need New Names. Habila likens Bulawayo’s portrayal of Africa to recent works which, according to him, are inundated with “images and symbols and allusions that evoke, to borrow a phrase from Aristotle, pity and fear, but not in a real tragic sense, more in a CNN, western-​ media-​ coverage-​ of-​ Africa, poverty-​ porn sense” (2013: n.p.). Listing some of these disturbing images in “Hitting Budapest”, he argues that the story reflects “a palpable anxiety to cover every ‘African’ topic, almost as if the writer had a checklist made from the morning’s news on Africa” (2013: n.p.).

178  Aghogho Akpome The dysfunctional society at the centre of “Hitting Bupadest” is set in a carefully contrived African urban space with transnational and globalised iconographies in the form of symbolically named streets –​AU (the African Union), SADC (the Southern African Development Community) and IMF (the International Monetary Fund). The juxtaposition of the indigent slum, Paradise, where the children live, with the nearby, affluent suburb of Budapest, where they go to scavenge for food, is also significant. These representational choices have loaded symbolisms, one of which is the global character of the extreme socio-​economic inequalities they reflect. The single most portentous iconography of these representations is perhaps the image of the slum that is fast becoming a ubiquitous trope for socio-​ economic transformation in general, and a compelling critique of the impact of globalised capitalism on contemporary postcolonial urbanisation, in particular. Conditions in these spaces have been linked to widening inequalities precipitated by neoliberal economic policies in developing countries. These policies, according to Ashley Dawson and Brent Edwards (2004), trigger socio-​economic processes by which the bulk of the growing global wealth becomes transformed from different forms of collective ownership into the private property of a few corporations and individuals, and invariably results in the proliferation of slums: Structural adjustment programs, widely deployed throughout the developing world by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the debt crisis of the early 1980s, have turned the state into a mechanism to expand this dynamic of privatization. As countries slashed spending on domestic programs such as education, health, and agricultural production, local production sectors were hollowed out. Just as was true during the initial round of what Marx called primitive accumulation in British agrarian capitalism, the neoliberal dispossession of the commons has pushed peasants off their land, but this time on a global scale. Inequality, political instability, persecution, and environmental degradation have generated a massive exodus toward urban areas. Notwithstanding differing regional and national dynamics, the end result of this burgeoning inequality has been the growth of massive squatter settlements, where people live and die in conditions of appalling misery. (Dawson and Edwards, 2004: 4−5) Achille Mbembe has noted in this respect that “[w]‌ays of seeing and reading contemporary African cities are […] dominated by the metanarrative of urbanization, modernization, and crisis. Indeed, for many analysts, the defining feature of contemporary African cities is the slum” (2008: 5). Rightly or wrongly, this view is reinforced by claims that the majority of urban dwellers in sub-​ Saharan Africa live in slums (see Pieterse, 2008). However, the proliferation of slums has not been limited to postcolonial countries but has indeed been a global phenomenon, a fact underscored by Mike Davis’s (2007) famous

Imagining Africa’s futures  179 description of the modern urban world as a “planet of slums”. Uri Linke has demonstrated, furthermore, how, in contemporary times, “[u]rban poverty is globally dispersed across all continents, from the geopolitical peripheries to the economic centres –​from the Third World to the First World” (2012: 296). Nevertheless, abject poverty remains a recurring aspect of the dominant aesthetic of narratives set in Africa’s urban spaces –​literary and otherwise. In this regard, it is important to consider briefly some of the ways in which such troubling representations of African cities contribute to the production and circulation of uncomplimentary visions of Africa. In her critique of the science fiction thriller film District 9, Adéle Nel (2012) explores how the pervasive imagery of abjection in the portrayal of a Johannesburg slum appeals to what Barbara Creed (1993: 10) describes as the “desire […] for perverse pleasure”. Similarly, Gareth Jones and Ramola Sanyal interrogate the ways in which the production of the postcolonial “slum as spectacle becomes part of a fluid representational stock of images and experiences that circulate, with the potential to be picked up and acted upon by diverse actors” (2015: 433). Focusing specifically on representations of Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the Indian city of Mumbai, they argue that the slum has assumed “a representational significance far greater than an immediate concern with housing conditions or service provision” and has increasingly become “a popular subject for novelists, journalists and academics […] tourism, art, film and documentary” (2015: 434). This illustrates how the portrayal of the abject conditions of Bulawayo’s protagonists in “Hitting Budapest” operates within a complex representational context from which stereotypical visions of African subjects emerge. The graphic depiction of filth and poverty in “Hitting Budapest” reflects postcolonial dystopia in its social, political and economic ramifications (see also Morrison, 2015; Chakrabarty, 2002). Sarah Lincoln (2008: 99) points out that representations of this type in postcolonial African narratives reflect “the continent’s continued status as a ‘remnant’ of globalization –​a waste product, trash heap, disposable raw material, and degraded offcut of the processes that have so greatly enriched, dignified and beautified their beneficiaries”. Similarly, Kenneth Harrow has also traced the use of such imagery in African cinema to theories that link the “material to the psychological, sociological, and political” (2013: 1). He argues that “trash, above all, applies to people who have been dismissed from the community, marginalized and forgotten, turned into ‘bare lives’ in ‘states of exception’ for others to study and pity” (2013: x). It is important, in closing this discussion of Bulawayo’s story, to note its unmistakable critique of the generational divide and of the father figure represented not only by Chipo’s abusive grandfather, but also by the boy Bastard, one of the protagonist’s companions. Bastard is the self-​appointed leader of the group who seems to typify male domination. Within the story’s short time span, he physically abuses all but one of his mates. He is inconsiderate towards the pregnant Chipo, snaps at Darling, provokes Stina, and calls

180  Aghogho Akpome almost every one of them unpleasant names. He is the one who throws stones at the corpse and proposes that they steal and sell the dead woman’s shoes. This image of the male figure is reinforced by the children’s view (while speculating on the sex of Chipo’s baby) that “boys kick and punch and butt their heads. That’s all they are good at” (Bulawayo, 2010: 3). The picture, completed by Chipo’s abusive grandfather, highlights the violence that has marked the socio-​political dysfunction of many postcolonial African nations under the control of androcentric and gerontocratic power structures. The inscription of postcolonial societies within an unequal and exploitative global economic system intensifies the dire living conditions of the majority of young subjects such as those typified by the child protagonists of “Hitting Budapest”. It is significant that none of them has a vision of a future in Zimbabwe; they all desire to emigrate, uncaring whether to South Africa or to the West, where millions of Zimbabweans have moved since the country’s worsening political and economic crises of 2000. But even this hope of emigration is brutally undermined by the doubts raised by Godknows and Bastard. The children are rendered speechless by Bastard’s gloomy prediction that they will end up being “stuck” on the fringes of those foreign societies like Darling’s Aunt Faustolina who, he says, is probably “cleaning poop off some wrinkled old man” (15) in America. The hopelessness implied by their speechlessness here recalls the sentiment expressed earlier in the story by Darling: “After crossing Mzilikazi we slither through another bush, gallop along Hope Street past the big stadium with the glimmering benches we’ll never sit on” (2, emphasis added). These dystopian elements all combine to conjure a predetermined sense of a bleak future that is belied by the children’s boisterous and irreverent laughter in the story’s last lines. This article has examined the growing significance of the Caine Prize for African Writing, foregrounding its positive impact on the careers of shortlisted and winning writers. I have highlighted criticisms against the prize’s perceived valorisation of negative narratives about Africa as well as the arguments offered in its defence, especially with regard to the innovative approaches adopted by different entries. I have also briefly explored features of the African short story and its apparent links with the novel, paying attention to the ways in which the short story seems to be well-​suited to contemporary African storytelling, demonstrated by the growing dominance of the Caine Prize. More significantly, the article has highlighted the different ways in which NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” and Henrietta Rose-​ Innes’s “Poison”, both set in African cities, imagine the futures of post-​2000 Zimbabwe and post-​apartheid South Africa. While the former uses the desperate socio-​economic conditions of impoverished and neglected children in a Harare slum to dramatise socio-​political dystopia in Zimbabwe, the latter is a post-​apocalyptic narrative that explores the psycho-​social disorientation accompanying ambivalent social realignments in post-​apartheid South Africa. The pervasive gloom underlining both stories, especially the graphic abjection

Imagining Africa’s futures  181 of Bulawayo’s child protagonists, has the inevitable effect of projecting uncertain futures for the African societies reflected in the respective narratives.

Notes 1 See also Edwin (2016: 359–​371). 2 This is not to say that it was a unidirectional movement, for Achebe wrote short stories later in his career. The point being made concerns the significance of this movement as a sort of coming-​of-​age ritual. 3 Michael Titlestad (2010: 189) makes a distinction between the “modernist short story” and what he calls “other modes of the short story” whose form, he suggests, might better suit narratives that focus on South Africa’s past. 4 I use this term to refer broadly to speculative African fiction (see Thomas, 2000). The term, which has assumed varying connotations, is credited to American cultural critic, Mark Dery, who used it originally in specific reference to African American themes and contexts (see Dery, 1993, 2016). 5 See also Huggan (1994: 61–​73). 6 See also Kearney (2012: 125–​144).

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182  Aghogho Akpome Collins JJ (2014) What is apocalyptic literature? In: Collins JJ (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cortázar J (1999) Some aspects of the short story. Review of Contemporary Fiction 19(3): 25–​37. Creed B (1993) The Monstrous-​Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Davis M (2007) Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Dawson A and Edwards BH (2004) Introduction: Global cities of the South. Social Text 81 22(4): 1–​7. Dery M (1993) Black to the future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. South Atlantic Quarterly 92(2): 735–​778. Dery M (2016) Afrofuturism reloaded: 15 theses in 15 minutes. Fabrikzeitung, 1 February. Available at: www.fabrikzeitung.ch/​afrofuturism-​reloaded-​15-​theses-​in-​ 15-​minutes/​ (accessed 10 May 2018). Edwin S (2016) (Un)solving global challenges: African short stories, literary awards and the question of audience. Journal of African Cultural Studies 28(3): 359–​371. Gordimer N (1968) South Africa (Short Story Symposium). The Kenyon Review 30(4): 457–​463. Habila H (2011) Introduction. In: Habila H (ed.) The Granta Book of the African Short Story. London: Granta Books, 7–​15. Habila H (2013) We need new names by NoViolet Bulawayo –​review. The Guardian, 20 June. Available at: www.theguardian.com/​books/​2013/​jun/​20/​need-​new-​names-​ bulawayo-​review (accessed 10 May 2018). Harrow KW (2013). Trash: African Cinema from Below. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Holden PJ (2007) Between modernization and modernism: Community and contraction in the paracolonial short story. Philippine Studies 55(3): 319–​343. Hron M (2008) Orana-​azunwa: The figure of the child in third-​generation Nigerian novels. Research in African Literatures 39(2): 27–​48. Huggan G (1994) Echoes from elsewhere: Gordimer’s short story as social critique. Research in African Literatures 25(1): 61–​73. Ikheloa IR (2011) The 2011 Caine Prize: How not to write about Africa. Available at: https://​xoki​gbo.com/​2012/​03/​11/​the-​2011-​caine-​prize-​how-​not-​to-​write-​about-​ afr​ica (accessed 10 May 2018). Irvine L (2008) “I had an inkling I might win”. The Guardian, 10 July. Available at www.theguardian.com/​books/​2008/​jul/​09/​awardsandprizes.caineprize (accessed 10 May 2018). Jones GA and Sanyal R (2015) Spectacle and suffering: The Mumbai slum as a worlded space. Geoforum 65: 431–​439. Kearney J (2012) The representation of child deprivation in three contemporary African novels: An exploration. English in Africa 39(1): 125–​144. Lincoln SL (2008) Expensive shit: Aesthetic economies of waste in postcolonial Africa. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Duke University, Durham, NC. Available at: http://​ dukesp​ace.lib. duke.edu/​dspace/​bitstream/​handle/​10161/​696/​D_​Lincoln_​Sarah_​a_​ 200808.pdf ?sequence=​1 (accessed 11 June 2015). Linke U (2012) Mobile imaginaries, portable signs: Global consumption and representations of slum life. Tourism Geographies 14(2): 294–​319. Mackenzie C (2002) The use of orality in the short stories of A. C. Jordan, Mtutuelezi Matshoba, Njabulo Ndebele and Bessie Head. Journal of Southern African Studies 28(2): 347–​358.

Imagining Africa’s futures  183 Mbembe A (2008) Introduction: Afropolis. In: Nuttall S and Mbembe A (eds) Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Morrison SS (2015) The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mphahlele E (1969) South Africa (Short Story Symposium). The Kenyon Review 31(4): 457–​463. Nel A (2012) The repugnant appeal of the abject: Cityscape and cinematic corporality in District 9. Critical Arts: South-​North Cultural and Media Studies 26(4): 547–​569. Okuyade O (2009) The postcolonial African bildungsroman: Extending the paradigm. Afroeuropa 3(1): 1–​11. Patea V (ed.) (2012) Short Story Theories: A Twenty-​ First Century Perspective. New York: Rodopi. Pieterse E (2008) City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development. New York: Zed Books. Pucherová D (2012) A continent learns to tell its stories at last: Notes on the Caine Prize. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48(1): 13–​25. Riach G (2016) It’s not easy being green: A review of Henrietta Rose-​Innes’ Green Lion. Available at: africainwords.com/​2016/​06/​09/​its-​not-​easy-​being-​green-​review-​ of-​henrietta-​rose-​innessgreen-​lion (accessed 9 May 2018). Rose-​Innes H (2010) Poison. In: Homing: Short Stories. Cape Town: Umuzi. Thomas SR (ed.) (2000) Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Aspect. Thurman C (2015) Apocalypse whenever: Catastrophe, privilege and indifference (or, whiteness and the end times). English Studies in Africa 58(1): 56–​67. Titlestad M (2010) Afterword: Observations on post-​apartheid literature. In: Medalie D, The Mistress’s Dog: Short Stories 1996−2010. Johannesburg: Pan-​Macmillan-​ Picador Africa.

10  On reading, writing and being read Journeying with the short story Makhosazana Xaba

Soon after the publication of my debut collection Running and Other Stories (2013) –​hereinafter referred to as Running –​I attended the International Cape Town Book Fair, held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (ICC). On the first day, as I walked with a black South African novelist, he swiftly switched from our trivial nice-​to-​see-​you-​again-​chitchat to a serious writerly conversation as we approached the traffic lights so we could cross over to the ICC building. He asked, “So when are you going to graduate?” As I tried to sort out in my head what he meant I focussed on the walk as one does when approaching a set of traffic lights. As I noticed the wry smile painted on his face, he in turn seemed to notice the questions in my eyes and on my forehead; I knew then that the question was more pregnant than it sounded. Then he cleared my confusion with the words: “You have two books of poetry and now this one: short stories. When are you going to graduate to the real thing: the novel?” The traffic lights turned green and we crossed together. Until then I had not been aware that short stories, like poetry, were viewed as inferior by many a novelist. While I see myself as a student of writing I do not share this sentiment about hierarchy amongst genres that he seemed to uphold. Over the years since that ‘writerly graduation’ talk, I have continued to hear this sentiment –​expressed with passion by a number of novelists. My journey with the short story is long, deliberately playful, surprising, rewarding as well as affirming of my craft. In this essay I reflect on my reading the short story genre, writing my own stories now published in Running, commissioning, compiling and editing short stories for anthologies, and on feedback I have received from being read. I end the essay with reflections on reading-​as-​writing and writing-​as-​reading.

In the beginning, I read My reading began before I started going to school. I read pictures and shapes in colour, from the magazines that my Mama read. I enjoyed paging through the magazines and creating stories in my head based on the images I saw. I would count shapes and work out the differences among them, even though I didn’t know the names for the shapes. DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-10

On reading, writing and being read  185 Within a few years of starting school I was truly bored with the story-​less, learning-​to-​read-​and-​write-​the-​alphabet and differentiating-​nouns-​from-​ verbs phases, so I returned to Mama’s magazines and tried to read on my own. This time I knew some words. In no time I worked out where the short story sections of the magazines were, from Bona to Drum to Fair Lady and Farmer’s Weekly, whatever the magazine she read, I used it to skill my reader-​ self by searching for short stories. The mere act of paging through was exhilarating and in time it became my private enjoyment. And then Mama started receiving the Reader’s Digest from the post office. That sealed my short story reading life. By the end of primary school, I had read innumerable short stories in the languages of the magazines Mama read. And, from the Reader’s Digest I learned many words for grown-​ups. High school transformed my reading practice. In no time my genre of choice became the novel. And I was able to borrow books from the school library at Pholela High School and read full length novels in isiZulu. High school became my reading paradise. After three years at Pholela and the two spent at Inanda Seminary I had read novels in isiZulu, English and Afrikaans. I continued reading the novel way into early adulthood. And then political and historical creative nonfiction took over.

In the present, I read In 2004, I returned to reading short stories with the vigour of studentship as soon as the first semester of the MA started because our course coordinator Michael Titlestad had told us that that would be the genre of focus. My method –​seeing as I had lost contact with the genre –​became the reading of short story anthologies, rather than single author collections. I was curious about the range of style I believed the anthologies offered. I read South African anthologies from the past as well as all the more recent ones I mention later in this essay. When I read African Love Stories: An Anthology edited by Ama Ata Aidoo (2006), I never stopped telling people about “Jambula Tree” from this anthology, a story grounded in ordinariness. I was also shocked to read that an anthology of love stories was the first of its kind in the continent. Today, all the Caine Prize anthologies enjoy a spot of pride on my bookshelf and the Twenty Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing (2020) outshines them in its regal cover of the many shades of blue. Similarly, all the volumes of the “Short.Sharp.Stories” anthologies, from the inaugural Bloody Satisfied to the current, grace my bookshelves with their variedly storied presence.

The context of my writing of short stories I had not expected to enjoy writing short stories because my writerly aspirations were geared towards a biography and a historical novel because women are missing from the biography shelves and I grew up being taught a highly selective and racially problematic slice of history as dictated by Bantu

186  Makhosazana Xaba Education. The historical novel, I believed, would lead me to learning the kinds of history I could be proud to know. The dream was to fill these gaps. From the start the MA class transported me to the short story, a genre of my initial reading practice. I enjoyed the feedback process used in class. It was uncomplicated: each week we all wrote a new story, we all sent our story to everyone, met as a group once a week to give each other feedback. I brought into my writing of short stories the painful awareness of the sexism and racism present in the writings of many South African authors, which had befuddled me. I did not know how to express my discomfort with reading stories so full of sexist and racist spectacle. Stories that were clearly portraying women as less than men, as being perpetually at the service of men, as being used as sex objects by men, as narrow and one-​dimensional characters whose supposed agency was gossiping with friends and neighbours, competing for the attention of men, falling pregnant so they could trap men, losing their sanity because they were so madly in love and sacrificing their individuality in the name of marriage, were off-​putting and some were actually nauseating. Similarly, racist stories that showed black people as inferior to whites, as being perpetually at the service of whites, as being used as objects of labour for whites, as exotic humans, as narrow and one-​dimensional characters without any agency were equally uninteresting to me and often maddening. In fact, I experienced such stories as bad literature because they lack creativity and imagination, instead they hold onto the stereotypical tropes in the name of being realistic. One of the many gains of democracy is indeed that black people would start telling their own stories and in their own way. However, my disappointment with this specific political gain has been that black literature and culture has become far too kasiefied1 for my liking. Novels and stories from the township have become the hallmark of South African literature by blacks, so much so that it is now the grand narrative. I am curious and would like to see more stories centred in rural parts of the country, stories about urban life beyond the “Jimmy comes to Jo’burg” the “Black child leaves the township and goes to a Model C school in the white suburbs” (AKA the coconut) tropes because we are now at a stage of history where at least two generations of some black people were born and raised in the former white-​only suburbs. The publication of 180°: New Fiction by South African Women (Moffet and Morris, 2005), two years later, Dinaane: Short Stories by South African Women (Davey, 2007), and then Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (Gilfillan, 2008) quenched my thirst for short stories authored by women and assured me that I was not alone in feeling this deprivation. These anthologies were, to me, feminist responses to the overwhelming dominance of stories written by men. The individuals and teams behind the curation of anthologies were clearly filling the yawning gap in literature. Commenting on the short story, F Odun Balogun in his entry in The Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature, says “The genre has been most dominant in South Africa” (2012: 499) and also asserts, as I do, that

On reading, writing and being read  187 “[i]‌nitially, except for a few female writers as Ama Ata Aidoo, Grace Ogot, Bessie Head and Nadine Gordimer anthologies of African stories featured almost exclusively male writers” (499). Later in 2010, I felt alive again as I drank from Home Away: 24 Hours 24 Cities 24 Writers edited by Louis Greenberg because the creativity in the conceptualisation of this anthology bred stories that focus differently while they opened up to more complex writerly creativity. Vikas Swarup wrote this in the foreword: “You have traversed twenty-​four time zones in five hours, leapfrogged six continents. It unsettles you this shifting of paradigms which has happened so seamlessly, so unconsciously” (2012: x). Greenberg’s invitation for submissions encouraged contributors to mix fact and fiction. This brief: “Write about a specific interaction, place or object in a foreign city that makes you reflect on your South African home” (2012: xiv) launched me into a writing experiment that resulted in “The Odds of Dakar”, a story that unfolded between 3 and 4 pm in Dakar, the capital city of Senegal. Let me quote from the foreword to Running by Pumla Dineo Gqola: “I chuckled with sheer delight as Xaba played games with the plot and the very architecture of what we expect from the genre of short stories in “The Odds of Dakar”. The genius in this particular story blew me away” (2013: ii). It was indeed Greenberg’s brief that pulled my imagination in that direction. More recently, I have enjoyed reading stories from duduzile zamantungwa mabaso’s stable, Black Letter Media, the poignantly titled volumes The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story (2017a, 2017b; Jijana, 2017). The motto for Black Letter Media is “To affirm Africa always.”

Writing short stories The very first story I wrote during that semester was “Running”. Discussions in class had centred on some points that give a short story its character: few characters and an identifiable time frame that holds the narrative. If you like: rules. The first thing I wanted to do then, was break only these two rules. I needed to tell a story that was not grounded on South African soil, so I chose Zambia. But the story needed to evoke South Africa, somehow. To break the rule on “few characters” I decided on a conference, where many characters –​conference participants: delegates and speakers, as well as organisers –​would come alive in tangible and easy to imagine ways. I knew it would be easy to portray these characters because I, too, had been in all those roles at all the different conferences over the decades, in many countries of the world. The conference would also have a specific time frame. It was to be a women’s conference. In order to break the time rule, I decided on using the memory of the main character through whose narration the story “returns” to South Africa in her head while she was doing what she needed to do in the conference. And sure enough, on the second day of the conference an unplanned agenda item, “returns” all the conference participants to South Africa.

188  Makhosazana Xaba So, a story whose starting point was to break two rules continued as playful creativity (in particular, trying out dialogue and working with the character’s flashbacks), went on to give the book its title, and ended up winning the Deon Hofmeyr Award for unpublished stories in 2005. “Running” was subsequently anthologised in Dinaane: Short Stories by South African Women (Davey, 2007) and Twenty in 20: The Best Short Stories of South Africa’s 20 Years of Democracy (Twenty Years of Freedom Initiative, 2014) and in Recognition: An Anthology of South African Short Stories (Medalie, 2017). One of the recommended books during the first semester was Njabulo Ndebele’s Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (1991). This book revealed to me what, until then, had been an unconscious and therefore impossible to express dis-​ease that I had with committing to writing. As I indicated above, there seemed to me to be an overwhelming reverence and regard for stories that are the exact opposite of what I wanted to read and that induced a self-​restraint on my part. Reading Rediscovery therefore affirmed my rural roots and inspired my desire to tell quiet stories, stories that pace slowly like my life in Ndaleni where I grew up, stories whose drama (yes, there is drama, spectacle does also live in rural areas) if that were the plot, has tangible rural sensibilities. Ndebele’s opening essay “Turkish Tales and Some Thoughts on South African Fiction” in Ndebele’s Rediscovery reflects on a collection of short stories by Yashar Kemal called Anatolian Tales. Kemal’s collection is one of seven short stories; four “fairly long” and three “very short stories”. Ndebele reflects on how reading these stories as he was preparing to write a review of the book, led him to thinking about South African literature. Here is how Ndebele expresses his conclusion, what affirmed my discomfort and indeed irritation with what was dominating our literature and thus encouraged my own approach to short stories: I became aware, after I had read Kemal’s stories, that I did not remember ever coming across as compelling a body of fiction about peasant life in South Africa. It then seemed to me that there existed a disturbing silence in South African literature as far as peasant, as subjects of artistic attention, were concerned. (1991: 10, emphasis added) I wanted to centre women as “subjects of artistic attention” in most, if not all the stories that now appear in Running. In the stories “Prayers” and “People of the Valley” it is this rural centred-​ ness that was foremost in my head. I needed rural settings that would not only ground the stories and their characters as subjects of artistic attention but could also allow readers the view of rural characters in “their own right” (Ndebele, 1991: 11). In writing “Prayers” I wanted to tell a story I had not read anywhere, the story of a child, heading a household, in the light of what the HIV and AIDS

On reading, writing and being read  189 pandemic had exposed during the first decade of its devastating impact as it swept through and resituated and reconstituted our ideas of what a family looks like in South Africa: the “child-​headed household”. I needed to tell this story through the child’s own eyes because I had read abounding epidemiological statistics about children heading households. I wanted to focus the reader on the “unseen” girl behind the terminology and statistic. What better location then than a rural setting in an imagined village in Limpopo? In writing “People of the Valley” I had more than one vested interest. I wanted to practise writing dialogue because I was painfully aware then that I found it challenging. As a lover of radio and a lifetime listener as well as a former radio broadcaster myself, basing the story on a radio programme, I decided, would provide the easy side of the writing as I struggled with the more challenging side of working on credible dialogue. This then is how the idea of a community radio talk show, in a rural area, was born. While practising how to write dialogue, I also needed to write on a topic that would really invite listeners to call in. This became the most exciting part of writing the story –​showing the debate that the callers were having on air. In “Prayers”, then, the reader is aware of the thousands of people living with HIV and AIDS who become the breathing surround sound of this story, and the deliberate mention of president Nelson Mandela. While the story is held through one character and her small community there are thousands of characters who cannot be un-​thought of. Similarly, in “People of the Valley” the broadcaster and the callers are the voices readers hear; the running children and their teachers, the confusion and the shock that the story of the day has delivered brings in the other numerous characters. In both these stories I was working on bending the rule of having few characters. In these stories based in rural areas the buzz of multitudes of people is palpable while the core of the narrative arch stands firm. Running comprises stories written during the MA and a few years later. My interest in writing on topics that might be seen as taboo in many societies, or those that are seemingly marginal for whatever reason, or those that centre women’s bodies as theirs rather than objects of the male gaze, continue to interest me. I next turn to editing short stories that focus on and normalise sexual orientation and gender identity.

Facilitating the writings of others I now reflect briefly on my role as an editor of Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (Martin and Xaba, 2013) and Queer Africa 2: New Stories (Xaba and Martin, 2017), following an initial approach by Karen Martin, my co-​editor. What I am moved to reflect on specifically is how, after many years of being edited by white editors outside of the creative writing discipline, I developed what I see as empowering and writer-​centric editing: a black feminist praxis of editing. The problems I experienced with editors in the 1990s is what I will call superiority-​complex-​driven-​and-​racism-​flavoured-​overreach. How did this

190  Makhosazana Xaba overreach manifest? A few examples. Not a single editor ever asked me what I meant when they encountered unclear or confusing sentences. They simply replaced my sentences with theirs. Not once did an editor ask me if I was committed to a particular word I had used. They simply replaced my words with theirs, without asking for my permission and or approval. There was a palpable projection that the “editor knows best”. And when I challenged them, they were either shocked or irritated or downright arrogant in their insistence. Editing, it became clear to me, was viewed by these editors as a more superior role so they needed to ‘teach’ me how to write. And I was supposed to simply take it. To their horror I never did. My commitment then was to make sure that I do to others as I would have liked these editors to do to me. My editing style is centred on questions and suggestions, along these lines: What do you mean by this? [I then rewrite the confusing sentence]; This sentence and or word suggests two readings [I then name them]; Which one do you mean to portray?; Character so and so does such and such on page so and so BUT, it is unclear what their motivation is, is there a reason you have chosen not to make this motivation clear?; and, While I see where your current title comes from, how do you feel about replacing it with [then I quote the words, name the page and highlight words on the draft], because it sounds so poetic and captures the essence of the current title while also opening it up to other possibilities, thus inducing curiosity for the reader? The process is time-​consuming for the editor while it is author-​centred and therefore enabling rather than patronising. I never delete and replace with my own words, words that the writer used. In my view the writer and the editor are equals bringing together different skills. This then was my approach and practice as a co-​editor of these anthologies. What is memorable to me from reading the submissions is how most of them were written as ‘summaries of novels’. I use this descriptor to point at what was intriguing to me: that to these contributors a short story was a shortened story which only uses broad strokes of narration so that for the reader the characters never truly emerge and dialogue only works as a bridge to connect the phases/​chapters of the narrative/​novel. I only ever had the discussion on the short story as a genre with one contributor, who initially did not respond positively to my feedback. This is because the stories chosen from the initial pile of submissions were already meeting what we considered to be the most crucial literary criteria. Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (Martin and Xaba, 2013) won the 2014 Lambda Award in the LGBT Anthology (Fiction) category, thus becoming the first ever book from the African continent to win a Lambda Literary Award, founded in 1989. It was also translated into Spanish. Queer Africa 2: New Stories (Xaba and Martin, 2017) was short-​listed for the Lambda in 2018. I was in New York, in the audience, to receive the news of not winning while Martin had had the pleasure to receive the award in person in 2014. These two volumes excited those at New Internationalist, a publisher in Oxford, UK, who approached MaThoko’s Books so we could work

On reading, writing and being read  191 towards a “selected” version of Queer Africa which was published in 2018. In his introduction to Queer Africa: Selected Stories, Chiké Frankie Edozien, a professor of journalism at New York University, writes: “The truth is often said to be stranger than fiction but this sterling collection contains exquisite writing that again and again has the ring of truth. It is a wonderful treat” (2018: 9). I like this quote because it reminds me of the many times when I gave the writers I supported the feedback on credible sounding characters and authenticity of narration. Work on the queer fiction anthologies was interesting because of the varying range of contributors who ended up in the final manuscripts. It was only after the news of winning the Lambda Award in 2014, for the first anthology, that I became aware of the positioning of the short story as one that is used to introduce difficult subject matter. When Martin had approached me to coedit I agreed because I was excited about the challenge of becoming the editor I wish I had worked with in the 1990s.

Being read: Some examples from universities The reflections in this section comprise examples from two universities in South Africa, one in the USA and one in Israel. In 2016, I met a lecturer who had taught Running at a South African university. I will give her the name, Mrs. van der Spoel. Over dinner she excitedly gave me detailed feedback on how her students had responded to the collection. Below I share just two examples I found most intriguing. Example 1: On the short story “The Trip”, a mundane-​sounding story about Qhamukile and her young daughter Nontshisekelo driving for the first time, in her own car, from Johannesburg to Pietermaritzburg. It is a story centred on the ordinariness of a long-​distance drive on one of South Africa’s highways. There is no spectacle in this story, only a major personal milestone for a young black woman. The story ends equally mundanely as the long drive terminates as expected at its destination and Qhamukile, the main character, indulges in sexual self-​pleasuring before going to sleep. This is another ordinary act not often written about from a woman’s perspective. Mrs van der Spoel told me that the first student to raise her hand asked the question: “Is the author suggesting that as women we do not need men to enjoy sex?” The lecturer went on to tell me about how that question led to a passion-​filled conversation about women’s sexual freedom and control over their bodies. I was reminded of an experience I had had in my class in 2004 when my classmates gave me feedback on the draft of “The Trip”. One of my classmates, a white male, whom I will call Peter, said my story has nothing to offer the reader as it was far too commonplace, in fact it had nothing worth telling. His own story from that week was centred on a male character at a game reserve in Kenya who was attracted to some woman and was pursuing her. Clearly, according to Peter, the exotic game reserve in Kenya is a real story, full of action.

192  Makhosazana Xaba What these two responses point to mainly is the fact of how our reading of any text is always informed by how we are positioned to it. The young female students in a literature class zoomed into the very end of the story and took in for themselves a message of sexual liberation. Peter on the other hand saw the story as a complete disaster of a non-​story. These two fiercely oppositional readings of “The Trip” aside, I felt that my attempt at crafting a narrative that captures a trip at two levels –​in its road groundedness as well as its emotional growth as a personal milestone –​was successful in presenting banality in storytelling, particularly in its ending, where the female character’s sexual self-​pleasuring is rendered as a banal climax of the trip as well as an anticipated imagined climax of this bodily pleasure. What I needed the reader to imagine –​an orgasm from self-​pleasuring –​Peter read nothingness, while the students read a possibility for self-​ reliance even in sexual pleasure. Example 2: When Mrs van der Spoel finished giving her feedback I noticed that she had not once mentioned “The Weekend”, a story about two women who are friends, Phatheka and Zaba, who go away to spend a weekend together privately because Zaba, the younger woman, needs time to complete an abortion that has already been medically induced. Phatheka is with her to give her the support she needs. The story ends as a successful complications-​ free termination of pregnancy. I asked Mrs van der Spoel if she had just forgotten about “The Weekend”. No, she said, she was also aware of the silence surrounding “The Weekend” but chose not to push the students. Why? I asked. Well, I think the topic is far too close for comfort to some of them, too close and too personal and too private. I know that some of them have had abortions because they have confided in me but I am also aware that they are not fully accepting of their choices and if some are, they still haven’t found a way of being publicly open about them. Recently, as I read Okri’s introduction to the anthology Twenty Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing I was reminded of what Mrs van der Spoel had said about “The Weekend”: It is in this way that the short form lends itself to the political, the social, the contemplative, the anecdotal, the cultural. It is because it can be a perfect mirror of life that it serves on so many levels. …The elasticity of the form is astounding. There is almost nothing it cannot do. (Okri, 2019: 11, emphasis added) From what she had said the story was so perfect a mirror of some of her students’ lives that they were not ready to face it in class and talk about it. At the University of Cape Town (UCT) I am aware of more than three disciplines wherein Running is taught. The most recent and most surprising one I heard of was how the story “Behind the Suit” is taught by Dr Marlon Swai in an anthropology course. Anthropology. Feminism, yes. Literature, yes. Creative writing, yes. Black feminist Thought, yes. Once I started hearing from some lecturers that they teach my short stories I was not surprised by

On reading, writing and being read  193 the courses in which they use Running. In a sense, then, this is also a commentary on the potential of the short story; teaching the course on “Societies in transition” Dr Swai uses short stories to make the points he needs to make in class. Knowing as little as I know about social anthropology, wouldn’t it have been great to be a fly on the wall of that zoom class where “Behind The Suit” and “The Suit Continued: The Other Side” were discussed, quoted, analysed and critiqued? Louise Bethlehem is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She shared with me via email that she has been teaching a graduate seminar on “Postapartheid Literature” to a diverse student body, including Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, from East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as Jewish Israelis of various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. In the course two years ago, she used Can Themba’s classic story “The Suit” among other works to historicise apartheid since the question of post-​apartheid literature begs the question of what apartheid was. In order to demonstrate the different climate of post-​apartheid writing, I coupled the text with two of your stories: “Behind The Suit” and “The Suit Continued: The Other Side” from Running and Other Stories. I asked the students to respond to these texts in an open-​form response paper. I was particularly delighted when two married Palestinian women who self-​identified as observant Muslims together wrote a short story in response to your texts. They set their story in a local context and constructed a plot involving a love-​story between two women. In class, they spoke of their distance from the subject-​position they ascribed to their protagonists but also of their pleasure in exploring a subjectposition so distant from their own emplacements. The story became something of a legend among other women in the course: just recently, one of my students in this year’s cohort referred to it so it seems to have taken on a life of its own. It was wonderful for me as a teacher to see the creative process that the students wove between their reality and your text.2 Stéphane Robolin is an Associate Professor and Director of the Center for African Studies/​Department of English at Rutgers University’s School of Arts and Sciences. Robolin shared this feedback on an “element of surprise” with me via email. Commenting on “Running” the story, during a class meeting of an upper-​level undergraduate course on South African women’s writing taught alongside Yvette Christiansë’s poem “Some of the Women” in 2019: An underlying narrative that runs contrary to the direction of the opening of each text slowly emerges over the course of the short story and poem (albeit in different directions). That gradual emergence allowed us to reflect upon the complicated pathways women must negotiate in the prevailing winds of power and resistance. And the students came to

194  Makhosazana Xaba realize how this fact of negotiation yields textured, layered, and complex representations (and representational possibilities).3 Robolin comments further on “Running” the story, this time in an upper-​level undergraduate course on South African literature in 2020; he notes: the short story focused our attention on the resurfacing of repressed memory, the pain of that involuntary resurfacing, and the challenges of sharing that memory even in putatively empowering settings. This piece, alongside the others, prompted students to rethink the simplistic account of South Africa that predominates in the United States: that liberation was won, that the country effectively reckoned with the past, and that it has cathartically transitioned to a more just, equitable society. “Running,” in particular, drew our attention to the ironic undercurrents and eddies that manifest in the wake of the liberation struggle.4 While the first comment is on the writing as a craft and what a focus on narration allows, the second comment is on content and how it allows an engagement with the broad political context and the south–​north dynamics. Having my stories taught at universities in my lifetime is encouraging, particularly if it facilitates shifts in perspectives and allows openness and more egalitarian understandings of the context from which I write.

Being read: Some examples from general readers Of all the ordinary people’s readings of Running, the most memorable feedback came from an acquaintance who said: “I loved the way you wrote that radio story about the placenta, what did you call it?” Then she continued, “Which radio was it aired on by the way, I remember liking it very much!” As we talked it became clear to me that she had thought that “People of the Valley” was originally a news item she had heard on radio that I had adapted as a short story. As I clarified that the story was a product of my imagination she repeatedly said: “But it feels so real!” and then I remembered that Running had been read on SAFM Radio for months, in 2014. I asked her if she had listened to those readings and she said no. My take from that feedback is that in “People of the Valley” as I practised dialogue, the story also achieved the credibility criteria. The second most memorable feedback came from a reader who made a fun comment on “Inside”. “You changed Killarney Mall for me. After reading “Inside” I can no longer sit at Exclusive Books and drink coffee at Seattle without thinking of how sexy Killarney Mall is.” This speaks to the impact stories have on us as readers. For this reader, the intensity with which she engaged with “Inside” went beyond her head, to the actual scene of the story, it transformed her engagement with these scenes. She started visualising the two characters each time she was there.

On reading, writing and being read  195 In 2019 I met with a student who had contacted me for a research project she was undertaking. At the end of our first encounter, I gave her a copy of Running because our research conversation had also veered toward her love for reading. When we met for the second time her opening line was: “How do you know my story?” As I was trying to understand the question she went on to say: that story, that story, is my story, that’s my father you wrote about. She was talking about the story “Room for my Shoes”. She went on to tell me how she cried in the train as she read the book and how the main character, Ntombizoluntu’s parents are like her own parents who are “struggle parents” and that even she, likes the sea. She went on to show me photographs on her phone; the sea and often with the sun either rising or setting. These three examples of readers’ feedback affirm my general approach to my writing process, in particular how I strive to represent characters in as credible a manner as possible.

Being read and understood by literary scholars In this section I share a few examples of how literary scholars have responded to my short stories and how their reading of these stories speaks to my writing goals, practice and praxis. In her recent article “ ‘Rediscovering the Erotic as Ordinary’ in South African Women’s Short Fiction” Jenny du Preez analyses “Inside” a short story that was initially published in Open Anthology by South African Women Writers, which was published in 2008 and I republished in Running. “Inside” is a story of two women, Bhekiwe and Zodwa, who are navigating an emerging friendship. Bhekiwe teaches at a school where Zodwa’s two brothers go, which is how they met. The story explores friendship as a possible starting point for a romantic relationship through the use of suggestive erotic moments within mundane life situations. Du Preez makes the points: The story thus ends with a moment of possibility for the discovery of new aspects of herself as well as possible erotic futures for her and Zodwa. These potentialities are entangled, presenting the erotic as a fundamental part of the ordinary internal explorations of life. Linking the erotic to the ordinary and the spiritual potentially runs the risk of disembodying the erotic. However, alongside Taiwa’s music, Xaba also includes a range of moments where Zodwa’s body is figured erotically. (2020: 689–​702) Reading this I was reminded of a reader who told me how he had memorised “Inside” for the National Eisteddford Academy of South Africa competition when he was still in high school, having chosen it because he liked the subtle eroticism in the story. I was also reminded of how I was curious about whether the editors of the anthology, Open, would choose the story for

196  Makhosazana Xaba inclusion because I had decided to write an erotic story that did not include descriptions of sex acts. What I find interesting with Du Preez’s comment is, of course, that she uses Ndebele’s Rediscovery of the Ordinary for the title of her own text, thus affirming what I was attempting in crafting “Inside”. Du Preez argues my case in the following manner, Here, the erotic is understood as an integrative force, which contests the ways in which sexist and racist discourses about Black women seek to reduce them to their bodies and transform those bodies into sexual objects with no desires of their own. In other words, it could be seen to contest “spectacularisation”. (2020: 693) It is important to remember that Ndebele’s book was first published in 1991. His observations, comments and examples are on the literature produced during the apartheid era. My paraphrasing of Ndebele’s main argument of that no matter how deep the oppression and the marginalisation, a more interesting approach to literature is one that defocusses on what is visible in order to probe what is invisible, and or made invisible. It is one that values enough the complexity of the lives of the oppressed and marginalised that it demonstrates it rather than focussing on pointing a finger, that is, blaming. In “Inside” I was deliberate about moving away from the spectacle of sex acts. I have read far too many stories that are detailed on the physicality of sexual intercourse. I therefore wanted to write a story that centres the less physical, the less predictable, the less gymnastic and yes, a story set outside of the heteronormative frame. I wanted to challenge myself in writing the not so tangible eroticism; the anticipatory, the building phase, the imagined and the suggested. The reason I wanted to write this story in this manner is I needed to engage with the interiority of the erotic in the early pre-​sex act stage that Du Preez analyses so accurately. Of all the stories in Running, “The Suit” stories: “Behind The Suit” and “The Suit Continued: The Other Side” have received varying engagements by literary scholars. From Cheryl Stobie’s article “Re-​tailoring Can Themba’s ‘The Suit’: Queer Temporalities in Two Stories by Makhosazana Xaba”: Both “Behind ‘The Suit’ ” and “ ‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side” critique hetero-​patriarchy; they queer marriage, procreation, Sophiatown, black communities and the South African nation; and they contribute meaningfully to present and future postcolonial queer writing and reading. (2017: 87) Stobie’s interpretation of these stories articulates the end goal I had in mind when I wrote them. I needed to show the other sides of the grand narratives

On reading, writing and being read  197 of black lives in the 1950s; to demonstrate the range of how black people in Sophiatown lived their lives. Sally Ann Murray, from her article entitled “Queerying Examples of Contemporary South African Short Fiction”, from the subsection she calls “Queering the canon”: Another version of queering time occurs in queer rewritings of canonical stories. An excellent example here is Makhosazana Xaba’s “The Suit Continued: The Other Side”, a re-​casting of Can Themba’s 1963 short story, “The Suit”. By queerying, in story form, the archive as always-​ unfinished potential in formation, Xaba as creative writer performs a version of the interventionist agency more usually associated with queer criticism such as Brenna Munro’s South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come (2012). Part of Xaba’s skill has been to recognize Themba’s highly successful story as a productive failure. (2020: 90, emphases added) I have never read the Brenna Munro text that Murray mentions above. What I find intriguing about Murray’s comments are the points on time, the archive, agency and literary endeavour. My starting was simple: using imagination to respond to the heteronormative patriarchal sexism that screams maddeningly from Can Themba’s story. My experience tells me that the archive is always subjective, as are the acts of canonisation of literature. Because of this understanding I used these two stories aiming to expose this subjectivity and to flatten the peak of the canons by uncovering their community. In his abstract to the article “ ‘All Futures are Bred in the Bellies of their Past’: Siphiwo Mahala’s, Zukiswa Wanner’s and Makhosazana Xaba’s Intertextual Dialogues with Can Themba’s Short Story ‘The Suit’ ”, Raphael d’Ábdon asserts: Xaba’s “Behind The Suit” and “The Suit Continued: The Other Side” (2013) should be considered pivotal texts in the South African literary palimpsest, since they deconstruct some of the most controversial features of Themba’s story, and infuse it with ground-​breaking feminist and queer narratives. (2019: 26, emphasis added) Here d’Ábdon understands my feminist deconstruction practice and affirms that the goals I set out to achieve have been met. The normalisation of sexist attitudes towards women enabled the canonisation of Themba’s story. “The Suit” is a story of violence against women which Themba normalised. And, the absence of written critiques on writing as a craft meant that Themba’s story was hardly under scrutiny. All three articles are deeply detailed and steeped in a discipline that is foreign to me, yet they reflect the ideas that sparked my writing. Being read has

198  Makhosazana Xaba therefore meant that I have learned about how my work is read in ways I never anticipated. This then takes me back to my favourite quote by Adrienne Rich which I read over two decades ago from her collection of essays On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–​1978: “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves” (1979: 19). “Black people cannot write.” This then is one of the assumptions in which I was drenched. It is an assumption that was articulated out loud, by whites, in the 90s, straight into our faces, repeatedly, with authority, as an indisputable fact. It is this assumption that also resulted in being edited in the manner that I touch on earlier in this essay.

Reading-​as-​writing and writing-​as-​reading As a child I was excited by reading without ever thinking that I could, one day, also write. I developed the habit of rereading texts out of a need to understand what I was reading and so improved my vocabulary. Learning new words was fun. I do not remember the stories I read from Mama’s numerous copies of Reader’s Digest. What I do remember is sitting down as I read, working out how sentences connect and how they then connect to paragraphs. I remember how sometimes I would read a story to the end and only afterwards sit with a dictionary so I could learn the meanings of words. It was reading that had me enjoy reading dictionaries. However, something bothered me for the longest time –​my memory. I forgot the stories, could never retell them, not even the ones I thought I liked. This memory failure continued way into adulthood, even with novels. And then when I started writing, I realised that I was fascinated more by how a story was written. Often that is what made me like or dislike a story: the how of it all. As I write this essay it is becoming even clearer to me that my fascination with breaking rules of the short story genre is closely linked with the fascination with sentence structures and paragraphs that had fascinated me as a reading child and teenager. It is this ‘how’ of the writing that often sparked the ideas that developed into the stories that appear in Running. This then is how I understand how reading drives, influences and impacts my writing. In 2001, I picked up from a second-​hand bookstore a book entitled Writing to Learn by William Zissner. From the book a message that has lived with me ever since is how reading what you write triggers the thinking process and therefore learning about your own process. It is this thinking process then that propels further writing and then revision and revision and further revision. I remember during the MA course writing a reflection on how I had written the short stories and realising that my average number of drafts for the five stories I had written was 13. That is how I embraced reading-​as-​writing and writing-​as-​reading. I realised that with each draft the text improved and ideas grew. Put simply: reading for revision improves the writing.

On reading, writing and being read  199 I see reading and writing as happily entangled activities because for a writer they are in a constant conversation and continuously building on each other. Reading propels the creativity in my writing. My creativity includes playfulness and always trying something new, with each new story.

A few words on the next collection Today I sit with five very early but complete drafts of stories for the next collection. Working on the next volume has been an on and off process for about five years now. It was only in January 2021 that an idea for one short story knocked on my head with the question: whatever happened to the suit? Within three days, of this question landing in my head I had reread all five The Suit stories and then wrote the first draft of a story that attempts to answer this question. This was so unexpected to me, it was as if the story was asking to be written. That is what a subconscious imagination does, pushes through what is lying hidden in the mind and positions it in the active brain. The draft stories continue to focus on women’s perspectives of the world, the not-​too-​dramatic and “spectacular” events of life, because I sincerely believe that most of us live ordinary lives. Similar to Running wherein the idea of running seemed to shore up in each story, a theme on death has emerged and maybe the whole collection will end up exploring death’s varied manifestations. Who knows? Of the 11 stories five are now in preliminary draft form. I am often drawn back to the drafts by reading for the how I was working with in each story.

Breathing out In this essay I have shared something from all ten stories that make up Running. I was once asked why and how I chose Running as the title for this collection. Well, I remember so clearly the panic I had as I tried to find a title for the collection once I had revised the whole manuscript and sequenced the stories in a manner that made sense then. I was a day away from submitting so my way to handle the panic was to reread the whole manuscript just so I could ‘discover’ what seemed to hold it together. In the title story “Running”, the main character runs in more ways than one. In “Room for my Shoes” the main character wants to run but she cannot. Between those two ends of the run I realised that in all the stories a character (or more) is either running or needing to run, literally or figuratively, or as a reader you want them to run, or their life seems like a life on the run. There was a sense that running encapsulates ideas and their interconnections, feelings in their multiplicities, and various actions in all the stories, such that it made sense to use the title for the collection. I felt that no story would be excluded by the title even if the act of running was not the driver of the story.

200  Makhosazana Xaba Stobie has this to say about the title: In addition, the reader encounters Xaba’s two Suit stories at either end of her book of short stories, requiring the slotting together of the narrative jigsaw puzzle across the space of the other stories which enact “Running”, the title story of the collection which typifies all the tales, suggesting movement, escape, activity, progress, becoming. (2017: 83) Through reading critical analyses of Running by scholars, I realise that I have received the gift of being heard and understood. While I am aware that brother-​novelist in Cape Town may have been joking when he asked that question about graduating from short stories and poetry to novels, I cannot stop wondering about how anyone would receive the question-​cum-​suggestion that a gum tree needs to graduate by becoming a baobab tree. For the longest time I have been saying that reading saved my life. More recently I have noticed that writing, in whatever genre, gives me life. My long journey with the short story can be summarised in one word: learning. Trite, banal and should be expected with every journey? Well, yes, but true.

Notes 1 Kasie is taken from the Afrikaans word lokasie which is a translation of the English word location. The words “location” and “township” were used to identify the labour camps-​cum-​residential areas built by the apartheid regime in its implementation of its policy on separate development. Black people were moved to areas that were “designated” for them by the apartheid regime, far from cities and towns, but close enough to allow movement in the service of whites in these cities. The language that these location dwellers and their subsequent generations appropriated and made their own is “kasie” to mean the township. 2 Email from Louise Bethlehem: 18 March 2021. 3 Email from Stéphane Robolin: 25 April 2021. 4 Email from Stéphane Robolin: 25 April 2021.

References Aidoo AA (ed.) (2006) African Love Stories: An Anthology. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd. Balogun FO (2012) Short stories. In: Gikandi S (ed.) The Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 497–​499. d’Ábdon R (2019) “All futures are bred in the bellies of their past”: Siphiwo Mahala’s, Zukiswa Wanner’s and Makhosazana Xaba’s intertextual dialogues with Can Themba’s short story “The Suit”. English in Africa 6(2): 25–​47. Davey M (ed.) (2007) Dinaane. Short Stories by South African Women. London, San Francisco, CA, Beirut: Telegram Books.

On reading, writing and being read  201 Du Preez JB (2020) “Rediscovering the erotic as ordinary” in South African women’s short fiction. Journal of Southern African Studies (46)4: 689–​702. Edozien CF (2018) Introduction. In: Xaba M and Martin K (eds) Queer Africa: Selected Stories. Oxford: New Internationalist Publications (in collaboration with MaThoko’s Books). Gilfillan L (ed.) (2008) Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers. Cape Town: Oshun Books. Gqola PD (2013) Foreword. In: Xaba M, Running and Other Stories. Athlone: Modjaji Books, i–​ii. Greenberg L (ed.) (2012) Home Away: 24 Hours 24 Cities 24 Writers. Cape Town: Zebra. Jijana T (ed.) (2017) The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story, Vol 3. Yeoville: Black Letter Media. mabaso dz (ed.) (2017a) The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story, Vol 1. Yeoville: Black Letter Media. mabaso dz (ed.) (2017b) The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story, Vol 2. Yeoville: Black Letter Media. Martin K and Xaba M (eds) (2013). Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction. Braamfontein: MaThoko’s Books. Medalie D (ed.) Recognition: An Anthology of South African Short Stories. Braamfontein: Wits University Press. Moffet H and Morris C (eds) (2005) 180°: New Fiction by South African Women Writers. Cape Town: Oshun Books. Murray SA (2020) Queerying examples of contemporary South African short fiction. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55(1): 77–​95. Ndebele N (1991) Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Fordsburg: Congress of South African Writers. Okri B (2020) Introduction. In: Twenty Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Auckland Park: Jacana Media, 7–12. Rich A (1979) On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–​1978. New York: Norton. Stobie C (2017) Re-​tailoring Can Themba’s “The Suit”: Queer temporalities in two stories by Makhosazana Xaba. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 29(2): 79–​88. Swarup V (2012) Foreword. In: Greenberg L (ed.) Home Away: 24 Hours 24 Cities 24 Writers. Cape Town: Zebra, ix–​xi. Twenty Years of Freedom Initiative (2014) Twenty in 20: The Best Short Stories of South Africa’s 20 Years of Democracy. Rosebank: Times Media Books. Xaba M (2007) Running. In: Davey M (ed.) Dinaane: Short Stories by South African Women. London, San Francisco, CA, Beirut: Telegram Books. Xaba M (2013) Running and Other Stories. Athlone: Modjaji Books. Xaba M (2017) Running. In: Medalie D (ed.) Recognition: An Anthology of South African Short Stories. Braamfontein: Wits University Press. Xaba M and Martin K (eds) (2017) Queer Africa 2: New Stories. Braamfontein: MaThoko’s Books.

11  Short stories born from the womb of the past Siphiwo Mahala

“In different ways many of the stories explore the relationship between the present and the past. Written from the perspective of contemporary South Africa, they narrate the present as a direct consequence of the past. The new emerges, so to speak, from the womb of the old.” Andries Walter Oliphant, 1999

The use of the past in literature serves a variety of purposes, largely propelled by a combination of aesthetical choices and thematic content. Often times, the past is an essential reference to illustrate the vicissitudes that manifest in the present. The past and the present become intertwined. As such, the past has a very strong bearing on the present condition of short story writing in South Africa as much as it does on the socio-​political condition at large. While the thematic focus of this chapter is to reflect on intertextual discourses amongst contemporary short story writers in South Africa, it will dart back and forth to use the past as a crucible to gauge the present. This is done not only to affirm Oliphant’s assertion, as exemplified in the quote above, that the present is “a direct consequence of the past” (1999: 8), but also to demonstrate the infusion of oral narrative devices with writing stylistics, the intersection of old motifs with the new, as well as how contemporary writers reimagine the works of their predecessors. Textual intersections between different generations will be explored using prominent examples, which bear traces of each other at varying levels. I am part of this movement and it is inevitable that part of my creative output becomes the subject of my own reflections and critical analysis. It is widely understood that there is a symbiotic relationship between short stories and oral narratives. The converse is also true that the origins of storytelling, regardless of the genre, point to oral narratives, for oral narratives precede any form of recording, including writing. What connects the short story with oral narratives more than other forms of written prose like novels and drama is its brevity and sense of immediacy, making it convenient for reading in one sitting, as well as the fact that it encapsulates elements of each of these art forms. In other words, the short story is not a truncated form of DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-11

Short stories from the womb of the past  203 a novel, yet it can be descriptive and philosophical as the best novels ought to be; it is not designed for stage performance like a play, yet it deploys dialogue and character interaction to build a riveting plot as you would find in the best of plays; and it is not told in verse form like poetry, yet the poignancy of the choice of words and the lyrical nature of the narrative aesthetically emboldens the story. The short story is a sum total of all these genres. It is its nature of hybridity, the fact that it is the microcosm of all these genres, that makes the short story one of the most sophisticated forms of storytelling. In a paradoxical sense, both the technical complexity and the brevity of the written form of the short story are some of the elements that dialectically connect it to its oral narrative origins. Oral narratives (or orature), whether practised through folklore, poetry, myths, fables, riddles, songs and chants, or a combination of all these art forms, are usually performed and finished within one sitting. It is primarily for this reason that many critics have drawn parallels between oral storytelling and the written form of the short story, in particular. The short story is the point of convergence where elements of oral narratives meet, sing and dance on the page. My interest in literature emanates from my exposure to oral narratives. As much as one has had the privilege of reading the works of a vast number of eminent scholars who draw parallels between the short story and oral narratives, none have vividly illustrated this interface as much as my grandmother did when I was young. I was partly raised by my grandmother, Shinana Thembani of the Madiba clan, who remains one of the most exceptional storytellers I have ever come across. My most vivid childhood memories involve my grandmother telling stories while sewing grass mats or cooking on a three-​legged pot. The stories could either be a folktale that she loved or felt appropriate to tell at that particular moment, a moral tale that she would tell as a way of sending a warning to an errant grandchild, rehashing a serialised story from the radio, or a reflective story where she reminisced about lived experience. One of the most unforgettable reflective narratives unfolded while she was preparing to wash a pillow. Perhaps I should explain how she made pillows: she would take an empty sack, fill it with old clothes, and stitch its mouth so that it became something that resembled a pillow. When the ‘pillow’ was extremely soiled, she would unstitch and empty it so that she could wash the sack. As she took the various pieces of cloth out of the sack, she would tell a story about each item: This cloth is from the blouse I was wearing when your grandfather noticed me amongst all other girls. Do you know how beautiful I was at the time? I never used any skin lighteners because I come from a lineage of people with fair complexion. A story that began with a mere piece of cloth would develop into a narrative of family history.

204  Siphiwo Mahala My grandmother’s stories illustrated the intersections between oral narratives and the modern (written) short story. It is perhaps a great injustice to refer to hers as storytelling; it was more of a performance than just telling a story, particularly when it came to folktales where there were some gruesome characters. She would change her voice into something croaky and loathsome to imitate the frightening characters like monsters, and when she told the story of smaller and innocent animals that we would often sympathise with, she would turn into a squeaky childlike voice. At times, we would be so captivated and emotionally involved with the narrative to such an extent that we would be scared of darkness when we had to go to sleep. The story became our own reality as we became part of the story. As audiences we were active participants to these oral narratives. Our role was to contribute by laughing, squirming, singing, responding to her chants, and asking questions. Afterwards, we would retell the stories to one another, imitate her gestures, try to make sense of certain parts, reimagine others, create new characters, argue over the facts, the logic and meaning. We became the audience, critics and storytellers at the same time. In retrospect, these oral narratives were the foundation on which my literary appreciation was inculcated from an early age. My grandmother’s oral narratives are a fundamental component of my literary apprenticeship. The most prominent exponent of this form of storytelling in South Africa is Gcina Mhlophe, who emerged in the 1970s as a poet, short story writer and storyteller. The connection between the written short story and oral narratives is a perennial reference in literary criticism, even if it is superficially addressed. Many commentators have not gone beyond stating this as a fact and have not demonstrated how the intersections between orature and written literature manifest. Norman Hodge was probably the first critic I was exposed to who wrote about the oral narratives and the written short story connection. This was when in 1992, as a high school student, I came across the short story anthology, To Kill a Man’s Pride and Other Stories from Southern Africa, compiled and edited by Hodge. Reading this book would turn out to be an experience of many ‘firsts’ for me, and these would shape my literary appreciation, my fascination with the short story genre as well as with certain writers who have contributed immensely to the development of the genre. What struck me even before I could read the stories, was his bold assertion in the introduction that: The craft of storytelling is as old as the human community itself and no individual culture can claim an advantage or procedure. Whether one reads Aesop’s fables, Xhosa iintsomi, North American Indian legends, ancient Hebrew myths, Persian tales or Norse sagas, the roots are the same and all are equally illustrative of the art of oral narrative and recitation. (Hodge, 1984: 1)

Short stories from the womb of the past  205 One of the firsts in reading this specific paragraph was to learn that the oral narratives were not a uniquely African or South African phenomenon, which was contrary to my initial perceptions. It is practised in communities as far afield as North America and India in the far east. It was also in this text that I encountered for the first time the works of Bessie Head, Can Themba, Mbulelo Mzamane and Njabulo S. Ndebele, who would become some of the major influences in my literary appreciation and shape my writing career in years to come. Mzamane, in particular, had the power of proximity to me and became an influential figure as an educationist, mentor and one of the foremost critics and proponents of short story writing. Following my first encounter with Mzamane’s work through his short story, “My Other Cousin, Sitha”, published in Hodge’s collection, in 1995 I enrolled for undergraduate studies majoring in language and literature at the University of Fort Hare where Mzamane was the Vice Chancellor and Principal. Paramount to Mzamane’s academic transformation agenda was a shift from the predominant Western literature and making available material by African and South African writers, in particular, as an integral part of the syllabus. He had already transformed the curriculum of the English Department, recruiting globally acclaimed scholars of African literature and introducing more books by African writers as set works. This was the period in which I came across Hungry Flames and Other Black South African Stories (edited by Mzamane), which remains my all-​time favourite short story anthology. In his rather elaborate and very incisive introduction to Hungry Flames, Mzamane makes an observation similar to what I had read from Hodge that: The short story tradition in South Africa is as old as the Xhosa intsomi; the Zulu inganekwane; the Sotho tsomo and other indigenous oral narrative forms. (Mzamane, 1986: ix) Mzamane’s prognosis fell onto a fertile soil, previously tendered by Hodge’s assertion, as alluded to earlier. Mzamane, however, was much more vivid as he made reference to the cultural nuances that were so familiar to me. What I discovered in the interface between oral narratives and the written form of literature is not only the power and relevance of my grandmother’s brand of storytelling as the bedrock of written stories across genres, but also the similarity in storytelling traditions from different cultures and societies around the world. Most importantly, it reaffirms the view that there are no binaries between the narratives of the past and the present. The present is told through the prism of the past. The use of the past in storytelling goes beyond the historical relevance, factual accuracies and thematic focus of the stories, but also extends to narrative techniques. Stylistically, one of the common features in folktales is the opening formula, which in English is usually expressed as “Once upon a

206  Siphiwo Mahala time”. In Xhosa intsomi the equivalent of the phrase is “Kwathi ke kaloku ngantsomi”, a similar phrase in Zulu inganekwane would be “Kwesukela”, and in Sotho tsomo it is “Ba re e ne e re, ka tsatsi le leng.” Although the literal meaning may not be precisely the same, these phrases serve the same purpose of opening a story and point to the past as the womb from which the stories emerge. This bears relevance both in terms of the content of the story being told as well as the form of storytelling. The intersection between the past and the present is most prevalent in the fantastical short stories of Mohale Mashigo, in her collection Intruders (2018). In this short story collection, Mashigo draws from the narratives of the past to leap into the future in exploring what she calls “Afrofuturism”. She describes this intersection in the following words: For me, imagining a future where our languages and cultures are working with technology for us in order to, as Miriam Tlali says, “expose what we feel inside”, I had to draw from South African folklore and urban legends. How could I not go back to our amazing stories about mutlanyana (rabbit) outsmarting a hungry lion, for inspiration? Or ‘jazz up’ urban legends: the headless horse named Waar is my Kop (Where is my Head) that terrorises young children, or the beautiful ghost of a young woman named Vera who haunted the roads of Soweto at night, causing young men to drive off the road? (Mashigo, 2018: xii) Mashigo stands out as an example of a contemporary writer whose narratives embody elements of folklore as the womb from which her stories emerge. What is articulated in her introductory note, aptly titled “Afrofuturism: Ayashis’ Amateki”, manifests in the stories. In my own compilation of short stories, Red Apple Dreams and Other Stories (2019), I allude to the same entanglements as discussed earlier in this chapter. This is further illustrated through several instances of intertextual resonances. My short story, “The Suit Continued”, first published in 2002, instigated a series of textual intersections with Can Themba’s “The Suit”. At the time of writing this story, I was deliberate with the rather perilous endeavour of reimagining “The Suit”, but I was not well-​versed with the dialectics of intertextuality as an established literary practice. It was Mbulelo Mzamane who first put it in the context of intertextual discourse, as he wrote in his introduction to Words Gone Two Soon: Thus while we can rightly speak of new directions in South African literature and society, there are inevitably echoes from the past that are evident in such work as Siphiwo Mahala’s “The Suit Continued”; based on Can Themba’s “The Suit”. Such inter-​textual discourse goes on all the time among the new-​order authors, in their endeavour to connect with the past. (Mzamane, 2005: xiii)

Short stories from the womb of the past  207 Although I have been credited for having initiated the intergenerational dialogue with Themba post 2000, Mzamane embarked on a similar endeavour as far back as 1981. In his short story, “The Dube Train Revisited”, published in his collection, Mzala: My Cousin Comes to Jo’burg (1981), Mzamane experiments with Themba’s work. The story is inspired by Themba’s “The Dube Train”, which was first published in the Mphahlele-​edited Modern African Stories in 1964. The story shares a similar setting and plot as Themba’s original story, but the narrative style, the characters and the actions are quite distinct. Mzamane was my principal at university and our relationship grew stronger over the years, with him playing the role of a mentor, and Themba’s writings being an integral part of our common interests. Conversely, Mzamane had been Themba’s student in Swaziland and was instrumental in getting his collected works, The Will to Die, published posthumously for the first time in 1972. In this instance, there is a clear epistemological connection of what Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence” (1973), between three writers of different generations. In her review of Ode Ogede’s book, Intertextuality in Contemporary African Literature: Looking Foreward (2011), Gloria Oyeonziri-​ Miller captures the conceptions of intertextuality succinctly: Writers gather ideas and styles from their predecessors and reconceptualise texts from which they borrow. Intertextuality is a creative process fundamental to the way that African literature reproduces itself over time and requires greater critical attention than it has received to date. (2012: 140) Ogede’s book grapples with the question of intertextuality specifically in African literature, but the concept of intertextuality is applicable to other literatures beyond the African continent. Intertextuality can be defined as the influence that different literary texts have on each other. It is in many ways the reflection of what you read. In his paper, “The Short Story Tradition in Black South Africa”, delivered at the Writers’ Workshop Gaborone, Botswana, in 1976, Mzamane argues: “You can actually study the development of the English novel from, say, Defoe to the present, identifying influences all the way. I can’t conceive of D.H. Lawrence without Thomas Hardy, for instance. In fact, Lawrence saw himself as an improvement on Hardy.” The fundamental factor here is the ability of literary texts to cross over the epistemic borders and interweave narratives from divergent texts. Intertextuality can be both explicit or implicit, and the author can be both deliberate or subconsciously reflect their literary influences. This is a crucial element in literary apprenticeship and is essential for discerning the full meaning of a literary text. In Red Apple Dreams, I attempt to give the chronological account of how contemporary writers have embarked on an intertextual discourse with one another. Tracing the genealogy of my own stories, I begin with my first published story, “Mpumi’s Assignment”, which was originally published by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa

208  Siphiwo Mahala in 2001. Although there is no direct connection in terms of the plot, the story has the underlying influence of Njabulo Ndebele’s writings, which can be easily deciphered in the township setting, in its simplicity of language, as well as in the reflection of boyhood perspectives prevalent in my own writing. Presenting the same story at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2002, I got feedback that it had resonances of Themba’s “The Suit”. Initially, the impulse was to take personal offence at the insinuation that I had plagiarised. I revisited “The Suit” to make sense of this assertion. After reading the story numerous times, I realised that the postulation was not so much an allegation of plagiarism, but acknowledgement of intertextual allusions. In “Mpumi’s Assignment”, a wife finds an earring in her bedroom, and the husband, realising that he has been caught in his adulterous ways, claims that the earring belongs to him. The wife forces him to wear the earring all the time, including when going to work where he is a school principal. In Can Themba’s “The Suit”, a man finds his wife in bed with another man who then jumps out of the window, leaving his suit behind. The husband (Philemon) decides to use the suit as an instrument to unleash his vengeance on his wife (Matilda), treating it as a visitor and making her dish food for it and carry it around when they walk in the streets. The similarities in the castigation methods used by the two characters in the two texts are palpable, but the story is not the same. After reading “The Suit” with closer scrutiny, I realised that there was an aspect that was not adequately explored in the narrative. “The Suit” is supposed to be a love triangle, yet it revolves around two characters –​the adulterous wife and her husband. The last time we hear of the fellow adulterer is that “a man clad only in vest and underpants was running down the street” (Themba, 1972: 40). I was left wondering what happened to the man who jumped out the window and fled the scene. Looked at differently, what sets the conflict off in “The Suit” is the discovery of an adulterous relationship, yet the crucial aspect of a fellow adulterer in the triangle remained unexplored. I began to ask if the woman was cheating, what became of the man with whom she was cheating? This became the window through which I entered the story, to explore the unfolding events from the adulterer’s point of view. My entry point in the narrative is more creative exploration than critical analysis, as it is preoccupied with imagining the fate of the character to whom adultery seems acceptable, whereas the woman had to bear the brunt of her husband’s fury and retribution. One had to ask questions to reimagine the story: why was the man wearing a suit in a township? How was his journey from the house after jumping out the window? What was the reaction of people seeing a grown man running in the streets in underwear? And, most importantly, where did he run to? It is important to note that the questions were asked to enhance imagination in the process of creative exploration, and by virtue of its attempt at closing narrative gaps in Themba’s original text, the questioning inadvertently results in what could be described as creative criticism. With every answer found, more questions emerged and thus began

Short stories from the womb of the past  209 the journey towards the continuation of “The Suit”, aptly titled, “The Suit Continued”. Themba had provided the template in the form of Sophiatown of the 1950s as the setting, adultery as the source of conflict, as well as Philemon, Matilda and the suit as the central characters. My task was to plug into the canvas that had already been laid out and take the story to new directions while keeping the authenticity of the social fabric and remaining mindful of the historicity of the original piece. Given the perspective from which the story is written, the unnamed adulterer from Themba’s story had to justify what appeared to be his nefarious deed, so I had to create him as an unreliable and discordant narrator. The perilous endeavour to experiment with an existing text that had built its own reputation or notoriety, is bound to pose its own benefits and hazards. The story is most likely to be viewed against an existing text, as opposed to on its own merit. “The Suit Continued” is told from the perspective of Terence, an unreliable first-​person narrator. One of the technical pitfalls of employing the agency of an unreliable narrator to carry the story forward is the misreading of the story or the articulations of the character being perceived to be the views of the author. A case of gross misreading of the text can be found in the following extract from Raphael d’Abdon’s paper, “All Futures are Bred in the Bellies of the Past”, where he argues: In both stories Mahala tends to belittle and malign female characters, while playing down the fact that his innocent-​sounding semantical practices validate and replicate Themba’s supremacist tone. (d’Abdon, 2019: 34, emphasis added) This view is in direct contrast with Julia’s Sertel’s argument in her paper, “Power Relations in The Suit Stories of Can Themba and Siphiwo Mahala”. Interrogating the same matter of the narrative approach where the protagonist is the first-​person narrator, Sertel observes: As he interprets the incidents in accordance with a specific personal goal, he must be regarded as an unreliable narrator. His statement that “this is not a confession, but a testimony” (Mahala 2011: 15) implies that he is convinced of his innocence. In his understanding Terence even experiences a double victimization by Can Themba on a meta level, who portrays him as the victim of his “propaganda piece” (15), as well as by women in general and Matilda in particular, who “take advantage of [us] men”. (Sertel, 2015: 15) The decision to reimagine an existing text is, whether explicitly acknowledged or not, the recognition of the text on which the piece is based as a formidable literary output in its own right. The creative process therefore draws from the existing piece, and as the story unfolds it can take different directions. Apart

210  Siphiwo Mahala from the process of creative imagination to develop a storyline which has to align with the already established plot, the major challenge with this method is that writing a period piece in a different era poses dangers of anachronism. This demands consistency in character portrayal, rational plot development, historical accuracy and a believable setting to maintain authenticity and stay true to the original prototype. One of the fundamental aspects of my intervention was the use of the suit as a significant object in the furtherance of the story and augmenting the imaginative process. In developing the narrative in “The Suit Continued”, I gave the man (Terence) a teaching job, which accounts for his wearing a suit and being in the township during the day. Furthermore, as the suit was central in the original narrative and stood as a symbol of masculinity representing the third person in the marriage, the character of the suit deserved further development. I was conscious of the masculine symbolism of the suit, and, in reimagining the story, I had to further augment the significance of its character in the narrative. I bestowed the suit with new features which, both literally and figuratively, further developed its character. In its pockets the suit has the man’s wallet, house keys and his pass, without which Terence was legislatively reduced to nothing as a black man under apartheid laws. Added to this, the suit also has a sentimental value as it happens to be his wedding suit. All these factors are exacerbated by the character of Terence’s wife, Grace, who despite the dominant patriarchal culture, comes across as a strong and highly perceptive woman. While she performs the tasks traditionally assigned to women by the patriarchal society, she uses these to stamp her authority and castigate masculinity, as demonstrated in this passage: My wife always ironed my suit every day for me to wear. When I woke up the following morning, I only found my vest and boxer shorts nicely ironed and waiting for me. “Where is the suit that I am supposed to wear today, Grace?” “Your suit is at school, Terry. Didn’t you say you left it there? You can just go and you’ll get dressed there.” “But I can’t go to school like this.” “But you came from school like that.” (Mahala, 2019: 146) What we see in the above dialogue is the reflection of the socio-​cultural architecture as we know it, and its subversion by the character. In other words, it is a fact of history that the South African society is highly patriarchal, and this was even more so in the 1950s, the period in which the story is set. Scholars like Dorothy Driver, for instance, have written quite extensively about the predominant patriarchal culture and misogyny among the Drum generation of writers, which is symbiotically linked to the societal culture of the time. In her paper, “The Fabulous Fifties: Short Fiction in English”, published in The

Short stories from the womb of the past  211 Cambridge History of South African Literature edited by David Attwell and Derek Attridge, Driver makes the following observation: Whereas Drum –​its white editors and black journalists, but also the very context it sprang from and represented –​arguably failed women writers, it helped concretise a historical moment through and against which black South African writers and readers would define and redefine themselves. (2012: 405) Whereas Driver’s predisposition in this paper, and largely her scholarship on the Drum generation of writers, concerns the lack of gender representativity and to some extent the suppression of women voices, she takes the broader societal complexities within her purview. The same applies to a writer who explores this period in their creative output, they need to situate their story within the relevant historical context. In chronicling this historic moment, a writer has, on the one hand, to create the most authentic and verisimilitude reflection of the time and, on the other, problematise it by challenging its conventions. Hence in the case of “The Suit Continued”, Grace typifies a woman of the time and then moves to castigate her husband, leading to Terence making efforts to untangle himself from his own web of lies. He borrows clothes from his brother, who is much shorter than he is, and although this rescues him momentarily, in doing so his brother inadvertently subjects him to a different kind of public humiliation. Chronologically, Terence’s tribulations happen at the same time as those of his fellow adulterer –​Matilda, in Themba’s story. This culminates with him dropping his pride, and partially confessing to his wife that the suit had been ‘confiscated’. Although he does not tell the whole truth, which is consistent with his character, this offers Grace an opportunity to go with him to fetch the suit. It is at this point that the story reaches its climax, with Grace and Terence finding Philemon helplessly crying over the lifeless body of Matilda. The story ends with the two men weeping alongside each other, after losing the same lover. Since I first published “The Suit Continued” in 2002, there have been several reactions both critically and creatively, with critics undertaking comparative studies between my version and Themba’s original, while creatives reimagined the plot. In 2006, Zukiswa Wanner wrote “The Dress that Fed The Suit” as a creative response to my take on the subject, thus bringing the perspective of the woman whose voice was muted in both Themba’s original story as well as in “The Suit Continued”. This was a necessary intervention to complete the accounts of the three lead characters involved in the love triangle. “The Dress” is written as a suicide note from Matilda, who is central in both “The Suit” and “The Suit Continued”. This story keeps to the original motif as conceived by Themba but, instead of the suit, uses the dress as the symbol representing the feminine figure as it is presented from a woman’s

212  Siphiwo Mahala point of view where Matilda gives her own account. The following passage illustrates the perspective from a woman’s point of view: Maybe a woman is not supposed to love only one man, but needs two to get all the qualities she needs in her perfect man. Because I loved you. I still do even as I pen these dying words. But in some odd way, I loved and still love Terry, too. (Mahala, 2019: 153) Here Matilda justifies her adulterous relationship with Terence, much as the latter did in “The Suit Continued”. Unlike Terence, Matilda’s account is not seeking sympathies from the reader, but lays bare the truth –​her own side of the story. The reader is quite aware that Matilda is going to die, as in Themba’s original narrative she dies in an apparent suicide. However, towards the end of the story she drops a bombshell, that she is pregnant and is not sure about the paternity of the child. This revelation sets the whole narrative on a tailspin and overrides any justifications for adultery that might have been brought forward thus far. In 2011, I wrote “The Lost Suit”, which was then published in African Delights. “The Lost Suit” follows the theme of the suit, establishes a different plot and introduces the new shrewd and witty character of Stompie, a brother to Terence. The two brothers have similar characteristics except that Stompie is a professional thief, whereas Terence is an irresponsible teacher. Once again, the suit takes centre stage in the story. Unlike Themba’s original piece, in the two stories in which I explore the motif of the suit, what drives the plot is the absence of the suit. In “The Lost Suit”, Stompie picks up a lover from a shebeen and goes to ‘her place’, after which he wakes up naked, with no lover in sight. Knowing that this will solicit fury from his wife, Doris, he embarks on a quest to find the suit, or a replacement thereof. These four stories, “The Suit”, “The Suit Continued”, “The Dress that Fed The Suit” and “The Lost Suit”, are featured for the first time alongside each other in my latest short story collection, Red Apple Dreams. Conspicuous with their absence are Makhosazana Xaba’s two rejoinders, “Behind the Suit” and “The Suit Continued: The Other Side,” published in her 2013 collection, Running and Other Stories. Although the book only got published in 2013, it seems the two stories were written much earlier and, more specifically, even earlier than Zukiswa Wanner’s story. In the acknowledgements section of Running, Xaba writes: At the launch of Words Gone Two Soon: A Tribute to Phaswane Mpe and K Sello Duiker in Grahamstown in 2005, I was fascinated by the pieces of writing in the book. Most intriguing was Siphiwo Mahala’s story “The Suit Continued”. As soon as I finished reading it, my mind began to race. It raced so fast that “The Suit Continued: The Other Side” was written and complete in my head before the festival ended. Naturally, the first

Short stories from the womb of the past  213 thing I did when I arrived back home was to empty my head. About two months later, “Behind the Suit” began brewing in my head and again, I responded. (Xaba, 2013: Acknowledgements) “Behind The Suit” is the first story in Xaba’s collection, and it is written in the form of a letter from a new character called Mondliwesizwe Mbatha to his daughter. In this epistolary account, Mondliwesizwe reveals that he had a homosexual relationship with Philemon, the protagonist from the original version of Can Themba. A logical explanation has to be given about the birth of the daughter to whom he is writing the letter. He explains that the daughter was conceived in a rare moment of extraordinary sexual encounter: We each experienced our firsts: me with a woman and she with a black man. You, my darling angel, were to be the precious product of those firsts. (Xaba, 2013: 4) Similarly, “The Suit Continued: The Other Side”, is the account of Matilda’s plight, where she reveals that she had an affair with Gladys, a teacher who introduced her to corners and slopes of Sophiatown she did not know existed and this expanded her worldview. With this revelation comes another startling perspective about the details of her marriage to Philemon. What I had never told even my closest friends was that Philemon had never taken me from the front. We had discussed this. I really thought myself lucky, a man who was in no rush to prove his manhood by making me pregnant! We agreed it was the only form of contraception that guaranteed no pregnancy. (Xaba, 2013: 143) It is worth noting that while Xaba explores the idea originally conceived by Themba in this intergenerational dialogue, hers is not necessarily a continuation of the plot, nor is it an attempt at writing a pastiche of the original text. Instead, it is a recasting through the selection of elements from the preceding stories germane for her own immediate purposes. In many ways she subverts the established pattern of intertextual dialogue and does not conform to the hegemony of the established patriarchal and heterosexual templates. She ventures into the previously unexplored terrain by bringing forth queer perspectives into this continuum. In the first instance, in Xaba’s narrative the suit is almost non-​existent as a character, nor is it implied by way of its gender opposite –​the dress –​as found in Wanner’s intervention. Furthermore, the setting extends from Sophiatown to Swaziland and England, something not found in the previous pieces which are all confined to Sophiatown. The character of Matilda, whom in Themba’s

214  Siphiwo Mahala original piece is affectionately called Tilly, is deliberately referred to as Matty in Xaba’s “The Suit Continued: The Other Side”. However, in what appears to be a mere intertextual narrative faux pas, Xaba refers to Can Themba’s house as the House of Spirits, as opposed to the House of Truth, which is what the proprietor named his abode at 111 Ray Street, Sophiatown. Can Themba may not have imagined that more than half a century since his passing, this story will be inspiring recasts across generations. If anything can be the barometer to measure the success of “The Suit”, surely reproductivity, adaptability, intertextuality and durability establish it as a canonical text in the history of short story writing in South Africa. Themba’s “The Suit” stands out as one of the most experimented South African short stories of all time. In 1993, “The Suit” was adapted into a graphic story published in Deep Cuts: Graphic Adaptations of Stories by Can Themba, Alex la Guma and Bessie Head, edited by Peter Thuynsma. In the same year, the story was adapted as a stage play by Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon. It has since been performed on various prestigious theatre stages across South Africa and has now been performed in about 30 countries worldwide. In 2011, Kitso Lynn Eliott produced The Tailored Suit, a short film with resonances of Themba’s story, which is unapologetic in acknowledging “The Suit” as its influence. Most recently, Jarryd Coetsee produced the film adaptation of The Suit, featuring Phuthi Nakene and the Kani dynasty –​the talented Atandwa alongside his father, legendary actor and producer, John Kani. In short, whether in its original form, adaptation or extension, “The Suit” has had a remarkable presence in the South African educational, creative and literary spaces for over half a century. Themba has an almost perennial presence in short story criticism, largely because of this singular creative output, which has had a transcendent appeal and continues to inspire intergenerational dialogue. The duplicative power that Themba wields in the South African literary landscape has the potential for establishing a new canon that bridges the gap between the past and the present. Over the years, Themba replicated himself through generations, from Casey Motsisi whom he mentored, to Mzamane; from Wanner to Xaba; one can almost guarantee that these intergenerational allusions are bound to continue for the foreseeable future. Themba, who died more than 50 years ago, epitomises a past that is always present in successive epochs. What we see in Themba’s “The Suit” is the capability of old motifs to infuse themselves within the new. In a sense, the new is not entirely new, but is the refinement of the old. In Red Apple Dreams I introduce my new story, “The Park Revisited”, as an attempt at expanding the notion of intertextuality through the exploration of James Matthews’s short story, “The Park”, first published in the 1950s. “The Park” is a story about a boy who is removed from a public park because children of his race are not allowed to play in it. The story demonstrates how vile apartheid was to the extent of denying children their right to be children. “The Park Revisited” explores the same motif as Matthews’ original story

Short stories from the womb of the past  215 but locates it within the context of the democratic South Africa. The re-​visitation of the park is symbolically a re-​evaluation of South Africa’s socio-​ economic condition, to assess the impact of the changes brought about by the democratic dispensation. This literary exploration reinforces the ongoing intergenerational dialogue between the past and the present. The pathologies of new narratives can be traced back to the old either by theme, narrative style or general inspiration. The intersection between the oral and the written narratives is best demonstrated in the works of contemporary writers like Mohale Mashigo and Gcina Mhlophe, the latter having established herself as the repository of oral storytelling. The adaptation of old narrative devices to modern forms of storytelling aesthetically strengthens the architecture of the written short story. The old is always present in the new.

References Attwell D and Attridge D (2012) The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloom H (1973) The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. d’Ábdon R (2019) All futures bred in the bellies of the past: Siphiwo Mahala’s, Zukiswa Wanner’s and Makhosazana Xaba’s intertextual dialogues with Can Themba’s short story “The Suit”. English in Africa 46(2): 25–​47. Driver D (2012) The fabulous fifties: Short fiction in English. In: Attwell D and Attridge D (eds) The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 381–​409. Hodge N (ed.) (1984) To Kill a Man’s Pride and Other Stories from Southern Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Mahala S (2011) African Delights. Auckland Park: Jacana Media. Mahala S (2019) Red Apple Dreams and Other Stories. Pretoria: Iconic Productions. Mashigo M (2018) Intruders. Johannesburg: Picador Africa. Mzamane M (1976) The short story tradition in Black South Africa. Unpublished paper presented at the University of Botswana (Gaborone Campus), Botswana. Mzamane M (1981) The Dube Train revisited. In: Mzala: My Cousin Comes to Jo’burg. Cape Town: Ravan Press. Mzamane M (1986) Hungry Flames and Other Black South African Short Stories. London: Longman African Classics. Mzamane M (2005) Words Gone Two Soon: A Tribute to Phaswane Mpe and K. Sello Duiker. Pretoria: Umgangatho Media. Ogede O (2011) Intertextuality in Contemporary African Literature: Looking Forward. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Oliphant AW (ed.) (1999) At the Rendezvous of Victory and Other Stories. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Oyeonziri-​Miller G (2012) Review of Ogede O (2011) Intertextuality in Contemporary African Literature: Looking Forward. Research in African Literature 43(3): 140–​141. Sertel J (2015) Power relations in “The Suit” stories of Can Themba and Siphiwo Mahala. www.academia.edu/​11257092/​Power_​Relations_​in_​The_​Suit_​Stories_​of_​ Can_​Themba_​and_​Siphiwo_​Mahala (accessed 22 September 2021).

216  Siphiwo Mahala Themba C (1972) The Will to Die. Cape Town: David Phillip. Themba C (2006) Requiem for Sophiatown. Johannesburg: Penguin Books. Thuynsma P (ed.) (1993) Deep Cuts: Graphic Adaptations of Stories by Can Themba, Alex La Guma and Bessie Head. South Africa: Maskew Miller Longman Pty. Ltd/​ Storyteller Group. Xaba M (2013) Running and Other Stories. Cape Town: Modjaji Books.

12  “Concrete fragments” An interview with Henrietta Rose-​Innes Graham K. Riach

Henrietta Rose-​ Innes was born in Cape Town in 1971. Her first book, Shark’s Egg (2000), was shortlisted for the 2001 M-​Net Book Prize, and was followed by The Rock Alphabet (2004). Her short story “Poison” (2007) won the 2007 South African PEN Literary Award and the 2008 Caine Prize for African Writing. This story, as well as several others, appears in her short story collection, Homing (2010). A more recent story, “Sanctuary” (2012), was awarded second place in the 2012 BBC International Short Story Competition. Her stories have been published in, among other publications, The Granta Book of the African Short Story, AGNI and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Her novel Nineveh (2011) was shortlisted for both the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the M-​Net Literary Award before winning –​in French translation –​the François Sommer Literary Prize in 2015. Her most recent novel, Green Lion (2015), was shortlisted for the 2016 Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, and has also recently been translated into French. She has held residencies all over the world, including in America, Italy, Scotland, South Africa and Switzerland. She currently lives in Cape Town, South Africa, while completing work on a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. This interview focuses on Rose-​ Innes’s use of the short story form, and particularly its ability to refract societal concerns. Graham Huggan (1994: 71), discussing Nadine Gordimer’s short stories, has argued that their “concentrated form” makes the “enormity of [societal] discrepancy” felt more keenly, and so provides a form that “may well cut deeper than the ostensibly political novel into the fabric of society”. In Rose-​Innes’s stories, this intensity of focus and compression of form are particularly visible in her use of setting and spatial organisation. Land, landscape and the built environment have been abiding concerns of South African literature, from the earliest travel writing, through the apartheid years, to the post-​apartheid present (Barnard, 2007; Coetzee, 1988; Glenn, 2012). Rose-​ Innes’s writing responds to the spatial organisation and material conditions of life in contemporary South Africa, but it does so in highly mediated ways, transforming and transcoding the world into the unique terms of her fictions. The following interview began DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-12

218  Graham K. Riach in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town in January 2013, and continued over email until August 2016. I’d like to ask you some questions about the short story to start off. As a big fan of this form, I was happy to see your collection, Homing, come out in 2010. I hoped you might like to say something about how you see your short stories in relation to the other forms you write in –​the novella in Shark’s Egg, or a novel, such as Green Lion, your most recent. HR-​I:  I like the agility of the short story. It allows a quick response to events, and to one’s own emotional climate. When I’m engrossed in a novel, it pretty much empties out my writing life: there’s just this one big slow thing going on. In between novels, there’s more of a day-​to-​day engagement with the world, because I’ll be offering up stories, seeing them published, reflecting on the responses and so on. Writing long pieces feels as though I’m taking myself out of the flow, disappearing for as long as two or three years, whereas a medium-​slow drip of stories is a helpful way to stay visible.      Any publication is heartening. Especially for writers starting out in this tough publishing climate, platforms for short stories are a lifeline. Story competitions, those for African writers in particular, were very important to me in getting a foothold. Single stories were a way to find international readers, long before I was able to place my novels “overseas”. Some of my stories have worked very hard for me, appearing in several different contexts and collections –​another thing that makes the story a handy form. GR:  Do you think that the kind of experience you might describe is different as well, or is it more a question of quick response? HR-​I:  The short form feels like a natural fit for my way of perceiving things and my skills as a writer. I think I apprehend the world in concrete fragments, singular images and intuitive flashes, rather than in terms of an overarching narrative or abstract scheme. For me, short stories have always felt not easier than longer forms, but perhaps more in my gift.      These brief, eclectic contributions also feel like a natural and appropriate way to consider South Africa now, or perhaps any fractured, various, rapidly changing milieu –​particularly for someone who is wary of sweeping statements. It’s hard for anyone to have a good overview of what’s happening with our country, to the extent that it can feel artificial and hubristic to try. Rather than a magisterial narrative, it may be that a mosaic of stories, its overall form undefined and with the capacity for new elements to be added quickly to the mix, might be the best and most honest commentary on our condition. GR:  I’ve noticed that in a lot of your stories, and even in some passages of prose in your novels, the writing almost tends towards prose poetry, a very condensed language with very dense imagery. GR: 

“Concrete fragments”  219 HR-​I: Like

many writers, my first love was poetry, and I aimed for that kind of richness and density in prose. But that intensity can feel constrictive, claustrophobic even, in a way that I associate with aspects of my childhood. It’s been said about my writing that it can feel “airless”. With the stories, and especially with the novels, I have tried to wean myself from that. I became interested in spinning something out longer, for a more complex or multi-​layered payout. It is liberating to step back from that breathlessness, to learn a more loping pace, to take a longer view. But also difficult to learn. GR:  For me, that intensity is what I love about your writing! I remember reading Shark’s Egg and the combination of an aquatic imaginary with a sensation of being bodily dunked into the text for the duration of the book gave a similar reality warp to what you sometimes get when reading short stories. You feel like you have been pulled right out of your world and into this other one for the duration and then you’re thrown gasping back onto the shore afterwards; I thought that was extraordinary. HR-​I:  [Laughs] I’m sorry. Well, I like that. I suppose that was originally my conception of what a writer should try for: those moments of transport and transformation. And maybe it still is. Recently, I’ve been feeling that the next challenge for me is to reverse direction, in a way … I’m turning back towards compression and stylisation. Deep down, the transformative, hallucinatory quality of language is what I still value most. I hope, though, I have gained more ability to use it without suffocating myself or my readers. Or at least to suffocate in a thrilling way. I can see myself whittling things down again, lengthwise, too –​I’d like to write poems again before I die. GR:  I noticed that Homing sits somewhere halfway between a collection and a cycle of stories. I mean, it’s geographically quite restricted, and there is a lot of recurring imagery, although you don’t go so far as to have characters that reappear. It struck me while reading it that it gives the impression of a camera, shifting perspective around one object. Perhaps that object might be Cape Town? HR-​I:  The stories were written over the course of about a decade, and never with the intention of them sitting alongside each other. It was a revelation to me, when compiling the collection, to see the structural and thematic similarities that emerged, to an almost embarrassing degree. It seems I have been rather obsessively slogging along the same paths, back and forth and round and round: concerns, landscapes, imagery. I have made my peace with this! It is possible and legitimate to build a body of work that traces a series of routes round a complicated thing, like a city or a mountain. (Ivan Vladislavić’s work on Johannesburg helped me to see this, and encouraged me.) And it does give the collection more unity than I had reason to hope for. I find it a bit exhausting, though, the idea of setting out to write a linked cycle of stories. Each story idea comes to me as a singular phenomenon, and they don’t come easy or often. I will

220  Graham K. Riach work on each story very thoroughly and for a long time. It’s such a relief to get one out, that to consider coming back at the same material from a different direction, over and over, is quite daunting –​even though that’s what I seem to have effectively ended up doing, over the years. I also have a fondness for single-​author collections that are eclectic and all over the place, like a lucky packet –​maybe one day I’ll manage one of those. GR:  One recurring device I noticed coming back across the collection was that of dramatic changes of visual perspective. One minute you are on the ground and then suddenly you see the same scene from some elevated point. You often use these reversals and telescoping of perspectives in your stories, things that are big suddenly appearing small and the inverse. This also appears in the form of miniature models –​I’m thinking of “Burning Buildings”, in which an artist makes a scale model of a house, or The Rock Alphabet, in which there is a scale model of a mountain. It seems to be an image that pulls you back. HR-​I:  I do often express human motivation in terms of the external environment, rather than through internality. I find it exciting to think about the ways the physical world compels and interacts with us, and I like the dynamism that those reversals of perspective introduce –​useful in writing where plot is not the strong driver. I fear, though, that my reliance on these devices can become a bit of a habit, or even a gimmick. For example, I have a great number of journeys out and back, and often these are negotiated via architecture or geography –​a character might venture to the top of a skyscraper and down again, or, as in Green Lion, a mountain.      Miniatures, architectural models and scale models are a related fascination … I think this is partly about a desire for control, which I associate with childhood and being little myself. Anxiety about the world out there, and a desire to make it small and close and graspable. GR:  Is this also perhaps part of what pulls you to the short story form? HR-​I:  I think that’s true. I have an intuitive sense of the whole shape of a short story, indeed an aerial view; something I can take in at a glance. And it’s something I can tinker with more confidently than with the sprawling material of the life-​size novel, with its troublingly large cast of characters and its disappearing horizons. GR:  Often, though, one would associate these aerial perspectives with a position of power –​the view down from above. But yours imply more of a sense of danger, of precariousness. In “Falling”, there’s a man spread-​eagled across a glass dome. Or the adolescent in “The Boulder”, standing at the top of a mountain with a huge rock that, like Chekhov’s gun, seems certain to go off, or rather roll down, by the end of the story. On the one hand, an elevated position makes the world safer, brings it into your sphere, but at the same time … HR-​I: It never works [both laugh]. All of the situations you have just mentioned are fundamentally the same: someone who has aspired to

“Concrete fragments”  221 ease or power, but when they attain it, it is uneasy, or as you say, precarious. I think I’m interested in undermining not exactly power, but false assumptions of power, of where power lies. I don’t think my characters are ever completely comfortable or easy in anything, especially not attainment. GR:  To stick with “The Boulder” for a minute, what stood out for me was something to do with masculinity. I’ve noticed that men are becoming more present in your fiction, and that their characters are more fully developed than they perhaps were before. Is this something you have been thinking about –​ about men in South Africa at the moment? It seems that masculinity is going through some kind of change there; it’s being interrogated more than it was in the past. HR-​I:  I have indeed been writing more men. Part of it is due to increased confidence on my part. In Shark’s Egg, the protagonist is very close to myself in age, gender, race and every other marker: at that point I was intimidated to write beyond those bounds. As I’ve become more experienced, my central characters have become more distanced –​which is considerably more challenging and more interesting, for me anyway. Of course there is debate as to how much one can or should attempt to inhabit other bodies, but it is exciting for me to find those limits. It can invigorate writing to “swap” roles occasionally, and that bit of distance can add clarity and freshness too.     Green Lion has a male protagonist, and in part deals with masculinity, sexuality and male friendships. But no, I haven’t set out to address a crisis in South African masculinity. I think my concerns are more directly personal: these characters’ unease with their roles, their imperfect inhabitation of their male skins, reflects my own unease with conventional gender identity as much as anything. This is related once again to childhood in complex ways. I was a boyish child whose ambitions for adulthood were all attached to male figures. Creating male characters is a way of fulfilling this impossible desire and also critiquing it.      I do try to write characters that are unorthodox, to different degrees, that disturb gender assumptions and gendered social roles. And perhaps writing as a woman from a man’s point of view –​and no doubt getting it wrong here and there –​adds a necessary element of strangeness and estrangement, which can both upend expectations and add power to the writing. GR:  Are you conscious of yourself as a woman writer, or a women’s writer, or perhaps a woman who writes? HR-​I:  Sometimes I’m more one than the other, but I’m not sure they’re divisible. I am all of these things. Unless I specifically set myself against those identities, or perversely try to mask them –​how could I not be? I don’t reject those labels and I think they can at times have strategic advantages. “Women’s writing” creates a gap for an author like me to exist, and there are precious few gaps for writers these days. Sometimes it’s helpful, and

222  Graham K. Riach emboldening, to embrace that, and it’s good to feel solidarity with other women writers. In other contexts it’s of less relevance and can be counterproductive, in which case you can, ideally, choose to define yourself differently. I don’t think these labels are useful for describing the writing itself: whatever kind of book I produce, that’s what a woman’s book looks like. GR:  A lot of these stories have appeared individually before, and I noticed that from their previous incarnations to how they appear in Homing, some have been changed slightly, and some quite a lot. I’m thinking particularly of a story like “Tremble”, which first appeared in an anthology of erotic writing (Shimke, 2008), but in Homing, it’s become something else. It’s more nostalgic, there’s more of a play of memory. HR-​I:  The stories feel like a continual work in progress. (I’m also an unrepentant rewriter and tweaker. Nothing is ever perfect, and if you give me a chance I will attempt over and over to make it so.)      Part of it is the time-​warping oddness of putting old stories alongside new ones in a collection. It’s hard not to condescend to one’s silly younger writer-​self, and to resist pulling that sensibility into line with the older and wiser one. You want to create a coherent identity for this author who is in fact multiple authors over time. I find I often start out trying to make the time frame shallower, more urgent. I want my characters to be free of their pasts, to move through the present unburdened by backstory. But when I return I always find myself layering in the past, unwillingly adding the telling childhood anecdotes that make sense of the story and give it weight, in every way. These very often are drawn from my childhood, which is still the most potent generator of creative ideas for me. You try to shake free of your own history by writing, by inventing characters with their own lives, but that’s just wishful thinking. GR:  Some people have described writing since apartheid ended as being less political, others say that it is more personal, but is inherently political as a result. Do you feel these concerns are relevant to your writing? HR-​I:  When it was published in 2000, Shark’s Egg got a bit more attention than it was due, I think, because it was perceived as something new: a small intimate story that did not overtly address the politics of the day, or of the past. There were very few writers doing that at the time (and in fact, hardly anyone of my immediate peer group being published in South Africa at that point). It was seen as “apolitical”. It’s always made me uncomfortable that it was received like that. I was not setting out to proclaim myself an apolitical writer, and of course the book was political: it was saturated in the politics of the era and setting, in the identity of its protagonist, and in its own conscious and unconscious biases.      I think South African writers have a responsibility to acknowledge where we come from and what is happening around us, to not wilfully shirk or deny our history or our present circumstances; but within that there are a great many kinds of story that are important to tell. Light and

“Concrete fragments”  223 heavy, big and small, they are all necessarily political. You write the ones you are best able to write. GR:  What gave me a feeling of political engagement in Shark’s Egg was, firstly, the social milieu of the setting, and also the kind of Gothic doubling that partly structures the book (see G. Gaylard, 2008; Joseph-​Vilain, 2012). I found that this doubling gives some sense of the societal unease in South Africa, of lives running parallel and rarely meeting. HR-​I: There is that tension and alienation, to some extent, in everything I write. (And in quite a lot of South African literature, as has been noted.) It’s partly temperamental, but it’s also very much a reflection of how we grew up in white South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. I recall a generalised sense of anxiety resulting from state propaganda, from the violence and abnormality of the society, and from the distrust and fear South Africans felt for each other. These divisions and inequalities continue to disfigure the country. The sometimes eerie doubling you speak of is, I think, an acknowledgement of this separation, but also in the twinning is an acknowledgement of wounded kinship and frustrated desire to connect. GR:  Along with the doubling of characters, the other Gothic element I noticed was ruined houses. They come up in The Rock Alphabet, and in Homing. I hesitate, though, to use the term “Gothic”, because I think it can be dangerous to apply these very general categories, particularly when it is a European category being used to describe South Africa. It can erase a lot of the subtleties of very different situations. There is something unhomely, though, about these buildings and spaces that become repurposed into dwellings. It creates a feeling of haunting in a spectral sense, but also in terms of the places you frequent, “your regular haunts” –​the word “haunt” has roots in the German word Heim, or home. I felt this dual pull in your writing, between home as a familiar place and as an uncomfortable, uncanny one. I suppose the title Homing suggests that “home” can be thought of as a process as much as a place … as well as having ballistic connotations. HR-​I:  It’s always fun spotting, after the event, the ridiculously clear tropes that I was clueless about at the time of writing! But I share your hesitation: the resonances of a stone-​age rock shelter in the Cedarberg are different to those of a ruined tower. The spaces I’ve written about are (I hope) strikingly strange because of their curious juxtapositions, but I’m not sure if I find them classically Gothic, or unhomely, exactly. I’ve been talking about “abandoned” spaces but most of them are being used –​ repurposed, as you say. Much of their emotional power for me comes from the signs of hopeful re-​inhabitation of spaces that might otherwise be considered desolate and inhospitable. (The pigeons and their feeder resolutely occupying the alleyway in “Homing”, the domestic touches in the seaside cave in “Bad Places”, and so on.) They are uncanny, haunted spaces that turn out to be familiar –​if not at first to our protagonist, then to someone or something, flesh and blood.

224  Graham K. Riach     As you suggest, this sometimes unsuccessful striving to make a home, to be at home, is consciously reflected in the several meanings of the title, but for me there was no undercurrent of threat there. (I often take a sunnier view of my own writing than my readers do.) GR:  To come back to the idea of alienation, particularly in relation to place, whether it’s nature, wilderness or Cape Town. I was wondering if you could say a bit about how you think people and their surroundings might affect one another, particularly in terms of writers and landscape? I understand J.M. Coetzee supervised your creative writing master’s, and his book, White Writing, explores this fraught relationship. He has described Sidney Clouts as having an “unsettled habitation in the landscape” (Coetzee, 1988: 173), a turn of phrase that I was reminded of when reading your work. HR-​I:  There is the sentimental and historically dangerous attachment to the idea of an empty land, so astutely identified in white South African culture by Coetzee. These echoes are inescapably there in my writing. They are present in an attraction to abandoned places, places emptied of other humans and the challenges and stresses that encounters with them entail. This of course is troubling in the context of our bloody history of land appropriation and ongoing land struggles.      However, I don’t think these spatial preoccupations are always malign (or crude ruin porn). Abandoned places can represent the compelling mystique of other people’s lives. They offer the opportunity to imagine oneself into another’s space, and they do, in a way, facilitate meetings with inaccessible strangers –​via their leavings, their poignant remains, the cryptic signs of their presence and occupation. These interactions are potentially fraught and strange, but also vital. GR:  But your landscapes are by no means romanticised and empty ones. I mean, Nineveh is positively teeming with life. HR-​I:  Nineveh is a hopeful book, although not everyone has read it that way. It’s about acknowledging and even celebrating all varieties of habitation of our shared urban space, human and non-​human, even if it comes in forms that are unpredictable, uncontrolled and unwelcome. Certainly, in the insect-​overrun, swampwater-​flooded housing estate that is Nineveh, the “empty land” has never been empty at all –​it’s just being used in ways that no one planned, and that are initially invisible to the city’s conventional powers.     Green Lion, on the other hand, is a bleaker book. With its theme of animal extinctions, it shows the enforced emptying out of a landscape by the forces of environmental destruction; this is a sterile, unromantic emptiness, that leaves the characters more isolated than before. The humans are alienated, from each other and from the non-​human world; they long for a “teeming” landscape to cure them of their loneliness in it. GR:  I understand you are writing a longer work at the moment. Would you like to say anything about that?

“Concrete fragments”  225 HR-​I:  I’m

currently completing a third novel in the loose trilogy begun with Nineveh and Green Lion. I’m calling it Stone Plant. It takes place, you’ll be startled to hear, on a piece of contested urban wasteland on the outskirts of a Cape Town southern-​like city. There is a historical dimension to this one, and it expands my exploration of human/​non-​human relationships into the slower rhythms and life-​cycles of the vegetable realm. I think living in the UK for a bit has somewhat loosened my writerly attachment to the actual, contemporary Cape Town. With Nineveh and Green Lion and now even more so with this new book, I think I am moving further from the real and deeper into dreamlike territory, while still engaging with the local concerns we’ve been talking about.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-​for-​profit sectors.

References Barnard R (2007) Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coetzee JM (1988) White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gaylard G (2008) The postcolonial gothic: Time and death in Southern African literature. Journal of Literary Studies 24: 1–​18. Glenn I (2012) Eighteenth-​century natural history, travel writing and South African literary historiography. In: Attwell D and Attridge D (eds) The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 158–​180. Huggan G (1994) Echoes from elsewhere: Gordimer’s short fiction as social critique. Research in African Literature 25: 61–​73. Joseph-​Vilain M (2012) “Something hungry and wild is still calling”: Post-​apartheid Gothic. Commonwealth Essays and Studies 34: 61–​70. Rose-​Innes H (2000) Shark’s Egg. Cape Town: Kwela. Rose-​Innes H (2004) The Rock Alphabet. Cape Town: Kwela. Rose-​Innes H (2007) Poison. In: Malan R (ed.) African Pens: New Writing from Southern Africa 2007. Cape Town: Spearhead, 1–​10. Rose-​Innes H (2010) Homing. Cape Town: Umuzi. Rose-​Innes H (2011) Nineveh. Cape Town: Umuzi. Rose-​Innes H (2012) Sanctuary. In: Anderson C (ed.) The BBC International Short Story Award 2012. Manchester: Comma, 121–​135. Rose-​Innes H (2015) Green Lion. Cape Town: Umuzi. Shimke K (2008) Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers. Cape Town: Oshun.

13  LongStorySHORT Decolonising the reading landscape –​ A conversation with Kgauhelo Dube Corinne Sandwith, Khulukazi Soldati-​Kahimbaara and Rebecca Fasselt In the conversation that follows, Kgauhelo Dube, the director of a Tshwane/ Pretoria-​ based arts consultancy, Kajeno Media, gives an account of a reading and literature project called “LongStorySHORT”. Variously branded as “LongStorySHORT –​African Literature Goes Digital” and “LongStorySHORT –​Africa Reads”, the project employed digital technology in order to “showcase African literature through a combination of live readings and recordings” which were subsequently packaged into podcasts that the public could access as free downloads (Facebook, n.d.). The project aimed to “introduce readers to the vast community of African writers and publishers” and to act as “an important distribution channel for African writing” (Facebook, n.d.). In this regard, it sought to encourage a South African reading culture and to promote African literature and literacy in a context in which the structural inequalities, shaped by the long history of colonialism, segregation and apartheid, still persist. This legacy is evident in the fact that the majority of public schools in South Africa do not have libraries (Davis, 2013), and, as Dube points out, that most people in township and rural areas do not have access to physical bookstores (Facebook, n.d.). Also at issue is what Dube describes as “the literary value chain and how it consciously ignores African writers and readers”. LongStorySHORT used digital technology to make books more widely available and to circumvent a publishing context which is skewed towards writers in the US and the UK by getting “African stories distributed through mobile platforms” (Facebook, n.d.). LongStorySHORT was launched on 27 March 2015 at the Olievenhoutbosch Library in Centurion near Tshwane/Pretoria and went on to host several events in community libraries in and around the city, including Soshanguve, Hammanskraal, Sunnyside and Nelmapius. LongStorySHORT events typically took the form of a reading of a short story or extract by an African writer followed by discussion. In a departure from the literary festival norm, readings were performed by well-​known local TV and theatre celebrities. These readings were also filmed and subsequently posted online in the form of accessible podcasts and YouTube videos that could be accessed on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. At the inaugural event in Centurion, the short story, “Tender” by Cynthia Jele (author of the novel DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-13

LongStorySHORT  227 Happiness is a Four-​Letter Word, 2010) was read by South African actress Hlubi Mboya. Since then, other writers featured in the project have included Zukiswa Wanner, Chibundu Onuzo, Nape a’ Motana, Uche Peter Umezurike, Thando Mgqolozana, Doreen Baingana, Niq Mhlongo, A. Igoni Barrett and Zakes Mda. Some of the storytellers who have participated include Abena Ayivor, Sisanda Henna, Quanita Adams, Lindiwe Matshikisa and Ghanaian hip-​hop group “Fokn Bois”. The stories were selected and curated by Yewande Omotoso, award-​winning author of Bom Boy (2011), The Woman Next Door (2016) and An Unusual Grief (2021). As Omotoso remarks, the project sought to do justice to the wide range of contexts, genres and themes in African literature. Rather than being prescriptive about what young people should read, it emphasised the entertainment value of literature and sought to encourage young people to read as “widely as possible about a range of matters that concern us as human beings” (Books Live, 2015: n.p.). As a project which moved from material book to digital product –​from spoken word and written page to illuminated screen (Jabr, 2013a, 2013b; Piper, 2012) –​LongStorySHORT can be seen as yet another example of the burgeoning practices of innovative digital engagement with the written text. In the case of LongStorySHORT, the printed book was also accompanied by a performance of reading, thus instantiating important connections with ongoing practices of orality. Both the oral performance and the printed page were subsequently transposed into a malleable and mobile digital product which was also highly visible, widely accessible and infinitely reproducible. In its unusual combination of oral performance, printed page and digital video, LongStorySHORT offers a striking example of the journeys and afterlives of the written text as it is shaped and reshaped in relation to altering contexts of production and reception. Like other digital publishing ventures, such as Jaladaa (jaladaafrica.org) and Chimurenga (chimurenga.co.za), LongStorySHORT took the arguably marginal literary forms of African literature and the “short story” and inserted them into the fluid, rhizomatic spaces of the cybersphere. In its new incarnation as mutable digital product, the work of literature is put into play as part of a range of new digital reading and interpretive contexts and connections in which many different kinds of texts, images and interventions vie for attention. As several scholars have suggested, the particular settings and spaces of book display, diffusion and consumption have an influence on the reading experience itself (Colclough, 2011; Darnton, 2011/​1986; Hammond, 2006; Hobbs, 2011). In this regard, digital reading projects such as LongStorySHORT offer fresh possibilities for thinking through some of the implications of digitised reading environments. By harnessing the dialogic potential of other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter –​through associated hashtags like #FortheLoveofAfrikanLiterature and #OneStoryAtATime –​the project also opened up an important public debate on a range of questions including decoloniality, racism and the legacy of apartheid. In this way, the reading of stories facilitated a wider political discussion. What is also significant is the

228  Corinne Sandwith et al. amenability of the short story and flash fiction to various online and electronic formats, and the ease with which they can be transposed into new forms and novel contexts. This condition of transferability has important implications for genre classification: that is, even if the story is extracted from a longer work, the piece is nevertheless read and received as a “short story” in its own right. In its multiple performative and digital afterlives, the extract becomes a work of short fiction by default. As is suggested by the various descriptions of the project, LongStorySHORT explicitly drew on the discourse of decoloniality, famously inaugurated in Ngŭgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind (1981) and taken up more recently by various Latin American and African scholars (Mbembe, 2016; Mignolo, 2009, 2011; Ndlovu-​Gatsheni, 2013). In the Facebook incarnation of this project, this impetus is evident in citations of popular decolonial quotations and polemical statements as well as the inclusion of interviews with African writers, such as the late South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile who, from its inception, was also the project’s main patron and promoter. The discourse of decoloniality as it tooks shape in this context reflects on black (in)visibility and the continuing epistemological dominance of Eurocentric paradigms and interpretive frames. As Kgositsile remarked in a LongStorySHORT interview, one of the consequences of colonialism was that African content was replaced with content from Europe and North America, thus making it particularly important that Africans draw on a collective memory and indigenous stories (LongStorySHORT, n.d.). In another intervention, South African writer Niq Mhlongo speaks of the importance of “dismantl[ing] the institutions and systems of the oppressor”, of creating the space “to imagine something new, something not informed by a colonial framework” (LongStorySHORT, n.d.: n.p.). As our interview with the project’s founder will also go on to suggest, what is at issue is the sense of dislocation and alienation experienced by African scholars and students in institutional contexts that are still dominated by colonial or apartheid logics. As a community reading initiative, LongStorySHORT is usefully historicised as a contemporary post-​ apartheid manifestation of a long-​ standing interest in literacy and library projects for black readers in South Africa. The questions of black reading –​Do black people read? Should black people read? If not, why not? And what can be done to encourage it? –​have been an issue in South African public debate since the early twentieth century. These interventions, which drew in a range of political constituencies, tended to reflect a basic tension between the Enlightenment project of creating a critical citizenry via literacy and the more utilitarian or assimilationist colonial project of inducting black citizens into an amenable workforce.1 More radical reading projects in early twentieth-​century South Africa (associated with groups such as the Communist Party and the Non-​European Unity Movement) took shape as private libraries, discussion groups, debating societies, amateur theatrical groups, salons and adult education classes (Dick,

LongStorySHORT  229 2012; Sandwith, 2014). The instigators of the liberal reading project, by contrast, tended to focus on the establishment of the segregated “Non-​ European library” (Cobley, 1997; Rochester, 1999), taking the act of reading as a consoling sign of the possibility of black advancement and a compelling index of approximation to Western cultural norms. Projects developed in this name, drawing on the Romantic ideal of quiet contemplation and inward reflection, sought to address a gap opened by state neglect and thus tended to be framed in moral terms. However, as in the British and North American contexts, the democratisation of reading provoked anxiety and fear. This was as much a response to the threat of “the great unread” as to the danger of vast numbers of readers untrained in the rigours of “proper” moral and aesthetic discrimination. The ambiguities in this discourse are pervasive, reflecting the contradictory allure of reading for indoctrination, compensation, assimilation and education as well as an awareness of the dangers posed by the spread of radical ideas (Sandwith, 2016). As a black reading initiative in contemporary post-​apartheid South Africa, how does LongStorySHORT differ from its historical antecedents? An important point of correspondence is that reading projects in South Africa, whether developed in the 1930s or the post-​2000s, respond to a similar set of structural and economic inequalities in which access to education, work opportunities and infrastructure continues to be closely linked to race. The need for projects like LongStorySHORT thus speaks to an important contemporary political failure that replicates that of the apartheid and segregationist regimes. Other continuities between past and present are evident in the dominance of reading as a communal, convivial and shared activity, based on the oral performance of extracts in public spaces such as libraries and schools, underpinned by various kinds of social networks and relations, and generating public debate. Also evident is the ongoing practice of mediated reading, namely the importance of reading and mentoring relationships in which the uninitiated are guided into what is frequently experienced as an intimidating or elitist activity. In this sense, reading in the present, as in the past, takes shape not as a solitary practice but one which is animated by various social relations (Sandwith, 2018). What the evidence of reading initiatives in South Africa, both past and present, indicates is not a “downgrading of the network of personal loyalties” favoured by oral cultures, as Jonathan Rose (2001: 25) suggests, but rather their continuation and even elevation. In the contemporary post-​ apartheid period, the older tropes of the liberal-​ paternalist ethos such as reading for moral education, “advancement”, anthropological knowledge or racial harmony (Sandwith, 2016), have been supplanted by a more radical political stance that places emphasis on redressing inequality and empowering the poor. Framed within the contexts of economic constraint, dislocation, decoloniality and alienation, the idea of reading as formulated in LongStorySHORT was linked to the goals of education, emancipation and even healing. In these non-​prescriptive, more open, reading contexts, reading accrued significance as a means of pleasure and

230  Corinne Sandwith et al. escape. In the access it granted to a wider world of debates and ideas, it was also understood as both a counter to parochialism and as a platform for new pan-​Africanist solidarities. Finally, the emphasis in LongStorySHORT on undoing the dominance of Western epistemological frameworks indicates a further departure from the liberal model; in this sense, the project seeks sought actively to engage with the invisibility of African literature in the broader corporate publishing context. Before addressing the LongStorySHORT project itself, can you tell us a little about your background, your early career and the reasons why you became interested in issues of literacy, reading, culture and the arts? KD:  My name is Kgauhelo Dube. I was born in Pretoria and I am 34 years old. I was raised by my mother so my upbringing is really related to my mother’s life. My mother’s father is from Winterveldt, northwest of Pretoria. My great grandparents are called the pioneers of Winterveldt because of the work they did in starting schools and churches in the area. I did not know much about my mom until I was old enough to actually understand who she was and then I understood that she was a journalist. When I was growing up, she was writing for The Sowetan. Later, she became a journalist for the SABC [South Africa Broadcasting Corporation] Radio News in Pretoria before moving to the SABC in Johannesburg. So I spent a lot of my time in Pretoria –​I went to school there –​even though I was living with my grandmother in Mabopane and Garankuwa, which were then part of Bophuthatswana.2     My years at school were very influential. I attended Pretoria High School for Girls: as you know, black schoolgirls there have been protesting against the rules about black hair.3 The rules say that natural black hair must be relaxed. For me, it’s all about control: black hair is just too big. It gets in the way. It’s like it’s too much. Actually, I am grateful to that school for politicising me because after I left high school I never relaxed my hair. Yet, my former classmates were saying that this black and white thing is tired. And I got so upset and hurt. These are black girls who have their own struggles with white supremacy on a daily basis. The fact that some of my former classmates are defending this white supremacist system is unthinkable. Some of them defended it by saying, “I had the opportunity of having white friends”.     I go back to my upbringing. I am being raised by a black woman who does not have a husband. She is raising three children. She is probably the only black journalist in the Newsroom and in the 1980s she already has white friends. For me it was not important to make white friends in school. So it is also not fair for me to judge those people because my life was different. I was not privileged but my life was different. For me, it was not a privilege to be with white people. And now to fast forward to today when some of my classmates are excusing white privilege because it meant that they had access to white people? It is painful for me, you know. INTS: 

LongStorySHORT  231     When my mom heard about the protests, she called me and said: “My child, why didn’t you tell me what you went through at school?” And I said, “Mom, it was a rough time; we were always treated like it was a privilege to go to that school so we shut up. Even if stuff happened.” These kids are only talking about hair. Can you imagine what else is happening there?     But if you think about it, it is the same with what is going on in literature, when we are talking about decolonising literature. It’s actually about decolonising everything. So I feel that what happened at Pretoria High School has sparked something; I am trying to remember why I am the person that I am. I studied advertising; I worked in advertising as a brand strategist and I let it all go. I had a crisis of conscience: I had clients who wanted me to sell black people jeans, airtime and cars. And I thought, is this it? Especially selling that stuff to black people who can’t even afford it. Now knowing that my cousins live in an RDP house,4 you understand, I felt it was dodgy. I understand that I am not implicated in the system; I understand that I cannot change it, but I don’t think I want to be a part of it. What I thought then was that I am a good marketer; I am good at selling things. So maybe I should apply myself to selling culture and art, things that will actually take these people out of this poverty. INTS:  The question of decolonising the literary landscape has been the subject of ongoing debate in South Africa. Was this something you originally imagined when you started the project? KD: LongStorySHORT for me comes from a very deep place, from my experience at school and from my relationship with reading and books. Here I am, a young black girl in a primary school before Girls High. I’m at Brooklyn Primary. I’m in a primary school in Brooklyn, which is a very affluent neighbourhood in Pretoria and I still live with my grandmother with about four or five of my cousins, and not with my mom. And the rest of my cousins, most of whom were my peers, go to township schools. I am the only child in that house who goes to a white school, you know. And I come back home every day; the commute is an hour and a half.     I leave home early; I come back late and there is a lot of resentment towards me because I go to school with white people. That’s why also I am very happy with what happened [at Pretoria High School for Girls] because our communities will understand that kids who go to these schools do not have it easy. Because a lot of these kids who live in the townships are reduced to being cheese boys and cheese girls.5 We don’t know what these kids go through in these schools, just for a quality education.     So already from a young age I’m in this situation and I come back from school and my cousin, who is six years older than me, is studying the same thing that I’m studying in Grade 5 and she is in Grade 8. She is older than me so I don’t want to say, “Oh, I know how to do this”. So

232  Corinne Sandwith et al. I just keep quiet. But for me at that age I already see the divide in the quality of education. Also, because I’m living in the township and going to school in Brooklyn –​I’m alienated from my family because, when I come back, nobody wants to play with me so what do I do? I take books from the school library. And if they do want to play with me, I have to live with the fact that people are going to be passing remarks like “You think you’re white”. So, books are my escape. I think to myself, I am so happy. I have a library at school I can take five books a week and just read, read Adrian Mole.     At times I would visit my mom. As a journalist, sometimes she would have a story to follow up on. If the story was at a squatter camp, I would have to go and just sit there and play with those kids there. I had to be in a world where my daily life was much more privileged than those around me. I’m in a squatter camp, in a township, but I’m also at Brooklyn. It’s kind of schizophrenic. Actually, it made me a very sad person. That’s why I just wanted to read. I couldn’t deal with it so I just wanted to read. Luckily, socially, I would never have closed myself off, but I was always disturbed. And it’s not even just the other kids at school. Even in my own family I was so different from the others. I could never let the disparity go. But I told myself, at least I have a school library. At least I can get books. At least I can easily lock myself in a room and read until it’s time to eat and have a bath. INTS:  So you had all these varied experiences? KD:  Ja, so that escape. It’s not just a nice PR story. I lived it and I carried that throughout my life. Also the fact that when I was with my mom, she would be socialising with artists, photographers, a lot of Black Consciousness writers. So there was a huge gap between that reality and my life in other places. Even going into the advertising industry, it still did my head in because, as a result of my conditioning, I always felt like there must be something better. And I felt like, for me, books presented that possibility. Even in a place like Girls High, books were still an escape. You would think that, Oh, because I went to such a good school it is fine, but for me I had to break the madness with reading. INTS:  Would there have been any African writers? KD:  Very few. And actually, this whole situation about black hair has made me think that maybe I should engage the school, do readings there and maybe encourage the girls to have some sort of a black feminist club. INTS:  What you have been describing about your experience of reading as a form of escape leads us back to the LongStorySHORT project. Why do you want these kids in the township to read? What is driving that? KD:  Well, to go back to what I have said, I think reading as an escape is good. There are certain realities that black people find themselves in and maybe literature, particularly African literature, can be part of the healing. Especially when we realise that our realities are not just South African; they’re bigger than that. We are part of a bigger struggle. South Africa is

LongStorySHORT  233 a very closed-​off space because of apartheid; we’re so closed off in our thinking. You see the advantage that other African countries have over us in their knowledge of the world. Firstly, because our democracy is younger but also because apartheid was really successful in separating people. So there has to be an active intervention in opening up people’s worlds, particularly those who don’t have economic means. If you don’t have economic means, reading is such an immediate way of opening up your world and also realising that, Oh! These people in Nigeria have the same struggles. So, there is this mind-​travelling thing that happens with reading; reading facilitates those human connections that apartheid closed off. So I feel that books can enlighten people and then if people read more of this literature, do you think we would have the xenophobic attacks? I wonder. INTS:  So this also speaks to the Pan-​Africanism of the project. Because you include Nigerian, Ugandan and South African writers. KD: From all over the continent. And Yewande Omotoso is the curator. I don’t choose the stories. It’s up to Yewande and, since she is a writer, it works very well. This has been a very successful part of the project; the writers have bought into it because a fellow writer is curating. Yewande’s involvement is also important because when we talk about African literature we think of Achebe, Mphahlele, Ngŭgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mandla Langa and so on but we are not thinking of the more contemporary writers and yet they are the future Achebes. For me this is something that is also very exciting as I’m working with future classics. INTS:  So she chooses the stories. Does she choose what extracts are taken or do the writers have some say in what they want to be read? KD:  There’s a word count. I think it is 1,000 words and the writers are asked to submit. INTS:  Submit new stories? KD:  No, they submit extracts. INTS:  So, they do the cutting. Does Yewande help with that process? KD:  Yes, she does. And then for the writers who are too lazy to do it themselves –​who say, “choose anything” –​she does it for them. But this doesn’t always work. We saw it with Bra Zakes’s book The Sculptors of Mapungubwe. It so happened it was not an exciting part of the book when it came to the actual reading. INTS:  Do you tend to choose parts that are funny or dramatic or exciting? Is there any sort of genre that works better? KD:  My understanding of Yewande’s curatorial process is that she wants to represent a cross-​section of contemporary African literature. We also have flash fiction. We’ve got A. Goni Barett’s submission which is very very short. That’s also exciting for us because this is a very interesting way of introducing people to literature. INTS:  So, you have the whole range from short short fiction to longer extracts from a novel.

234  Corinne Sandwith et al. KD: 

Yes, it’s really a cross-​section and I’m most excited about flash fiction. For me, the most important thing is the consumption of what we’re doing. It’s not about us boasting about knowing all the writers. I get a sense that flash fiction is an interesting inroad for us to try and win readership because these are serious writers. It takes a particular skill to condense a story into a hundred words.     Yewande has already curated about 24 stories so far since the inception of the project in March 2015. The reading in Uganda last week was on the 10th. We read from Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish, which was awesome because she was there and we could do a Q and A with her. We’ve done ten stories, nine English stories and one Setswana story. There are also some guys from Ghana who are visiting South Africa called “Fokn Bois” –​very interesting hip-​hop, very rebellious, social commentary kind of guys. The “Fokn Bois” are big Internet rock stars so it works for the project because our content lives online. If we do a reading with them it will be an English story and a Ghanaian Pidgin story. Ja, so we’re slowly trying to break out of English. Language has always been an issue for us. It was always part of the branding for us to start with English stories but if we didn’t move to other languages we wouldn’t be speaking to the decolonising agenda. INTS:  Do you imagine that the stories are a kind of taster? KD: Yes, definitely; they are almost mini adverts for the books because whether the book lives within a Caine Prize anthology, or a whole novel, the entire book must be read. So, the little bit that you get should spark your interest in the writer or the book that the story lives in. For me it is a triumph to promote literature in this way. I’m a marketer, so I don’t live in that world where books are books. To me, books are creative products; they are like songs. So how have musicians managed? How does Beyoncé manage? How did Miriam Makeba manage? How is Chimamanda [Ngozi Adichie] doing it? She has a machine that gives her exposure and that puts her on particular platforms that have a particular style and aesthetic. In this way she has become a feature of popular culture and yet she is a writer. INTS:  So, is LongStorySHORT a way of becoming part of this popular dimension, rather than the more elite circuits like the festivals?6 KD:  I can’t speak of markets that I don’t know, like Europe and the US, but my understanding of Africa and my people is that people still have a thing about FOMO –​Fear of Missing Out. We have to appeal to that fear. If people want to be members of this cool club of people who read, let’s humour them and within that time and space they’ll get around to reading the books. In an interview with Chuma Nwokolo recently, I asked him what books he would recommend to someone who has just started to read African literature. He said he would recommend short stories because they are not intimidating and yet you feel you have accomplished

LongStorySHORT  235 something. He said, “Please, if a book doesn’t feel right let it go, don’t feel the pressure to complete it. Rather finish a short story that is four pages long and read another one.” And I suppose that is why there is this thing around the short story. Also because they are short. For example, I can tell you a story about what I did yesterday in five minutes and that’s a short story and that is why it works, especially in this environment with us being so busy and consuming so much information. INTS:  What is interesting is that a longer work becomes, or is reshaped, into a short story. At the moment it is read it is a short story and not the longer work. KD:  Ja, I remember at one of the readings in Soshanguve, one reader asked that particular question and the MC said, “Ja, that’s what makes LongStorySHORT fabulous. Writers can actually rework pieces of their novels to be short stories” but, you’re right, the piece works on its own and it is fulfilling. You don’t feel like you’ve been short-​changed. In my interview with Chuma, I asked him to comment on the assumption that blacks don’t read. He said it’s just a very obtuse statement because a lot of our storytelling is oral. So, perhaps the stories that people want to hear have not been captured in books. Because literature is oral and it is written, we are leaving out a big chunk of literature when we make these statements. So, I suppose, because it is read out loud, LongStorySHORT also speaks to that space of oral literature. INTS:  And it is read by celebrities and performers. Could you talk a bit about the idea of having celebrities read the stories? KD:  The idea is that celebrities are used to sell a lot of products that are of no value to society. So why can’t we use them to do something useful? We also made a choice to use people with a theatre background because they are more comfortable with live performance and also with the reading. They are not supposed to memorise the story: they are supposed to read. It is important for the audience to see the act of them reading. It is not about knowing your lines. No, it’s a demonstration that it is okay to read. We also try to work with people who we know are readers themselves. It’s not a one-​off act. You have to be a bookworm in order to be part of this project.       Another important part of the LongStorySHORT readings is that we have a theatre director who works with every celebrity. So, there’s a strong performance and preparation. You can’t just rock up and read. We can all read. We are trying to sell people the world of loving to read, so you can’t come there and just mess around. You have to enthral these people. When the person leaves they must want to buy the book. They must want to meet the writer. They must just feel “Oh My God, I thought books were boring but now I feel differently about this, and on top of that my favourite celebrity read the story so beautifully.” And then we put up the podcast and I think, “You were there! Go get the book!” INTS:  So the specific books would also be sold at the event?

236  Corinne Sandwith et al. KD: Yes,

we have a partnership with African Flavour Books. Every time we have a reading, they do a pop-​up store. So that’s all been very good because this idea that black people cannot afford books is a big fat lie. People can buy whiskey, and all sorts of things, expensive shoes and expensive sunglasses. This is also the reason why we house the readings in libraries: if you can’t afford to buy the books, you’re in the library, you can get that book. But if you want to take the book home, right now, you can buy it. So the follow-​through is there. That’s why I’m quite disturbed by some of the campaigns especially with National Book Week and the campaign “Buy a book, read a book”. What book am I supposed to read? Where am I supposed to buy it? Actually you need to curate people’s choices. INTS:  So you’re saying that to choose a book can be quite intimidating. KD: Yes, hence you find many people reading something, but not fiction. Black people read self-​help books, for example. It is also informed by our life circumstances and also no one is actually encouraging us to interact with the world of imagination and fiction and to make us realise how much truth is there. There seems to be prejudice against fiction. Among black men especially. It’s not that they don’t read but they don’t read much fiction. This is one challenge I would like to take up in the near future. That is the good news, although it has been very difficult to run LongStorySHORT consistently because of funding.7 It costs a lot of money to put the production together. INTS:  Because it is very professional. It reads easily. It reads very well and it’s such a pleasure to watch online. KD:  Thank you. But it’s quite a costly exercise. There’s a Facebook joke which mocks the idea of artists doing things for the “exposure”. They say “Is exposure going to feed my children?” I can’t patronise the writers, the performers, the filmmakers, myself and my social media team by saying it is about exposure only. They are attached to the project. They know it is worth something but they still have to eat. It does give us social capital but it is also our work. I think the next frontier would be for us to team up with the writers and to say, for example, “Okay Yewande, would you entrust us to do the audiobook of The Woman Next Door?” Because now we have the technical experience of producing. I listen to audiobooks and sometimes they leave much to be desired. INTS:  There are African classics and writers such as Chimamanda Adichie and NoViolet Bulawayo but not a lot of young South African writers are on audio. KD:  LongStorySHORT started off in its simplest form as a means of encouraging reading and promoting African literature. But when you are in that space where you are doing a reading in a township and you discover that there is so much more that is needed, you can’t just walk away and just do events with celebrities. And ideas take on their own lives; that is what happens. We are trying to promote African literature but we don’t have

LongStorySHORT  237 much of it in the public libraries. Public libraries have very rigid systems of procurement so publishers can’t just walk into a library and present new books. So it’s difficult; you are trying to run a very simple reading project in a library and you uncover all these obstacles. There is no point in me having a reading and having someone like Niq Mhlongo in the library when the library does not have even one of his books. INTS:  We see what you mean by these other things which are beyond the project. The project has become much larger. KD:  And I can’t just walk away from these things. I also feel that the space for audiobooks is untapped because with an audiobook you just need a digital file that you can send by SMS or WhatsApp. So, if books are taking too long to get to a place, you can have an MP3 and then you start. And people who say they don’t have data are lying because they are the ones when you phone them, they have songs as caller IDs. But one of the bigger challenges that we have with the culture of reading and literacy is that although there are quite a few government programmes for young people, many of these grants and programmes are accessed by people like me –​young people who went to good schools. Because the others cannot articulate their aspirations; they don’t read; they cannot write. INTS:  Do you have time in the sessions for people to ask questions and to talk about their own experiences? KD:  Yes, so the format of LongStorySHORT is that the celebrity reads and obviously, because it is a short story, the reading is hardly ever longer than 12 minutes. INTS:  Would you have an introduction to the writer? KD:  Yes, we have an MC who is fabulous. INTS:  And do you pay the celebrities? KD: Yes, but we do not pay them a lot because we are building such an important brand. We rely on goodwill from the celebrities because we have to podcast the reading. The agreement is that we pay them what we can afford and if they are not down with that they must just say so. INST:  So the format? KD:  The format is the MC welcomes everyone and the celebrity reads the story. The MC comes back and calls the writer on stage. When the writer is around s/​he talks about what it was like to hear their story read by someone else and the celebrity talks about their preparation and how different it is from their other work; the celebrity also discusses the work at hand. Then we open it up to the audience. They can talk about anything related to the performance. We’ve found that young people often want to talk about their own writing and about being a writer. At the session in Hammanskraal, for instance, one girl came up to me and said “I have written a book”. A whole book.     So even when the writer whose story is being read is not around, we always make sure another published writer is present to do the Q and A. For example, in Soshanguve when we were reading Doreen Baingana story,

238  Corinne Sandwith et al. the author was not there, but Futhi Ntshingila was there. In Nelmapius we were reading Peter Umezurike’s story, but Umez was not there so Yewande filled in for him. The writers give the project credibility. But I think from their side –​from what I have heard from them –​it’s such an interesting and new way to promote their work, something they had not thought of, especially the fact that when we read their story, there’s a podcast. Whether they send it to their next publisher or to friends and family who do not understand what this writing thing is about, they have got something that is alive. They have something that has some social capital to it as well.     Something else I want to highlight are literary festivals. I don’t know who organises them but I get a sense that it is writers rather than other types of people. If writers want people to read their books, I think the structure of these literary festivals should be opened up to readers. They should have fewer panel discussions and more informal interaction. One way could be to have a selfie booth where there are say five writers, where readers can take selfies with authors and their books. This may help to demystify this world of literature to readers. Just because we are comfortable with these formats doesn’t mean that potential readers are. So, if we are to have interventions –​that is, if we are trying to make people read –​then we need to break down that wall that exists between readers and books, which theatre people call the fourth wall.8

Notes 1 See Couzens (1985), Cobley (1997), Dick (2007, 2012) and Sandwith (2014, 2016). On the UK context, see Roberts (1998), Rose (2001) and Hammond (2006), and for a discussion of reading projects in antebellum North America, see McHenry (2002, 2011). 2 Bophuthatswana was an “independent homeland” or “bantustan”, established by the apartheid government. It was reincorporated into South Africa in 1994. 3 In August 2016, black school pupils at Pretoria High School for Girls embarked on protest action against the school’s code of conduct which, they alleged, required them to chemically straighten their hair. The protest was also concerned with what the students perceived as a long history of racism at the school. See Pather (2016) and Feltham (2016). The students were vindicated by a subsequent probe into the allegations which confirmed that many black pupils had experienced racism at the school (Maromo, 2016). 4 Houses provided for free to poor South Africans under the post-​ apartheid Reconstruction and Development Programme. 5 Street slang for young people with money; people who are spoilt. 6 For some of the debates on decolonising South African literary festivals, see Sosibo (2016) and Anonymous (2016). 7 Due to lack of funds, LongStorySHORT has ceased to operate. To access the videos, see: https://www.jamesmurua.com/long-story-short-all-the-videos-from-2015/. 8 In June 2017, Dube launched the literary festival Tjo! Storyfest, held at the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi Campus. Broadening the definition of storytelling to include orality, political biography and autobiography, the festival built on

LongStorySHORT  239 the success of the LongStorySHORT project by inviting celebrities to read extracts and stories. In keeping with the desire to decolonise the festival format, the festival also made space for community activist storytelling.

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LongStorySHORT  241 Sandwith C (2018) The appearance of the book: Towards a history of the reading lives and worlds of black South African readers. English in Africa 45(1): 11–​38. Sosibo K (2016) Thando Mgqolozana on how we can decolonise SA literature. The Mail & Guardian, 14 March. Available at: https://​mg.co.za/​arti​cle/​2016–​03–​14-​aut​ hor-​mgq​oloz​ana-​how-​canwe-​dec​olon​ise-​sa-​lit​erat​ure (accessed 2 July 2018).

14  “My stories will remain written the way I talk” A conversation with Niq Mhlongo Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith

Introduction Niq Mhlongo, as Lucas Ledwaba suggests in a review of the author’s second novel, After Tears (2007), tackles life and writing with a carefree sense of humour that reminds one of the late short story genius, Can Themba. Like Themba, Mhlongo loves a good party and a tipple. He is also a loyal servant of good writing. (2008: 18) In contrast to Themba, who is most renowned for his short stories, journalistic pieces and essays in Drum,1 Mhlongo made his literary debut with the longer prose genre, his novel Dog Eat Dog in 2003. Although Mhlongo has written short stories in parallel to the novel from the beginning of his career as a writer, Affluenza (2016), the first collection that introduced South African readers to his short stories, was only published more than ten years after his debut and the publication of his subsequent novels After Tears (2007) and Way Back Home (2013). As Mhlongo highlights in the conversation below, his own journey with the short story not only testifies to his growing ‘brand’ as a writer over the years but also reflects developments in South Africa’s literary landscape, which has witnessed a renaissance of the short story genre in recent years, propelled, in part, by the increasing influence of book clubs, short story competitions, social media and other digital platforms. Interestingly, Mhlongo first became known as a short story writer internationally in the context of editors’ and publishers’ attempts to introduce European readers to new black literary voices from South Africa in the mid-​ 2000s, around the time South Africa won the bid to host the 2010 soccer World Cup. Written between 2004 and 2016, several stories in Affluenza were first published in Europe, such as “The Dark End of Our Street”, which appeared in the German collection Yizo Yizo: Stories aus einem neuen Südafrika, edited by Manfred Loimeier in 2005; and “Betrayal in the Wilderness”, first published as an audiobook by the Flemish-​Dutch cultural organisation deBuren as part of their Radio Books project in collaboration with the National Arts Festival DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-14

A conversation with Niq Mhlongo  243 in Makhanda/​Grahamstown in 2009. “Goliwood Drama”, was Mhlongo’s entry for the Caine Prize in 2005 published in The Obituary Tango: A Selection of Writing from the Caine Prize for African Writing 2005 (2006), a story that was also translated into Italian and Dutch. Mhlongo’s first collection, Affluenza, a term taken from his debut Dog Eat Dog, has been described as a collection of “stories about a society that has lost its way” (Ifeh, 2016: n.p.). While largely written in Mhlongo’s trademark “witty, racy dialogue” crammed with “modern-​day street lingo” (Ledwaba, 2008: 18) and acerbic satire, some of the eleven stories also take on a more contemplative, elegiac tone as they relate narratives of emotional violence and betrayal between intimate partners. Examining the phenomenon of “affluenza”, “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more” (De Graaf et al., 2000: 2), expressed through the blending of “affluence” and “influenza”, the titular story provides yet another metaphor for the “morbidly diseased” (De Kock, 2016: 196) state of the country, a trope that, according to Leon de Kock, suffuses much recent writing. In Mhlongo’s story, the contrast between the theme of “overload” and the short story’s limited narrative space dramatises the failures of the transition project. The ending of the short story, where the characters Fana and Sanele find themselves in a fatal situation, trapped in a dilapidated apartment block by a trio of glamorous women they have just flirted with at a high-​end Sandton bar, points toward the deadly culture of conspicuous consumption. With this unexpected turn of events, the story becomes a parody of postapartheid deception and pretence, reminiscent of Can Themba’s social satire in the Drum era. With his second collection, Soweto, the Apricot Tree (2018), which won the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction and the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award as part of the South African Literary Awards (SALA), Mhlongo further established himself locally as a critical voice of contemporary short fiction. While signalling new directions in contemporary short story writing, the collection, much like Affluenza, challenges the tendency of previous collections to conceive the postapartheid short story in terms of rupture. Mapping the daily lives, familial relationships, memories and social encounters of a range of Soweto residents next to tracing, in some of the stories, their travels to other parts of the city, the stories initiate an intergenerational dialogue with the Soweto stories of the Staffrider generation that, in its commitment to document township voices, vociferously denounced conventions of the genre in favour of a hard-​hitting, polemic documentary realism grounded in oral forms. Yet, while Mhlongo’s stories, as he states in the interview, are frequently rooted in the everyday speech of Soweto residents, his form of bearing testimony to various aspects of postapartheid’s uneven social landscape –​gender-​based violence, racism, the legacy of forced removals and historical trauma, absent fathers, depression, greed and corruption –​largely breaks with the language of spectacle that characterised the Soweto stories of earlier protest writing. Instead, the collection opts for subtler, introspective

244  Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith and, at times, satirical modes of narration driven by dialogue and a specific theme, modes that leave behind former moral absolutes and imagine women outside the script of the Mother Africa trope. As an anthologist of short fiction, Mhlongo continues to pay homage to Johannesburg as a “space of loss and deprivation, but also […] of resistance and possibility” (Mhlongo, 2020: ix) with his recent Joburg Noir (2020a), which won the 2021 Humanities and Social Sciences Awards for Best Fiction Edited Volume. His most recent edited collection of short stories, Hauntings (2021), brings together a range of writers who reflect on contemporary South(ern) African socio-​politial realities through the lens of spectrality. In the following interview, Mhlongo addresses the role of the short story throughout his writing career, commenting on prominent short story writers who have influenced his work, the short story tradition in South Africa, his practice as a writer, teacher and marketer of the short story genre, the reception of his stories in various geographical contexts as well as the increasing significance of book clubs, social media and digital publication platforms. Mhlongo describes how he conceives his short stories around a key theme or idea that speaks to contemporary South African socio-​political realities before fleshing out individual characters and deciding on aspects of narrative voice, exploiting the form’s privileging of a singular focus. Experimentation with conventions of the short story genre –​brevity, tight narrative structure, ellipsis and implication, beginnings in medias res and open endings –​for Mhlongo, is driven by his efforts to bring across, in as rounded a manner as possible, the complexities of a theme rather than by a mere desire for textual play with form and language. As such, Mhlongo rejects observations about the modernist short story and its inchoate, fragmented and disjointed nature as suitable means to approach the postapartheid moment in favour of a poetics that re-​validates relatability, accessibility and everyday speech. During the course of the interview Mhlongo also highlights his approach to marketing and facilitating access to his work as a literary hustler selling his books directly to his readers from the boot of his car or, during his travels to other African countries, out of his suitcase, in an effort to forge and sustain black reading communities across South Africa and other parts of the continent. Challenging local book shops to stock copies of his works, Mhlongo also promotes closer relationships between book sellers and authors and urges the South African book industry to publish works that speak to the realities of local communities and create more equitable publishing cultures. Moreover, he foregrounds the growing role of black book clubs in South Africa in validating the short story genre via social media, which resonates with Bibi Bakare-​Yusuf’s observations that “in the age of the digital and social media we should be thinking of stories as a site for certain form of sociality and congregation, where readers and authors come together to produce content” (2011). The following interview took place on December 13, 2019, in Melville, Johannesburg.

A conversation with Niq Mhlongo  245 Your first three books were novels, after which you published two short story collections, Affluenza in 2016 and Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree in 2018. What informed your shift to the short story form? NM:  I have been writing short stories for quite some time. One of the short stories in Affluenza, “The Dark End of Our Street”, was first published in Germany in 2005. And in 2006 and 2007, I wrote other short stories. So I’ve been writing short stories concurrently with my novels; it’s just that the novel came first in terms of publication. Because short stories weren’t the most popular genre in South Africa around that time, I decided to put them away so that I could focus on my second novel. But by that time my stories had already been published in German and, later on, Italian, French, Swedish and Flemish. Around 2011/​2012, I decided to write more short stories so that I could publish my own collection. I could also see a resurgence of short stories around that time –​Siphiwo Mahala, for example, published his collection African Delights in 2011 –​and I felt it was time to put my stories out there because the short story genre also offers an opportunity to get new readers in South Africa. INTS:  Comparing the genres of the novel and the short story, what do you find attractive about the short form? What does it enable you to do that you can’t do with the longer genre? NM:  From my point of view, it is easier to write short stories with a particular idea or theme in mind. I start with a theme, for example racism or unemployment, and then the story follows as I think about how the theme can best be captured in a short story. While novels are usually multi-​themed and readers might not necessarily pick up the theme you had in mind as an author, it is easier to foreground a specific idea in the short story. For example, when I wrote my first novel Dog Eat Dog I was thinking about the plight of students at our universities, an aspect that initially did not come out well. It was only later discovered that the novel was in fact about #FeesMustFall. If a short story is driven by a theme, I feel you do not lose your audience that easily. In a story about load shedding in South Africa, I would first think in more detail about the theme and perhaps link it to other topical issues and changes in South Africa, for example in terms of governance. The characters would follow later. INTS:  The short story has been a particularly attractive genre for writers in South Africa in the past. Why do you think that has been the case? Are there particular collections or authors that influenced you? NM: While I have been influenced by a range of authors, for me Njabulo Ndebele comes first. His collection Fools and Other Stories has been prescribed at high school level and was also covered when I went to university. Internationally, some of my main influences are writers like James Joyce and Roald Dahl who was born to Norwegian immigrant parents in Wales and wrote the popular short story “Skin”. In South Africa, Drum writers such as Es’kia Mphahlele, Can Themba and Casey Motsisi also INTS: 

246  Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith come to mind as well as the Staffrider collections, especially Chris van Wyk and Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s stories about Soweto.      Coming to why the short story was such an attractive genre, I think it is easier to capture a particular moment in the short story. During apartheid, access to short stories was much easier than to novels. In the 1950s most of the short stories were published in Drum which was easily accessible to many people. The magazine focused on the lives of black people without sugar-​coating their experiences, which is another reason why the short story became more popular. Short stories, even if set during apartheid, also allowed writers to foreground the lives of ordinary people without centring on apartheid. This was in contrast to autobiographies of the time where the centre of reference would be what apartheid had done to people, how it affected their lives and why they were not part of the broader South African society. I’m thinking of books like Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue and Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History. The scope of the short stories was much broader compared to that of the novel. But this is my own thinking and I could be wrong. Can Temba, for example, would simply go to Soweto and write about train rides, the overcrowding and pickpocketing on trains, about how ordinary people lived in the townships. I think short stories were much more inclusive in terms of the different lives of ordinary people they included. INTS:  You mentioned that you published your short story collection after Siphiwo Mahala’s African Delights came out and, in a lecture to our first-​ year students earlier this year, you also highlighted an increase of short story collections after Jane Bennett’s Porcupine was published in 2008. We are interested in how you see the place of the short story in the contemporary moment. Do you have any thoughts on why the current literary scene is more open to the short story genre? NM:  We realised from around 2005 that there is an increasingly larger reception of short stories. This is also because of social media and their influence in getting people to read. The growing number of readers also has to do with the short story. New readers are introduced to a short story, rather than the novel, in most cases because a short story is something that can be read on a train ride from Johannesburg to Hatfield, for example, and it is also much more accessible. Social media play a major role in informing people about different writers; following writers has become very fashionable. There is a particular movement driven by book clubs in South Africa. In order to belong to a particular league, you have to have read something. And most people start with the short story. If you want to be relevant in South Africa today in terms of public debates you definitely have to read. We cannot afford readers who only claim to have read Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like or Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. Things have moved on and new things have brought new ideas. INTS:  Regarding your publishing experience, was your publishing of the two collections easier or more difficult in comparison to the novels?

A conversation with Niq Mhlongo  247 NM:  It

was difficult for me because I don’t think that even today, I would have been published as a short story writer if I did not have a name or brand behind me. Looking back at the time when I first published my short stories in 2005, I also feel that this was because there was a name behind my writing and because after K. Sello Duiker and Phaswane Mpe passed on I was almost alone as a young black South African writer. At that time, international interest in South African writing also started to grow and I was featured in The New York Times (Donadio, 2006) in an article on new literary voices in South Africa, which put my work on a much broader literary stage across the world. South Africa had also just won the bid to host the soccer World Cup and the whole world wanted to know more about the country beyond the crime statistics. Many found that the best way to do so was to read current and new literature, which resulted in the publication of a number of international anthologies. This form of visibility made it a bit easier to approach my publisher about the short story collection.      But publishers are also starting to realise that the world of literature in South Africa is changing. You cannot publish a book at the moment without taking into consideration the influence of book clubs, for example. Around the time when I started publishing, there was virtually no book club owned by black people. They only started around 2009 and used to read mainly older works. Today, more and more black writers are being published and read in South Africa and there is an ever-​increasing number of book clubs, probably up to 100. Genres that do not sell according to publishers are, of course, poetry and short story collections, unless authors already have a name. But even big publishers like Kwela are gradually turning to these neglected genres. We saw the publication of the poetry collection This Way I Salute You by poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile by Kwela in 2018, Mongane Wally Serote’s Sikhahlel’u-​OR: A Praise Poem for Oliver Tambo, also by Kwela in 2019, and at the moment there are rumours that they will be publishing Napo Masheane and other women poets. Publishers are realising that this is a niche market that they are missing. Coming back to your question, I had the advantage of having a name when I approached my publisher about my first short story collection but the genre is also becoming increasingly more visible and recognised by mainstream publishers. INTS:  Could you talk a bit about the response that your short story collections have received from readers and the general public? NM:  I just wrote a piece yesterday in which I reflect on literary prizes and accolades. Until this year, when I was awarded the Herman Charles Bosman Prize and the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award for Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree, I had not won a literary prize in South Africa. Nothing. The only prize I received for my work before then was the Spanish literary award Internacionale La Mar de Letras for my debut novel Dog Eat Dog in 2006. Some of my short stories are now being adapted

248  Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith for theatre productions by theatres like the Market Theatre. Tertiary institutions are also teaching some of my stories and Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree has been reprinted up to four times now with about 9000 copies sold. All these examples show the success of the collections. INTS:  You also go to a lot of trouble to get your books out. Could you talk a bit about your marketing strategies and what you do to increase your readership? NM:  Even now, as I’m sitting with you here in Melville, I have books in the boot of my car. I always carry books. That’s my greatest marketing tool next to promoting my books on social media. Last year in August, I was invited to an event organised by the Goethe Institute Nairobi and I carried about 150 books with me. After the event, Zukiswa Wanner and I took the remaining copies of my books with us on a road trip by bus from Nairobi to Tanzania and then to Zambia and Zimbabwe, selling books to interested readers, book clubs and literary organisations along the way. By the time we arrived in Zimbabwe, I was only left with about twelve books. Shortly after my return to South Africa, I travelled to Botswana and Swaziland to sell books. Adopting such strategies works because sometimes books cannot sell themselves. Just like human beings, books also have a lifespan: a book might be popular for five or six months but will die then if you don’t activate it. That’s why I use every opportunity that comes up, even in locations such as a pub. I also go to booksellers such as Exclusive Books, Bargain Books and others to ask them how many copies of my books they have on their shelves. It’s a strategy that also helps my publishers. But it may not work for all writers, especially more introverted writers.      I also feel that personalised books are the most important books. When you look at your library after a period of, say, ten years and find a signed copy of Andre Brink’s novels now that he has passed on, that’s a very special moment. So I encourage people to have their copies signed by the author. Someone I met at the Franschhoek literary festival a few years ago had a copy of The Story of an African Farm signed by Olive Schreiner in the late 1800s, which they found in the library of their great-​ grandmother who had belonged to a book club. I found this such a beautiful story. INTS:  In terms of the different markets you are targeting, can you observe any differences in the responses to your short stories? Are there certain stories that are often commented on internationally and others that are more popular locally? NM:  Yes, definitely. I facilitate a writing workshop for two weeks every year in Zurich at a school called Kanti Baden. When I had a manuscript of my second collection, I gave it to the students to read and their favourite story was “Curiosity Killed the Cat”. To them, the story talked about racism in South Africa and made them understand the ongoing nature of racism post-​1994. They also loved the story “Moving Landmark” about

A conversation with Niq Mhlongo  249 a protagonist who is mentally ill, because at the time depression was not a topic that people would take seriously, even though it was very much present. In South Africa, one of the most popular stories is “Nailed”, maybe because it is so political. That is the story that was adapted into a Market Theatre Play.2 The title story, “Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree”, is also a favourite because it engages with forced removals and is deliberately rooted in a township lingo, echoing my first two novels Dog Eat Dog and After Tears in terms of style and language. The story also addresses the apartheid government’s planting of two fruit trees in the backyards of the houses of people who were forcibly removed to Soweto, a context that readers love to learn more about. When I launched the collection in other parts of the country, there were always a lot of questions about this story. Readers from Kimberly and KwaMashu in Durban also pointed out that they have similar arrangements of trees in their backyards. It seems that the story helps people compare and contrast their living conditions. INTS:  You have also become one of South Africa’s main literary ambassadors in your travels to other parts of the continent, as you mention earlier. How were your stories received in other African countries? NM:  “Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree” is also one of the most popular stories in other countries on the continent. I think because it helps people understand a bit of the history of Soweto and it encourages them to read more about South Africa. It also gives readers insight into a particular moment of South African history and challenges them to think of whether what happened in the past has any bearing on the present and the changes that have or haven’t taken place. INTS:  Looking at the two collections in more general terms, is there a particular focus that each of the books takes? NM: The themes in my first collection, Affluenza, are very diverse, mainly because they were not written with a specific collection in mind. “Betrayal in the Wilderness”, a story that brought in lots of money, was commissioned by the Flemish Writers’ Association with the brief to write any story about South Africa for their collection. One of the stories in the collection is set in the bush in the Kruger National Park, while another engages with suicide. In contrast to my second collection, the focus is quite diverse and wide-​ranging. Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree is dedicated to Soweto and most of the stories are set there. Another dominant focus of the collection is on family. “My Father’s Eyes” is about a particular person wanting to know who their father is, “Curiosity Killed the Cat” centres on a fight between a black family and a white family because they don’t understand each other in terms of their cultural rights. “Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree” narrates the story of a particular family against the background of forced removals. INTS:  Talking about Soweto, we wondered if there was a conscious effort to bring to attention a place that you hadn’t seen written about as much as other places.

250  Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith NM:  Definitely.

It was a conscious decision on my part. There is an apricot tree at my house and I always meet with friends under the tree. It is under the apricot tree that stories are born. I realised that I had taken too much from Soweto without giving back. Soweto is also the place that I know better than any other place in the world and it was important for me to write about myself and where I come from, about things that influence me, things that I see every day. There is no other possible title for the collection than Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree in honour of this place. INTS:  The short story has often been a vehicle for social critique, even though, as you say, sometimes this was not always overt. In your view, is the short story doing something different in terms of social critique in the present than it used to in the past? NM:  It depends on a particular short story. There are short stories that talk about utopia or dystopia and comment on the social environment. I write about the political, social and the economics of the country but in a very subtle way. When I wrote “Curiosity Killed the Cat”, one of the themes that I wanted to address was racism, which was becoming much more overt in South Africa at that time. Incidents that received a lot of media coverage were the estate agent Penny Sparrow speaking about monkeys on the beach, Vicki Momberg who was arrested recently for swearing at a police officer and Helen Zille’s defence of colonialism. There are so many incidents of overt and subtle racism. While my stories are influenced by these realities, I write short stories that are readable instead of overwhelming readers with information which they can easily find in newspapers. When I was writing “My Father’s Eyes” I realised that we’re living in a broken country, a country of too much suffering, a country of femicide and absent fathers. Tradition and patriarchy force people to have fathers but in our society, it is sometimes impossible to have fathers because you cannot call a rapist a father. INTS:  How do you approach conventional characteristics of the short story form such as pace, tight narrative structure, density of language, lack of resolution and so on? NM:  That’s a very good question because I’m one of the people who is against rules. One of the things my readers have been accusing me of is that most of my books do not have an ending. I don’t believe that I should cut a story short because short stories, as an example, are supposed to have a word limit of 5000 words. The last story in Affluenza, “Passport and Dreadlocks”, goes way beyond the conventional length of a short story. I’m mostly driven by a story and a theme, not language. The main point is to capture an idea. While some readers have complained about the length of “Passport and Dreadlocks”, it was one of the most popular stories in Zimbabwe because it is multi-​layered and addresses the issues of migration, borders and love. I wanted to bring across the idea that borders should not only be the end of space but also the beginning of space. Through the movement of a particular character who is crossing

A conversation with Niq Mhlongo  251 the border without using their own passport, I wanted to foreground the dangers and possibilities of border crossings on the continent and the context of international migration on a larger global scale that had a critical impact on the Brexit vote, for example. There is often the sense that a short story should not reveal too much and that it works by implication. But I feel that it is sometimes necessary to reveal details and make readers understand my standpoint, such as the issue of migration and xenophobia in “Passports”. It’s critical to have balance in terms of length, experimentation with language and so on because I intend to access everyone, not only a particular set of people who already know my work. I write to experiment and to experiment is to go beyond a set of rules about beginnings, middles and endings and about a short story being driven by a limited set of characters. INTS:  Just coming back to the idea of the popularity of the short story in the present, Henrietta Rose-​Innes observes in an interview that the fragmentary nature of the short story form for her seems to be an apt way of commenting on the fractured nature of postapartheid society and the disappointments with the democratic promise. We’re wondering about your thoughts on this. NM:  My problem with this view is that it presupposes a particular kind of audience. I write for ordinary people and I would like people to understand my stories without having to provide explanations. I feel that we have different audiences. I’m not disrespecting readers here by suggesting that there are readers who are well-​versed and can make such intellectual connections and another group of readers. I write for people who want to understand my writing and talk about it in an intellectual format or maybe just in an ordinary layman’s format. There are different kinds of writers and we all write differently, but it all depends on how you package your writing. I package my short stories in a way that is accessible and also sometimes intellectual. But overall, I’m not interested in writing stories intellectually. I prefer writing stories in the way I speak and in a way that makes readers laugh. I cannot afford to fragment my stories; my stories will remain written the way I talk. INTS:  As a storyteller who wants to be faithful to oral delivery, your work is firmly rooted in African storytelling traditions. Could you elaborate a bit on this form of influence? NM:  From a point of view of African storytelling, there is no story that is told without a lesson as far as I know. For example, if you don’t want your children to go out at night, you tell them a particularly beautiful story and also tell them a ghost story. You don’t simply tell them in one sentence not to return home after dark, but you tell them a story of someone who has been taken by a ghost because they defied their parents. You have to bear in mind where we come from and ask yourself about the source of your stories. How will I tell such a story? I won’t tell it in a Western way or in a fragmented way, I have to tell a story in its totality. If you tell a

252  Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith story in a fragmented way, you might not get the nuances of a particular tradition that the story is about. INTS:  The influence of folklore and other oral forms is also visible in your frequent use of the figure of the hustler that is already present in your novels, but also features in your short story collections. In the title story in Affluenza, Fana, for example, refers to Johannesburg as “Johussleburg”. What attracts you to the figure of the hustler and what does it say about contemporary South Africa? NM:  This has to do with where I come from because you cannot afford to come from a place like Soweto, or any other ghetto, and not be a hustler. Families are already fragmented, there are many single parents and poverty is pervasive in the township so that you have to know how to hustle for things. Many students don’t have money to buy lunch at school and there might not be food when they return home, leaving them no option but to hustle around. These characters have multiple identities; they could be Niq or any other black South African living in the township. When I write a particular character, 98 per cent will identify with the character’s lived experience. Hustling is something that I observe and am told about every day. It is the life that I have been living and that I’m still living as I hustle selling books from the boot of my car every day. In this sense, I’m writing about something that I know. And the greatest thing about this is that I always have the upper hand over my characters. Since I know them so intimately, my characters won’t ever be able to bully me when I’m writing them. INTS:  Some of your stories, such as “Turbulence” and “Avalon”, have a lot of dialogue and it appears that dialogue almost becomes a form of substitute for the plot. Could you comment a bit more on this style of writing that is not necessarily plot driven but focuses more on capturing encounters and people’s belief systems that are presented through dialogue? NM:  I think a mistake that we make is that dialogue cannot be plot itself. For me dialogue can also be plot. There are certain things that characters can only do or change through dialogue, not necessarily through action or plotting. The more I write, the more I like dialogue that allows the story to become more authentic. The dialogues I include in my writing are not manufactured; they might not have actually happened but they exist within a certain space in my society. In this sense, there’s a fine line for me between dialogue and plot. INTS:  We noticed your frequent use of the second-​ person address in stories such as “My Father’s Eyes”, “Private Dancer Saudade” in Soweto, and “My Name is Peaches” and “The Baby Shower” in Affluenza. Most of these are narrated by female characters. What are your thoughts on this technique? NM:  I could not have told these stories from a male perspective, especially “My Father’s Eyes”, as I wanted to address patriarchy, sexual violence against women and the issue of the church, which surprisingly attracts more

A conversation with Niq Mhlongo  253 women in black societies. I felt that the stories would be more authentic written from a woman’s point of view. The second-​person narrative was a more experimental narrative choice, influenced by Phaswane Mpe, who was my lecturer at university. The choice of the female perspective combined with the second-​person narrative allows for the story to be more believable, for the themes that I cover to come out stronger, because I find the second-​person form much more personal than narratives told in the first person. INTS:  Both collections frequently reference (South African) music that your characters listen to or that serves as a leitmotif in the entire story, such as in “Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree” and “My Name is Peaches” in Affluenza. Could you elaborate a bit on this? NM:  Music gives me a sense of time and place and flair of a particular setting. It allows me to describe a particular setting or era without offering a detailed description. Music in “Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree”, for example, captures certain nuances about South Africa at that time. It also indicates the mood and sets the pace –​slow or fast –​in a particular story. Music also helps me get a sense of how to write a dialogue set in a particular time. I talked about kwaito in Dog Eat Dog to such an extent that people thought I was a musician but it was to indicate the mood of the transition years. A particular setting can sometimes also inhibit characters to speak in a certain way. Characters cannot openly swear or talk in a particular way in a restaurant, for example, but a specific song can equally capture the mood of a place. INTS:  You have facilitated writing workshops across the world. Could you elaborate on your experience in these workshops and participants’ response to the short story? NM:  I normally facilitate short story writing workshops. Short stories are the most difficult form of writing and once writers get it right, it’s easier to move on to other genres like the novel. I introduce participants to conventional rules of the short story but encourage them to break these. Even if someone is focusing on a novel or another longer piece, I encourage them to write in such a way that chapters can be read on their own. Short stories submitted for the Caine Prize are a good example of this. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Helon Habila and Binyavanga Wainaina all entered their short stories and were later asked to expand them into novels. Novels like Purple Hibiscus and Waiting for an Angel were all developed from a short story. So, I learned from other writers and their experience with the Caine Prize that once you master the short story, you can easily write a longer narrative. INTS:  What are you working on at the moment? NM: I’m currently busy with the final edits of my new novel, tentatively called Paradise in Gaza, that is scheduled to come out in August. It’s mostly a historical novel spanning the time from the 1970s until just before apartheid was dismantled. In many ways, the novel resembles

254  Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith Way Back Home but further develops ideas, especially my concern with spirituality. The majority of the plot happens in a fictional rural area and I did a lot of research on rural areas. I think it’s one of the best novels I’ve ever written. I started writing it about five or six years ago and put it aside to focus on short stories and write Way Back Home. When I feel a project doesn’t work at a particular time, I tend to leave it. But when I went back to the manuscript last year, I was surprised by how many ideas came from it.     I’m also busy with another short story collection and you are the first to hear about it. It will be a collection of around 14 to 15 short stories and at the moment I have drafts of 13. I have to admit that I cannot write without having a title, so the collection is provisionally titled In the Niq of Time. The collection is divided into three sections, past, present and future, and the final section will include five futuristic stories, a new genre that I’m experimenting with. It should come out in 2021 or 2022. INTS:  Thank you very much!

Notes 1 In his doctoral dissertation, Siphiwo Mahala (2017) traces Themba’s development as a writer, journalist, essayist and public intellectual from the mid-​1940s onwards, shedding light on the largely neglected early period of Themba’s career in which he published in student journals and other publications of the University of Fort Hare, as well as in Zonk. 2 The play was directed by Luthando Mngomezulu and featured Khulu Skenjana and Aya Mpama among others.

References Bakare-​Yusuf B (2011) Keynote speech: Technologies and the future of the book. Information for Change, Lagos, 11 May. Available at: www.foresightfordevelopment. org/ ​ s obipro/ ​ 5 4/ ​ 4 04- ​ keynote- ​ s peech- ​ t echnology-​ a nd-​ t he-​ f uture-​ o f-​ t he-​ b ook (accessed 5 December 2021). De Graaf J, Wann D and Naylor TH (2000) Affluenza: The All-​Consuming Epidemic. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-​Koehler. De Kock L (2016) Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Donadio R (2006) Post-​ apartheid fiction. The New York Times, 3 December. Available at: www.nytimes.com/​2006/​12/​03/​magazine/​03novelists.html (accessed 5 December 2021). Ifeh A (2016) Pinpointing the troubles of modern South Africa: A review of Affluenza. Wawa Book Review, 2 September. Available at: http://​waw​aboo​krev​iew.com/​2016/​ 09/​02/​pin​poin​ting​the-​troub​les-​of-​mod​ern-​south-​afr​ica-​a-​rev​iew-​of-​afflue​nza/​ (accessed 17 May 2018). Ledwaba L (2008) In the Niq of time. City Press, 27 July, p.18. Loimeier M (ed.) (2005) Yizo Yizo: Stories aus einem neuen Südafrika. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag.

A conversation with Niq Mhlongo  255 Mahala S (2017) Inside the house of truth: The construction, destruction and reconstruction of Can Themba. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of South Africa. Mhlongo N (2003) Dog Eat Dog. Cape Town: Kwela. Mhlongo N (2006) Goliwood drama. In: The Obituary Tango: A Selection of Works from the Caine Prize for African Writing 2005. Johannesburg: Jacana, 147–​156. Mhlongo N (2007) After Tears. Cape Town: Kwela. Mhlongo N (2013) Way Back Home. Cape Town: Kwela. Mhlongo N (2016) Affluenza. Cape Town: Kwela. Mhlongo N (2018) Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree. Cape Town: Kwela. Mhlongo N (ed.) (2020a) Joburg Noir. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Mhlongo N (2020b) Paradise in Gaza. Cape Town: Kwela. Mhlongo N (ed.) (2021) Hauntings. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

Index

a’ Motana, Nape 227 abject 38, 57, 130, 139, 161, 177, 179, 180 Aboulela, Leila 168 Abrahams, Peter 169–​170 Achebe, Chinua 169, 170, 233 adaptation: generic 91, 97, 194, 214, 215, 247–​248, 249; as in rewriting 3, 11, 12, 134, 176 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 9, 234, 236, 253 affect 67, 97, 99, 109–​112 African American 132, 146 African cosmologies 115, 127, 128, 132 Afrikaans 64, 71, 76, 173, 185 Afrofuturism 123–​126, 132, 140n5, 206 agency 18, 41, 72, 79, 81, 98, 159, 197; women’s agency 99, 127, 155, 186 Ahmed, Sara 102–​103, 108, 112, 113, 119 Aidoo, Ama Ata 185, 187 Al-​Misaawi, Djarabi 162 alienation 13, 14, 46, 128, 223, 224, 228, 232 allegory 42, 43, 73, 131; national 11, 66, 172–​174 altered states of consciousness 14, 70, 97, 249; see also mental health alterity 55, 67, 117 ancestor 96, 97, 99, 115, 127, 130 Anderson, Benedict 80, 173 Angola 13, 68 anthology 3–​7, 9–​10, 21n4, 64; field guide 7; miscellany 128; niche 8; popular 8; queer 145; survey 6, 9, 63; women-​authored 145, 186, 188 apartheid era: governance 28, 233; hegemonic narratives of 4, 5; literature

of 7–​8, 67, 196, 246; publishing industry 146; short story criticism 1; see also postapartheid era apocalyptic fiction 124, 126, 139, 169, 172, 174, 176, 180 aquatic 128, 129, 130, 132, 219; see also water archive: African mythology 124, 125; othered literary 115; queer 118 audience 14, 237, 251; as participants 204; Western 168 audiobook 236, 237, 242 autobiographies 238n7; 246 avant-​garde 11, 20n1 Awadalla, Maggie and Paul March-​Russell, 18, 20n1, 106, 146 Baingana, Doreen 227, 234 Bakare-​Yusuf, Bibi 156, 244 Barrett, Igoni A. 227 Bauling, Jane 13 Bekker, Jo-​Ann 12 bell hooks 57 Bell, Suzy 147, 158, 159; “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus” 147, 157–​161 belonging 1, 81, 95, 112, 113, 156 Bennett, Jane 17, 108–​109, 145; Porcupine 116–​117, 145, 246 Beyala, Calixthe 149 Biko, Steve 246 Bildungsroman 68, 176 Black Consciousness 77, 78, 232 Black women 139, 146, 148, 149; bodies 18, 132, 147; dehumanisation of 162; objectification of 149, 196; sexuality 18, 147; queer 149, 162; violence against 137; writing 146 Blackness 52, 53, 89, 140n5, 162n2

Index  257 body 150, 160; African 156; black 145; black male 80; black women’s 148, 149; female 90, 138, 153, 155; Grosz, Elizabeth 90, 91, 94, 99; land/​body metaphor 18, 147, 149, 155, 158, 159; Scarry, Elaine 38; wounded 41 book: clubs 20, 242, 244, 246, 247, 248; marketing 20, 168, 244, 248; selling 244, 248, 252; shops 244 border 250; border-​crossing poetic; 50, 51, 57; border-​crossing subjectivity 51; cross-​border migration 13, 250–​251; epistemology 57, 207; thinking 57; transgression of 110 Bosman, Herman Charles 2, 6, 64 Botswana 9, 106, 207, 248 Brink, Andre 248 Brittle Paper 145, 162n1 Bulawayo, NoViolet 18, 168, 169, 236, 253; “Hitting Budapest” 176–​181 Caine Prize see prizes canon/​canonicity 1, 17, 19, 46, 67, 103, 105, 115, 126, 171, 197, 214 Cape Town 40; 79, 80, 95, 159, 172-​175, 184, 192, 217-​219, 224, 225 Chantler, Ashley 63, 65 Chapman, Michael 1, 2, 7, 8, 21n4, 63, 64, 66, 91, 171 Chekhov, Anton 170, 220 Chela, Efemia 9 childhood 18, 19, 97, 108, 111, 114, 133, 169, 170, 176–​181, 186, 219, 220, 221, 222, 230–​231, 251; child-​headed household 188, 189; queer 111–​113, 119n2; reading 198, 232 Chimurenga 227 Chislett, Dave 6, 140n8 Christiansë, Yvette 193 city 30, 79, 80, 81, 127, 135–​136, 138, 169, 172, 176, 179, 187, 219, 224, 225, 226, 243; African 81, 176; see also urban space/​urbanity class 46, 53; intersections of 48, 90, 94, 105, 116, 169; middle class 52, 114; underclass 54, 55; working class 55 Coetzee, J. M. 46, 75, 224 colonial: British history 55; colonialist/​ colonized relation 151, 152: discourse 18, 40, 53, 145–​150, 152, 155, 156, 159–​162; history 71, 80; legislation 94; tropes 147, 149, 161

colonialism 73, 76, 96, 110, 148, 176, 226, 228, 250; legacies of 81; neo-​ colonialism 40, 155; representation of 105 Colouredness 16, 48–​49, 52, 53 Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) 10, 21n6 Constitution, South African 93, 106, 112 corruption 12, 107, 243 cosmopolitanism 1, 5, 50, 57, 81, 169 Creative Writing: courses 18, 66, 192, 217, 224; discipline 189 crime fiction 3, 8, 9, 12, 16, 28–​44; see also detective culture/​cultural: assimilation 51; authenticity 52; capital 168; identity 52, 105; multicultural 50, 176; politics of 49 Dangor, Achmat 72 De Kock, Leon 8, 29, 30, 41, 67–​68, 73, 243; plot loss 10, 66; the seam 79 De Kok, Ingrid 68, 70 De Waal, Shaun 17, 107, 108 death 40, 66, 71, 77, 98, 99, 107, 111, 112, 113, 134, 139, 199; death-​drive 107 decoloniality 227, 228–​229; decolonisation 1; decolonising literature 231, 234, 238n6, 239n7; Decolonizing the Mind 228; decolonial reading 14, 16, 46; decolonial text 50 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 14 Democracy/​democratic 47, 66, 76, 106, 112, 186, 215, 233; democratisation of reading 229; genre 7; inclusivity 3; multiplicity 4, 10, 16; nationalism 105; promise 251; vision 4 denouement 104, 158 desire 18, 79, 107, 115, 139, 150–​153, 157–​160, 196; female 151, 154; heterosexual 111, 146, 148; language of 147, 162; lesbian 110; queer 98, 110; same-​sex 109, 115 detective: fiction 16, 28, 30–​38, 43; anti-​ 16, 28–​29, 31, 33–​35, 37–​38, 41–​43; metaphysical 33; novel 28, 30, 32; as reader 31; see also crime fiction Dhlomo, R. R. R. 63, 64

258 Index diaspora 51, 52, 53, 58, 106, 118; African 13, 16, 51, 125; intra-​African 13; postcolonial 50 digital 15, 20, 34, 69, 125, 226–​228, 237, 242, 244 dislocation 13, 14, 48, 50, 135, 228, 229 domesticity 55, 58, 90, 124, 132–​133, 223 drama 9, 20, 202, 214, 226, 235, 248, 249 Drum: era 7, 14, 115, 116, 243; and gender 210–​211; magazine 2, 8, 14, 17, 64, 89, 185, 210, 242, 245–​246 Du Bois, W.E.B. 98 Duiker, K. Sello 212, 247 Durban 76, 98, 129, 132, 134, 173, 175, 249; KwaMashu 249 dystopia 124, 169, 174, 176, 179, 180, 250; fiction 172 East Africa 110, 153, 155 editing 19, 184, 189, 190; black feminist praxis of 189; writer-​centric 19, 189 Edoro, Ainehi 145, 162n1 education 78, 178, 205, 214, 229, 231–​232; adult 228; Bantu 185–​186 embodiment 52, 55, 95, 105, 109, 110, 152 emigration 51, 64, 79, 180 Enlightenment 56, 58, 132, 228 entanglement 4, 19, 54, 81, 102, 129, 206 environment 44n5, 140n2; degradation of 178, 224; environmental disaster 172, 174–​175 ethics 5, 41, 43, 59, 67, 71, 79, 81, 95, 97, 124, 139 epiphany 58, 75, 77, 80, 111, 153 epistemologies 30, 34, 51, 57, 116, 207; Eurocentric 50, 228, 230 Eprile, Tony 16, 65, 67, 81; “The Interpreter for the Tribunal” 68–​73 erotic 80, 109–​110, 112, 131; fiction 3, 8, 12, 18, 145–​162, 186, 195–​196, 222 ethnicity 48, 50–​55, 58, 60n11, 60n12, 193 Eurocentrism 19, 50, 56, 228 everyday 12, 15, 20, 30, 92, 157–​159, 243, 244 exotic 56, 148, 151, 152, 157, 159, 160, 168, 186, 191; fantasy 111, 149, 151, 152; trope of exotic erotic 18, 147, 149–​150, 158 experimentation with form 6, 8, 14, 15, 20, 29, 34, 42, 105, 116, 145, 163n6,

207, 209, 214, 244, 253, 254; with history 139; with language 251 fable 70–​71, 72, 203, 204 family 114, 133, 189, 203, 232, 249; heteropatriarchal 11; lesbian 119n3; national 11; queer 98, 112 fantasy 104, 125, 128, 132, 137–​138, 147; epic 8, see also exotic fantasy father 133, 179, 249, 252; absent fathers 13, 243, 250 FeesMustFall 245 femicide 15, 124, 137, 250; see also gender violence femininity/​feminine 92, 130, 135, 211; agency 98, 127; body 90; monstrosity 124, 127, 155, 160; power 137, 139; rewritings 17; subjectivity 91, 117 feminism 93, 99, 127, 186, 189, 197; Black feminist thought 192, 232; feminist deconstruction 197; feminist theory 148 festivals: literary 9, 226, 234, 238, 238n6, 238–​239n7, 243, 248 flash fiction 3, 6, 8, 11, 16, 20n2, 63–​82, 117, 126, 228, 233, 234 forced removals 243, 249 Foucault 55 Frenkel, Ronit 1, 4, 6, 10, 51, 66 friendship 95, 108, 128, 146, 195, 221 futurity 1, 5, 17, 18, 96, 99, 107, 109, 113, 114, 125, 130, 131, 134, 139, 168–​181, 195, 206, 254 see also Afrofuturism Galgut, Damon 64 Gardiner, Sulette 76, 65 gaze 80, 134, 149, 150–​155, 159, 161; male 134, 189; power of 148, 158; reciprocal 152; sexualizing 149, 152 gay see homosexuality, lesbian, LGBTQI+​, queer gender 13, 15, 46, 47, 48, 92, 93, 95–​97, 102, 105, 106, 110, 115, 116, 127, 169, 211, 213, 221; fluidity 113; identity 9, 11, 12, 94, 189, 221; inequality 12; norms 3, 116, 118, 131; politics 17, 124 gender violence 108, 128, 243, see also femicide generation 11, 15, 49, 52, 67, 93, 179, 186, 210, 211, 243; intergenerational

Index  259 intertextual dialogue 15, 19, 202, 207, 213, 214, 215, 243 genre: classification 6, 18, 31; diversification of16; mixing of 18, 35, 117, 123, 124–​126, 138; self-​reflexivity of 33, 123 Germany 39, 42, 245 Ghana 227, 234 global North 5, 13, 40, 124 global South 42, 50 Gordimer, Nadine 8, 11, 13, 64, 79, 170, 171, 177, 187, 217, 243 Gqola, Pumla 2, 8, 110, 187 grand narrative 12, 66, 73, 186, 196 Gray, Stephen 5, 6, 9 Green, Michael Cawood 16, 65, 67, 73–​77, 81 grief 107, 111, 139 Habila, Helon 168, 169, 177, 253 hair 8, 14, 15, 150, 152, 160, 161; school hair policies 230–​232, 238n3 Harare 180 Hardy, Stacy 16, 65, 67; “Kisula” 77–​81 haunting/​hauntology 49, 50, 148, 223, 244; see also spectre/​spectrality Head, Bessie 2, 6, 64, 170, 187, 205, 214 healing 14, 69, 96, 130, 229, 232 Hemingway, Ernest 170 heteronormativity 11, 93, 95, 107, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 139, 145, 147, 152, 196, 197 heterosexuality 91, 95, 96, 102–​103, 104, 106, 108, 111, 114, 118, 133, 146, 160, 213; heterosexual desire 111, 146, 148 Hichens, Joanne 8, 9, 10, 18, 145, 163n8 Higgs, Colleen 65, 76 Higher education institutions 228; curriculum of English Department 205; teaching literature in 191–​193; writers’ experience at 207, 208 hijab 149, 150, 163n11 Hirson, Denis 5, 64 history 5, 49, 51, 75, 107, 138, 139, 145, 149; colonial 55, 71, 80, 148; cultural 93; fictional engagements with 56–​59, 123, 129, 132, 139, 151; historical progress 50, 94; historical erasure 145, 149; literary 1, 67, 81, 103, 115; national 50, 52, 73, 106; South African 6, 7, 76, 78, 112, 132 HIV/​AIDS 15, 114, 188, 189 HOLAAfrica! 8, 9, 163n8

home 11, 13, 54, 223–​224; unhomeliness 112, 223 homophobia 12, 93, 96, 104, 106, 111, 112 homosexuality 94, 95, 103, 104, 108, 110, 115, 119n5, 213; legality/​illegality 94 Hoosen, Mishka 11, 14 Horwitz, Allan Kolski 65 Hughes, Langston 8, 170 human: human/​non-​human 17, 123, 127–​128, 132, 134, 224–​225; dehumanisation 147, 149, 162; existence 98; rights 71, 76, 94, 99, 176; vulnerability 110 humanitarianism 153, 155, 156, 157, 161 humanity 57, 89, 96; humanism 90, 91 humour 9, 37, 92, 96, 146, 156, 180, 242 hustler 12, 244, 252 hybridity 5, 17, 18, 52, 123, 131, 139, 176; hybrid literary style 123; of minifictions 20n2; of short story genre 20n2; 124, 126, 138, 203 identity 2, 8, 31, 48, 55, 58, 79, 80, 81, 103, 112, 114, 222, 252; authorial 47; class 105; cultural 52; erotic 159; ethnic 54; gangster 76; gay 95, 106, 110; gender 9, 94, 131, 189, 221; politics 102; marginalised 48, 105, 106, 139; national 50; queer 11, 102, 107, 117; racial 48, 49, 173; sexual 93, 118; trans-​gender 11, 12; transnational 67 imperialism 110, 148, 161; cultural 56; economic 55 indigenous 97; cosmology 132; oral narrative forms 1, 170, 171, 205, 228; peoples 59n7; see also oral forms inequality 15; gender 12; racial 114, 118; structural 19, 66, 178, 223, 226, 229 inganekwane 1, 205, 206 inkanyamba 129 intermediality 15, 117 intersectionality 48, 90, 114, 116, 118 intertextuality 15, 16, 19, 35, 37, 44n5, 63, 81, 94, 115, 197, 202, 206–​208, 213–​215 see also generation intimacy 93, 95, 107, 109, 111, 115, 123, 134, 156, 243; emotional 108 intsomi 1, 204–​205, 206 intlwayelelo 130 irony 14, 50, 54, 57, 60n11, 71, 72, 76, 127, 194

260 Index Isaacson, Maureen 64, 141n9 isiXhosa 71 isiZulu 64, 71, 185 Jaladaa 227 (not italicised in original?) Jele, Cynthia 226 Jennings, Karen 9 Jeyifo, Biodun 5 Jobson, Liesl 65, 66, 77, 119n7 Johannesburg 8, 65, 79, 80, 91, 123, 134, 173, 179, 191, 219, 230, 244, 246, 252 Jordan, A. C. 170 Journalism/​journalist 76, 89, 98, 137, 179, 191, 211, 230, 232; journalistic fiction 242 Joyce, James 60n14, 171, 245 justice 69, 72; injustice 107, 139; restorative 70, 73; retributive 70, 73; social 94 Kalahari Review 15 Kani, John 91, 214 Kemal, Yashar 188 Kenya 94, 191, 248 Kgositsile, Keorapetse 228, 247 Khan, Shubnum 65 Khumalo, Fred 12, 14, 21n6 Kikamba Luyikumu, Simão 13, 14 Krog, Antjie 68, 70 Kruger, Loren 66, 91; “post-​anti-​ apartheid” 66 land 54, 63, 125, 178, 217; appropriation 224; empty 224; homeland 112, 238n2; land/​body metaphor 18, 147, 149, 155, 159; ownership 12; sexualisation of 158, 161 landscape 56, 217, 219, 224; literary 10, 46, 168, 171, 214, 231, 242 Langa, Mandla 64, 233 language 2, 38–​43, 53, 63, 73, 93, 116, 129, 161, 193, 206, 234; digital 15; everyday speech 20, 243, 244; in fiction 28–​29, 31–​33, 35, 65, 71, 116, 152, 153, 157, 208, 218–​219, 249, 250; play with 20, 31, 116, 244, 251; pre-​linguistic 56; speechlessness 180 lesbian 93, 95, 107, 110, 111; desire 110; eroticism 152; family 119n3; look 151; mother 114; writing 105, 106; see also homosexuality, LGBTQI+​; queer Lesotho 13, 134

Lewis, Desiree 145, 148, 149 LGBTQI+​ 3, 93, 94, 102, 106, 190 see also homosexuality, lesbian, queer liberalism 5, 76, 229, 230; liberals 64; complicity and 68; paternalist ethos and 229 liberation 71, 93; of the body 139; post-​ liberation 79; queer 106, 154; sexual 147, 156, 192; struggle 194 library 3, 226, 228–​229, 236, 237, 248; community 3, 226; facilities in townships 19, 226; school 185, 232, 226 liminality 53, 55, 57, 79; liminal postcoloniality 5; of the short story 5, 10, 16, 17, 21n3 literacy 19, 41, 226, 228, 230, 237 LongStorySHORT 19, 226–​237 Lorde, Audre 148 loss 90; literary trope of 12, 91, 107, 108, 139, 244; of a child 111; plot 10, 66 love 9, 12, 13, 18, 108, 113, 114, 116, 156, 185, 197, 208, 250; lesbian 111; interracial 111; parental 111; polyamorous 92; queer 112; story 81, 193 Maart, Rozena 145 mabaso, duduzile zamantungwa 65, 187 MacKenzie, Craig 1, 2, 4, 6, 10, 51, 66 Magona, Sindiwe 68 Mahala, Siphiwo 3, 12, 14, 15, 17, 93–​94, 197, 254n1; African Delights 14, 91, 212, 245, 246; Red Apple Dreams and Other Stories 15, 206–​207, 213, 214; “The Lost Suit” 91–​92, 212; “The Suit Continued” 19, 91–​93, 115, 206, 209–​213 Mahlangu, Songeziwe 14 Makeba, Miriam 234 Malatji, Reneilwe 12, 13 Mandela, Nelson 66, 189, 246 Marais, Sue 1, 2, 4, 49, 51, 55, 76, 105 marginality 14, 78, 81, 111, 152; figures and subjects in short fiction 8, 12, 18, 19, 127, 138, 189; queer 115; of short story form 1, 17, 102; social position 48, 54, 55, 57, 75 marginalisation 104–​106, 112, 152, 179, 196; in literary canons 1, 126, 227 Market Theatre 91, 248, 249 Marquard, Jean 1, 5, 64

Index  261 Martin and Xaba 8, 17, 18, 106, 145, 189, 190 masculinity 89, 92, 139, 210, 221; black 13; masculine body 90; Maseko, Bheki 4 Masheane, Napo 247 Mashigo, Mohale 12, 17–​18, 123–​139, 206, 215; Intruders 17, 123–​13, 206 Matlou, Joël 4 Matshoba, Mtutuzeli 170, 246 Matthews, James 15, 214 Mbao, Wamuwi 10, 17, 64, 92, 111–​112; “The Bath” 64, 111–​112 Mbembe, Achille 178, 228 Mda, Zakes 227 Medalie, David 5, 11, 17, 114 melancholy 107, 108, 139 memory 69, 72, 73, 108, 194, 198, 222, 243; childhood 203; collective 228 mental health 70, 109, 135, 138, 243, 249; see also altered states of consciousness metanarrative 51, 58, 178 metafiction 14, 33 meta-​text 35, 36 metonymy 7, 14, 68, 81, 172, 173, 174 Meyer, Deon 43, 74 Mgqolozana, Thando 227 Mhlongo, Niq 3, 8, 12, 15, 20, 21n6, 75, 78, 227, 228, 237, 242–​253; as anthologist 8, 12, 244; Affluenza 242, 243, 245, 249, 250, 252, 253; book marketing and selling 244, 248, 252; Soweto, under the Apricot Tree 21n6, 243, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 253 Mhlophe, Gcina 204, 215 microfiction 3, 21 Mignolo, Walter 55, 57, 228 migration 9, 13, 16, 50, 53, 58, 81, 180, 250–​251; refugee 13, 78, 79 miscegenation 49, 78 modernist aesthetics 1, 3, 126 modernist short story 8, 10, 11, 20, 66, 81, 181n3, 244 modernity 50, 66, 160 Modisane, Bloke 8, 246 Moffett, Helen 9, 145 Mohulatsi, Mapule 14 Moolman, Kobus 65, 80 Mopai, Keletso 12, 14 Morrison, Toni 52, 179 mother/​motherhood 8, 98, 112, 113, 114, 129, 133; Mother Africa trope 132, 244

Motsisi, Casey 64, 214, 245 Motsoeneng, Kabelo S. 12 Mozambique 9, 13, 94 Mpe, Phaswane 80, 212, 247, 253 Mphahlele, Es’kia 8, 169, 170, 171, 207, 233, 245, 246 Mqombothi, Lidudumalingani 12, 21n5 Mugo, Tiffany Kagure 15, 160, 161; “Coming Into Self-​Awareness” 152–​157, 158 Mulgrew, Nick 9, 65 Mulvey, Laura 147, 148, 154, 159, 160, 162 Munro, Brenna 103, 104, 106, 110, 116, 118, 146, 197; queer family romance 112 Murray, Sally Ann 11, 15, 17, 65, 135, 139, 151, 152, 197; “How to Carry On” 112–​113 music 76, 146, 234; as leitmotif 253; song 203, 234, 253 Mutloatse, Mothobi 63, 91, 214 misogyny 91, 92, 95, 97, 115, 131, 145, 148, 210; see also sexism mythology 90, 203, 204; African 125; aquatic 129, 131, 134; transcultural 127 Mzamane, Mbulelo 1, 205, 206–​207, 214 Mzobe, Sifizo 12 Namibia 9, 68 narrative voice: first-​person 76, 77, 92, 93, 97, 209; focalisation 31, 34, 50, 56, 57, 75, 76, 173, 175; omniscient narrator 50, 57; second-​person 13, 252–​253; unreliable narrator 209 nation/​national 48, 50, 97, 99, 105, 118, 173, 180, 196; allegory 11, 66; belonging 112; boundaries 105; culture 47, 117; exceptionalism 57, 106; family 11; history 50, 52, 73; identity 47, 50; literature/​canon 1, 28, 48, 126; multinational 50; narrative 5, 7, 51; reconciliation 66, 174, 176; teleology 4, 67, 81; tradition 47 nationalism 5, 7, 8, 10, 13, 17, 47, 49, 50, 58, 81, 105, 106, 145, 169, 172; cultural 170; democratic 105; denationalisation 3; ethno 16, 52, 54, 58; rainbow nation 66, 174 Ndebele, Njabulo 4, 15, 73, 170, 205, 208, 245; “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary” 67, 134, 157–​158, 188, 196

262 Index neoliberalism 66, 178 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 169 Nguni: cosmology 128; folklore 63, 123, 127; rock art 129; symbolism 130 Nigeria 106, 168, 233 Nkutha, Lindiwe 11, 12, 15, 145 Nongqawuse 130 nostalgia 52, 54 Ntshingila. Futhi 238 ocean/​oceanic 97, 129, 130, 132; Indian Ocean 173 Ogot, Grace 187 Okri, Ben 192 Okorafor, Nnedi 132, 140n5 Oliphant, Andries Walter 1, 4, 6, 10, 19, 202 Omotoso, Yewande 227, 233 Onuzo, Chibundu 227 oral: cultures 229; folktales 14; forms 1, 2, 8, 14, 16, 19, 202, 203, 204–​205, 215, 235, 243, 252; moral tale 203; orality 20, 170, 227; performance 227, 229, 251; storyteller 170; testimony 70; tradition 64, 170, 171; see also inganekwane, intsomi, tsomo ordinary 111, 112, 123, 191, 194, 195, 246, 251; lives 4, 199; Ndebele’s use of 4, 67, 73, 134, 147, 157–​160, 188, 196 Orford, Margie 28, 29, 30, 38, 43, 74, 75 Orientalism 56, 111, 151, 152, 160 Otherness 54, 55, 56, 57, 75, 76, 78, 81, 96, 102, 103, 104, 112, 114, 115, 118, 149, 151, 152, 156, 159, 160 palimpsest 53, 79, 197 pan-​African 3, 15, 17, 53, 58, 106, 132, 230, 233 paratext 9, 73 parody 33, 68, 108, 243 patriarchy/​patriarchal 90, 93, 146, 155, 156, 197, 210, 213, 250; heteropatriarchal 11, 17, 18, 99, 196; control 96; culture 210; discourse 145, 147; violence 15, 154, 252 Phillips, Jolyn 12 Pikoli, Phumlani 15 Plaatje, Sol 80 pleasure 8, 130, 139, 158, 159, 162, 179; female 157, 161; of reading 229; sexual 11, 12, 18, 147, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 191, 192 podcast 20, 226, 235, 237, 238

poetry 15, 21n2, 65, 68, 146, 184, 200, 203, 218–219, 247 political commitment 8, 113, 243 polyphony 15, 16, 32, 49, 50, 58, 71 popular 3; anthology 8; culture 234; literature 1, 7, 9, 11, 29, 30, 43, 117, 126, 146, 245; magazine 18, 20n1; music 146; readership 9, 46; reception 18; sub-​genres 2 pornography 148, 149 post-​transitional literature 2, 4, 10, 16, 28, 67 postapartheid: aesthetic 9, 67; art 67; disillusionment 3, 10; idea of 2; legacy 73; literature 29, 33, 51, 64, 66, 68, 79, 171, 193; narrative of reconciliation 7 postcard fiction 3, 20n2, 117 postcolonial: condition 49; nationalism 106; Bildungsroman 176 postcoloniality: interstitial or liminal 5; of normativity and proleptic designation 5 postcolony 40, 41 postmodern 20n2, 35, 37, 39, 43, 80, 171, 176 poverty 55, 75, 77, 89, 179, 229, 231; porn 18, 177 Pratt, Mary Louise 1, 105 precarity 13, 53, 107, 220 prizes 10, 59n1, 168, 217, 244, 247; BBC International Short Story Competition 217; Caine Prize 3, 9, 18, 168–​171, 173, 177, 180, 185, 192, 217, 234, 243, 253; Commonwealth Short Story Prize 9; Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award 10, 247 protest literature 4, 67, 157, 243 publishing 15, 19, 124, 125, 169, 170, 218, 226, 230, 244; digital 15, 140n6, 227; editorial process 18, 19, 189–​190; industry 146, 168; writers’ publishing experience 246–​247 queer: activism 105; Queer Africa 1 and 2: 17, 18, 145, 147, 189; bodies 117, 119, 147, 161; child 111, 112; coming out 96, 98; coming-​out narrative 106; criticism 116, 118; erotica 110, 145–​162; failure 111, 116; family 98, 112, 114; futurity 109; genealogies 17, 99; identities 11, 102, 105, 107, 124; literature 8, 12, 18, 99; marriage 99, 196; ordinariness 12, 107; reading 107, 118; sexuality 18, 104, 106, 108, 147; short stories 9, 11, 18,

Index  263 103–​119; sociality 109, 113; temporality 17, 89–​99, 107, 113, 115, 196, 197; theory 17, 103, 118; transgression 107, 139; women of colour 111, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162 quotidian 107, 117, 123, 124, 134 race/​racial 71, 78, 73; interracial relations 67, 78, 81, 111, 174; ambiguity 123, 124; racial identity 48, 53, 53; 173; racial inequality 114, 118; intersections 46, 47, 48, 90, 94, 99, 105, 116, 221; multiracial 89, 173; oppression 8, 89, 96, 214, 229; stereotypes 40, 89 racism 12, 64, 89, 102, 117, 186, 189, 227, 243, 245, 248, 250 radio 189, 194, 203, 230, 243 rape 39, 108; corrective rape 111 rewriting 15, 17, 19, 57, 69, 115, 197; see also revision reading: against the grain 19, 29, 35; anti-​reading 34, 35, 37, 42; Black reading cultures 226, 228, 236; childhood 18, 184–​185, 198, 232; close reading 67, 68; and community 20, 228–​229, 244; decolonial 14, 16, 46; digital 227; implied reader 63, 81; performance of 227, 235; practice 18, 19, 43, 58, 185–​186; project 19, 226–​238; Reader’s Digest 35, 36, 63, 185, 198; readership 9, 46, 47, 149, 170, 234, 248; re-​reading 17, 51 realism 6, 7, 8, 12, 16, 17, 21n4, 104, 112, 116, 123, 124, 125, 126, 132, 243; magical 128 religion 12, 89–​90; Christianity 72, 134; Islam 160, 163n11 reproduction 114; reproductive futurism 95, 96, 108 revision: literary 17, 93, 95; see also rewriting Rich, Adrienne 17, 93, 198 romance 78, 108, 110; hetero 110, 152; queer 110, 112 Rose-​Innes, Henrietta 3, 11, 18, 19, 68, 168, 217–​225, 251; “Poison” 169, 172–​176 rural 14, 19, 186, 188, 189, 226, 254 Salafranca, Arja 106 San 64, 124; cosmology 127, 139; mermaid 128, 141n12; rock art 127

sangoma 96, 97 satire 9, 13, 32, 39, 42, 43, 51, 71, 79, 92, 136, 243, 244 Schimke, Karen 8, 18, 109, 145, 148 schools 18, 19, 52, 80, 133, 184, 185, 186, 195, 204, 208, 210, 229, 232, 237, 245, 248, 252; libraries 185; private 78; Pretoria High School for Girls 230–​231, 238n3; public; 226 Schreiner, Olive 248 science fiction 8, 124, 126, 128, 139, 139n1, 140n6, 179 Scotland 16, 46–​51, 170, 217; Scottish romance 55; Scottish working class 55 self-​help books/​literature 236 Senegal 187 Senne, Tshegofatso 12 Serote, Mongane Wally 247 Setswana 234 sex: cross-​racial 67, 81; non-​normative 112; scenes in literature 146–​147, 149, 153, 158, 161, 196; “Sex Wars” 148; work 12, 14 sexism 91, 92, 102, 148, 186, 197, see also misogyny sexuality/​sexual 8, 9, 15, 90, 97, 102, 106, 109, 116–​118, 128, 221; African 145, 148, 155, 169; bisexuality 95, 96, 98, 99; desire 151, 152; hypersexualisation 146, 148–​149; liberation 147, 192; non-​normative 17, 103, 105, 106, 112; orientation 94, 95, 112, 115, 117, 151, 189; pleasure 11, 12, 18, 92, 149, 152–​157, 191, 192; polyamory 92, 96, 99; queer 3, 17, 104, 106; same-​sex 12, 96, 149, 150, 158; as spectacle 147–​161; women’s 18, 145–​162; see also heterosexuality; homosexuality shame 49, 139 Shona 129 short story: as minor form; 103, 104, 105, 119, 146; niche genre 146, 171; as vehicle for social critique 14, 137, 171, 173, 250; characteristics of the: adaptability 11, 105, 118, 126, 176, 194, 214; ambiguity 3, 6, 20n1, 38, 58, 71, 107, 146; brevity 7, 11, 18, 20n2, 50, 64, 66, 68, 70, 71, 79, 89, 114, 146, 158, 163n6, 171, 176, 202, 203, 218, 244; compression 16, 19, 63–​82, 217, 219; concentrated form 8, 14, 67, 80, 127, 217; controversial subject

264 Index matters 18, 103, 104, 105, 189; ellipsis 7, 14, 52, 66, 244; fragmentation 1, 10, 11, 14, 16, 19, 20, 20n2, 34, 35, 42, 47, 66, 104, 124, 139, 169, 218, 244, 251–​252; hybridity 17, 20n2, 126, 203; immediacy 7, 8, 202, 233; implication 7, 10, 11, 63, 66–​67, 76, 78, 81, 244, 251; in medias res opening 51, 77, 78, 244; indeterminacy 10, 11, 58, 67, 117; intensity 7, 19, 42, 104, 107, 127, 147, 217; irresolution 7, 10, 15, 16, 37, 38, 66, 72, 74, 81, 250; length 15, 63, 65, 71, 219, 250, 251; non-​linear structure 35, 51, 58, 102, 139; reading in one sitting 202–​203; surprise 7, 66, 193; technical complexity 20n1; 203; tight narrative structure 244, 250; see also experimentation short story cycle/​sequence 5, 12, 13, 49, 219 Short Story Day Africa 9 Short.Sharp.Stories 9, 10, 185 short short 3, 20n2, 63, 65, 73, 117, 233 Sibiya, Nakanjani G. 14, 15 Siluma, Michael 4 Simon, Barney 91, 214 slavery 39, 55 slum/​squatter settlements 169, 177, 178, 179, 180, 232 social media 20, 227, 236, 242, 244, 246; Facebook 227, 228, 236; Twitter 68, 227; WhatsApp 15, 237 Sole, Kelwyn 65, 76, 77, 79 solidarity 13, 40, 53, 55, 98, 124, 222 Sophiatown 89, 95, 96, 98, 99, 115, 196, 197, 209, 213, 214 Sotho 1, 128, 205, 206 cosmology South African exceptionalism 48, 57, 106 Soweto: 123, 206, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253 space/​spatiality 50, 58, 79, 98, 108, 124, 152, 173, 223, 224, 227, 229, 250; chronotope 124; spatiotemporal 17, 56, 58, 129, 134; urban 81, 178–​179, 224, 244 spectacle 18, 40, 41, 70, 132, 133, 137, 147–​150, 152–​162, 177, 179, 186, 188, 191, 196, 243 spectacular 4, 12, 13, 67, 73, 111, 115, 134, 147–​162, 196, see also Ndebele, Njabulo spectre/​spectrality 50, 97, 114, 223, 244 speculative fiction 3, 8, 17, 104, 123–​139

spirituality 58, 130, 195, 254 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 40 Staffrider 2, 8, 243, 246 Steinberg, Johnny 79 Stobie, Cheryl 17, 95, 106, 112, 116, 117, 196, 200 storytelling 14, 15, 170, 180, 192, 202–​206, 215, 235, 238n7, 251 student protests, see FessMustFall Somalia 79 subaltern 40, 54, 55, 57, 79 subjectivity 8, 30, 50, 51, 58, 90, 91, 94, 97, 108, 117, 148, 197 Sudan 39, 168 sudden fiction 20n2, 64 suicide 12, 89, 92, 93, 96, 111, 211, 212, 249 surrealism 42, 43 Swahili 129 Swaziland 96, 207, 213, 248 Szczurek, Karina M 8, 9, 65, 73 Tanzania 110, 248 teaching 80, 195, 210, 212; of short stories 20, 192–​193, 244, 248 temporality/​temporal 6, 35, 51, 104, 116, 128, 135, 139; disjuncture 16; entanglements 19, 81; queer 17, 89–​99, 107, 196; see also space/​ spatiotemporal, short story The Johannesburg Review of Books 15 Themba, Can 6, 205, 207, 242, 243, 245, 254n1; “The Suit” 15, 17, 19, 89–​99, 115, 193, 196–​197, 199, 206, 208–​214 Titlestad, Michael 1, 10, 11, 33, 34, 43, 65, 66, 124, 126, 139, 171, 185 Tlali, Miriam 13, 125, 206; “Devil at a Dead End” 134–​135, 138 township 77, 200n1, 210, 226, 232, 236, 252; language 249; life 12; in literature 186, 208, 246; schools 19, 231; setting voices 8, 243 Transatlantic: pan-​Africanist solidarity 53; slavery 55; spirit of Mami Wata 132 transgender 11, 12, 93 transition: socio-​political 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 28, 43, 66, 172, 173, 174, 175, 243, 253 translation 38, 39, 41, 64, 71, 73, 76, 91, 217, 129, 190, 217, 243 transnationalism 8, 42, 49, 50, 51, 54, 57, 67, 80, 99, 105, 110, 178;

Index  265 cosmopolitanism 1, 81; migration 12, 13, 81 trans-​species 124; human-​animal affinities 128; inter-​species 131 trauma 38–​42, 72, 107, 108, 111, 115, 127, 135, 139, 156, 243; second-​order trauma 70 Trump, Martin 5, 64 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 37, 67, 68–​73, 76, 81 Tshuma, Novuyo Rosa 13 Tshwane/​Pretoria 3, 226, 230, 231 tsomo 1, 205, 206 Tutu, Desmond 70, 71 Uganda 39, 40, 106, 110, 163n7, 233, 234 Umezurike, Uche Peter 227, 238 university 18, 78, 108, 170, 205, 207, 253; of Cape Town 192; Fort Hare 205, 254n1; students 46, 51, 245; teaching of short stories at 191–​194; Wits 208 urban space/​urbanity 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 30, 50, 67, 79, 81, 137, 168–​181, 186, 206, 223, 224, 244; flânerie 30; flâneur 30, 79 utopia 123, 124, 139, 154, 156, 250 van Wyk, Chris 6, 71, 246; “Relatives” 64 Vandermerwe, Meg 12 Vasani, Dolar 17, 153, 161, 163n7; “All Covered Up” 109–​110, 147, 149–​152 veil 149–​152, 163n11 violence 13, 14, 16, 28–​30, 33, 37–​38, 42, 66, 75, 77, 105, 116, 117, 136, 137, 156, 180, 223, 243; discursive 57; gender 108, 115, 128, 137, 148, 154, 197, 243; against lesbians 111; language of 28, 41; sexual 127, 134–​135, 252; structural 40, 91; slow 113, 135 Vladislavić, Ivan 2, 11, 16, 28–​43, 65, 219; 101 Detectives 28–​43; Portrait

with Keys 42, 65, 79; The Loss Library 34, 42, 65 vulnerability 75, 76, 108, 113, 129, 135, 138 Wainaina, Binyavanga 253 Wanner, Zukiswa 15, 17, 93, 197, 214, 227, 248; “The Dress that Fed the Suit” 91, 92, 94, 211, 212, 213 water 9, 129, 131–​134, 141n12, 141n15, 175, 224; folkloric valence of 130; see also aquatic whiteness 52, 75, 176; and privilege 78, 79, 176, 230; and supremacy 125, 162n2, 230 Wicomb, Zoë 2, 11, 16, 46-​59, 64; literary criticism on 46–​49; “Raising the Tone” 49–​59 women: in anti-​apartheid struggle 76; objectification of 18, 147, 149, 156, 158, 159; as sexual object 148; solidarity between 98, 222; stereotypes of 90–​92; see also sexuality, gender violence women writers: 110, 116, 162, 221-​222; anthologies 6, 18, 65, 66, 109, 145, 146, 186, 195; and Drum 211; in the diaspora 53 Wright, Richard 8, 170 writing workshop 6, 65, 66, 207, 248, 253 Xaba, Makhosazana 3, 8, 9, 15, 17, 18, 106, 116, 146, 157, 158, 184–​200; “Behind ‘The Suit” 89–​99, 212–​213; “The Suit Continued: The Other Side” 89–​99, 115, 212–​214 xenophobia 12, 13, 131, 233, 251 Zadok, Rachel 9 Zambia 187, 248 Zanzibar 40, 110, 149–​151 Zimbabwe 9, 13, 54, 60n9, 106, 168, 169, 172, 176, 180, 248, 250