What’s African anyway?

I said to myself that I was going to keep my mouth shut about this. Really. Because this old argument has been doing the rounds in my immediate writerly circles for ages now. But some stuff’s been said by folks in the media recently that picked open the scabs, so I’m going to have my say and then be done with it. I'm also glad that I've waited a week to calm the hell down before posting this (and removing all the F-bombs).

Firstly, there’s the notion of what constitutes being African, and writing African issues. Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that all people who reside in Africa, or who were born here, should have a voice. But … And here’s the really big BUT. This voice should be inclusive.

We need to ask ourselves why many South African fantasy, horror and SF writers look to getting published overseas rather than locally. Oh, it’s never said out in the open, but I’ve – excuse the colloquialism – picked up enough stompies. (Reading between the lines, for you folks overseas.) We have a wealth of amazing talent in this country, and what’s being done to develop it? Not much.

Oh, you’re not literary enough.

You’re not writing about “African” issues.

Your ancestors were not born in Africa.

You are not African enough.

Major awards or grants go to writers who create the “right” kind of “African” fiction or poetry. So, what’s going to happen to South Africa’s answer to JRR Tolkien, Stephen King or Ray Bradbury? Not much. Their voices will go unheard because they do not validate a common stereotypical perception of “Africa”. This is discrimination. Plain and simple. You can try dress it up in platitudes about how we need to uplift blah, blah, blah, but it doesn’t change the facts. I see this in other art forms too, particularly the film industry. It makes me tired.

Culturally I'm Afrikaans. When I was a teenager, I was so ashamed of my culture and race back in the 1990s I stopped writing and reading in my mother tongue or discussing "local" issues in my fiction. I looked to the worlds created by Anne McCaffrey, JRR Tolkien, Kate Elliot and CJ Cherryh for inspiration. Which is possibly now why I write mainly SFF/H. I often feel my writing is socially unacceptable here because I choose to write SFF/H. But, get this. (It gets even better.) When I submit to overseas houses, I have my stories rejected because they are not “recognisably African”. When you say you are an African writer, there are certain expectations of your art, and you need to play along and conform to a particular vision of what is African – according to the lens presented by the world.

What makes my experience of being African any less valid than that of a farmer’s daughter in the Northern Cape or a retired security guard living in a township?

But jawellnofine. I'll leave you with that. I'm going to continue doing my thing, and I'll continue cheering on some of my mates who've broken into the overseas market because hey, that's awesome. You go. Do your thing. I'm not going to stop trying.

All I ask is that you think about what it means to be African, and how we are moving into a world where borders are blurring, and cultural identity is moving from local to global. Africa is more than thorn trees in the Serengeti. It's more than South Africa's apartheid past or the depredations of colonialism. We need to move beyond that.

#Friday Flash: How Does Your Garden Grow?

It’s an open-casket funeral. I only notice once I’ve clutched at D’s suit and left creases and tear stains in the silk after I hug him.

Don’t look, says the crow.

A dozen nightmares of animated corpses eyeballing me flood to the surface but I hunch on the pew—not quite in the middle of the church but not at the back. I’m not family. I was the daughter of the next-door neighbours. No one important. Today my funerary attire is not out of place.

The people I remember from a decade ago are older, balder and fatter. The kids are all grown up, like me. I struggle to marry faces to names. The projector displays its slide show and the dearly departed is broadcast for all present and I can’t stop the tears. I’m not crying for the departed. She is gone. I cry for myself, for the fact that I’m the one who hurts. Selfish.

A nasty little voice suggests I could have gone to visit more often and reminds me of others who will shuffle off this mortal coil next, each taking another fragment of my past; my childhood cremated to ash and scattered to the four winds. But I know the truth of it. We grow up, we grow apart. We can only mourn that which has passed. We cannot force branches together that have grown perpendicular to each other.

The sermon is bland, staid words repeated a million times before by parish priests in dry whispers that wash over those gathered like a river of sand. Vague notions of guilt remind me of the faith I’ve cast aside.

It’s all lies, it’s all lies, my atheist grandfather says from his death bed while my mother prays for his salvation.

I can’t go back. I’m the acorn that’s germinated and grown into an oak with twisted boughs warped by the wind. It’s impossible for me to fold myself back into that easily contained package that will match the dozens stacked away into neatly regimented rows.

People wonder where the soul goes upon death. They would like to believe that a new body is prepared for an afterlife. It lets them feel better about the fact that we all bear the black mark on our foreheads. It’s wishful thinking. Tooth Fairies in which big people can believe.

They play Don’t Cry for me Argentina, but the music fails to move me the way it did when I was a kid. I used to dig Andrew Lloyd Webber. Now the tune seems hackneyed, worn out from overplay. It was the deceased’s husband’s favourite song. They played it at his funeral too, though he was an atheist and they held his funeral in this very same church more than a decade ago.

We get a last chance to view the deceased once the service is over. I can’t help but think she looks pinched, a dried-out husk and the placeholder of the woman who taught me to love my garden. Why is she so small? I could lift her in my arms. The coffin is heavy lacquered wood with shiny brass handles. It seems incongruous when compared to the features of the woman who taught me to plant avocado pips and steal cuttings from botanical gardens.

I want to yell at them that this is wrong. I want to scoop her up and run with her and plant her beneath a spreading ficus so that its roots can tangle with her hair and worms can dance beneath her skin. The white satin is sterile. It is death.

Afterward, I sit on a bench beneath a cypress and watch as the family carries the coffin to the waiting hearse. The funeral director is a thin, upright man with precise movements. He shakes hands mechanically after the family have slid the casket into the back of the vehicle. Faces are expressionless, thoughts blown away with the Southeaster that shakes the plantains and rips the clouds into tattered shrouds. This isn’t really happening, is it?

The leaves are turning and summer draws to a close. I wonder about the deceased’s garden, about the plants growing there that hail from Singapore, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Mauritius. They planted her husband beneath an Iceberg rose, but so far as I can remember, the plant died within months. Will she return to the earth or will her family keep her locked away in an urn so that they can keep her near? Does she even care now that she’s gone, her essence flown to star stuff?

All that matters is here and now. My husband comes to fetch me after I’ve had too-sweet mango juice and endured people telling me the last time they saw me I was a wee sprog that was so high. My husband and I talk about normal things, like what we’re going to do later, about fabric that needs to be bought for a photo shoot and pictures he needs to print out. I lose myself in his words and dream about my garden. I need to plant more trees.

#Friday Flash: Memory Lane

I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a game. It was more of a ritual. Suzanne and I would meet each Halloween at a small restaurant in Kalk Bay. The place had been there for ages—one of those spots that kept their doors open over the years despite the downturn in economic climes.

“You’re looking amazing!” the manager told me when I arrived. He was one of those rare ones, I gathered, with a gift for recalling faces. If he knew what was good for him he wouldn’t remember me the next time. He’d shown me to my table last year, and the year before that. I liked the view. I liked the memories. I came here even if Suzanne couldn’t make it.

“I stay out of the sun,” I told him with a pointed smile. “You have no idea how harmful UV radiation can be.”

I shouldn’t take such risks but the older our kind became, the more prone we were to being creatures of habit. And I was keen to see Suzanne. We hadn’t gotten together in more than a decade because she’d been living overseas with her second husband. Foreign travel understandably posed difficulties for those of us who were night dwellers.

Although I no longer had a pulse, I couldn’t help but feel a small lurch of excitement as I made my way to our usual table—one that overlooked the tidal pool. And, as promised in her last communiqué, Suzanne was there. She had her back to me, so did not see me until I slipped into the seat opposite hers.

“Oh!” Suzanne pressed a hand to her chest. “You startled me.”

“I’m sorry.” I grimaced, partially from giving her a fright but also because of her appearance. Even more lines marred her face and her once nut-brown hair was streaked liberally with grey. “How are you?” I held my hand out to her and she took it, squeezing lightly. Her skin warmed mine. The last time we’d met, she’d thrown herself at me and we’d embraced, squealing like young girls.

“I’m fine,” Suzanne replied. Her eyes glistened and I could smell the sour burst of emotion from her. “You haven’t...” She wanted to complete the sentence with “aged a bit”.

We never discussed my condition or, indeed, the special needs that accompanied it. It was enough that she was aware of it, and that she didn’t judge me.

The skin around her eyes tightened briefly. “Charles was diagnosed with colon cancer last month.”

“That’s terrible,” I said, but I meant the words more for her than for the husband I’d never met.

Suzanne withdrew her hand then waved the waiter over, not quite meeting my gaze. She ordered us both a glass of red wine then waited for the man to get out of hearing. “I’ve filed for divorce. I can’t go through this a second time.” She meant living through the slow death of a loved one. The second husband had eventually died of a series of strokes, but he had been bedridden for almost two years. She’d gone through an almost literal hell.

I inclined my head. “I won’t think ill of you.” I was the last one to pass judgment. Especially since I’d long lost track of how many I’d killed. Some inadvertently. A few not.

Suzanne’s laugh was shallow and bitter. “I thought you’d like to know I went to our school reunion.”

I’d been unable to attend. For obvious reasons.

She dug in her handbag and produced a tablet in a slick leather binder. I watched with interest as she scrolled past icons to bring up a folder of pictures.

“You’ll laugh.” She handed me the thing. “One of the teachers made up a series of before and after pictures. I thought you’d be interested.”

I hardly recognised the faces, even of the photos taken when we’d been younger. A surprised hiss escaped me when I encountered the first images of me. My hair long, straight hair had been almost white. The colour now was more that of burnished gold and it looped in lazy ringlets through its own perverse will. The better to be more beguiling, my dear.

My eyes were wide and innocent in a sun-kissed face, a faint sprinkling of freckles across my nose. I looked like a baby. Not this dead white thing I was now. I paused at a picture taken on our valedictory day. Almost a hundred girls posed on the stands by the hockey field with Table Mountain in the background. Our beige uniforms couldn’t quite detract from the vibrancy of our smiles.

“Remember that day?” Suzanne said. “Mrs De Wet made us all take our jerseys off so we could look the same. We just dropped them in a scattering of discarded knitwear.”

“And I recall telling you they looked like empty skins, like cocoons or something that had hatched.” For some peculiar reason I felt ill. I could feel the ghost of sunlight on my skin, and the salty tang of the sea breaking on the rocks below the window made me think of blood, thick and hot on my tongue.

We shared a silent moment and I couldn’t help but think how we were both victims of time, and how differently things had turned out for each of us.

Suzanne gave a nervous laugh. “None of us were butterflies, were we?”

I shook my head. “And there are no knights in shining armour, either.”

We’d be back next year. I knew it. Suzanne would be a year older. I’d still be the same. She’d never ask to be turned, and I’d never offer.

* * * *

If you liked my vampires, you might want to try out two of my novellas, The Namaqualand Book of the Dead and What Sweet Music They Make.