Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Joyce Cary lived in West Africa for a while and understood clearly the tensions between the colonial masters and the local people. I’ve chosen Mister Johnson because it’s a tremendously funny, witty and human book about exactly that.
Finally, Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, which sees a temporary clerk in Nigeria waste his money entertaining on a grand scale.
Well Joyce Cary is an interesting case. He lived in West Africa for a while and understood clearly the tensions between the colonial masters and the local people. I’ve chosen Mister Johnson because it’s a tremendously funny, witty and human book about exactly that. A very influential book. Carey made the case very early on – in about 1940 I think – for African liberation. He wasn’t one of your conventional English writers just using it as a background.
And how do you feel that your own writing fits into all this?
Well, one of the things you find in South Africa is that all academics are completely locked into post-colonial theory, a form of self-torture. I’m discussed in a great volume about writing against apartheid – me and Coetzee and others who were writing against race. I think they feel that we are the right wing and attach no importance to race issues as such. Well if that’s what they’re saying it’s untrue. I think that race is way more important that they like to acknowledge, and way more irrational.
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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.
