P Jordan: BTA Anglo Platinum short story competition finals

8 September 2006

In a recent statement I quoted the following lines from a poem by Gwendolyn
Brooks, the late poet laureate of the state of Illinois in the United States of
America:
“Art is life worked with; is life wheedled, or whelmed: assessed: clandestine,
but evoked.”

The stubborn aptness of those lines to the art and craft of storytelling
should become apparent as I continue. In the production of literature what the
writer has to deal with is life through language in other words the writer
works with, creates with language through the texture of life. The story, like
any other piece of fiction, is not a mirror reflection of life. Mirrors are
passive and assuming they are clean, can only reflect what stands or is put in
front of them.

The story does much more than that: it reflects on lived experience, it uses
that experience, whether imagined or actual, as a point of departure for the
storyteller's imaginative exploration of the possibilities of whatever aspect
of life has provoked the artistic sensibility. In this way the end product, the
world created by the storyteller, becomes real to the reader or the
listener.

In Chinua Achebe's “Anthills of the Savannah”, a novel that could easily
have been pessimistic had Achebe allowed himself the luxury of cynicism, there
is a white-bearded elder whose words of wisdom regarding the importance of the
story command attention. Let me quote this elder from Abazon in Kangan, an
imaginary African country with disturbingly familiar features:
“The sounding of the battle-drum is important, the fierce waging of the war
itself is important and the telling of the story afterwards each is important
in its own way.

“I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me
which one of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. Do you
hear me? Now, when I was younger, if you had asked me the same question I would
have replied without a pause: the battle. But age gives to a man some things
with the right hand even as it takes away others with the left. The torrent of
an old man's water may no longer smash into the bole of the roadside tree a
full stride away as it once did but fall around his feet like a woman's; but in
return the eye of his mind is given wing to fly away beyond the familiar sights
of the homestead.

“So why do I say that the story is chief among his fellows? The same reason
I think that our people sometimes will give the name Nkolika to their daughters
Recalling-Is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story can continue beyond
the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums
and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves
our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus
fence.

"The story is our escort without it we are blind. Does the blind man own his
escort? No, neither does the story; rather it is the story that owns us and
directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark
on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbours.”

The elder from Abazon proceeds much further to illuminate the crucial role
and importance of the story. What commands attention in the elder's
intervention is not just the content, what he says, but it is also in the
telling, the narrative techniques he deploys to make his story interesting and
enjoyable. And his narrative techniques are rooted in the collective memory
that gives birth to image, metaphor, nuance, steeped in the juices of his
people's experience, his point of departure.

From the context of his people's experience the elder has carved out the
content and the form of his story, on the “story”. The experience and profound
observations of the elders in society are thus used as the foundation on which
to build. Later in the novel we are told of an old man who told Ikem Osodi, a
resourceful journalist and poet with a remarkable sense of social
responsibility, the story of the tortoise who outwitted and made a fool of the
leopard threatening to kill him. Osodi informs his audience that that old man
is now in jail. Asked the reason why? Osodi explains: “Because storytellers are
a threat. They threaten all champions of control; they frighten usurpers of the
right-to-freedom of the human spirit in state, in church or mosque, in party
congress, in the university or wherever.”

Earlier this year the Department of Arts and Culture partnered with the
Mutloatse Heritage Trust to launch the “Memory is Our Heritage” fellowship
grants. These are grants awarded to writers and researchers to write the
biographies of artists who have made significant contributions to our memory,
our heritage and our story; to artists who have made significant contributions
to the development of our culture. Through these contributions of our artists
we enter one of the most crucial sites of the struggle to reclaim our sense of
ourselves, of our identity, as South Africans.

By launching these fellowships we took an important step to activate our
collective memory from different angles to establish it as a vital aspect of
our living heritage, enabling us to recreate ourselves as we move to inform and
shape our future with a knowledge, assertion and affirmation of who we are and
our possibilities. Because of the interconnectedness of, and interaction
between elements of artistic and cultural expression, I will venture to repeat
something I have said on another literary occasion:
“The human family is unique in its ability and desire to externalise itself
through acts of creation reflecting on its experience, its environment, its own
life as a species and its imagination. The human animal sings, dances, sculpts,
carves, paints, recites poetry, tells stories and records its memories.”

The development of literature in South Africa is dialectically related to
the history of struggle. The brutality of colonialism did not allow space for
the proverbial fence-sitter or for a writer who could straddle it. Whether the
writer was an out-and-out racist monster who did not accept the indigenous
African as part of humanity or a liberal who just loved the African and had a
number of friends in the township to parade as proof or a black cultural
nationalist boasting the glory of some pristine African past or a protest
writer appealing to the conscience of the oppressor or whether you were a
revolutionary unconditionally committed to the national liberation movement,
under scrutiny the literature you produced would place you somewhere
recognisable in relationship to the history of struggle. And apartheid made it
very easy for any interested person to be part of the struggle because the
enemy was so easy to identify or so some thought.

However many who were against apartheid writers as well as other members of
society did not do enough homework to know what they were for. Literature,
whether oral or written, because it is created with expressive language through
the texture of life, is the major depository of a people's cultural and social
values. Over the years South Africa has produced a number of outstanding short
story writers, especially in English and Afrikaans. Here, one must pause and
ask the compelling question: Why especially in those two languages? The answer
to that question has to be sought in the power and economic relations which
resulted in privileging the development of those two languages and literatures,
often at the expense of the indigenous languages and literatures. I will not to
attempt to open up that debate tonight in and of itself it would require far
more time and space than we have.

Although the story in written form that is the short story originated in the
United States of America, it did not reach its artistic heights there. We would
have to look at the development of the short story in Russia for that. But in
South Africa there is a wealth in the crucibles of the various indigenous oral
narrative traditions that has yet to be mined more deeply. The aspiring South
African short story writer can dig deep into those mines to hone her or his
skills in the context of producing stories that explore our experience and
contribute to the development and strengthening of our cultural diversity.

I welcome the BTA/Anglo Platinum short story competition for the value it
adds to the development of the short story in South Africa. I would like to
take this opportunity to appeal to our writers, especially the young ones - the
older ones might be carrying loads too heavy to allow them to change their
habits – to work very hard at developing reading habits. No one can develop as
a writer out of a vacuum. In order to hone your writing skills you have to know
what has been done; you have to work very hard to learn what your literary
voice is connected to. You must know that you are a small part of a huge
international community whose other members know very clearly that you need
much, much more than talent to know how to tell your stories. And those stories
must plant their feet firmly on South African soil to be nourished enough to
guide us to the future as well as to the past.

In conclusion I would like to congratulate those who worked hard enough to
make it to the final four in this competition. I hope not only do you continue
to write but you make writing an essential element of your being-in-the-world.
I believe the major reason for holding this competition on 8 September 2006,
International Literacy Day, is that BTA and Anglo Platinum are determined to
encourage the writers to read. So read as widely and as deeply as you can in
order to develop the tone of your literary muscle. And write; write every day
to stay alive, to make your contribution to the development of the new South
African.

Thank you.

Issued by: Department of Arts and Culture
8 September 2006
Source: Department of Arts and Culture (http://www.dac.gov.za)