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New configurations
A conversation between Elleke Boehmer and Wim Manuhutu
For this special issue, we are happy to veer off our usual path. After all, considering the themes at hand, a lenient stance towards (formal) boundaries seems particularly appropriate. So we present a piece that is neither here nor there - not an article, not really our usual interview - but a conversation between two scholars, recorded and prepared for Vooys by editor An Prudon. We met Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English (Oxford University) and acclaimed novelist, when she was in the Netherlands to visit family. Boehmer was born to Dutch parents in Durban, South Africa, and speaks perfect Nederlands. Yet, she preferred to use English for this piece, and so we gladly relinquished some of our usual all-Dutch pages to this foreign tongue. Joining us at De Balie in Amsterdam was Wim Manuhutu. After years of experience in the cultural sector, he is currently working on a PhD project (VU University) in which he explores the Dutch colonial past in relation to the concept of shared cultural heritage. The resulting exchange takes us from the Netherlands and South-Africa to Indonesia, and from Benedict Anderson to Marlon James and Marlene van Niekerk. All in all, a truly border-crossing conversation.
Wim Manuhutu (WM): Benedict Anderson, author of the classic work on the nation, Imagined Communities, recently passed away in Indonesia. Since the publication of his book, theory has moved beyond the nation to think and write instead about the ‘transnational’. What do you understand by this term?
Elleke Boehmer (EB): By ‘transnational’ I understand cultural, political and economic linkages between nations, and not just between nations but also between cities, considering how cities have become rising forces in this globalized world. We've seen in the past twenty years a far greater intensity of transnational, or border-crossing, developments between cities and nations. This is a result of global economic flows - of product-flows or commodity-flows - but also of course of cultural and people-flows. The globalized planet is on some levels advancing the greater migration of peoples, even if it has in some cases also produced an intensification of barriers and wars between nations.
WM: You emphasize the strong connection between transnational movements and globalisation. Does that mean that this is something that has only been going on in re- | |
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cent decades, or could you point to places where these processes have been at work for a much longer time?
EB: Yes, of course, when I speak of transnationalism now, I am very much thinking about a ‘new phase’ in transnational migration, exchange, and interaction. However, this is by no means the first such phase the world has seen. If we go right back to the Indian Ocean world, circa one thousand A.D., we see a world that was entirely one of flows, circulation and cross-border exchanges. A giraffe arrived in the palace of the Chinese emperor around that time, and bananas travelled from Indonesia to Africa; there was a lot of monsoon-driven transport and trade across the Indian Ocean. So we've seen these kinds of developments before in history. My book Indian Arrivals looks at transnational travel - the movement, not only of people but also of goods and texts - in the late nineteenth century as a result of British imperialism, which at that time was the driver of these kinds of exchanges.
If we ask the question ‘why are we talking about transnationalism now?’ I would have to say it is because transnational movement has increased in recent years. It has not only increased in intensity, but probably also in terms of the power gradient that these travellers are moving across: they are moving from increasingly impoverished margins to increasingly wealthy and powerful centres. That is where cities come in as important players.
WM: Would you say that in this new phase of transnationalism there are new centres emerging? And if so, what kind of effect does that have on literature and culture?
EB: The centres of cultural authority and power are definitely shifting. This is not to say that the attractive or magnet power of the West is entirely on the wane - on the contrary. As we've just seen in the transnational movements of migrants in 2015 alone, the west remains something of an economic lodestar.
However, all of that is also changing. There are new ‘global centres’ we could name, in South America for example, or Johannesburg in South Africa. We could also talk about Jakarta, Shanghai or Sydney as Austral-Asian entrepôts, as locales where different cultural-economic streams intersect. So there are new configurations, certainly in terms of where the centres of power are located. And what that also means is new kinds of concatenations, a new clashing and intermixing of cultures in configurations that we have not seen before.
WM: Do you see Marlon James' winning of the Man Booker Prize as a reflection of transnational shifts in the world of literature?
EB: I am glad that you mention James. A History of Seven Killings is a wonderful novel, and Marlon James was the first Jamaican to be awarded the Man Booker Prize. However, writers from across the Anglophone world (I'm thinking of Australian,
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South African, and Indian writers, for example) have been receiving the Booker Prize for some considerable time really in recognition of their border-crossing creative work. Salman Rushdie is probably the most famous example, and perhaps the inaugural author in this regard.
But what's so interesting about the Marlon James novel is that, although it is very Caribbean in its preoccupations, it was written - as in, was physically written - from the vantage point of the United States. The book is really a mix of North American and Caribbean styles, themes and motifs. A great chunk of the novel (the last sections) take place in the United States itself. In respect of our conversation, this book alerts us to the fact that literature, such as novels like James', but also poems and the kind of ‘transnational poetics’ that Jahan Ramazani writes so eloquently about, often come out of transnational fusions and interconnections. It is no longer the case that the most interesting works of literature are coming out of a homogenous cultural sphere or community.
WM: How is this registered by readerships? Do people have trouble relating to the topics, styles or forms that are brought into the body of national literature by authors that have a transnational, multi-ethnic, or multicultural background or interest?
EB: This is a really important consideration. On the one hand, incredibly interesting things are emerging currently as the novel sets out to engage with a number of universal or even global mediums. One of these mediums is the English language, as is the case for Marlon James' novel, although I wouldn't say that this kind of transnational involvement is exclusively something that involves the English language. Another ‘global medium’ A Brief History of Seven Killings engages with is music. In the 1970s and 80s the music of Bob Marley, reggae music, became internationally known, admired, loved and listened to. A writer like James can plug into certain international or universalized tastes by writing about that music. His novel connects with pre-existing themes and rhythms through which these kinds of transnational writings can win an ever more international audience.
On the other hand, there is also resistance to the transnational and multi-ethnic. I have seen this amongst my own students. Granted, it is changing but I still notice this: a resistance to unfamiliarity. For example, I had a student once who, in a class on Chinua Achebe, told me that she found the novel very interesting, but that at the end of the day she liked Jane Austen better because she preferred to read about characters named Elizabeth or John, rather than Okonkwo. When I pressed her on it, she said: ‘I'm not being funny or purposely difficult, it's just that I have grown up with friends called Elizabeth and John and not Okonkwo. Those names sound familiar and that's what I'll go for in a bookshop when I'm next looking for a book.’ Clearly, then, these concerns about unfamiliarity and strangeness are real. I do think though, and I am an optimistic reader in this sense, that these blockages are loosening precisely because of the fascinating things that international writers, using the English language, are doing with that
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language and with literary form. I think that this is beginning to override some of those rather problematic issues that readers might have had in the past.
WM: Your own most recent novel The Shouting in the Dark (2015) also combines a number of fascinating transnational histories.
EB: Yes, the novel does map various cross-border pathways. Of course, no writer of fiction begins with a certain agenda, but they do begin with a set of starting assumptions. One of the starting assumptions in The Shouting in the Dark is that all the characters come out of some sort of transnational mix: who they are is defined by how they have moved. In this novel I was fascinated with doing a couple of things. I wanted to talk about the world of the Indian Ocean, and to bring the South African space - in which a great deal of the novel is set - into that world.
The father character Har in the novel is an old colonial officer, and he has seen action in the Indian Ocean theatre of war in the 1940s. He has also worked in Singapore, which was a British colonial possession, and the Dutch East Indies, which was of course a Dutch colonial possession. He's touched down in India and in the Arabian Gulf area, too. In short, the space that has shaped him is that fluid world of the Indian Ocean, and that is one of the things I really wanted to bring to the fore. I was also interested in the transcontinental movement of the characters, such as the mother, from the ‘fatherland’ of the Netherlands to the peripheries of that European world, and the movement of the daughter character, Ella, along a similar axis but with a different interpretation of the relations between Africa and the Netherlands.
WM: Did your South African audience pick up on anything in particular?
EB: I suppose audiences there were particularly struck by the theme of post-traumatic stress and trauma that runs through the book, specifically the question of how trauma is transferred to the next generation and how that generation inherits it. There is currently a lot of discussion in the country about the condition of those who were ‘born free’, so in other words, born in 1994 or after. They are very divergent in their preoccupations from previous generations, yet those divergences cannot be bridged unless the trauma of apartheid, and how that trauma is transferred, is stared in the face: they need to be actually dealt with and actually talked about. One thing that this novel is very much about is the need to grapple with those nightmares: to confront and to listen, rather than to shut them away or deny them. It's precisely in dark hidden spaces, where trauma is locked away and denied, that resentment and hatred breeds and grows. This issue was picked up again and again by a range of audiences in South Africa.
People also found the interracial attraction, or at least the infatuation, of Ella for Phineas particularly interesting, in part because interracial relationships have so much been described as violent or vindictive in South African literature, even in the very
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recent past, whereas this relationship is tender and at least on Ella's side passionate. As in Coetzee's sometimes notorious Disgrace (1999), black-white relations in the South African novel were generally understood in terms of ‘swart gevaar’, as it was called in apartheid South Africa, that is, the sexual fear of the racial other. It was interesting that interviewers about The Shouting in the Dark wanted to respond to and talk about the interracial relationship in the novel.
WM: You really challenge your readers to use their imagination, much remains unexplained, in part because of what I find to be a very economical style. Is this something you did deliberately?
EB: I suppose I grew up, by choice, in a late modernist school of writing, in which the detail is sketched impressionistically or post-impressionistically. This is my fifth novel so far and of those five, only one book is ‘realist’ in any sort of recognizable sense. That was the second novel and it is the one I feel least connected with at the moment. I admire greatly, and have pored over and studied in depth, the writing of modernists like Virginia Woolf or Joseph Conrad. I'm fascinated by how Conrad - through various devices like delayed decoding, and the sketching in of seemingly minor salient details - can conjure up a whole social world or a nightmarish psychodrama.
Although I haven't studiously tried to replicate features such as these, I can say with some confidence that I have been influenced by those styles and techniques. I much prefer to engage the readers’ imagination than to tell them everything. That said, it was really important to evoke the world of the late seventies in the way that I've tried to do here, through salient details that bring the reader very firmly into a certain context at a certain time - specific fashions, what is on television, certain foods and smells and so on. So there is probably a mix between impressionistic and realist detail.
WM: The novel also recently appeared in Dutch translation as Op de veranda (Cossee 2015) and you are of course in this case in the unique position of being able to speak and write in both languages. Did you communicate closely with the translator?
EB: It is great that you are bringing translation into the conversation, because of course transnational relations often require translational interactions. It was crucial for me that this novel appear in Nederlands more or less at the same time as it appeared in English. One reason why this was so important was of course that the novel involves, as we were saying, identities which are in transit and in translation - the characters speak Dutch but they live in an Anglophone context. Another reason is that the novel harkens back to the Netherlands, even as it ponders what it is to be diasporic Dutch in the late twentieth century.
I did for a considerable time think of doing the translation myself. I admire very much the work of my late friend André Brink, who translated all his work himself. But I simply ran out of time. Furthermore, some of the material in the novel is quite difficult
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and I actually couldn't bear, psychologically, to go through it again, and especially not in the Dutch language. This might sound like a strange thing to say, but I think those who read the book will know what I mean. So I was introduced, through my Dutch publisher Cossee, to a wonderful translator named Joost Poort. I actually worked through the translation with him twice over, so I have gone through every single word myself as well.
WM: Does anything get lost in translation?
EB: In some cases, I had to advise Joost on certain things, simply because he hasn't experienced the context of South Africa that I talk about in the novel. For example, in one of his translations he got the climate of Durban wrong. He evoked a climate of great heat and dryness, whereas in fact we're talking about a very humid, tropical environment. Then also, there's the interracial relationship that impinges in important ways on the emotional growth of the central character, Ella. In the interaction between Phineas - the black character whom she likes - and Ella, speech marks aren't much used. What I was trying to suggest is that their exchanges are to some extent without words, or without them directly speaking to one another. I had to work quite closely with Joost on evoking in the translation that close communication which takes place almost wordlessly. There were other similar instances - the work of translation is such an incredibly subtle, even psychological process, as well as of course a matter of straight linguistic exchange.
WM: I want to return, via language, to the broader theme of empire. Although Dutch is still the official language in Suriname, for example, it has vanished in Indonesia, and with it much of the ‘Indische Literatuur’. Would you see this as a loss for Indonesia?
EB: This is a very complicated topic. My initial response would be that, yes, I think it is a loss. To some extent these developments have cut that nation off from that medium of transnational exchange that the imperial language can facilitate. But at the same time, of course, I would consider the arguments of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a writer from Kenya, a different postcolonial context, who is very much of the opinion that one should write in one's native tongue, and that translation should occur only afterwards to make those vernacular literatures available worldwide. If we follow that line of thought, then of course it's perfectly all right for Indonesia to reject Dutch as its national language.
It is interesting - and this remark is really a postscript to that important question - that contemporary Indian or South Asian writers using English are increasingly uncomfortable with the label of ‘postcolonial’, and with the idea of writing in ‘British English’. They increasingly want to see themselves as writing in ‘Indian English’. Even though they are using the global language that is English, they want to tag it, as it were, as something that is more or less indigenous to, or of South Asia or of India, rather than
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being only of the globe. I am thinking of a writer like Amitav Ghosh, for example. He has taken a very different position towards terms such as ‘postcolonial’ and ‘English’ when compared with writers such as Rushdie.
On the one hand, then, we're talking about discontinuities of tradition, whether fortunately or unfortunately facilitated by imperial/post-imperial language use. On the other hand, we're talking about the need for ever more translation - about the need to push back against this sense that English is somehow globally available and globally exchangeable. Because actually, what may be happening to English is what happened to Latin in Europe all those centuries ago: an increasing diversification and appropriation. That kind of development is important because it allows those different forms of English to be used to express different kinds of national and regional identities.
WM: Afrikaans has a very negative label, for some, because of its relationship to the era of apartheid in South Africa.
EB: Yes, Afrikaans got a very bad name, and rightly so I suppose, especially in the 1970s. During that time the apartheid government forced all black students in secondary schools to learn Afrikaans and to have many of their lessons in Afrikaans. This was roundly rejected by the student movement in 1976. During the build-up to the democratic elections in 1994, the question arose of which languages would become national languages of South Africa and it was decided at first to choose English and all the major African languages, but not to include Afrikaans. However, there was an outcry from the so-called ‘brown people’ or ‘Coloureds’ or ‘Kaapse mensen’ of the Western Cape, because Afrikaans was their home language and their mother tongue. And, as various censuses have shown, there are in fact - there were then and there are now still - more brown-skinned speakers of Afrikaans than white-skinned. Afrikaans was therefore eventually included as one of the national languages, as a properly African language.
When I travelled to South Africa to promote The Shouting in the Dark in September 2015, I was accompanied by my eldest son, who is interested in languages and in linguistic mixes in particular. He was struck by how much Afrikaans was still spoken on the streets of Cape Town, by ‘Kaapse mensen’, and this emphasized the fact for me, too. However, understandably, a number of the up and coming writers from the Western Cape community who may have Afrikaans as a mother tongue, are now writing in English. I'm thinking of writers such as Rehana Rossouw, C.A. Davids, and also of the dramatist Nadia Davids. They are referring to communities who speak Afrikaans, so they weave a lot of hybridized dialogue into their work, but they ultimately write in English. This is partly again that question that we touched on earlier, of reaching a broader, a more global audience - it allows writers to skirt, or leap-frog, the stage of translation.
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WM: Are there any other authors writing in English or Afrikaans right now that students of literature in the Netherlands should be aware of? Do you have any tips?
EB: I'm sure many of the writers I would recommend are already established names and very well-known here as well. I love the work of Marlene van Niekerk, whose Afrikaans is so very interesting because she uses street Afrikaans, if you like, a kind of patois, particularly in her novel Triomf (1994). I also admire the street-wise imagination of Ivan Vladislavic. And I am, and have been for a considerable time, a great admirer of J.M. Coetzee. He of course comes from an Afrikaans family background but he has always written in an English that some would call ‘already translated’ - critic Rebecca Walkowitz has called it ‘born translated’. It's a very plain, spare English prose, seemingly stripped of all the special vernacular locutions that a native English speaker might use.
There are some fantastic spoken word poets I would recommend as well, who perform their work before they write it down, and who are using an inventive angry mix of Afrikaans, African languages, and a kind of hybridized English in order to express themselves. Look for names like Conelius Jones or Lebohang Nova Masango. As I said, their work is not that securely text-based yet - in any language - but I would recommend to keep an eye out for this work, it's really exciting.
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