RUSTUM KOZAIN
Like millions of South Africans, I live in a cave of ignorance about large swathes of the city I inhabit, about my own country, South Africa, about southern Africa and about the rest of the continent. Part of this ignorance is structural (the history of apartheid education, media blind spots) and persists; part of it is individual, following curiosities without any moralising shackles (I have an abiding interest in Germany’s World War II U-boat campaigns). But, as an individual, I am also a generalist: I know titbits of things, rather than things in depth. I might know things about the U-boat that many other people do not know, but if I am in the company of someone who has a deeper knowledge of the U-boat, I will shut up.
And so I marvel at people who can draw connections across maps of the world, based on their own secret troves of knowledge, of books read or conversations had into the early morning hours. A friend of mine, with a much, much deeper knowledge of music than mine, obsesses about all the lines of music across the world and how they criss-cross the oceans like so many shipping lanes to always touch a port city somewhere in Africa. Another friend, an archaeologist, holds the theory that language itself – intellectually modern humanity – might have emerged as early as 170,000 or more years ago somewhere along the eastern coast of South Africa, a theory that places humanity’s emergence into the symbolic order in Africa and much earlier than 35,000 years ago in Europe.
The way knowledge comes to us can be structured, intentional and deliberate: you go to school, to university, to the library and choose to learn about things you’re either interested in or you feel you should learn about. But knowledge can also come to us serendipitously, especially to those who don’t stay at the back of the cave, but who peer out of its mouth and know, at the very least, that out there is a whole world; that the world and everything in it is not only this cave.
I provide this frame as a kind of mea culpa of astonishment. Although my knowledge of colonialism in Africa exists in the broad points of a generalist’s approach, I do not pretend to have knowledge of any kind of depth about the intricacies of various countries’ politics, culture, and arts. And I provide this frame so that readers might modulate – or dismiss as naivety – my astonishment and enthusiasm.
What do I know of Angola?
The broad points picked up during my teenage politicisation (school boycotts, informal conversation, reggae): MPLA, UNITA, SADF, Namibia, unending civil war; USA, Cuba, USSR, Cold War. After that, not much other than what I have culled from a cousin who went to teach in Luanda and her stories of a country with social structures (unsurprisingly) similar to ours, but with a population that has been through so much worse than ours; and from Adamu, a musician from there, who I bump into now and again in Cape Town, and whose music carries a melancholia of wandering that pierces the heart before language.
Angola, a paragraph of less than 100 words.
Recently, I received an email from someone in Italy. The English was a bit confusing but the gist of it was: would I be available for the award ceremony, 22-24 October 2008, in Addis Ababa, for a newly constituted Italian prize for African literature, the Grinzane Cavour for Africa Award?
I googled the award and eventually found the site. The Grinzane Cavour has many categories: international, Italian, some regular, some irregular, and the now new one for literature from Africa, itself divided into three categories – a lifetime achievement or heritage award, a regular award for established writers and a young writer’s award. Someone had nominated me for the latter, which is judged mainly by university students.
I was sceptical. In my forties, with only a three-year-old book to my name? Young students as judges? Nevertheless, yes, I would make myself available to fly to Addis Ababa and gorge myself on injera wot and maybe find some coffee brewed from grounds that have been milled in a wooden pestle-and-mortar 100 years old. (These are collector’s items because the oil from coffee beans that soaks into the wood over the years adds layers of flavour to the grounds. A titbit from a generalist.)
I got the bad news and was also informed that the winner was one Ondjaki, a 31-year-old writer from Angola (Ngugi won the heritage award and Ben Okri the ‘regular’ one). I was disappointed – without sponsored travel, famed Addis Ababa would remain for me a dreamed-of city of the world.
I googled Ondjaki. I never stood a chance. At 31, he had already published three novels, three short story collections, two collections of poetry and a book of children’s fiction. The winning novel, translated into English as The Whistler, had been garnering rave reviews. It sounded like a magical book. Set in a small village, it concerns the arrival of a stranger who impresses everyone, as well as animals, with his ability to whistle. Quotations from the book, even if available to me only in English, have that mark of the truly literary: a treatment of the world that creates it for the reader. A comedy of light touches, and deftly drawn characters that are yet fully human. The excerpts from The Whistler also reminded me of Mia Couto’s fiction. Is there something about the Latinate language at the root of these fictions that gives them, even in English, a magical air?
For me the Grinzane Cavour African Award delivered a serendipitous prize and I could not wait to get my hands on the novel. Of course, when I think of other countries, I realise that, conceptually, people have lives there, and lives produce art, among other things. But when one finds an artifact – a book, a song, a poem – the intellectual concept fades and you are astounded, despite your book knowledge, despite your intellectual rehearsal, you are astounded by the artifact. Not because of its existence, but by what it can tell you of your own ignorance about its existence. Your own ignorance about how another human being can show you what it is to be human.
Here we are in South Africa, burning people because they do not look like us, because they do not speak like us; reducing people to ciphers – kwerekwere, cockroach, shit; reducing people who have been through far worse than the deprivations of apartheid and who, as survivors of calamity, can teach us things about being human. And, as I have argued elsewhere, all South Africans are complicit in this violence because we are ‘proudly South African’. We carry our badge of struggle with arrogance, as if we alone have experienced invasion, slavery, colonialism, racist exploitation. Look at us! We have overcome apartheid! We have not walked through minefields and lost limbs or died, but we have overcome apartheid!
That night, after googling Ondjaki, I had the strangest dream. In this dream, I had fallen asleep and woken to the most seductive whistling. I sat up and saw a cockroach, as big as a man, swaying in my doorway, six legs akimbo. When it saw me wake, it turned around to exit, glancing once at me. It came to me that I should follow it. Outside, it fell forward onto all its legs, then scratched frantically as it avoided a taxi barreling down the road. Its whistle returned and, astoundingly, the cockroach grew in size until it was big enough for me to mount it. Then it took off and we flew up into the sky. After a long flight, we landed on the balcony of an apartment in what I knew had to be Lisbon and where inside was a man hunched over a small desk, pouring over what appeared to be a manuscript. Startled, he turned around, looked at us and rubbed his goatee.
I apologised for my intrusion, but he waved it away and at once handed me the manuscript. It was the final proofs for the English translation of his novel. Would I mind to proofread it? He’s concerned only about typos and spelling errors at this stage, but when he proofreads it, he is compelled to write more, to change a paragraph. In fact, my visit on the back of a cockroach compelled him to want to add that too, but the publishers would not appreciate that.
I started to read, and as happens in dreams, things, people, situations change and morph, the one becomes the other, a flavour turns into sound, a page of print is turned and a world that is full of astonishment appears.
The story drew me in immediately through its lyricism, in English, which, in my dream, I could only imagine in the original Portuguese. But occasionally I caught a soft echo and would look up: there was the man I was visiting, Jose Eduardo Agualusa, the author of this book I was now proofreading in manuscript form.
The story he tells in My Father’s Wives is, how can I say, an experience (I must stress I do not mean this at all in terms of ad-speak). You don’t read this story. I wasn’t reading it, sitting there by a table lamp, in a comfortable chair, provided with wine and cigarettes by Agualusa. No, I was being drawn out of a cave. In my dream I was being drawn out of a cave and into so many dreams that I feared I would not wake.
Just as he would occasionally cough lightly, or pour more wine, and so draw me out of the one dream, thus he appears in his book at times, telling the story of telling the story. This mechanism I detested in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, where it worked to shake one awake from the various dreams and nightmares of history. But in My Father’s Wives, the movement between story and the telling of the story becomes seamless. Agualusa tells the story of how he pursues, researches and writes the story about Laurentina, whose details of birth are an entanglement. She seeks to disentangle these details in search of her recently deceased father, Faustino Manso, a popular, wandering cad of a musician who sired 18 children with seven wives. So, as Laurentina follows stories about Manso from Portugal to Angola, Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique, and gets entangled with characters with further entanglements of their own, so the author follows Laurentina all over the place as he is telling her story.
Looked at it in another way, Laurentina follows her author all over the place, growing entangled with him as he becomes entangled in her and with characters with entanglements themselves. Of course, other characters tell stories of their own entanglements. Eventually, the world comes to inhabit the novel in all its wild carnival of voices.
Although it might be daunting at the outset, the rewards of giving in to this dream are immense. Narrators and authors criss-cross each other as history, politics and fiction become each other. All is dream-state, and fiction proper: grounded in history, yet through that very grounding escaping that history into the fantastical, estranging realm of a fiction that reflects back onto that history from which it escapes. But not in an obscure way such as in, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The real in My Father’s Wives is there, in front of you, a familiar object, but strangely made into something else as if the author was a magician, a dream weaver.
It intrigues, challenges and cajoles. It is a big organism heaving and breathing, sweating and dreaming. Realities are revealed for their dreaming, and dreams for their acid reality. The parochial becomes worldly by the exploration of the parochial. Borders are not crossed, they are dissolved. The state has faded.
Excuse my breathlessness, but I was dreaming. And when I woke, I knew again the possibility of dream and that to chase dreams – the visions beyond the possible cordoned by a horizon of the real – remains a noble pursuit.
This story, and others, features in Chronic Books, the review of books supplement to Chimurenga 16 – The Chimurenga Chronicle (October 2011), a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present. In this issue, through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
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