Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
If you have an interest in Western culture, or particularly in high art as Coetzee does, you discover that in South Africa there is actually no role for you any longer. And I think that Disgrace is a sort of farewell note to South Africa – a “Goodbye, I’m off”.
Let’s talk about Coetzee. He’s a white South African émigré like you, isn’t he? Though he lives in Australia.
If you have an interest in Western culture, or particularly in high art as Coetzee does, you discover that in South Africa there is actually no role for you any longer. And I think that Disgrace is a sort of farewell note to South Africa – a “Goodbye, I’m off”. What happens in Disgrace, which is also relevant I think to Achebe, is that the protagonist’s daughter is raped by a local warlord – a local “big man” – and she accepts it as the way things happen in Africa. But her father does not accept it. He’s left the university because he doesn’t like the new political correctness there, and then his daughter is raped and she just accepts it. She’s not happy about it but she certainly doesn’t think of leaving the country. Her father, on the other hand, can’t accommodate himself to it, and neither can Coetzee. I’ve recently read the last volume of his autobiography and what I take away from it is that he thinks there is no meeting place between Western and African culture. He’s not anti-African, but he says explicitly there is no common cause.
And is this your view as well?
It’s slightly more complex. What Coetzee says is that he was never a joiner, so that even though he was deeply distressed by what his own people, the Afrikaners, were doing, he nevertheless identified with them. He would never have joined any overt political movement – the ANC or any of the other alternatives. And before I came to university here in England I had the same sort of option. We were all virulently against apartheid, but I couldn’t see why I’d join a Marxist or Trotskyite organization because I was against apartheid. I was a liberal. So from Coetzee’s point of view it was more that his love of European literature meant that he couldn’t fit himself into what this multicultural society in South Africa was producing. My take is much the same on that. It’s the difference between those who join the latest politically fashionable party and those who may sympathise but who cannot accommodate or truncate themselves in order to fit the offered category. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons comes to mind.
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Justin Cartwright’s novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet; the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers; White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award; The Promise of Happiness, winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize, and, most recently, the acclaimed The Song Before It Is Sung, winner of the London Jewish Cultural Award for literature. Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London.
Your next book is Disgrace by J M Coetzee.
This book was written in the late 90s and although it is very difficult – especially with writers like J M Coetzee – to link the work to the man, my personal reading of the book is that it is a work of profound disappointment and sadness. It is all about a 50-something professor, David Lurie, who teaches at a Cape Town university. He has an affair with a young student – Melanie. He gets hauled before a disciplinary panel and refuses to defend himself.
He doesn’t see why he should submit to a jury of his peers, who are as compromised, if not more compromised, than he is. He views the whole thing as a farce, and he goes off to live with his daughter Lucy on a farm in the Eastern Cape – which is a beautiful part of the country, and Coetzee’s descriptions of it are second-to-none. What happens here is a rape.
Lucy gets raped by a group of black men who break into the farmhouse. And David gets beaten and tied up in the bathroom and, ultimately, this is symbolic of his powerlessness over these sorts of events and eventually over history. What Coetzee is basically saying is that South Africa is the bastard child of an interracial rape. And it is a very powerful metaphor for what the country is.
Now the reaction to the book in South Africa was vicious. Coetzee was censured in parliament. Thabo Mbeki spoke out against the book in a public forum. One of Mbeki’s major issues when he was president, and I think it still remains, is this image of a black man as promiscuous and unhinged, and Disgrace did portray that. But I think what the ANC didn’t get was how the book was also portraying white culpability in that entire metaphor. It is an act of revenge for a rape that is perpetrated over 350 years.
Coetzee no longer lives in South Africa. Although he will never confirm or deny this, it is my reading that the reaction to Disgrace from the ANC had quite a bit to do with him leaving South Africa for Adelaide.
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Award-winning South African writer Kevin Bloom is the author of Ways of Staying, a journey into the heart of a country that remains riven and undefined. From the murder of the author’s cousin in 2006, to the hills of Zululand after the death of historian David Rattray, from the fateful ruling party showdown at Polokwane in 2007, to the xenophobic attacks of winter 2008, it is a book that goes behind the headlines and into the marrow of a strange and troubled land. Do South Africa’s whites ‘deserve’ to feel at home in their own country? How does a white person assume a South African identity that acknowledges the past and takes responsibility for the compromised present? Is there a way that the white ‘I’ and black ‘other’ can talk outside, or around, the past?
