Here is the piece promised yesterday. Please pass on to people you think may be interested. As I said before, it has been published in a slightly different version, and met with a significant reaction from members of the Melville Poetry Festival: silence. LEGISLATING FOR A NEW WORLD: WHY WE NEED GO BEYOND JUST MULTIKULTI What does it mean for poets to be called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”? Some time ago two friends and I ruminated over the famous phrase by Percy Byshe Shelley, and we struggled to apply it to modern times. In Shelley’s time, and before the 20th century in general, it was possible to see poets as setting the intellectual scene, because poetry was then still one of the dominant literary forms, only challenged by the rising novel. Religion dominated Western society, and poetry had a vital connection to it, so one can say that poetry ruled through the church, and as poetry was greatly straitjacketed by it, so the foundations of society’s social and psychological repressions were laid by the predominant curtailments of poetry in a kind of “negative legislation”. Today, however, poetry and to a lesser extent the novel, are marginal forms, as television and movies, and now the internet, have a far greater impact on the lives of our minds. No matter how much it is jazzed up through performance or other enhancements, poetry remains a slow, even sluggish genre, suffused with obscurity and difficulty, enjoyed by only a minority of the minority that cultural consumers are. We struggled that day to understand why people did not like poetry, but it did not change the fact that the vast majority of people simply don’t. At the Melville Poetry Festival an opportunity arose to change some of that – not to make poetry popular again, but to nurture the seeds of a new dispensation not only in literature, but in all South African communities. It arose from often vociferous disagreement among the members of the organising committee about the structuring of the festival that was never resolved, but hopefully the spirit of Shelley’s “The Defence of Poetry” will yet prevail; he started out from an opposition between Imagination and Reason, with the latter the power of dissection and the former the power of synthesis: “Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.” At the heart of the debates were the question of what to do about Afrikaans. While poetry is as unacknowledged and avoided in Afrikaans communities as anywhere else, one can safely contend that where it does occur, it is much more vibrant, layered and socially connected than in any other language in South Africa. The question is, should it therefore get a special dispensation in a festival aiming at reflecting the whole of South Africa? Afrikaans poetry presented some very practical problems. At the several Afrikaans arts festivals poetry is routinely represented in very creative performances and formats, from full-on theatre pieces to frequent collaborations with artists and musicians. Internationally acclaimed movies have been made about two Afrikaans poets, Ingrid Jonker and Eugene Marais. The benchmark is high, and if you want to succeed with a new festival, you have to aim to come close to it. Another key problem was to try to prevent the monotony that often ensues when one tries to get people to indulge in poetry for longer than an afternoon. My answer was to pitch the festival on a first leg of overlap and variety, trying to hook up visual artists, musicians and others who mixed up their genres with poetical or lyrical text, and on another leg of setting up fixed venues for the different languages and formats that dominate the poetical scene today, with a view to create a model for future festivals. Cribbing from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I believed the basic structure should be a rhizomatic one - as with ants’ nests various new nodes are attached to the original structure as and when they become viable. Melville, with its dozens of bed and breakfasts, school and church halls, and above all empty shops, fits such an approach hand in glove, or several hands in several gloves. The rhizomatic structure is opposed to hierarchical structures, of a top-down chain of command-like structure, and to my great surprise this was what I was confronted with when other committee members began to oppose the broad framework that I proposed. The festival should be held in English, they said, since it is the dominant language in South Africa, with the other languages slotting into subordinate positions when it comes to allocating times and spaces. Their argument is not irrational. English is the global and local lingua franca, is as beautiful as any other language and has a special history as a medium of absorption and representation of other cultures. Half my own work is produced in English: I put on a play in English in Cape Town in 2014, and am preparing fiction and poetry publications in English. If we wanted to get bodies to the festival, the marketing would have to be done mostly in English, to start with. This essay is in English, because I want to reach as many people as possible. But that phrase “dominant language” triggered memories of some former battles. In the 1980s, when I was part of the group setting up the United Democratic Front-aligned Congress of South African Writers, the prevailing sentiment was that English was as much a language of the oppressor as Afrikaans. Three of the five resolutions at the founding congress had to do with promoting local languages, including bringing Arikaans back to its roots as a “black” language, created and developed by slaves and workers before it was hijacked by whites opposing the oppression of the British empire. It also reminded me of the infamous Macaulay Minute of 1835. “All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives ... are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them... the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them,” baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, at one stage the imperial war minister, told the British parliament. Of course, this “language not vernacular amongst them” would have to be English. In some notorious comparisons Macaulay sings the praise of English as the dominant language of civilisation. And he specifically mentions poetry, saying that the vast literature of myth in Sanskrit and Arabic cannot compare with English verse. Upon rereading the minute I was fascinated by the similarities with the current perceived wisdom on English’s primacy in countries such as ours. Macaulay argued that English, at the very least, provided access to scientific knowledge and superior moral philosophy much quicker than any vernacular language could, and that it was the language of commerce and of the ruling classes of the British empire, “the higher class of natives at the seats of government”. That is a sentiment you would commonly find, almost in as many words, among the elites of South Africa of all colours and creeds today. In India of the 19th century students had to be paid to learn Sanskrit or Arabic, Macaulay observed, while students paid teachers for English classes – a situation not dissimilar to the latter day reluctance of South African blacks to study vernacular languages. This could come from many an African National Congress-leaning educationist’s notebook: “To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” Does it matter, and could it be that he is not wrong? For it is quite true that in order to gain the maximum knowledge quickly you need a proficiency in English. Macauley was more of an imperialist than a racist, using as part of his argument observations that any native was capable of the most complex forms of English – indeed, he argued, the English of many Indians was better than that of most Europeans on the wrong side of the English Channel. Be that as it may, there is no gainsaying that if you use even parts of such an analysis, you are acknowledging that empire is alive and well. And while one might want to argue like British TV celebrity historian Niall Ferguson that this is on the balance of things a good outcome, you have to ask how deleterious are the bad things that remain. At the moment, the state of our education is a very bad thing. It is not stretching it to say that what will happen in education over the next ten years, will determine the future of South Africa. Many explanations have been proffered, but at the root of it lies the apartheid-produced incompetence in the “black African” part of the school system. The destruction of the teacher college constellation after 1994 by the ANC government entrenched this “lack of capacity”, that wonderful euphemism reminiscent of Faraday’s early experiments with electricity, meaning “we can’t do it”. Why can’t we do it? Why is our education even worse off than it was during apartheid, in the eyes of several observers? Many analyses have in common a few things: lack of esprit de corps among teachers, lack of understanding of the work among teachers; and failures in communication between teachers and pupils and teachers and the bureaucracy. At the heart of this, as with all communication, lies the mostly unacknowledged issue of language. It is on this point that the history of Afrikaans becomes instructive. And its key moment was during Lord Alfred Milner’s attempts to impose English on the vanquished Afrikaans speakers after the Anglo-Boer War. Milner’s name is to this day villified among Afrikaners, also, and mainly, for his role in subjugating the Boers with genocidal means. But the truth is that he did more than anyone else to elevate Afrikaans from the “kitchen language” spoken by workers and their bosses to a language of first-rate science. Afrikaans is at root a creole language, the kind that many linguists, among them the illustrious Umberto Eco, believe cannot carry the complexities of science. Afrikaans is living proof that they can. Milner’s aim was the imperialist one of turning South Africa’s numerous poor whites into the managers of the new colonialist state then being planned. The key, of course, was education, and so Milner forced all “Boer” children to go to English schools. But his government soon discovered that education only really took where rebellious Afrikaans-speaking teachers taught the children clandestinely in Afrikaans, also scorning the little Dutch that was allowed. So Milner had the brainwave to tacitly allow such dissidence, since he believed Afrikaans was a harmless, inferior patois that could not pose the threat to the empire that Dutch might have. To complete this potted history, the Afrikaans language movement was revived and before long books were being feverishly translated and teachers trained in a makeshift grammar to transform Afrikaans into a medium of first-rate instruction. The illiterate war refugees in the towns and cities and the tenth-generation Cape settlers gradually turned into the ancestors of the Chris Barnards, Bram Fischers, Beyers Naudes, Charlize Therons, Roger Federers and Craig Venters of later ages. If this can happen to Afrikaans, a language of Africa, why not to other indigenous languages? I am no expert on education, but my guess is that the vernacular is being used in schools throughout the country in their daily operations. But there is a crucial difference with Afrikaans – they are fallback languages, on perpetual standby as props only while the Macaulayan project of hoping to acquire proper English is being pursued. Developing vernacular languages for the purpose of disseminating knowledge and creative thinking among the masses, is almost entirely lacking. We famously have eleven official languages, but linguists in general are in short supply in South Africa, fewer than the fingers on one hand, according to one estimation. Teachers who can barely speak English properly, and try to hide their inferiority by scorning vernacular languages, are not capable of instilling the esprit de corps that is necessary to motivate pupils. They cannot always pick up the nuances of curricila or even of bureaucratic briefings. If they cannot tell pupils what they mean, chances are slim of instilling the discipline and respect for learning that are necessary to save our schools. No doubt a deep fear distorts the issue, that by promoting vernacular languages too assiduously, the nationalisms that the apartheid regime tried to impose as part of its divide and rule strategies, would be revived, recreating the real danger of the traumatic and soul-destroying “black on black” violence of the early 1990s. But another factor has been emerging, the broader South African nationalism that the African National Congress is trying to foster as it carries out the mandate alluded to in its name. It is an anglocentric nationalism, but more pertinently, it is an antivernacular nationalism. This was starkly demonstrated during the 2008 xenophobic riots, when a number of “immigrants” from the lower rungs of South African society’s ladder were killed along with Zimbabweans and Mozmbicans – people speaking languages from the border areas, such as Venda and Shangaan. All these were called “makwerekere”, mocking their language; in other words, people unable to speak English properly. Indeed, it is standard practice for the police to ask alien suspects on the street to speak Zulu or Xhosa to determine whether they should be harassed further or not. The ANC’s nationalism, it has become clear, is an elitist nationalism, for large parts a parasitic one not intent so much on expanding the formerly white economy, as occupying it and exploiting new divisions to manufacture layers of supremacy, with the limited spoils of a globalised economy kept for those top layers that are capable of plugging into it. One line of demarcation is that of language – only if you have a certain level of proficiency in English are you able to prosper and rise in such a world. One could say South Africa is being divided into the English and the natives. The English can go anywhere in the world, as they were able to in the British empire, the natives tend to stay at home and watch them do it on TV. It can be argued that the culture of bling and conspicuous consumption engendered by this situation, produces the self-esteem that was destroyed by apartheid, and should therefore be accepted as psychologically inevitable and even necessary, for the moment anyway. The problem is that such resources of self-esteem are at the mercy of the global economy and its whims and vacillations. The other great event of 2008, the Great Recession, led to cosmetic “affirmative actions” and “quotas” being discarded by the hundreds of thousand in South Africa, as companies could mostly do without them. The million people who lost their jobs, vastly under-reported as they went, proportionally was one the biggest calamities of the global crisis anywhere. And so black self-esteem stays linked to Western ways, in an echo of Macaulay, who said in the Minute: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Substitute African for Indian and you get Robert Mugabe and Thabo Mbeki. It is causing great psychological conflict, as the writer and sociologist Jonny Steinberg wrote in April 2013 in Business Day. He recounts a young “born-free” student asking: In what language will my children dream? Am I the last in my family to know Zulu as a mother tongue? Steinberg’s colleague, born in rural KwaZulu-Natal but now in a white-collar job in Durban remarked: “What that boy says is so true. To be black and to succeed, you must become schizophrenic. You live on two planets.” Zimbabwean witer Noviolet Bulawayo’s oft-quoted take on English is worth repeating at length here: “The problem with English is this: You usually can’t open your mouth and it comes out just like that - first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right. “But then because you have to do all this, when you get to the final step, something strange has happened to you and you speak the way a drunk walks. And, because you are speaking like falling, its as if you are an idiot, when the truth is that its the language and the whole process thats messed up. And then the problem with those who speak only English is this: they dont know how to listen; they are busy looking at your falling instead of paying attention to what you are saying.” Let me make it clear at this point that I am not aiming to instigate confrontation of our anglocentric elite, not for the least reason that I am part of it. Although I grew up as an Afrikaner, my English-speaking relatives have ensured that I have always had a measure of access to the highest echelons of the anglocentric world in SA. Since I would not like that to change, for pecuniary reasons, I cannot expect of others who have even greater such access to deny themselves just because they are black. But an unequal society divided as English or native is not the basis for a secure future, let alone a just one that conforms to our democratic ideals. The new frontlines have been revealed by the Marikana massacre and the De Doorns grape riots, where the starkest line of demarcation were the languages being used by the strikers and protesters: predominantly Afrikaans, Xhosa and Sotho, along with bad English, as emblematised by the awkwardness of the name Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union. Somewhat better, to varying degrees, was the English of the police and the employers, of Cyril Ramaphosa and the distant government, and of the myopic journalists who failed to identify the crisis in time. And self-esteem can have more substance than eating sushi off women of another race or ploughing your British-made status car into your fan base. There are other forms of expression, much more lasting and fruitful, and poetry is one such form close to a better lived experience. Self-esteem will grow organically when the words you use in your bed with your loved one, in the kitchen with your nearest and dearest, at the shebeen or club with your “mors” mates, are acknowledged in some way – and when they don’t have to be translated first to validate them, when they already have prime value intrinsically. Steinberg writes about the “born-frees”: “So many are discovering their ancestors. They detect the dead ones in the voices in their dreams, in the causes of their ailments, and in the strange visions they suffer when they travel.” And the ancestors speak in the associative language of the dreamer, most of the times exclusively in that language. This is not a challenge of creating new ways – they have been existing ever since local communities, including illiterate white ones, filled the need for exploiting the fecundities of words. In other words, since time immemorial. It is assumed nowadays that by “black” poetry or some such category, one means the English strand of the broader South African poetry that culminated in the purported glories of anti-apartheid poetry. But this poetry has been, and will always be inferior to the other black poetry, produced in the vernacular languages and drawing from practices near unknown and forgotten. This was one of my great discoveries about my country, albeit in translation, much facilitated by Antjie Krog’s anthology of Afrikaans versions of such poems – Woorde teen die Wolke (Words against the Clouds). It is not the solution to merely add native languages to the anglocentric curriculum. Whole schools need to be transformed into linguistic nodes, where everything is done in the local language. Of course, careful planning would be needed to prevent such nodes from becoming centres of ethnic mobilisation. But we can also not allow the minuscule numbers of ethnic chauvinists, such as the Boeremag or the remnants of Inkatha, to hold our languages to ransom. Such planning is eminently doable, through the expediency of double-medium education, again drawing from the example of Afrikaans. Setting up schools that function in Zulu and Sotho only, for instance, would go a long way towards neutralising ethnic energies. It also has to be recognised that in the current circumstances and with the current constitution, chances are much reduced of ethnic differences getting out of hand. Words also do not live in isolation, they have you and your immediate world at their centre, and so if you recognise the need to transplant them outside of that sphere for the sake of their recognition, that need will not be met if you simply turn them into add-ons to float around among other words, eternally subordinate to those of the lingua franca. You need a space where they can take their world with them, and even briefly take root again, to live collectively, like an ants nest. This where poetry steps to the fore. The making of poetry demands the deepest submergence in the aura around the words of a particular language, or their elastic web of associations. While translation of fiction works pretty well, and often adds value to the original work, poetry is notoriously untranslatable, or only with substantial loss of value and nuances of meaning. This means that poetry for the greatest part has escaped the conformisms of an American-driven world consumerism, the devaluations and emasculations of a commercial totalitarianism. It is one of the only public areas left where languages can act without confinement or consignment. In Shelley’s phrase, where they and the world can be legislated. What this also entails, is a momentary resistance to other languages. I have found – and many others agree - that monolingual poets have great difficulty in understanding this. Especially in South Africa, this resistance to always accommodating other languages under the English umbrella rather than promoting them is labelled reactionary, and a desire to return to the old days. They interpret the desire to use words to their fullest potential as puritan, and therefore politically dubious as promoting an exclusivity that is anathema to South Africa and its anti-apartheid needs. The short answer to the exclusivity argument, is to point out that the vernacular langauges are used exclusively in daily life all the time. Due to my second-rate apartheid upbringing I don’t understand any local language except Afrikaans, and there are at least two or three languages that are not understood by black South Africans (few understand Venda, for instance). Exclusive use of language even as others use their language exclusively, is characteristic of South African daily life and customs. The standard response is to devise some sort of multikulti offering, where poets are invited to do their thing in their own language as part of the greater whole. While such events are enjoyable in their unique way, and I have spent most of my time as a Melville Poetry Festival organiser driving events like our two mixed concerts in 2012, for vernacular users they are often makeshift solutions, unable to reach much beyond the level of gesture or to make events politically safe and produce that feelgood sensation that works for the moment, but for almost all poets I know, is the very antithesis of creativity. English-only poets are limited in their ability to make such an assessment, because the feelgood factor does not come across as such, it is experienced as just another part of their natural, unmediated engagement with their world. What is needed, and which was what I tried to lay the foundations for in the year that I spent as Melville Poetry Festival organising committee chair, are hubs and nodes where a particular vernacular would be practiced in the ways that may be unique to that language. In Melville the infrastructure was already there; my vision was of turning the many restaurants and empty shops into spaces where people could come off the street and listen to offerings in their own language. Multikulti events could happily continue in the other spaces unchecked. Where I began to disagree with several committee members, was in insisting on assigning a particular venue to a particular language, purely to making things easier for the hordes (nothing wrong with fantasising) coming to the festival. The difficulty, as I reasoned higher up, is that the only local language whose literary offerings are organised, is Afrikaans. There are so many Afrikaans poets and such great overlap with other genres, much more than in English, that at least three venues are needed to do justice to its great variety. My opponents baulked at this, willing only to compromise on having what they called “exclusive” sessions of readings in Afrikaans, and not language-specific venues, on the grounds that they would become little “homelands” in a neo-apartheid set-up. I was unable to see how poetical events happening cheek by jowl in the same three street blocks could be considered as promoting a neo-apartheid. Also, in the alternative, mere lip-service was being paid to a vague notion of inclusiveness as giving local languages their moment in the lingua franca sun. Poems in English always turned out vastly outnumbering poems in the vernacular. In fact, most often there were only snatches of vernacular: Mouth a few words in Zulu, or even better Swahili to allude to your Greater Africanness, and your duty has been done. Where I could be wrong, of course, is that submission to the lingua franca is what the majority of poets want. The great difference when it comes to applying lessons learnt from the Macaulay Minute, is that Zulu or Venda is not Sanskrit. There is very little in the way of a literary treasure chest in vernacular languages to stand up in court in a case against English supremacism. Perhaps what people want is to appropriate the lingua franca, in the way that punks appropriate military uniforms, and turn it into one of the many “Englishes” existing in the postcolonial world. Then wall to wall multikulti, with the aim of fleshing out the humanistic values of the global cultural village and steadily raising its quality, is the way to go. Only people using SA’s “vernaculars” can really answer the question. If they choose the multikulti way, that would be legislating for SA’s linguistic future. It would be a negative legislation, and one for South Africa’s future in general terms as well, but what they decide, won’t just be a marginal choice. If poetry stays multikulti, the poets would have spoken, foregoing opportunities to go the other way. Exclusive usages of languages, in all their forms, will continue, and South Africa will remain a country of secrets, unknown to itself.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 04:46:03 +0000