Reflections Vol.1: Journey into African Literature Sessions by Joy Shan**
So, to begin, here’s a snippet of what I scrawled in my journal in the
cab ride home from African Image:
I loved hearing your favourite books. I loved
it but felt subsequently guilty, because I felt I had just gotten access to the
some of your most private information without knowing any of you.
I
was wrong, though. It’s true that favourite books and favourite reading memories
can hint at much more. And it’s true that a sentence about the book that captures
your existence has behind it the freight of that book’s story, setting, mood. But
I’m careful to remember that the names we swapped were just ciphers: clues of
where each of us have been, where we’re going. In the last few weeks I’ve
become acutely aware of how easy it is for my imagination to impose a past or a
future on another person. I don’t want to do that, if I can possibly avoid it.
Because of how
little was exchanged, I want to first tell you a bit about the perspective I
had on writing before that night at African Image. I’m still in college, and,
the semester before I came here, I’d crammed my schedule with English classes:
two on literature, one on prose writing, and a poetry workshop. I was editing a
student magazine, and I was making plans to come to Cape Town, to write. I
thought I’d finally found what I loved. It was the most amazing feeling in the
world: that I had things to say, and that I had people who’d listen.
You’re probably
laughing at me now, at how ridiculous I was. I feel ridiculous describing it. Predictably
enough, that nice feeling dried up. I’d say it happened around the time the
real Connecticut winter set in, when we began to hibernate in the library,
trying to dig our way out from under avalanches of work. Churning out poetry
and essays and analysis, one deadline making way for the next. Picking apart
lines of text until they were sapped dry of meaning. I don’t think I said much, ultimately. Writing
was no more than a vain exercise we did, in between hearing ourselves talk in
seminars and updating our resumes. No wonder my poetry rang empty.
*
Two weeks into
my time in Cape Town, not much had changed. I work at an online newspaper where I
write bland copy about various “social justice” issues. I would spend days and
nights scouring the Internet for possible things to write about, as if Google
were an adequate replacement for live experience. But eventually I found it
hard to shake the fact that this newspaper, despite its holier-than-thou
mission, wasn't being read—in fact, it was just another arm of the massive
cultural production machine was producing for the sake of producing. Why write,
then, if my words would just get swallowed into this black hole of “news” in
South Africa?
It wasn’t until
I read Ben Okri’s speech that it became most clear what was missing in the
writing—both at school, and here at my job in Cape Town. What was missing was
real stakes. Stakes like what Okrivdescribed as the burden of Black Consciousness, “that black people
because of their history and all that they have learned, should show the world
a new way of being – to paraphrase, a better way of being human.” Is this what
you, as writers and artists, must do? The English department at my university
is one of the most respected in the world, but never once has it felt like any
work being produced carried such an onus. Compared to you all, we are merely
play-acting.
It’s a tremendous bar that Okri sets for
writers like you. I wonder if it’s paralyzing. How does one person, or one set
of people, usher in a new reality? I wish his speech had explained this more. The
act of simply surviving is so expensive these days, that I don’t even see how
one person can find time in between working your day job and keeping up with
the bills to write into existence an untold history. But maybe, and I’m just
guessing, these costs of writing feel like nothing when you’ve got something
real to lose.
*
The week following that Thursday evening, I
went to Central Library and checked out an old, yellowing copy of Famished Road. I’ve read only 20 pages,
and I don’t expect to finish it by the time I leave. What stood out to me
before I even began, though, was the newspaper clipping taped to the inside of
the front cover. It was the announcement in the paper from when Okri won the
Booker Prize. It’s a dispatch from London, where Okri is sipping champagne,
probably rubbing shoulders with other cultural bigwigs, the ranks of which he
had officially joined. When I saw this, I wondered whether, in making a name
for himself and for other African writers on the world stage, Okri lost a
little bit of his ties to home. I wonder, too, whether this is the necessary
cost of being a writer from this continent—that, somewhere on the road to
success and recognition, you’ll have no choice but to play the “game of others”
because you can craft your own.
These are all questions I had after
listening in on this meeting. In less than a month I will be back in my
academic bubble, back among friends and classmates who may never have
questioned their status as the ones who get to tell the stories. I don’t think
I questioned it, until recently. Thank you for letting an outsider into your space. Whether I
ever put a pen to paper again, I’ll never forget what I learned.
**At the time of writing this reflective
piece, Joy Shan was studying towards
her Undergraduate degree at Yale University and visiting Cape Town for about 2
months to do some research for her final year thesis. As to whether, she’ll end
up being a writer, we can only hope she does.