In 2011 the literary awards season gave rise to hopes that the establishment was finally starting to recognise some of our younger and more innovative writers. Cynthia Jele’s Happiness is a 4-Letter Word and Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood both enjoyed outstanding critical success, raking in a bouquet of wins between them.
This year the winners have been a great deal paler, maler and older. One could almost be excused for thinking that there were no exciting releases by young black authors at all in 2012. This would be crashingly inaccurate, 2012 was a year that saw some of the most excellent and innovative writing of the last 20 years. And while those novels that did win awards were highly deserving of their honours, I am puzzled by those that were overlooked.
It seems to me the judges of literary competitions find it difficult to relate to books that speak directly to black experience in fiction – to the tension between suburban and township life, between middle-class aspirations and ekasi realities. It seems as though the more authentically this experience is rendered on the page, the less merit judges can find in it.
So here is a round-up of those books I believe should have been serious contenders for literary awards this season. We can call them the “Fiona’s” if you like, or the “Snyckers’ Awards for Outstanding Literary Merit”.
The first to be released was Men of the South by Zukiswa Wanner. It follows the lives of three young men living, loving, struggling and fighting their demons in South Africa. These men tell their stories in their own words, demonstrating Wanner’s chameleon-like ability to inhabit the minds of characters as diverse as a gay Zulu man, a Zimbabwean struggling for citizenship and an aspirant jazz musician. Zakes Mda called this book “sensitive and witty … compelling prose”. He is quite right. It interrogates notions of African masculinity in a way that’s entirely revolutionary in our literary landscape.
Staying with the theme of masculinity we have African Delights by Siphiwo Mahala. The author of When a Man Cries is perennially fascinated with the expectations and realities of South African manhood. The book consists of four cycles of short stories, loosely grouped in themes. The best known is “The Suit Continued”, which is a sequel to Can Themba’s iconic story for Drum magazine. The other stories are vignettes of African life that crack open unspoken-about themes and let light and air into them. The collision between the white and black worlds is dealt with in the “White Encounters” story cycle that confounds expectations and rocks readers out of their comfort zones.
Mahala’s partner in crime is Thando Mgqolozana. They launched their second novels jointly in Johannesburg and have publicly said that they’re each other’s first readers and work-in-progress commenters. Mgqolozana’s second book Hear Me Alone is so incandescently innovative that one wonders whether South Africa is quite ready for this brilliant son of hers. It’s a retelling of the Gospel, focusing on the perspectives of the young Mary and the boy who loves and loses her. The pre-industrial landscape is lovingly and meticulously rendered, and the characters viscerally real. I suspect posterity will understand this book better than contemporary critics have managed.
Things I Thought I Knew by Kathryn White is a slim and elegant novel, more beautifully written than anything else to come out of South Africa this year. About a young woman burdened with second sight, it is by turns wonderfully romantic, and stomach-heavingly tragic but always intensely vivid. This book deserves to leave a deep imprint in our literary soil. It deserves to be studied at tertiary level because only the very closest reading can do justice to its multi-textured denseness.
In 2009 Whiplash by Tracey Farren was a literary sensation. The novel — about a prostitute in Muizenburg — that was too hard-hitting to find a home with a mainstream publisher was picked up by Modjaji Books and instantly shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Now Farren has brought out her second novel Snake, which is a riveting study of murderous evil viewed through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl. Page-turningly readable for adults too, Snake is a book one would love to see as a high school setwork. It’s a master class in the art of using perspective to drive a narrative along.
These books all deserved a better showing in the 2012 literary awards season. A startlingly innovative crop, they offered judges the chance to forge a new direction for South African fiction. But it seems we still prefer the safe to the challenging, the familiar to the unknown and the well-trodden path to trailblazing excellence.
Fantastic list Fiona though to be fair, Men of the South came out in 2010 so does not qualify to be on this list. Also, Mahala’s African Delights is a short story collection so it may be a little inaccurate to refer to it as a novel as in ‘they launched their second novels simultaneously.’ i never did understand how Hear Me alone, as ground-breaking as it was, failed to make the awards. Ditto Yewande Omotoso’s Bom Boy. Makes you wonder whether the people who judge awards read the books.
It’s counterintuitive to say that literary awards (like most awards) are highly subjective. As is taste in literature–I’ve read several of the books above, and disagree that all of them deserved awards. (The well written Bomboy was shortlisted for a Sunday Times award, the equally good Hear Me Alone was long listed). The question for me is why Nineveh did not win anything (but see, subjectivity). But then, who is better at judging, the writer of this article or the panels of judges (to my knowledge made up generally of diverse panellists who are often times writers themselves). BTW I found the Katherine White book inauthentic and lacking merit (see, subjectivity again). Still, I find this sort of belly aching tiresome and disingenuous. This same journalist has written previously that women writers never get the big accolades (never mind Anne Enright, Barbara Kingsolver, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Hillary Mantel, Zadie Smith etc). Disingenuous, because the author of this article is also a popular fiction writer. And so not all books win awards, or at least, not the awards that are most desired–but so what? Write whatever kind of literature/genre you like. We, the readers, will keep buying books, but please stand behind your work. And, may I just say as a black person (resentfully) that South Africa has produced fine, global writers of color Lewis Nkosi, Zoe Wicomb, Njubulo Ndebele, Bessie Head, Coovadia, Dangor, and certainly, without a patronising puff piece like this.
“Five English SA books that should have won literary awards” – FTFY
Moving away from the pedantism, thank you for the list. I will definitely make an effort to get hold of them.
Great article. So much to read, so few lives.
I enjoyed this column simply because I am a bibliophile and am always seeking new authors and particularly African authors since I believe this is one of the problems in our society. The minority have a long historicalbank of masters and classics to draw upon for both reading pleasure as well as educating young minds whilst sadly there is a very small number of books written by African authors regardless of ethnicity which paint a picture of Africa before colonialism and outside influences came to exert such a huge influence on current and former generations of both majority and minority populations. We need to read and learn more about previous generations and traditions and how and why they arose and we need to learn this before it has entirely disappeared from an entirely African perspective.
It is in my opinion an informative piece providing information on books which I might not have known about rather than a “puff” piece to be resented and found patronising. I associate “puff” with promoting something for no good reason other than encouraging people to purchase something of no real value. I did not sense that Fiona was being patronising and am curious to know where she wrote in a patronising manner. I also feel that the criticism directed towards Fiona on these grounds could be equally directed towards Amber. I find this need to feel slighted by people in general as tiresome and irritating as amber apparently found Fiona’s column.
Gail, I really don’t understand what you mean in your first paragraph. The writers who have written books (named above) do not write traditional African stories in any sense. They are modern, urban tellings of a certain South African reality, by contemporary writers.
Patronising — because why do black writers need lobbying (on their behalf) to be considered in competitions? There is ample proof of exceptional writing and so it has been for decades. Second, and in my opinion, it looks to me like Fiona’s piece is a rather thinly veiled complaint about how genre writing is generally perceived and she is merely using the authors names to advance this (she has said enough on this subject in other forums if you care to do some research). The latter two writers are not black writers, by the way, and hence I was perplexed at where she was going with this article.
I would not have made these comments at all if Fiona has simply stated (or written with the intent of saying): here are five great books worthy of being read and that should have won awards (in her opinion).
As it stands she claims that SA competitions and judges do not acknowledge black urban reality. Where is the justification for such a claim? Certainly not the past. Even opinion (puff) pieces require justification and thoughtfulness.
Oh come ON! Why am I being overlooked AGAIN? I do so deserve an award.
Do you have any idea how much I have had to drink to get where I am today?
Give me a break.
Just seen Amber’s comments and am deeply confused. They read like an ad hominem attack on Fiona for personal reasons — I’ve re-read the piece carefully several times and see no complaints, veiled or otherwise, about how genre writing is perceived. It’s certainly not a puff piece — the comments on each book reflect close and attentive reading of promising SA authors.
A few clangers: “They are modern, urban tellings of a certain South African reality, by contemporary writers.” Um. “Hear Me Alone” — a truly brilliant book, one that should have won many prizes — is set in first century Judea, and tells an alternative version of the birth of Jesus from the perspective of a village teenager. And “Snake” is a brilliant twist on the lethal implications of rural land ownership, seen through the eyes of a Boland child. Not much urban action going on there. And much of things I thought I knew is set in Grahamstown and on the Wild Coast.
Then there’s the claim about “South Africa['s] … fine, global writers of color Lewis Nkosi, Zoe Wicomb, Njubulo [sic] Ndebele, Bessie Head, Coovadia, Dangor.” Every one of those authors except for Coovadia had to go into exile and write from there. Coovadia is also the only one still alive or under the age of 65. Not even Zakes Mda or Mandla Langa make it onto this very dated list. Which exactly proves Fiona’s point: we’re not paying enough attention to young, fresh local writing talent, regardless of the colour of their skin.
I concede that the word “urban” was incorrect.
Why, however, should my comments be considered an ad hominem attack? Fiona Snyckers places her writing in a public arena and surely it is fair game to expect criticism when you do not substantiate? Her piece is self-serving because it tries to make a greater point, which has little to do with these five writers: “… it seems as though the more authentically this experience is rendered on the page, the less merit judges can find in it.”
I ask again, where is the proof for this? Because I couldn’t understand it (and I follow SA awards and local writing), so I did a Google search and came up with this: http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2010-08-30-freedoms-reign-begins-in-defence-of-franzen-and-high-art, and this: http://fionasnyckers.bookslive.co.za/blog/2010/08/27/franzen-frenzy-gets-foolisher).
Of course we must promote young writers, not by offering up their race as reason (which came across as disingenuous given the latter two names), but their writing and excellence.
Off the top of my head, here are young(er) South Africans who have recently won awards or been shortlisted: Damon Galgut, Kopano Matlwa, Zinaid Meeren, Ashraf Kagee, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Yewande Omotoso, HG Golokai, Adam Schwartzman, Terry Westbury-Nunn.
No, don’t you get it. As long as the characters are black, then that qualifies as black writing! You need to read more Amber! Get Trinity by Fiona Snyckers, a black girl who doesn’t care about the past and struggle and all that stuff. Now if this was music everyone woulda been shouting black face. maybe, but at least die Antwoord actually sound like the people they mimic.