Local English fiction in South Africa has a problem
Last week, reviewer and all-round bookish person Jonathan Amid posted a column to Nuuswerk24 interrogating the state of affairs and quality of book reviews and book reviewers in South Africa.
Reviewers and authors took offense. Subtweets (that word will never get old for me and remains cross-platform) were flung, people were blocked, egos were hurt.
I was initially going to post some kind of response to Amid’s piece—the state of reviews and what constitutes reviews in SA has long been a bugbear of mine—but then I thought I’d take a moment and just check some of what he was referencing and … holy shit … was I not put right in my place.
Because I was reminded, yet again and in no uncertain terms, just how small the local English fiction scene is in South Africa, especially in comparison to the Afrikaans cultural universe.
In the column, Amid calls out two particular awards dished out this year by Netwerk24—translated as ‘Reviewer of the Year’ and ‘Tastemaker of the Year’—and while I’m not going to go into this (although, yikes, I see his point), what all that googling to find this out revealed to me—again, because it’s not like I didn’t know this—was reams and reams of names and events and doings and festivals and more festivals and talks and theatre and kultuur and kuns and diepe dinkers and diepe dinkers wat dink about other diepe dinkers and writers writing about it all and feeding the machine … and then a whole lot of Christianity.
Amid says that much of what he writes about in the column is applicable to the English literary scene and although I can agree up to a point—it’s as gossipy and closed door and nepotistic and increasingly silly and ingratiating—I couldn’t even begin to draw a comparison, because the English literary scene has nothing on the depth and breadth and seriousness of the Afrikaans scene.
It also has a fraction of the readership buy-in and the money.
A tale of two (and some other) cultures
I think English writers here—and, frankly, I almost want to limit this almost entirely to the Western Cape because it’s such a Western Cape mentality—generally seem to think, because it’s how they behave, that they are the literary scene in South Africa.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
The South African traditional ‘literary scene’ is very, very, very tiny in comparison to the population and what ‘scene’ there is is dominated by Afrikaans literature.
And, most importantly, Afrikaans literature is dominated by local writers.
The Afrikaans population supports its creators and takes them seriously because it can’t get what it needs from anywhere else in the world.
English literature in this country, on the other hand, is dominated by international titles, with only a tiny, tiny fraction of local writers—and specifically fiction writers—squeaking up from the sales sidelines.
I won’t even venture into how under-represented indigenous languages are. I mean, if we all just take a wee moment to think about it, it’s kinda fucking weird and depressing for all sorts of socio-economic realities that the literary scene in South Africa is dominated by Afrikaans and English, instead of Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans, right?
Or is it just me?
Anyway. International publishing scene and lingua franca and all that, I guess.
If Afrikaans fiction writers have a home and that home wants them and needs them, and so welcomes them and supports them and invests in their creative existence, local English fiction writers are standing outside in the rain looking in through the window, noses pressed to the glass, wishing they’d been invited to the table occupied by writers writing in the English language from literally anywhere but South Africa.
You can protest this and point to the small handful of annual English literary events or to the fiction prizes that dot the annual calendar as examples of how English is ‘thriving’.
But all you need do is see what’s happening in the Afrikaans literary space to truly understand what robust cultural cohesion and promotion looks like to understand how meagre the local English lit scene is.
Or, frankly, just read this 2016 post by Sarah Bullen (based on numbers crunched by Paige Nick) about what South Africans are buying. And, spoiler alert, it’s not local English fiction. Bullen’s piece is ten years old now but still relevant. We did our own calculations on available current Nielson data and all that’s changed since then is that all sales trend dramatically downwards for local English fiction.
Or just take a look at the review and book spaces in English newspapers and magazines, look at what the online bookstagrammers and booktokkers are being given by the publishers to punt (for free by the way), what gets spoken about and foregrounded on YouTube channels and radio—and it’s all overwhelmingly international work.
I mean, for God sake’s, walk into any book store and ‘local fiction’ is usually a book shelf hidden around the corner. Can you imagine walking into a French bookstore dominated by American or British literature?
So why the ick for local English fiction?
Into the suck …
I think it’s a multi-faceted problem. The first being that ‘English’ has no one defining cultural foundation here in South Africa.
I’ve written before about the Americanisation of the South African mind during apartheid, but the precis is this: at the time that media became a going concern here, the Nats threw money at building the Afrikaans nation’s cultural heritage, the English got imports from America (and the last dregs of what they’d imported from Great Britannia), and everyone else got scraps.
This is important because it means that for the last 50 years, at the very least, English-speaking South Africans—generally—as creators and consumers of cultural artifacts have been dramatically and deeply influenced by the US and UK.
I think it’s also worth noting that when the English inserted themselves on this landscape, they did not bring their poets and their writers. They brought war mongers, colonisers, entrepreneurs and extraction machines.
Which brings me to the big publishers currently in South Africa.
They control the market and they’re not here to grow local English fiction. They’re here almost purely as distribution points for head offices in the global north and to make a buck on the local scene where it makes fiscal sense.
And where it makes fiscal sense is this: non-fiction and Afrikaans, and as a quaint aside, they’ll print some local English fiction. And why should they focus on the latter? They aren’t making their money with local English fiction. Local English language readers read internationals, right?
And this isn’t a comment on the lovely people who work at these houses, by the way. It’s a comment on the system, and the system reports to head office in New York and head office has Yesteryear to flog.
We can thank the indie publishers for keeping local English afloat. They punch way above their weight and means publishing local authors. Why do you think it’s only ever the local English authors and indie publishers exhorting readers to ‘please by local’ or ‘support local writers’.
I’ve never liked this appeal to readers’ charity, but it does bring me to the topic of readers and writers of local English fiction.
Writer, know thy writing might suck
As I was writing this, Marius Du Plessis, CEO and founder of Mirari Press, posted a piece On Acclaim / Or, why we wait for London and New York to tell us a book is worthy which did away with me needing to think about how to write about reader aversion to local fiction.
In his piece, Du Plessis goes into ‘cultural cringe’, a term coined by the critic A. A. Phillips that is ‘the ingrained assumption that whatever is made locally must be inferior to whatever is imported, and that the only route to esteem at home runs through the approval of the metropole’.
Du Plessis writes well about this and the reader experience of buying a local book so it’s no use trying to paraphrase something he’s captured so elegantly already, so just read the piece.
But I do think there’s something to say about the writing from this country and why it hasn’t exactly covered itself in beach-read glory for readers to want to choose local.
It’s true that South Africa has produced some excellent English authors, but I think our writing has sometimes fallen into two loose groups: writing that sways perilously close to mediocrity because publishers want to appeal to the broadest possible market, and writing that is steeped in collective and individual trauma.
For readers looking to escape their context—because what else is the fantasy created in any story—it’s a hard sell to convince them (myself included) to spend their pennies on the devil they know and desperately don’t want to be reminded of. There’s non-fiction for that.
And I’m not talking about the UK award-sniffer readers looking for heart-wrenching stories from the ex-colonies. I’m talking about local readers wanting to be entertained and transported.
Just look at the writers who have the chops to write and tell entertaining stories. There’s a reason some of our most recent best-selling authors and exports have been genre writers: Deon Meyer, Lauren Beukes, Wilbur Smith, Tony Park, Sally Andrew, Jo Watson, Sarah Lotz, Rachel Morgan, JT Lawrence, Kerstin Hall …
Where is more of this? Not on the awards lists that’s for sure. Or being reviewed by worthy literary types here. They’re barely being put on the front tables of book stores. Lotz, Beukes, Watson, Hall, Lawrence … no wonder their literary home isn’t South Africa any more (or, in Hall’s case, never has been).
Which brings us neatly back to Amid’s issues with reviewers in South Africa.
A platform to nowhere
The literary fishbowl is small here. If it’s English, it’s even smaller. There is no money, there are no systems to support it. As Du Plessis writes:
‘In South Africa the apparatus is thin, and getting thinner. Newspaper book pages have shrunk to almost nothing. The local prize ecosystem is small and chronically underfunded. Literary coverage is scattered across a handful of sites and a great deal of unpaid goodwill. A reader standing in a bookshop holding an unfamiliar local novel genuinely does not have much to go on – and so, sensibly enough, they reach for the one signal that is cheap, abundant and pre-validated: the foreign imprimatur. The Booker sticker is doing the work that an entire critical culture does elsewhere. It is a heuristic for a country that has been left to improvise its own literary infrastructure.’
When it comes to reviews, we can argue the finer points of what makes a review and reviewer worthy, but what can most English writers in South Africa expect? Nothing. That’s the short answer.
So when nothing’s on offer, what do you have?
There is Goodreads. But any local author will know how, here in South Africa, one has to practically beg people to leave reviews. South Africans are not so into reading and if they are they aren’t so into the habit of writing about it. If you can get your community to leave reviews, they’re likely to be glowing.
There are local bookstagrammers and booktokkers who might flash your cover in between the other hundred books they’ve been sent to market—for free—from publishers. How well the publishers charm them means that you’ll rarely get an honest review if they give one. No one wants to hurt any feelings. People have careers to foster.
There are the broadsheets and magazines and radio and digital platforms and they’re … oh, right, they’re punting internationals and what space they have for local stuff … well, it’s only a very small space kept aside for that, just enough to fit only one or two writers …
The only place, honestly, where local authors are front and centre are podcasts, and these are nearly impossible to keep going because the producers have no funding and there’s simply no cultural momentum around it.
It’s depressing. So why talk about it? Where’s the solution?
Author aftercare
I don’t know. But I do know that the only way to cope with the reality as an English fiction author in this country is to see the landscape for what it is. To step out of the delusion and come to some reality about how small our publishing pool is, how broken the networks to support it, how few readers there actually are and how little expendable cash there is to buy books.
You do this, so that when you’re through the high of finishing and publishing your book and you get five reviews on Goodreads and sell 150 copies, this doesn’t come as a crushing defeat to your writer soul—the soul that expected acclaim and thousands of copies sold—but sits rather as a reminder of where you are and the context your art was born into, and that just the fact that you doing what you’re doing against all the odds stacked against you is a massive, massive win.
But is this enough? Is this sustainable? Is this how it should be?
No.
Do conversations like Amid’s and Du Plessis’ mean there’s a slow shift happening? A coming to terms with how things are and how they have to change?
I’d like to think so.
TANYA MEESON 