Allaboutwriting

Arja Salafranca reflects on studying literature,  becoming a writer, publishing and editing.

I swung into Wits University’s Senate House in February a few years ago. It was a hot summer’s day. Clutching books, a bag, sunglasses looped around my fingers, the university was teeming with students, noise, life, there was a palpable energy to the place. I’d been given my student number – or rather, the faculty of Humanities had simply re-activated my old number, beginning with the numeral 90 – for 1990, the year I registered as an undergrad student at Wits. It was astonishing to realise that it had been 19 years ago that I had first became a student, started studying literature and psychology; and that some of these students milling around me had only been born that year, the year I was eighteen.

It felt like I was coming full circle as I headed off to the seminar room for my first creative writing seminar. This time I was enrolled as an MA student in creative writing, yet it seemed like I was returning to the source.

For it was at Wits that I really started to become a writer. I don’t credit the institution with making me a writer – I still believe writers are born or made into such by their circumstances and environment – but my fledging creativity and talent found a means of expression through the literature course I was to take that first year and throughout my degree: I studied English literature, African literature and half courses in European literature (in translation). The most transformative of these studies, for me, was in the field of African literature and, of course, in other ways, psychology. The study of African novels, stories and memoirs opened my eyes to what writers on this continent had produced. A literature that I had been ignorant of, growing up.

We have to go back to my government schooling of the late 1980s to gain some perspective on this. At best, at school, I had been introduced to a few South African poets; I had sought out Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, had read Dan Jacobson’s novella’s The Trap and A Dance in the Sun, and had decided to keep my setwork copy of Reef of Time: Johannesburg in Writing, edited by Digby Ricci, a book about essays on Johannesburg, because stories, books and essays about the place I lived in seemed hard to find, few, rare and precious.

One Afrikaans poem resonated so deeply with me, at age 16, called Die Kelnerin, that its images stay with me all these years later. I have forgotten the poet’s name, or even when it was written. But it spoke about a tired-looking waitress in a tearoom, with dirty blonde hair and a problem complexion. The poet observed almost clinically, dispassionately. And this was one of the poems that threw it all open for me, along with many South African poets who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s such as Sipho Sepamla and Mongane Wally Serote. But examples of these writings were like manna, rare and precious. For the most part literature in my apartheid-era government school consisted of reading just one Shakespeare play a year, and just one novel: in matric we read Charles Dickens’ Hard Times – thus was our introduction to literature. No one mentioned South African novelists; when I read an book of essays by Andre Brink which I had bought in my matric year, I had never been seen a book by this prominent writer.

So, when I entered Wits in an earlier February, in 1990, I had no idea how being introduced to a range of writers that described the place I had grown up in, sometimes identified with, and certainly recognised and knew intimately, would define me as a writer, would, in fact, make it possible to be a writer.

Up to that time I had written short stories periodically, beginning at age ten and eleven, when we were asked to do so at school. But my stories were all set elsewhere, some unnameable elsewhere. There was one, L’Attente (The Wait) based on a surreal painting, which described some equally surreal place by the seaside. It was nowhere I had ever been. I wrote quasi-horror stories, also set in unnameable, unrecognisable places. My first realistic story was written at sixteen or seventeen, about a bulimic teenager – but once more, I didn’t set it in South Africa. It was hard to even think of doing so – all the literature I read was American or British, these were natural places to set fiction, even if I had never been to the UK and had only visited California as an eleven-year-old. To set a story in South Africa, at this time, would be like setting a story on Mars. No wonder I grabbed Reef of Time, and didn’t return it as I should have to the school, this book was too valuable not to be seen again. I was hungry for descriptions of the country and the city I lived in. We were many years away from the plethora of local books now flooding the local publishing scene.

And so, at Wits, doing two literature courses in a year, I found myself being engulfed by the sheer amount to be read, as well as by the excitement of reading so much about this place I had found myself in. I discovered Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing, Chinua Achebe, Es’kia Mphalele, and anthologies such as A Century of South African Short Stories edited by Jean Marquard. I discovered, most importantly, that you could write about the place where you lived, that Johannesburg’s hot city streets could become the setting for a short story, or a poem. I started writing stories set in Johannesburg. That December I wrote Solly Bernstein’s Story and this became my first published piece, in a COSAW anthology entitled The Finishing Touch, edited by Andries Walter Oliphant.

My studying at Wits freed me, simply by introducing me to other literatures, both from this country as well as the continent. I was able to start becoming a writer.

I suspect this is not a problem to a beginning writer these days. An 18 or 19 year old has presumably, more African and South African texts in their repertoire of set reading; more local books are being published than ever before, so I suppose that a young writer today wouldn’t be as hamstrung emotionally as I was. Surely they would and do recognise that you can as easily set a story in Johannesburg or Cape Town as Sydney, Hong Kong or New York.

Ironically, then, so many of the stories I wrote then, and continue to write, could just as easily be set in some British or north American landscape as in South Africa. I am not a political writer, and few local novelists these days beat that political drum in any case. I write about feelings, relationships, the turns in friendships, I write about people, and these people could be anywhere. There are some exceptions of course: A Man Sits in a Johannesburg Park is about a man who is emigrating to Australia the next day; this is a peculiarly South African story and about conflict. And South African-themed issues do enter my stories. In Friends the narrator has stayed behind in Johannesburg, while a friend has lived in London for the past ten years. These issues crop up, and I feel confident about setting my stories in the city I know better than any other, in which I still continue to live. Importantly, though, I don’t feel compelled to deliver a message or comment on how evil a system is, such as writers writing during apartheid. My time and milieu has also freed me, as it didn’t and couldn’t, those who wielding pens during the 1970 or 1980s, for instance.

In addition to publishing two poetry collections, as well as a short story collection, The Thin Line, I have also been involved in editing two anthologies. In 2003 Jacana published Glass Jars Among Trees which I co-edited with the poet Alan Finlay. Our working title was an “alternative anthology” which gives some idea of what we were attempting. The result was a blend of poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction, including diary excerpts. Some of the stories were firmly grounded in this country; some flew way beyond both in terms of imagination as well as location. This year The Edge of Things appeared, published by Dye Hard Press, a selection of 24 stories by local writers – again the themes and approaches differed. Some deliberately reached into our apartheid past, some were intensely interior and psychological in approach. It’s been extremely rewarding and gratifying to see that local writers are choosing to work in this genre, and the results are exciting.

But back to my own writing: this time, at Wits, I set my own agenda in the creative writing Master’s that I enrolled in. I choose what to write, and what books to read to further my research and understanding of the genres I am writing in. My chosen form is always brevity – I love reading and writing essays, short stories, poems. I’m writing novellas in my MA, a genre probably as unpopular, and as misunderstood and under-read as the short story in South Africa, although I believe this is slowly changing. In the past few years there’s been a plethora of single collection short story volumes published as well as anthologies.

My novellas are set in this country, and yet there are echoes of leaving. In one there is the spectre of emigration. One of my characters now lives in Australia, he returns for his mother’s funeral and to make sense of the ghosts of the past and his parents’ choices. In another a group of friends meet up again after a decade, and in a weekend away dissect the choices they have made, and how this threads through the present. But, of course, these stories are not about leaving, instead they are about choices, decisions, obsessions; once more I am interested in dissecting people’s lives, relationships, as well as exploring the choices we make and do not make, and how life turns on casual remarks and decisions that can never be undone.

Arja Salafranca’s debut collection of short stories, The Thin Line, was published by Modjaji Books in 2010. She has published two collections of poetry, A Life Stripped of Illusions, 1995 and The Fire in Which we Burn, 2000. Her poetry is also collected in Isis X (Botsotso), 2005. She received the 2010 Dalro Award for poetry and has twice received the Sanlam Award, for fiction and poetry. In 2003 she co-edited the anthology Glass Jars Among Trees with Alan Finlay (Jacana, 2003). She selected stories for The Edge of Things, an anthology of South African short fiction, published by Dye Hard Press in 2011. She edits the Life supplement in The Sunday Independent and is studying toward an MA in Creative Writing at Wits University. Blog: http://arjasalafranca.blogspot.com/ She is a member of SA Pen.

To find out more about getting published, join David Chislett for an evening Publishing Workshop on 7 December in Parkview, Johannesburg.