That Half-Jammed Door

Editorial #10
John Mateer 

More than twenty years ago, I felt I was pushing against a closed door, trying to interest an Australian audience in South African writing. Having found the anthology The Lava of This Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996 at a bookshop in Melbourne, I'd felt a jolt of reconnection with the nation's literature. Seen from the vantage point of the present, almost all anthologies up until then had borne, despite the ambitions of their compilers, aspects of the divisions of their times. That anthology, more than Penguin's Book of Southern African Verse, was a powerful first taste of what a post-Apartheid literary scene could look like.

            But that is only one part of the story – there had long been ventures, such as the journal Staffrider and book publisher Ravan Press and, several decades before, the extraordinary Drum Magazine, that had, as effectively as was possible in their times, circulated a wide range of South African writing. Many of them had to survive censorship and attacks – in one case, a bombing – from the Afrikaner Nationalist government. It seems to me that it is publications of that particular kind of independent, small-press tradition that have come to the fore in the past two decades. It is thanks to their publishers' sense of a new, developing audience, many of whom came to adulthood in the decades after the election of Nelson Mandela, that we have the writers I am happy to present here in Portside Review.

            Today's Australian audience, unlike its counterpart in the late 1990s, whom I tried and failed to interest in post-Sharpville and contemporary South African, may be now better equipped to understand a good number of the political and economic tensions that made pre-1994 South Africa notorious. After the global rise to prominence of Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter and the various current decolonization movements, it is obvious that much of the world's economies are based on inequality and exploitation, that much of the world is being ruined by extractive industries, and that there now needs to be a radical rethink of the nature of our cultures. The ghouls who seemed to only haunt places like South Africa can now be openly acknowledged to have been active behind the closed doors of other parts of the world too.

Yet in another positive way, it seems to me that the possibilities that South Africans today, foremost among them the new generation, are inventing for themselves as new set of cultural dynamics may exemplify the best of current global experience and its futures. In this it is hard not to be optimistic about the future, sharing the view of the Cameroonian philosopher of global renown, Achille Mbembe, who not incidentally, is based in South Africa.

            In this selection for Portside Review I see an inevitable, particularly South African, cultural hybridity in most of the work. There is the intense performativity of the poems of Mboneni Ike Muila and Isabella Motadinyane. What, after all, could be more hybrid than iscamtho, a creole combining many South African languages? And there is the stylistic and thematic synthesis found in the work of the poet and Classics scholar Sihle Ntuli and in the — very different — Saale Idrees Baamjee, whose poems reveal an insightful intimacy with Islam. The same sort of complex engagement is true of Maneo Mohale's bold sequence “Semana Santa”. Kyle Allan's long poem sequence; Ayanda Billie's short, visually, and emotionally powerful powers; and Sarah Lubala's and Mangaliso Buzani's poems, are each in the South African context and reminiscent of the strange Wopko Jensma. They retain the lineage of South African writing, which evidences the continuing presence of poetics that owe a debt to Bertold Brecht and the writing of the early 20th century radical Left and to their own influence on later writers from what is now termed the Global South. The South African poets' strong, simplified language belies a complexity of emotion and politics well suited to the realities of their country today.

            In the midst of enmeshing of cultures emerges, equally atavistic and assertive, aspects of persistent and specifically African traditions: Siphiwe Ka Ngwenya in his tribute to Isabella Motadinyane, draws on a Zulu poetics. Athambile Masola Xhosa poems present those readers who may know nothing of a language with lyricism that parallels European lyric poems that are vivid, distinctive and grounded in Africa.

           Although it is the poets who, as always, experiment the most with their languages, it is the prose writers in this issue who provide readers with a good sense of the everyday paradoxes and tensions of life in a nation where symbolism, politics, and subjectivity and their economic effects are sometimes brutally apparent. David Mann, Chloë Reid, Ashraf Jamal, Nick Mulgrew, and Jarred Thompson each illustrate how South Africans are conscious of their own individual circumstances vis-a-vis others within the nation. In their fiction the flux of the everyday carries with it both ethical concerns and an awareness of how those concerns can inflect their character's self-perceptions and emotions. In his poem, Mulgrew subtly compounds these insights with his allusion to Douglas Livingston, a much appreciated Durban poet of a previous generation.

            In contrast, Keletso Mopai's story and Lindiwe Nkutha's surprising essay on hauntings and short-fiction — the latter written for an important festival in Durbanemphasise — at least to me, that there is much to be learnt from simply going deeper into storytelling itself, the nuances of an individual's own, rich experience. I feel that Dimakatso Sedite's poems are in this spirit, too.

            As is sometimes the case with projects like this, certain works have emerged that are so much larger, conceptually and on the page, than could have been anticipated. Mxolisi Nyezwa's “Bhlawa's Inconsolable Spirits”, an extended text, excerpted here from a book of the same title, which is both prose and poetry, and can be read as an autobiography which is a profound account of the community and history of the township of New Brighton. Allan Kolski Horwitz's literally epic, 700 page unpublished novel, represented here by its first three chapters, is an insight into South Africa's past and present, an ambitious work that, when read whole, would be a world of its own. It is in the tradition of the Gorges Perec's Life, A Users Manual and the Egyptian Alaa-al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building.

            I imagine the reader could easily be drawn into reading these chapters of Horowitz's novel and think they dramatise scenes from the photographs of Mark Lewis. Lewis' work, made in collaboration with the scholar Tanya Zack, is a beautiful parallel to the various themes of several of the included writers' works. Selected from their vivid, sell-out book Wake Up, this is Joburg!, the pictures, indeed, speak their own thousands of words. Like all the texts of this issue of Portside Review, these images reveal just how lively and surprising, diverse and unsettling South Africa can be. Especially Joburg, some might say.

            If Lewis' photographs represent South Africa's present, the Maputo-born, one-time Cape Town resident Angela Ferreira's sculptural homage to the late poet Ingrid Jonker is a melancholic reminder of the many paradoxes of the nation's past. Jonker, feted as one of the greatest lyric poets of her culture, yet sadly largely remembered for having drowned herself in the sea, was the author of a key Apartheid Era protest poem written in Afrikaans, “Die Kinds is Nie Dood Nie/The Child is Not Dead”. That poem was read by Nelson Mandela to the Afrikaners remaining in parliament on his first day as president, as his own poetic statement. This literary act is important to bear in mind when contemplating Ferreira's project.

            In curating this issue of the magazine, I have often returned to thinking of when, all those years ago, I had attempted to gain an Australian audience for South African writing. Despite the general incomprehension it met with, I did have some minor successes: I presented the work of several poets at a few universities and conferences, and I managed to have some poems by the late Tatamkhulu Afrika published in the prominent – now firmly resurrected – magazine HEAT.

            Eventually, strangely, it was thanks to the long defunct US online magazine Slope that I was to publish some more South African writers. In an African supplement I included several South African figures, among them the great Zulu poet Muzisi Kunene and the chronicler Antjie Krog, alongside the Sudanese poet-anthropologist Taban Lo Liyong and the Nigerian scholar Remi Raji. Now, with this issue of Portside Review, I am happy to say that I have been able to achieve something like what I originally intended, to open that half-jammed door.

            Although some ghosts or ghouls may slip past, please, dear Reader, push through and enter, and enjoy!

Thank you to everyone at Portside Review and Centre for Stories, all the contributors, and to the publishers who helped me contact them, especially Nick Mulgrew (Uhlanga), Robert Berold (Deep South) and Allan Kolski Horwitz (Botsotso).

This issue of Portside Review is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Australian Government and Creative Australia (formerly Australia Council for the Arts).