SmilingSouth

Work in Progress and other Stories

The Caine Prize for African Writing 2009

Jacana Media, 2009

Five entries on the shortlist of the Caine Prize, awarded every year to a short story by an African writer published in English, and 11 more written at the Caine Prize writer’s workshop held near Accra, Ghana, make up this collection.

Work in Progress, which gives its title to the collection, by last year’s Caine Prize winner, Henrietta Rose-Innes, is one of two South African contributions. Here the civilized veneer of a famous author peels away when a young aspiring writer visits his home for a one-on-one critique of her work.

The abuse of power, ranging from corrupt dealings to horrific war crimes, is a common theme, as ordinary people struggle to survive through exploitation, war and poverty. People at home dream of salvation through being spirited away overseas to America, or England. Those in exile discover betrayal, prejudice and loneliness.

While some of it’s harrowing, there’s also humour – the laugh of triumph as a taxi driver outwits a crooked cop in Ghanaian Alba K Sumprim’s No Windscreen Wipers; a less comfortable smile in Nigerian EC Osondu’s Waiting, as a child living the desperate daily dash for survival in a refugee camp describes how he and his friends acquired their nicknames from the free T-shirts they were given:  “Sexy’s T-shirt has the inscription Tell Me I’m Sexy. Paris’s T-shirt says See Paris And Die. When she is coming towards me I close my eyes because I don‘t want to die… Take Lousy, for instance; his T-shirt says My Dad Went To Yellowstone And Got Me This Lousy T-shirt.”

And  the gritty, dark humour in Sierra Leonean Mohamed Gibril Sesay’s Half-man and the Curse of the Ancient Buttocks – “armed men who amputated limbs called cutting off wrists ‘long sleeves’ and cutting off elbows ‘short sleeves’. They met this woman and asked: ‘What do you want, short sleeves or long sleeves?’ the woman replied: ‘Well, you are the designers, you should know the sleeves that fit me well.’

“Or like the man rebels met hiding in a cemetery. ‘What are you doing there?’ the renegades asked. ‘Don’t you remember me?’ the man replied. ‘I was amongst the people you killed last year.’ A rebel called Kill-man-no-blood… looked at the man and said: ‘Well you better hurry off from this place because our colleagues who kill people again and again are on their way.’”

During any given week you will find an analysis piece in some newspaper, somewhere, urging the world not to slot Africa into the stereotype of being rife with corruption and prone to war and violence. Either the African writers of this collection don’t read those newspapers, or they’re not very obedient.

Summertime

JM Coetzee

Harvill Secker/Random House, 2009

R295

Talking on a topic for one minute “without repetition, hesitation or deviation” was the challenge of a 70s radio word game. Here’s a new challenge: Discuss a book by JM Coetzee avoiding words prefixed with post-, or de-, or beginning with the letter S.

The premise of Summertime, JM Coetzee’s third fictionalised autobiography, after Boyhood, and Youth, is that a biographer is interviewing five people who have interacted with fictional writer John Coetzee during the period 1972-1977. The interviews are sandwiched between a series of extracts from the late writer’s notebooks from that period. The rather concrete beginning (literally, too, as he is laying cement around the ramshackle house he shares with his widower father in Tokai, Cape Town), a comment on news of the SADF’s attack on a house in Botswana, contrasts with the notes at the end which are far more fragmentary and less certain, to the extent that John Coetzee (fictional) more or less dissolves.

There are plenty of red herrings, or levels at which Summertime could be read. Fictional John Coetzee, for example, invites the reader to consider what forces shape an individual and what capacity they have to resist them; he observes how his widower father tries to find meaning in his life; and a superficial reading might give one a cameo of a segment of Cape Town society during a particular era, through the five interviewees. And of course Summertime could be perceived as a warning to would be biographers, or a finger in the face of gossip (this fictional John Coetzee has much in common with the JM Coetzee of anecdotes that do the rounds in academic and literary circles).

But Summertime is ultimately about language, and authorship. It’s at this level that the linguist and flesh-and-blood author JM Coetzee starts to play. Puns, both large and small, pepper the discourse beginning with the “author” about whom the biography will be. The question is raised of “authorisation” with regard to the biographer’s right to write about John Coetzee (fictional). And of course his father, who is the fictional writer’s “author”, or originator, turns out to have no control over the actions of his creation (his son) when he becomes terminally ill. More than a nod to 20^th century French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes’s “death of the author”.

It is significant that the alienated, cold-fish fictional John Coetzee comes across as his most human, most compassionate, when he helps his overworked  father, a book-keeper (geddit?), check figures in the office. Numbers being the ultimate symbol, and signifi-cance being at the heart of Nobel prize-winning author JM Coetzee.

Reinforcing this connection is that in the second set of writer’s notes, John Coetzee explains how when things take a turn for the worse and every day turns out bad, the writer tires of elaborating and instead replaces each day’s entry with a simple asterisk.

Summertime is about the way language embodies and limits. A delightful vignette early on alerts the reader to the notion that language has a will of its own. Fictional John Coetzee describes how a widow hires him, as a linguist, to reinterpret a clause in her husband’s will. He describes her frustration at his inability to make language mean what she wants it to.

In his 2003 Nobel Prize acceptance speech Coetzee spoke about  Foe. He discussed the allegorical aspects of Robinson Crusoe, describing it as “the original story”, and Friday’s footprint as a sign “you are not alone”.

The underlying archetype in Summertime, though, is the Oedipal myth. He doesn’t sleep with his mother but cousin Margot is a stand-in, most closely representing his origins on his maternal side. And he does contemplate “killing” his father by neglect.

So that’s the end of the author, and this is the end of the review – and I haven’t once said semiotics, stylistics or post-deconstructionism.