We don’t share many unifying philosophies as a country, but one thing all South Africans can probably identify with is the scepticism with which we understand the slippery nature of that concept known as truth. Fiction, nonfiction … in South Africa today, yesterday, and very probably tomorrow, there’s always been a slippage between those two theoretically distinct categories.
The two editors of The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction, an anthology of some of the brilliant nonfiction published since the end of apartheid, know something about the craft themselves.
Sean Christie is the author of a book that, in a small way — and I apologise for the cliché, which is even more jarring considering the quality of writing I’m reviewing here — changed my life. As a Capetonian, I imagined I knew a city that my family has lived in for multiple generations. However, Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard: Life Among the Stowaways, which is about the Tanzanians living under the Nelson Mandela Boulevard flyover in Cape Town, taught me the twin virtues of humility and how to look at a world I’d stopped noticing.
Christie’s fellow editor, Hedley Twidle, wrote “To Spite His Face: What happened to Cecil Rhodes’s nose?”. This is one of the greatest South African nonfiction essays you’ll ever read, and that includes the excellent examples in The Interpreters. Seek out these two works, I urge you.
The title, The Interpreters, is of course a deliberate intervention to make the life of reviewers easier. So thank you. Of course we are going to start rabbiting on about how fiction and nonfiction are both ways of interpreting the worlds around and inside us, and that the ultimate choice of appellation is going to depend on the reader’s relationship to their idea of the real.
Or to the actual, as Twidle described it at the book’s launch at that refuge for book lovers, The Book Lounge in Roeland Street. At that event, I was reminded that just up the road is the Western Cape Archives, the site of a former prison where — family legend has it — one of my relatives (his surname wasn’t Roper) was a hangman in the 1930s. Is that true? I don’t know, I’ve never had the heart to check. A simple search reveals that, before it closed in 1977, the last executioner was one Solomon Ngobeni, and I am sure that therein hangs a nonfiction tale waiting to be imagined.
That anecdote was intended to highlight the glissando that is the difference between fiction and nonfiction — if there is a difference. In many languages — and I am indebted to a Guardian article for this information — the fissure between fiction and nonfiction is mysterious. In Bosnian, according to writer Aleksandar Hemon, “there are no words for fiction and nonfiction, or the distinction thereof. This is not to say that there is no truth or untruth. It’s just that a literary text is not defined by its relation to truth or imagination.”
The term nonfiction shares a dissonance with the apartheid term “non-European”. Whites in South Africa were not European, which makes the via negativa of the racial classification non-European an absurdity, and the negation a false one. In a way, that holds true for the fiction/nonfiction dichotomy as well.
Which brings us back to The Interpreters. In his introduction, Twidle says: “Collected here is the work in prose of 37 authors, all of it writing (also some drawing: comics and graphic nonfiction) concerned with actual people, places and events. Actual rather than real, since a character in a novel might be powerfully real for a reader, even when invented or imaginary.”
There are no facts, wrote Nietzsche, only interpretations. There is always a set of choices, absences and emphases
— Hedley Twidle
The Interpreters takes its title from one of its essays, a piece by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele, described as being about “simultaneous interpretation as used during the Truth & Reconciliation Commission hearings, between April 1996 and June 1998. Years later, those who worked as interpreters speak in matter-of-fact ways about the task of rendering multilingual hearings — involving victims, perpetrators, grieving families — across different languages in real time.”
This will strike you as an invitation to consider the relationship between the authors and their subject matter, and perhaps even more interestingly, their subjects. This is not an insight on my part. Twidle steers us firmly towards this in his introduction. “There are no facts, wrote Nietzsche, only interpretations. There is always a set of choices, absences and emphases (even in the most apparently ‘straight’ reporting); there is always the work (especially in a place like South Africa) of translation — literal, cultural, metaphorical. The writers collected here have taken up this task of absorbing, shaping and interpreting the overwhelming complexity of our world for the reader — and trusting that reader more than most writing does.”
These writers are among the who’s who of great South African authors, and their work is the what’s what of the stories clamouring to be told about our country. The publishers list the subject matter as ranging from “the underworld of zama zama gold miners to the tragicomic closure of a Cape Town zoo, from stick fighting to punk rock, game lodges to fruit farms, cricket pitches to mermaids”.
I’ll truncate their authors list, but it includes JM Coetzee, Kimon de Greef (whose definitive account of perlemoen poaching in the Cape, Poacher: Confessions from the Abalone Underworld, I highly recommend), William Dicey, Alexandra Dodd, that genius of music writing Bongani Madondo, Rian Malan, Percy Zvomuya, Zanele Mji, Mogorosi Motshumi, Mark Gevisser, Kwanele Sosibo, Jonny Steinberg and many more.
Oh, and Niren Tolsi, whose contribution, “Salem”, looks at issues of land, dispossession and fractured communities through the prism of cricket, and is also included in his just published book, Writing Around the Wicket: Race, Class and History in South African Cricket. I have yet to read the book, but — it’s Tolsi, go and buy it. “Salem” ends with this sentence: “What is shared unequally — histories, land, violence, hierarchies, societies — will always divide.”
The Interpreters is a marvellous vehicle for sharing perspectives, experiences and imaginations, and pushing back against that division. The stories it anthologises all had many different origins, and many different editors. Twidle alluded to this when answering a question from moderator Bongani Kona about the ethical lines that many of the writers tread when trying to present their subject matter responsibly. Much of that work, he said, has already been done by the commissioning editors.
But are those editors still out there, and especially in our local media environment? “Compiling an anthology like this takes you into a history of where innovative nonfiction has been able to find a home over the years: notably the Mail & Guardian and the shape-shifting pan-African gazette Chimurenga,” Twidle writes.
This week, the rumour is that the Mail & Guardian is shedding more staff, and unable to pay salaries in full. Perhaps ironically, included in The Interpreters is “Clash of the Booker Titans”, an essay by the M&G’s founding editor, Anton Harber, about the furore around Salman Rushdie’s attendance at the 1988 Weekly Mail Book Fair, and the attempts by the apartheid government to shut down the newspaper. It includes an appeal for what we would now call crowdfunding. “Don’t let us go quietly! Carry on reading us. Carry on subscribing. Make a fuss. WAIL, DAMMIT!” If only that sort of appeal could work today.
Alas, very few media organisations are left that can finance the sort of immersive, long-form journalism that shines in The Interpreters. When this source material dries up, we are going to be left in the position facing AI, with no new data available to train our sociocultural language machine, to help us interpret the worlds around us.
In his essay about searching for the nose hacked off the Rhodes statue, Twidle writes: “Rhodes died of a bad heart in 1902, murmuring his famous last words: ‘So little done, so much to do.’”
One can only hope that the follow-up anthology that Twidle and Christie, and their publisher, Soutie Press, promised at the book launch comes to fruition. There is still much we hope they can do, and much that is needed.
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