The weather in Cape Town last Friday was hot and sticky, with my car’s temperature gauge showing 34ºC in the late afternoon. Perhaps not ideal conditions in which to squeeze cheek to buttock into the church of St Francis of Assisi in Simon’s Town for the opening of the inaugural Books on the Bay literary festival. The purgatory of those torture devices known to Christians as pews, and the struggle to remain absolutely still while breathing shallowly through your mouth, in case you break into a heavy sweat, added a quality of endurance to the event.
And yet, considering the subject matter and the speakers, a little creature discomfort wasn’t inappropriate. All three authors read from their works — works that spoke to the past, present and future of what we could very loosely term the Southern African postcolonial experience. Or we could call it the condition of fractured freedoms, if we were looking to escape from the conceptual claws of historical determinism.
The star turn was one of our more famous exiles, John Maxwell Coetzee, professionally known as JM. The first person to win the Booker prize twice, recipient of the Nobel prize for literature, and a host of other prizes too numerous to mention. But he was preceded by two other stellar writers.
First up was our very own Antjie Krog (Coetzee, I fear, now belongs to the world), perhaps best known for her 1998 work about the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, Country of my Skull, but also a beautifully confrontational poet. She read from Pillage, the Karen Press translation of Plunder, her new volume of Afrikaans poetry.
While Krog was reading a poem about the ugly complexities of the Fees Must Fall movement, and about to move on to one that referenced the even more complex question of land restitution (I think — the stupefying heat made it hard to concentrate), Eskom decided to introduce the prosaic to the poetic, and load-shedding kicked in.
The heat, the brash battery-powered strip lights and, above all, the rumble of the generator served to draw a crudely pointed frame around her reading.
While Krog was reading a poem about the ugly complexities of the Fees Must Fall movement ... Eskom decided to introduce the prosaic to the poetic, and load-shedding kicked in
Sandwiched between Krog and Coetzee was Angola’s José Eduardo Agualusa, one of the Lusophone world’s leading writers.
On the wall by the pew on which I was suffering was a marble plaque commemorating the death of two officers sometime in the 1800s. I neglected to take notes, as disturbing the hot air would have incurred annoyed glances from those around me, but one of the sentiments expressed was how terrible it was for their fathers to have lost their sons. There was no similar sentiment about the mothers, who were apparently not important enough to be included.
Agualusa read a short piece in Portuguese from perhaps his most famous novel in the English-speaking world, A General Theory of Oblivion (2012 in Portuguese, 2015 in English), then handed over to his wife, filmmaker Yara Costa, to read from the English translation. The novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2016, tells the story of a Portuguese woman who locks herself into her apartment in Luanda on the eve of Angola’s independence. She cuts herself off from the world for 30 years, then meets a young boy who has broken into her apartment. He helps her after a fall, and tells her about the changes Angola has gone through while she’s been hiding.
I haven’t read the book, but the chapter Costa read was evocative and absurd. As with the Krog poems, which can be partly understood as a commentary on the repercussions, or perhaps wages, of corrupt and inept misgovernment, and their serendipitous power outage, the chapter from A General Theory of Oblivion was made more poignant by the church’s stained-glass windows, shimmering in the febrile haze rising from the bodies of the audience.
Three of the windows were designed by the artist Peter Clarke and completed by Judith Mason after his death in 2014. They commemorate the forced removals from Simon's Town between 1965 and 1973 under the Group Areas Act.
When one of the festival’s organisers, David Attwell, was asked by online journal Litnet why they had decided to situate a book festival in Simon’s Town, he answered: “The obvious thing is the natural beauty, but it is a natural beauty with some rough edges, which makes it more literary. The town is full of narrative. There’s a story in every brick, and some of these stories are quirky, some of them are inspiring; a lot of them are painful, as Simon’s Town was hit very hard by forced removals.”
According to the website of the Simon’s Town Historical Society, “the first St Francis Church was completed on the site of the old DEIC [Dutch East India Company] granaries between the Residency and Admiralty House in 1837 and consecrated by the Bishop of Tasmania in 1843. It was named St Frances as a mark of respect to the governor, Sir Lowry Cole’s wife Frances.”
For some reason, which the society doesn’t delve into, the church was renamed St Francis of Assisi in 1958. Perhaps Frances had used up her allotment of respect.
South African History Online tells us St Francis church has suffered two major setbacks: the original building collapsed in 1821 due to severe floods, and they had to build a new church in 1837. Then the apartheid government moved 70% of the congregation away courtesy of the policy of forced removals.
“The decimated church not only survived, but was able to contribute significantly to the building of a church in Ocean View to serve the displaced parishioners.”
One can’t help but read traces of this pain into the words from Agualusa’s story concerning Angola’s revolution against Portugal’s colonialism.
After winning the International Dublin Literary Award for A General Theory of Oblivion, “with the substantial prize money [Agualusa] realised his dream to build a library in his adopted home on the Island of Mozambique”, according to the festival programme.
[Simon’s Town] is full of narrative. There’s a story in every brick, and some of these stories are quirky, some of them are inspiring; a lot of them are painful
— David Attwell
I juxtapose these stories only to show there is still goodness in the world, not only that ever-present evil infecting our country. Which in a sense — a far, far more sophisticated sense — is one of the things with which Coetzee’s reading engaged. He read from what seems to be a memoir in progress, dealing with his early life in South Africa and specifically his schooling in Worcester. This is subject matter already touched on in 1997’s Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, but in this reading Coetzee highlighted the importance of one teacher, Mr Gouws, who reaches out and supports the English-speaking kid in a school where the divide between Afrikaans and English is a source of conflict and stress. Well, not kid. The Coetzee we know from his public-facing persona has never been a kid. An English-speaking child.
It’s a much more sympathetic portrayal of Mr Gouws as a role model than the one in Boyhood, where the relationship is described, cruelly, as Mr Gouws trying to pretend he and a young John can be friends. “In fact he is trying to suggest that they have been friends all year: the teacher and the cleverest boy, the class leader.”
I read Boyhood many years ago, so I’m not qualified to ponder on the implications of this shift, but I hope literary scholars are poised to do so. Attwell (described by the Sydney Review of Books as “one of the foremost critics of Coetzee’s works”) commented after the event that “[Coetzee] has been writing about his complicated relationship with English, and the idea that — as he puts it in a letter to Paul Auster — he has no mother tongue. There’s an affinity with Mr Gouws therefore, in retrospect. Certainly a reworking of the Boyhood passage from this point of view.”
Coetzee is a beautiful reader whose delivery is as restrained and precisely calibrated as his prose. I am reminded of a line from John Updike’s 2002 New Yorker review of Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, describing it as “the second instalment of what seems to be an ongoing memoirist project ... These recollections of a stymied, melancholy Afrikaner in London are more entertaining than is easily explained.”
It was the same with this reading. The story is such a simple one and, as always, Coetzee didn’t waste a word. And yet, possibly because you know what exalted heights the boy attained, the tale seems like it’s about an entire world. And the takeaway of this revisiting of ordinary history is that ordinary people can influence great things for the better.
Another of the festival’s organisers, Darryl David, introduced Coetzee with an anecdote about how much Coetzee had influenced his literary life, so this is an ongoing transmission. (Attwell was an inspirational teacher of mine at school too, so this really is a constant that I hope never gets destroyed by the terrible state of our education system.)
The book festival itself is also ongoing: this was the opening event, but the meat of it takes place on March 10 and 11 and includes wonderful writers such as poets Gabeba Baderoon and Ingrid de Kok, and our most recent Booker winner Damon Galgut in conversation with author and University of Cape Town professor Wahbie Long.
As with the opening event, attendees will, I am sure, be rewarded by the coincidence of location and literature. Without the magic wrought by our writers, we would have a much drabber and stunted understanding of our environs and lives.
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