For instance, most societies/cultures in sub-Saharan Africa have what is now called ‘fantasy’ woven into some of their oral genres, especially oral narratives. In SA, one can point immediately to iintsomi (X) and izinganekwane (Z) and their equivalents in other languages. If one looks at the collections of these stories – A.C. Jordan, Harold Scheub, stretching back all the way to Callaway’s 1868 collection – there must be a wealth of ideas and material for aspirant fantasy writers.

It strikes me local writers could make more use of these as background and incident: sure, there are zombies in some of these, but it seems to me that we’re still tending to be stuck on European models … what about zims, or those river monsters, or the guys with slimy warts, or that snake with feathers on its head? One can surely create modern urban equivalents of these….Dugmore Boetie’s ‘Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost’ , from the 60s, e.g. in essence mixes fantasy with politics and a bildungsroman, very successfully; but it’s practically unknown.

There are some examples of the modern use of the oral fantasy/narrative tradition that have come out of Nigeria that I know about, as long ago as the 1950s – the translations of D.O.Fagunwa, and of course Amos Tutuola. But we don’t seem to have much of this (I am not counting the cute ethnically-bound ‘Tales from the xyz’ that are part of the colonial legacy!).

It’s harder to see how science fiction would work – most of the stories I know, such as ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ by the Congolese writer Dongala and our own story ‘Forced Landing’ , really use tropes of fantasy only to make fairly simple political points, I think.   But there must be ways. I can think of novels of ‘future projection’ … Visser argued that ‘To Every Birth Its Blood’ was one such, and there were a whole bunch of novels written in the 1940s (both pro- and anti-) which asked the question, ‘what will happen if apartheid triumphs’? – Sowden, Keppel-Jones are so on. But our reality of polluted water, shopping malls (SL Grey?), technocratic power and so on MUST mean there’s a lot possible, done for serious purposes rather than just entertainment.

What has this got to do with literature? Well, his parents were perturbed when he told them he wanted to dedicate his life to music, so they made him do an Eng lit degree first, to have ‘something to fall back on’ (?!?). This has had the result that he keeps turning out, among his other work (his concerti and string quartets are especially fine), numerous settings of English poetry to music: including just about the whole of the US modern canon.  There are settings of Frost, Williams, Ashbery, Moore, Bishop, Lowell, Stevens, Zukofsky, Pound, Hollander, Tate, Cummings, Dickinson; as well as Ungaretti, Baudelaire, Quasimodo, Montale; as well as Shakespeare, Herrick, etc.

At least some of these are  well worth the trouble of seeking out.

He’s also a cheering model; a model of a state of mind, perhaps represented best in the utterance of the ‘old man mad about painting’, the ukiyo-e painter Hokusai (late 18th – early 19th century) -

“Although from about fifty I have often published my pictorial works, before the seventieth year none is worthy. At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. Consequently when I am eighty I’ll have made more progress. At ninety I’ll have penetrated the mystery of things. At a hundred I shall have reached something marvellous, but when I am a hundred and ten everything I do, the smallest dot, will be alive.”

- Flaubert ‘A Sentimental Education’ (1869)

- Balzac;  ’The Splendours and Miseries of Courtesans’  (aka ‘A Harlot High and Low’ )     (1847)

The link address is very long, but there’s a very good interview conducted by Kate Waldman in The Paris Review last year, that is easily accessible. (On 2 March 2011 – ‘Tonight No Poetry Will Serve’).

“The split in our language between ‘political’ and ‘personal’ has, I think, been a trap. When I was younger, I was undoubtedly caught in that trap – like many women, many poets – as a mode of conceiving experience.” – AR

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIR5ps8usuo&feature=related

“…poetry comes from a place that no one commands, that no one conquers…”

“As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”

http://www.warscapes.com/home

IMO Kanengoni- and Samupindi’s novels are the pre-2000 works which help most in explaining the problems and degeneration of the ruling party.

- the re-emergence of political rap. There’s been things on the go in SA for a year or so, like Ewok, Heeger, Cmde Fatso etc … but have only recently come across people like Akala, Sole, Immortal Technique overseas. Wow.

- Jose Camilo Cela’s novel ‘San Camilo, 1936′. Explodes the ideology that has underpinned the notion of the ‘ordinary/everyday’ in SA. What if the ‘everyday’ is happening in the last few days before a war?

- if the ‘sublime’ still refers to art that leaves an afterburn of awe and horripilation, plus a feeling that there’s something important going on that you can’t quite put your finger on, then the novels of Cees Nooteboom. Wildly uneven, but try ‘The Following Story’, ‘Lost Paradise’ etc.

- the critical debates about ‘transnational poetry’. especially the seminal work of Jahan Ramazani.

- and possibly the most interesting poem from a South African this year:

http://newpoetries.blogspot.com/2011/09/don-share-on-kate-kilaleas-henneckers.html

‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ is creating discussion online: it’s such a pity for the South African poetry scene that Kilalea has moved to London.

- Oodles of popular social and natural histories: Mack’s ‘The Sea: A Cultural History’; Rediker’s ‘The Slave Ship: A Human History’; Federici’s ‘Caliban and the Witch’; Hoare’s ‘Leviathan; or, the Whale’; Safina’s ‘Eye of the Albatross’. (The scientist Safina writes prose that would put many a fiction prose stylist to shame. The only person, other than Neruda in his poetry, who has ever remotely been able to describe the flight of the albatross).

- Heiner Goebbels. Don’t know how to describe him: jazz musician? performance artist? classical composer? transcriber? Uses lots of poetry – Muller, Stein, Eliot, Poe and the like in his work.

- finally, music critics who write about issues of importance to literature, or performers who say things useful esp. to poets. Still, and always, new things to learn from the conceptual experiments of Per Norgard. – ‘tone lakes’, indeed!

Try http://www.pernoergaard.dk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grj_HR715SQ&feature=related

This bewilderment can only be the result of everyone relaxing their vigilance after 1994, assuming we were now a ‘normal’ society that only required a few things to be happy – BEE, poverty alleviation, various forms of developmentalism, etc. So long as everyone helped out.

However. We were never a normal society, and the kleptocracy that is the Ruling Party has simply taken the path of one of the trends already visible in the 1960s, that could have been noticed if we hadn’t all got stars in our eyes (‘we are the rainbow nation of God’, indeed!).

Ben jamin Zephaniah once commented to me that, in his travels here after 1990, he couldn’t find a single person who had ever supported apartheid. Give it a few years, and there will not be a left-liberal left who has ever, ever supported the ANC. Just watch.

My question is: what does this mean for the future direction of SA creative literature? Perhaps the big publishers, and too many writers, have jumped a little too quickly into the non-political, the commercial, the entertainment industry – at the expense of other requirements now starkly apparent again.

For starters, how about writers giving back all those awards given to them by the same people who are now pushing the Media Bill?