SOURCE: Brink, André. “Literature as Cultural Opposition.” In Reinventing a Continent: Writing and Politics in South Africa, pp. 185-202. Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland Books, 1998.

[In the following essay, based on a lecture originally delivered in July 1993, Brink comments on the role of writers and literature in opposition to political and social realities in South Africa, both during and after the era of apartheid.]

Within the general framework of this seminar, Literature as a Political Force, I have been invited to focus more specifically on literature as a form of cultural opposition. In other words—and this is an important preliminary caution—politics remains the context, not only as the institution “against” which culture may find itself in opposition, but also as a driving force within culture itself. If this is not always evident in sophisticated Western democracies, the situation in what used to be the Third World and what is now more commonly referred to as the South, continues to foreground the way in which politics permeates and informs every choice and every action of civic and even of private life. A “political novel” in the US or in Europe is a very specific kind of novel (i.e. one which overtly interrogates—or promotes—a given ideological system or stance); in South Africa all novels, whether so intended by the author or not, are “political”—because in that country, even as it moves out of the dark night of apartheid toward something new, every action, and utterance, and thought, every book and play and poem and song, carries a political load. In the mid-eighties, prompted by a French journalist who had asked me almost flippantly whether it was possible for me to write “a simple love story” if I wished, I tried to put it to the test: and in States of Emergency I used as my narrator a man who in a situation of siege tried to write (and live) a love story untainted by politics. Both he and I discovered, inevitably, that a country like South Africa does not allow it. (The difference between us was that, disheartened by the intersection of the private and the public, the narrator of my story abandoned the attempt; my novel, on the other hand, was written.)

The experience illuminated the immemorial debate between the “aesthetic” approach (“l'art pour l'art”) and that of littérature engagée. And I must confess that I more and more believe this dichotomy—like all dichotomies?—to be false. Rather than conceiving of “pure art” and “political art” as radical and mutually exclusive opposites, it seems to me, it would be more profitable to regard them as two extreme points on a sliding scale: and the kind of literature produced in any given situation, or by any given author, would be determined simply by the point on that scale where one happens to find oneself at that given moment and/or by the manner in which the tension between the two extremes on the connecting line is activated. (I am indebted to my wife for the image.)

In the kind of environment that obtains in South Africa, politics is not something which can be abstracted from “real life” as an ideology, a system, a theory, a philosophical “position,” but is, instead, a presence in the most ordinary and the most private moves across the chessboard of daily life: the food you eat and where you buy it, your means of transport, the suburb or township in which you live, the work you do, the school your children attend, the person you love and marry, the friends you associate with, everything has a political implication. Even an option “out of” politics—in art as much as in life—is a political choice.

In such conditions culture also becomes charged in a different way. To avoid getting bogged down in endless preliminary definitions or redefinitions of politics and of culture, I wish to propose, as a rough working approach, a view of culture as, pre-eminently, that territory in the life of the polis where meaning is engendered and shaped—most specifically as a product (but also as a condition) of the interaction between individual and society. It involves society in the process not simply of “performing” or “undergoing” actions within the unfolding of history, but of reflecting on that process and that history, trying to make sense of it. In what we normally regard as a relatively stable society, these cultural processes surround and inform those of politics, i.e. those which most specifically concern the exercise of power in that society, in the attempt to play the game of the possible. But the moment the internal stability is disturbed, culture finds itself in a position of interrogating, opposing and contesting the workings and instruments of power. This becomes all the more precarious if one considers the basic drive within power politics toward co-option and appropriation: a régime under threat almost reflexively attempts to draw culture within the framework of its own operations.

South Africa provides a particularly dramatic illustration of this kind of historical process. Apartheid, from the very beginning, like Nazism and Stalinism before it, persuaded organized religion, education, even sports, to collaborate with it in its classical colonization of hearts and minds as an accompaniment to the extension of its more blatant political excesses. What made it particularly insidious is that the hegemony of Afrikanerdom itself had begun as a culture of opposition: opposition to the imperialism of Great Britain, but also to the religious and linguistic domination of Dutch which, toward the end of the nineteenth century, came to be perceived more and more as a foreign-based power threatening the evolution of a local culture. In this struggle for independence (within white South African society) there was something particularly attractive: and the flourishing of Afrikaans literature, especially after the Anglo-Boer War, made an appreciable contribution to indigenous white culture. Culture, in these circumstances, not only reinforced the struggle for political independence but to a large extent provided it with its moral raison d'être. During its long march toward political domination (finally confirmed in the fateful whites-only elections of 1948 that brought the National Party to power), it continually attempted to consolidate its base—by harnessing artists and writers to its cause. And while Afrikaners were in political opposition, i.e. while Afrikaner writers and artists could be persuaded to believe that they belonged to a culture threatened by awe-inspiring economic and political forces from abroad, as well as by a vast multitude of hostile “barbarians” in Africa, their literature remained firmly allied to the cause of what they passionately saw as their emancipation.

But soon after 1948 this began to change. As apartheid emerged as the great consolidating force within Afrikanerdom (and increasingly within the whole of the white community in South Africa), it also adopted more and more overtly the power strategies of the very imperialist establishment that had been dislodged. Instead of learning from their struggle against power the need to avoid the destructive and appropriative exercise of that power, Afrikaners showed themselves only too eager to do unto others what had been done to them. One of the results was that writers within this new establishment began to question the bases of the cause they had previously promoted: initially this was done very cautiously, hesitantly, tentatively—which was understandable, as what they did was regarded as backstabbing within a previously tightly knit family. But gradually they became bolder in their protests; and when as a result, in a move traumatic to both sides, they were ostracised by the new power establishment and ejected from the fortress of Afrikaner interests, they found outside that enclave a new culture of liberation among the black masses, directed against the very hegemony they had previously assisted in establishing. And so another culture of opposition was fostered by the abuses of power by the apartheid régime. Now we are witnessing the dismantling of that dispensation and the likelihood of another historical changeover.

It seems to be a moment that invites celebration. Yet as a writer, having witnessed what has happened before, I also approach it with caution, wondering whether, once again, a culture of opposition may in due course ossify into its own framework of repression. Certainly, one thing has already become clear: the enemy of the writer in South Africa has not been something as readily definable as apartheid, but a much larger and much more ominous force of which apartheid has been only one, localised, avatar. The real enemy is power: power which, whatever its form and shape and manifestation, always and ultimately means only one thing—and that is what Musil called “the power to kill.” And as long as human society is characterized by the organization of power there will be a need for a culture of opposition to it. In fact, unless there is space for oppositionality and otherness in a culture it cannot really, ever, flourish.

At the same time a cautionary note is appropriate: in opposing power, literature is not innocent of power. The very fact that as writers we believe in “the power of the word” suggests that the enemy, power, lurks in the heart of our very oppositionality. The enemy is also part of ourselves. Even as we use the word to empower ourselves we should acknowledge that this same liberating power is dangerous and may turn against ourselves. This means that, once again, the old forms of binary thinking have to be treated as suspect and we have to move toward more “lateral,” more “deconstructive,” more “sliding-scale” modes of thinking and of definition.

The question remains whether the power of the word can ever successfully confront that of the state. Are the two not so intrinsically different as to rule out any possibility of contest? (There is the old question whether an elephant and a whale can do battle.) A democratic government is to be contested, and if need be replaced, at the ballot box; the removal of a totalitarian régime requires a total strategy of resistance. Surely violence demands counter-violence, does it not? And if so, then how can one hope to oppose a political régime—most pertinently one that abuses its power and represses its citizens—with cultural means?

Is it at all possible for culture to respond effectively to a political challenge? I know it cannot be quantified: but that does not mean that it cannot happen. It is eminently sensible not to over-estimate what literature can effect. Undoubtedly it would be ludicrous to ascribe the present political changes in South Africa (or recent changes in Czechoslovakia, or the USSR, or Chile, or wherever) exclusively to the pressures of culture and the power of literature. And yet it remains an open question, I think, whether those changes would have been thinkable without the cultural onslaught. I know from my own experience, from many letters from black and white readers alike, that a novel or a poem or a play can work a sea-change in the mind and the perceptions of individuals: helping them to keep faith when all the “facts” appear to shout against it; helping them to discover solidarity in the reassurance that one is never entirely alone; helping them to acknowledge that the Other is no different from oneself. And in these ways, in one mind at a time, a climate has been prepared in South Africa—not only by literature, but by literature among many, many other experiences—in which change has become possible. The mere change of political or economic systems amounts to very little unless it is accompanied by a deeper, and more personal, change in attitudes, susceptibilities, and perceptions. And this, as I have argued so many times over so many years, is precisely the domain—inter alia—of literature.

In the play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead Athol Fugard demonstrates, in terms both moving and exquisitely funny, how a black man without any means of physical survival in a big city can endure by adopting the identity of a dead man whose passbook (known with terrible irony as the “Book of Life”) he has appropriated. What it means in ideological terms, is that he learns to “play the system,” to work within it; what it means existentially is that he accedes to an existence without authentic being; what it means in psychological terms is that he survives at the cost of his real identity and his dignity. In all respects a dismal ending. And yet I have seen audiences weep and shout and laugh and cheer as they watched Sizwe Bansi outwit the system. This play has inspired a generation of oppressed people to resume or reinforce their defiance of oppression. From the simple demonstration that—whatever the cost—survival is possible, they have derived the courage to resist in their own lives. And two decades later the system that once held Sizwe Bansi prison has now released him, a free man to the world. There have been many Sizwe Bansis over the years; many deaths too. And from all of those a resurrection has come about. Even in the midst of this process of resurrection Fugard's play has not become irrelevant: in changed circumstances the play serves a new purpose by reminding its spectators never to forget. In its own way, in South Africa and in many other societies, it will continue to correct the insidious silences of history. Kundera has shown all of us how power exercises the faculties of forgetting; surely one of the enduring functions of literature as an oppositional force is to make it impossible for us to forget.

There is little need still to argue that as human beings we not only have physical needs, but also spiritual needs; that the mind needs food as much as the body does; that caring for those who require to be fed, or sheltered, or rested, does not preclude, or exclude, the profound need for meaning in our lives. If we need political organization to cope with social and economic demands, we also need culture to help us make sense of what is happening to us.

In The Fixer Malamud paraphrases Spinoza: “If the State acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it's the lesser evil to destroy it.” But the question remains whether culture, per se, can offer an adequate response to political abuse or outrage on the level where such a response can be practically effective. What I am moving toward is the assertion that if culture in general or literature in particular is set up as a response to a political challenge, in at least one sense it may be seen to displace a different response, or a response on a different level. In other words: if we wish to avoid the use of force, i.e. violent confrontation, by resorting to literature, that text, in this situation, displaces more obvious forms of opposition. Most specifically, literature may then be seen to take the place of violence. What I'm arguing now is that if we do propose the “use” of literature (to the extent in which literature can ever be “used”) in these circumstances, it means that we see in literature at least the possibility of another kind of violence. And this, I think, is what literature as cultural opposition comes down to. In An Act of Terror I have tried to suggest that violence resides not only in the protagonists' attempt to blow up the State President, or in the moves of the security forces to destroy them in return, but in something as small, yet as momentous, as a heron lowering its foot into a pool of dark water to set in motion ripples of water and light that assault the eye of the beholder.

This view of violence may not be so far-fetched after all. All that is required is to acknowledge that violence, like power, need not be only destructive but that it can be a creative force in its own right; that, in fact, violence determines our being in the world. Not only rape and assault and death are acts of violence: the act of love itself is violent; the division of cells that results from it is a violent process, as is birth, growth, interacting with an environment or with others. Violence resides in our testing of limits, in all the processes of transgression through which we confront and interrogate our world in order to extend its frontiers. Every question we pose, to ourselves or to the world, affirms a species of violence without which we shall remain forever imprisoned in a very narrow space preordained, from outside ourselves, by a system of power: by custom or tradition, by the law, by others and by otherness. What concerns me at the moment, in the context of the familiar Sartrean equation, is to validate literature as a form of human—specifically cultural—involvement which goes beyond the gesture of the actor on his stage: it is that kind of “essential gesture” Gordimer has spoken about, which acquires the weight of an act—an act of (creative) violence to counter the (destructive) violence which is the hallmark of power. What I am appealing to is that mind-set which inspired Wallace Stevens to describe the mind as “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.”

In a relatively free and democratic society, as I have already intimated, this is not so obvious, as (state) power can be countered on a “purely” political level (in parliament, in public debate, in the press, in elections); but in a closed society like the one we are still in the process of dismantling in South Africa, overt political contestation may often be proscribed. The successive states of emergency proclaimed by the beleagured minority government of my country during the eighties imposed a distressing silence on community life: state-controlled radio and television broadcast only stunted, truncated, officially sanctioned versions of reality; most organisations in political opposition to the régime were banned and thousands of individuals jailed, exiled or silenced in other ways; newspapers, their functions controlled by over one hundred different laws, were not allowed to report freely on what was euphemistically called the “unrest” in the country—in fact, they were not even allowed to leave blanks which might alert the public to the machinations of censorship. In these circumstances culture was one of the only territories of public life left relatively free as a forum of opposition and contestation. Culture became, as Joyce says in Stoppard's Travesties, “the continuation of war by other means.” This happened precisely because the government, composed largely of culturally ignorant individuals, either did not take culture seriously or lacked the manpower effectively to continue controlling the arts as it had done in the seventies, the attention of the security police being required more urgently elsewhere, to contain the growing black trade union movement, contestation within education and religion and the mounting pressure exerted by the United Democratic Front.

In the seventies censorship had been a real menace to creativity, almost succeeding in stifling, among other things, a generation of young writers in Afrikaans (after an explosion of new talent in the sixties only two novelists of some significance emerged in Afrikaans during the entire decade of the seventies). Censorship created a stifling climate of fear in which the security police had their hands full keeping writers under surveillance. I was personally subjected to interrogations, house searches, the confiscation of books, manuscripts, notes, even of typewriters; attempts were made to sabotage my car and to set my house on fire, and there were endless threats to kill members of my family or myself. Even so this, it should be emphasised, was nothing compared to the indignities, the persecution, and the dangers black writers were subjected to. Many of them literally placed not only their freedom but their very lives at stake by continuing to write, and to read their stories, recite their poems, perform their plays.

At a time when the media were denied the possibility of performing their most basic duty, that of reporting, writers, actors, dancers, musicians, painters, sculptors were forced to assume much of this function—in order to ensure, quite simply, that people were informed about what was happening in the silences surrounding them.

In the process, the limits of culture were constantly tested, and expanded. Even in writing that was often reduced to reporting and to sloganeering there was a vital experience of giving and taking, of being enriched by the processes of cultural communication. Critics, especially from the outside, tend to see this as a process only of impoverishment and of reduction. Recently one of them (Vincent Crapanzano) wrote in an American newspaper:

Writers writing in South Africa are served, as one is served a summons, their subject matter: apartheid—its scandal; its moral and political consequences; the separation, the misunderstanding, the un-understanding it produces. Even when they have tried to refuse that summons they are caught by it, for whatever they write is read in terms of racial politics. The rift produced by apartheid limits the imagination.

I shall return to this remark. But for the moment I wish to pursue my image of the other side of the coin, the dark side of this moon: the important positive qualities of this experience of cultural opposition to a deadly system. Far beyond the needs of reporting, the kind of writing that emerged during the dark years of apartheid fostered a spirit of sharing, and of solidarity in the face of a defined and definable enemy. Black society, menaced by divisions into a multiplicity of language and culture groups, was inspired by the affirmation of what all its members had in common.

And white writers too—at least those of us who found our writing informed more and more by our experience with and among a community of black friends—began to function not only as “reporters,” but as “interpreters” of what we had been privileged to witness among those whose lives had been so effectively sealed off by apartheid from the eyes and the awareness of the white minority. Literature became indispensable to the many new processes of conscientising at work throughout the community. And we, too, as white writers, began to experience that solidarity, that heady intimation of a new South African identity beginning to announce and define itself behind the official definitions.

What apartheid effected, notably through the seventies and eighties, was an increasing interaction among writers from different cultural streams, a new sense of solidarity, a new perception—and a testing—of at least the possibility of an emerging common identity. Of course many differences still remain—and this need not be a negative perception at all, as the affirmation of cultural diversity may well be as important as that of solidarity—but the appreciation of such an interaction has already had significant consequences for an emergent culture.

This emergent culture is enriched by forms stimulated through the context of the struggle for liberation when access to traditional and formal means of production and distribution was fraught with many difficulties and threats. Many of these forms reached back to a long tradition of African orature: poets who could not risk publishing their verse, playwrights denied access to regular theatres, resorted to the reading and reciting, or the haphazard performance of their work at impromptu gatherings arranged at short notice and ready to disperse at the first warning of police approaching. Fugard, Mda, Ngema and others brought new meaning to the Grotowskian experience of “Poor Theatre” by fusing it with African traditions of improvisation; great poetry recitals drew the kind of crowds one would normally expect at a soccer match. Even today, when Mandela addresses a crowd, there is invariably a poet on the stage to combine the functions of the traditional mbongi or praise poet and the revolutionary poet of fiery contestation. Much of it may be demagogic, much of it remains on the level of sloganeering: but the surprising thing is that so much of it (witness Serote, Gwala, Dikeni and many others) is good by any standards, opening whole new ranges of possibilities to old established traditions.

Another aspect of the functioning of literature as a form of cultural opposition has been highlighted by the South African experience of the seventies and eighties: that is the dual nature of the writer's position in society.

There is, first, her or his text, the work, the written product of private and interactive battles, agonies, explorations and celebrations. Because of the nature of the textual challenges they pose, some of these, like the poems of Breyten Breytenbach or the novels of J. M. Coetzee, may be accessible only to a relatively small group of highly sophisticated readers; others, like the work of Struggle poets who would be horrified if anyone found their verse “beautiful” (as beauty, in their perception, would stand in the way of the political conscientisation and galvanization that is their stated aim), have the widest imaginable appeal. If in the West poetry has become perhaps the most reclusive of the literary arts, among South African blacks it has the audience of a TV soap opera.

But apart from, and in addition to, the texts produced by a given writer, that writer, by virtue of her or his notoriety, is empowered as an individual within the wide community. Thousands of people who have never read a poem by Breytenbach—thousands who cannot read at all—are inspired by the writer who has demonstrated, through his life, his solidarity with their cause. And because he is a writer, yet irrespective of what he has written, Breytenbach occupies a position of influence which charges cultural opposition with political force.

None of this necessarily means, as Crapanzano (quoted above) so readily jumps to conclude, that apartheid has curtailed the imagination—in the sense that during that period of threat and deprivation South African writers should have felt “obliged” (whether by external circumstances or by an inner compulsion) to produce overtly political texts. To begin with, as my reference to Breytenbach and Coetzee should have made clear (and any number of other names may be added to theirs) not all South African writers did write “Struggle literature”; and not all “Struggle literature” was facile sloganeering. At the very least the texts produced under those circumstances can only be read contextually. But, more importantly, I know of no South African writer who wrote “political literature” simply because he or she believed that it was “expected” of her or him. In the best of the texts that emerged from apartheid one cannot but discover the remarkable coincidence of what a given writer wanted and chose to write—and what circumstances expected her or him to write. In this respect there was no “summons” served on any writer. If it is a truism that one can only write about one's most urgent personal experience then apartheid was that experience, determining every waking and sleeping instant of one's life.

Culture, it is true, presents a space in which the writer confronts the real (i.e. whatever passes for “real” in any given context). But this does not mean that, working within the conditions and constraints of a closed society, some kind of social realism is the only dreary option. Even when the writer is involved in the real, as has been dictated to such a large extent by the apartheid experience, the writer's vocation—if one dare presume, if one dare generalise—has always been, not to report the real but to imagine the real.

When I was working on A Chain of Voices I came to know almost by heart the archival documentation about the slave revolt the novel attempted to re-present: the depositions, in the trial court, of all the accused and all the witnesses involved in the case; I familiarized myself with whatever I could lay hands or eyes on that had anything to do with that time and that place; I visited the region of the Bokkeveld where the action had taken place; the house in which slave and master confronted each other in that ultimate turbulent silence; the oven in which the wounded woman tried to stow away from the insurgents; the loft where the slave Galant and the white woman Hester hid—in an intriguing enclave of silence undisturbed by all the documents—while the others went on the rampage downstairs. But knowing all this was to no avail. It was only when I attempted that dangerous fire-leap from self to other, that history could become what it had always yearned to be, namely story: and for this it was necessary to try to imagine what it is like to be a slave who has been promised his freedom and sees that hope frustrated; to imagine what it is like to be a woman who has to sacrifice her independence to the inarticulate domination of a husband; to imagine what it means to be fierce patriarch or uncomprehending child or dour matron or protective mother or wild adventurer—slaves, all of them, locked in an inescapable chain of voices, sprung from earth, cleansed in water, seared in fire, wanton with wind. Only in the leap from history to story, and from world to word, does literature as a form of cultural opposition find its true voice: opposition to the lie, opposition to injustice, opposition to the unfreedom which in one form or another holds us all.

This is the freedom of writing, demonstrated most urgently in writing in the state of siege South Africa experienced under apartheid. But there can be danger even in this experience—and South African writers, like others throughout the erstwhile Second and Third Worlds, are beginning to make this discovery as they emerge from their many forms of oppression and try to map the new world unfolding around them. The very openness of this new space can be frightening, because it is so indefinite, so undefined. There can be something very reassuring about knowing your enemy very well: he is there (the enemy is always a “he”); he is visible, circumscribed, present, known. How disturbingly intimate the relationship between the oppressed and his or her oppressor, the self and the other. And when that other falls away, or begins to disintegrate and become diffuse, opaque, amorphous, inchoate, one is threatened, suddenly, by the discovery of a loss of something that has become indispensable to one's definition of oneself. This is when the danger of power—in this case, apartheid—becomes so distressingly evident: in the discovery that one has come to rely on that very enemy, power, to sustain oneself. A literature of opposition now becomes a questioning of the self.

It is a difficult thing to face, and a precarious experience: but it is, above all, necessary. Only now can one begin to establish the implications of that “summons” issued by apartheid which Crapanzano has referred to. But the problem was not a “limiting of the imagination” as he so confidently asserts. The imagination has always been active within the cage of apartheid: decorating and masking the bars or painting them in such stark colors that the awareness of their presence was dramatised; intensifying the exploration of the cramped space inside; reaching out into the limitless Beyond. The problem was, instead, that the functioning of that imagination remained predicated on the presence of prison bars. This favored a reliance on easy oppositions and binarities, on manichean models, and on predefined otherness (however understandable—and sometimes necessary—those reactions may have been at the time).

What I mean is this: that a culture of resistance can become a habit like any other. A literature which becomes used to asserting itself only in the face of a menacing opposition may in the long run dissipate all its energies in expressing what it is against rather than what it is for. To learn to define oneself only with reference to the other (that is, as the object of the other rather than as its own subject) is to deny a whole dimension of existence. And even before the darkness has entirely withdrawn from South Africa it was becoming obvious that it no longer sufficed to portray apartheid as evil or to take up a stance against it: everybody more or less in her or his right mind knew that, and was that. Perhaps, as Gordimer once pointed out, part of the South African sickness was precisely that people began to term “courageous” or “heroic” that which was only normal and natural. Even that may not be so bad (especially not if it involves at least an attempt to define the sickness, to recognise it as such): the problem arises when a whole literature threatens (and I mean this literally) to become oppositional and only oppositional in the most elementary sense of the word.

In the late nineteenth century many painters were so discouraged by the rise of photography as the medium par excellence in which to capture the “true likeness” they had been laboring to reproduce that they abandoned painting; this, it seems to me, is the kind of artistic and moral crisis many writers in recently liberated societies are experiencing at the moment. But does this malaise not result from an altogether too restricted, even fallacious, concept both of “writing” or of “the real”? There were painters at the end of the nineteenth century who made the exhilarating discovery that, in fact, painting had never had anything to do with the production of “true likenesses”: instead, it had everything to do with working in paint on canvas. And it seems to me that this is the true challenge of the newly evolving situation in writing: the (re)discovery of the fact that literature arises out of a peculiar relationship with language, and with that reality which can be made accessible only through language.

Part of the present problem faced by literature in South Africa is that it can no longer slip so easily into the silences previously imposed by the government and—literally—circumscribed by the media: in the present circumstances there is a frenzy of overcommentary and overexposure. Rather than articulating against silence the new literature has to make itself heard against the clamor of the media, the babble of too many other voices. And it is the function of the media both to globalise and to trivialise. More than ever before—acknowledging that there is no point in trying to make oneself heard by shouting more loudly than anyone else—literature has to find space for the private vision, the personal imagination, the individual small, still voice. This does not mean a return to nineteenth-century heroic individualism or early twentieth-century Freudian egoism, or mid-twentieth-century existentialist solitude, but the articulation of a personal space informed by an experience of suffering and witnessing with others.

It is not just a matter of freeing the imagination: it is changing the conditions of its operation. Much of it concerns history, as whole tracts of past experience silenced by apartheid, by over three centuries of colonialism, are now to be reclaimed, reinvented, reimagined into story. This may be a vital part of the real opposition embodied in South African literature of the future: constantly to oppose the present with a recovered past, in order to open more possibilities for the future.

When the young poet Sandile Dikeni was in prison he began to recite poems through the bars of his cell every night when the inmates bedded down: and at all the barred windows they would cluster, like grapes, like bats, to inhale these words in which their own anger and suffering and loss and loneliness and hope were given shape. They refused to go to sleep unless he had first offered them a poem. Sometimes he would use words they had never heard, strange and disquieting music in their ears. One morning a fellow prisoner accosted him. “This poem you recited last night,” he said, “had a word in it I don't know. This soliloquy: what does it mean?” Sandile gave him the meaning of the word and then promised he'd never use such strange words again. “Oh no,” said the other prisoner, “you must, you must: for now I know a new word.”

I come from a literature that still has many new words to learn: and with each new word new possibilities enter the realm of the imagination and extend the prison-house of our language. They offer us new means of contesting—of responding to—the challenges of the real.

And not only the real (the reality of political power; even the reality of democracy) has to be confronted in processes of cultural resistance: language itself, which is the condition of both our affirmations and our oppositions, is to be interrogated and contested. This may seem an impossible task.

And yet! Is this not what it really amounts to in the end?—the opposition posed by literature as an interface of the possible and the impossible. For too long we have concentrated, in South Africa and elsewhere, simply in order to survive, on the possible: this is what has made our lives impossible. Only by dreaming and writing the impossible can life be made possible once again.¹

Note

1. Paper delivered at a seminar on “Literature as a Political Force,” Salzburg, July 1993.