Get with it, darlings
Our new fiction is finding “living readers”
There was a time, back in the 1970s, when you could number the South African novels published in any one year on your hand. One hand, not two. In those days there were only three major English-language publishers - David Philip in Cape Town and Ravan Press and Ad Donker in Johannesburg. The big UK publishing houses had representation here but that was largely about selling their stock rather than publishing local writers.
Back then, apartheid was in full force, and most novels were “literary” in style and tone and usually critical of the prevailing political dispensation. You could say that ours was a high literature.
And then things started to change in the late-1990s, as did so much else in the country. To all intents and purposes those three publishing houses “disappeared”. New outlets hit the scene: Kwela, Zebra, Umuzi and the big names - Random House, Penguin, PanMacmillan - started publishing local writers. More and more novels hit the shelves each year.
As this happened so changes began to appear. Changes not only in the content of the novels but also in style. Genre fiction asserted itself. Crime fiction being one of the first to break the mould. I can remember my publishers being surprised and confused by my first crime manuscript.
‘What’s this? Why are you writing crime fiction?’
They might also have been asking themselves, what is crime fiction? Locally, in English at the time, there was only Deon Meyer - and he was translated from the Afrikaans. But he’d found a market internationally and that made him acceptable to English readers back home.
What was happening was that novels were being written that no longer supplied social critique - although, arguably, crime fiction does that rather well. But here were books that did not want to be judged on literary terms but in terms of their genre. The local book world was opening up, you could also say growing up..
Yet we haven’t completely thrown off the way we used to see and do things. So when a book comes along that is not social critique, that doesn’t pay any attention to the myriad of problems in this country and is intent on simply offering an entertainingly good read, some critics still hark back to the old ways.
This happened recently with novelist and academic Imraan Coovadia’s review of novelist and academic Shafinaaz Hassim’s Darlings of Durban. It is worth repeating the last paragraph of his review which appeared on Litnet (a site mostly dedicated to literary works): “A writer has to balance the everyday qualities of novelistic writing with the dangers of excessive triviality and mundanity. Instead of working through this dilemma, which is a central part of creativity, Darlings of Durban simply replicates language which doesn’t enlighten, interest, analyse, or charm, but alienates through sheer vapidity. It’s taking the gamble that as a society, at least perhaps in our book clubs, we can no longer distinguish between what’s interesting and what’s vapid. And there’s one added mystery: Is there a market for Darlings of Durban? In another country, with a significant reading public, the novel might be flying off the shelves, a darling of book clubs and shopping malls. But in the La Lucia and Umhlanga world that Darlings of Durban sets out to reproduce and replicate, will the novel find any living readers? I fear not, but perhaps the novel would fit nicely in the glove compartment of Fahim’s ‘slate-grey Lamborghini’.”
The interesting thing here is that Darlings of Durban is finding “living readers”. Novelist Fiona Snyckers posted that she was giving it to family over Easter, adding: “Shafinaaz Hassim came under attack for writing a book about the lives and loves of women in the private, domestic sphere (with plenty of social commentary!) […] women writers have been putting up with this nonsense for too long.”
My feeling is that our writers are expanding the reach of the novel locally - both in what they write and how they write it and in the market that reads them. We have joined the wider world but sometimes we forget that, in this crazy country, books can be written that are not about all the ills of the crazy country, even if their characters live here. It might be hard for some to recognise, but Darlings of Durban belongs in the ranks of ground-breaking novels.
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So interesting and so true. On one hand writers face judgement for cultural appropriation and on the other for not focusing enough on current culture/politics. In another country it wouldn’t be called vapid, it would be called light hearted or cosy!
Thanks for an informative and balanced article. Shafinaaz has written a well-observed and valid portrait of a particular slice of SA life not often covered, namely the gendered and, yes, affluent oblivion of certain Muslim Indian marriages and the 'birdcage' struggles of the women within them to exert their agency and individualism. It's to her credit that she does this without tub thumping, leaving it to her characters to reveal for themselves.