Riding the bloody horse

The importance of being readers

A Peter Clarke cover picture for the lit mag, Izwi

Way back when, after writing my first poem about pirates, I went in search of my mother so that I could read it to her. I can’t remember her reaction but she probably patted me on the head and said encouraging words. I didn’t realise it at the time, but for writers, readers – or listeners – are an essential part of writing. It seems so obvious now. But we need readers in the same way we need words. Because without the reader the work is only half finished. We all rely on the reader’s imagination to bring the story to life.

         Which was why I was lucky when setting out on the writing life in Johannesburg in the 1970s. Lucky because there were regular writing get-togethers on the Wits campus (University of the Witwatersrand). It was there that I met (here follows some serious name-dropping): Christopher Hope, Stephen Gray, Miriam Tlali, Robert Greig, Ingrid de Kok, Kelwyn Sole, Andries Olifant, Cherry Clayton, Mike Kirkwood, Achmat Dangor, Matutuzeli Matshoba, Sheila Roberts,  Lionel Abrahams, Sipho Sepamla, Reg Rumney, Ahmed Essop, Patrick Cullinan, Don Mattera, Ivan Vladislavic, Mongane Wally Serote, Chris van Wyk, Jaki Seroke. Once or twice Nadine Gordimer might have joined one of the readings.

 

I remember Wally Serote giving a poetry reading on campus one lunch time shortly after the publication of his first collection, Yakhal’inkomo. For some reason I was the lone whitey in the audience and Serote refused to read unless I left the auditorium. These were the days of Black Consciousness so he might have been digging in for those reasons, or he might have thought I was a Security Branch spy. Anyhow, Don Mattera, who I’d met at previous poetry workshops, vouched for me and persuaded Serote to continue with the reading. Which he did. (An aside: at the time Mattera was defying a banning order which restricted him from attending any event where there were more than two other people.)

Jump twenty years to 1993 in Paris. A group of South African writers have been invited to France to give readings, and here I am at a breakfast in a five-star hotel (that had been favoured by the Nazis during the Second World War), at a table with Wally Serote. I tell him we’ve met before and explain the situation.

He looks incredulous. ‘No, never, chief, I wouldn’t do that,’ he says, laughing. And we leave it there. We’re all South African writers now and a little more than a year off the first democratic elections.

Back to those Wits gatherings, which would often adjourn to the home of Stephen Gray in the nearby defiant suburb of Mayfair. I seem to recall that the poet and author Peter Wilhelm lived next door. Mayfair was defiant because there was a “mix” of people living there, mix in the apartheid sense of white, Indian, coloured. At the time this was against the Group Areas Act and the suburb was subjected to regular police raids.

Stephen’s house was often used for impromptu readings round his kitchen table, and many of the poems read there ended up in a literary magazine he produced, Izwi. It was one of those hand-printed roneo-and-staple jobs but for some of us it was a step into the world of readers.

There were other little magazines on the go. Christopher Hope and Mike Kirkwood ran Bolt, one of those publications which young writers had to crack. It wasn’t easy and the rejection slips could offer stern advice. “Check your spelling. Don’t waste our time.” An early lesson in the presentation of manuscripts.

Patrick Cullinan and Lionel Abrahams started The Bloody Horse, another of those high hurdles that had to be jumped if you wanted to be taken seriously as a poet or writer. The title of their magazine came from Roy Campbell’s famous, On Some South African Novelists:

You praise the firm restraint with which they write –

I’m with you there, of course:

They use the snuffle and the curb all right,

But where’s the bloody horse.

Later, when he was at Ravan Press, Mike Kirkwood launched Staffrider which published a host of writers who would go on to make lasting contributions to local literature. Of course, the censors didn’t like Staffrider one little bit, and frequently banned it. But Staffrider’s circulation was unaffected because, on publication, batches were immediately bundled off to the writers groups in the townships and the suburbs. Those were the days when government looked askance at writers and regularly banned their work, and regularly banned Staffrider. These days government couldn’t give a damn for what anyone writes, and the censorship has moved to whistleblowers who often have to flee for their lives or end up dead. Back in the apartheid days writers could also end up dead but usually for their activism rather than their writing.

In retrospect, those Joburg poetry gatherings were where I learnt something of the craft and, equally importantly, where we experienced the value of readers. They were visceral readers who taught me as much about the snuffle and the curb as they did about the bloody horse.