Wally Serote Research Articles

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

The Militant Listener: Reading Mongane Wally Serote’s Sikhahlel’ u-OR alongside Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History

The Militant Listener: Reading Mongane Wally Serote's Sikhahlel' u-OR alongside Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History In Sikhahlel' u-OR: A Praise Poem for Oliver Tambo, Mongane Wally Serote presents an unflinching yet delicate meandering through the questions, reflections and provocations resistance history offers up through O. R. Tambo's life. As Ciraj Rassool points out, in this work Tambo appears not as an individual, but as an integral node in a web connecting various lives.1 This counter-neoliberal interpretation of Tambo's life offers what Michael Löwy calls 'a heterodox form of the narrative of emancipation' rebuilding the struggle hero narrative along a decentred framework.2 By radically dislodging this narrative, Tambo is portrayed as the 'non-iconic icon' he was esteemed to embody, and in this move, the poem, notably, points to the dearth of dialectic politics, both in our quotidian praxis, and the commemoration of others.3 Aptly, Serote's work contributes to what Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle describe as a 'total decentring of all thought, one that rejects all "centrisms" and highlights instead branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time'.4 To this end, the poem presents us with a constellation of historical actors who flicker on the horizon, beckoning us to engage in the labour of freedom ('here we go again / the hour demands us to be daring once more / to emerge from a possible storm').

Culture and activism: Mongane Wally Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood

ABSTRACT For South African author Mongane Wally Serote, art and activism can only operate in tandem. In the 1970s and 1980s, Serote took leadership roles in revolutionary and anti-apartheid organizations and movements, and in his writing and in these activist roles he mobilizes the one as a means to achieve the ends of the other. In his novel To Every Birth Its Blood, he uses narrative to experiment with chronology and perspective, and explore the physical spaces of township, exile, and state in ways that challenge the apartheid regime’s authority to regulate the lives of South Africans. Serote deploys the novel form against apartheid’s policies, social organization, and legacy. Through this work, he indicts the regime for human rights abuses, and imagines a new world order shaped by inclusive forms of community that carry forward the fight for equal rights.

Sharing the Love of Reading: A South African Story

Sharing the Love of ReadingA South African Story Dorothy Dyer (bio) I am South African, and as a voracious reader as a child, I had this half-conscious idea that writers colluded to create a fantasy world where wildflowers grew in leafy woods, snow came down in winter, and streets had quaint little ancient shops. Even when I was a bit older and realized that the books I read came from the northern hemisphere, it still affected my relationship with the landscape of my home. I distinctly remember feeling, one school outing, that the thorny acacias, stony hard ground, and brown muddy river just couldn't compare to the tumbling brooks and soft meadows of my books. It was only later, as I started reading South African books, that I realized my world was, in its own way, as beautiful, and that I was allowed to love it—to love the dry deserty karoo, the granite outcrops, the small fine flowers of fynbos—and see that my land had its own different beauty. Then as I grew older, South African books also helped awaken me politically. My family was politically aware and active, but it was reading André Brinks's Dry White Season, and other titles, that made the brutality and anguish of apartheid more real to me. These books also offered me an identity, of somebody white, but deeply critical of the government—I could be part of something bigger, I could belong somewhere. My old copy of True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist is falling apart, I read it so often as a student, and is full of underlinings and notes I made in the margins. Click for larger view View full resolution I also still remember that powerful moment when I read a book about a white teen girl growing up in apartheid—concerned about injustice, but also about boys, and about making sense of her own life in a complicated world. It was a profound moment of realization, what Walter Myers (a great African American writer) called a "shock of recognition," that my world was worth a story, my world was worth a book. (I found the book at a secondhand shop recently, and was dismayed by its colonial attitudes, its racial understandings. I can't read it again. But it came to me at the right time, and I will always be grateful to it.) At university, writers such as Mongane Wally Serote and, further afield, Ama Ata Aidoo opened my eyes to black experiences that otherwise I could never have known. Other books such as The Color Purple stirred me [End Page 73] deeply, giving me windows onto worlds I had never considered, which in turn made me think about my own sense of who I was, what mattered to me. I learned so much from books about the world I lived in. So, many years later, when I taught English at a school for black students, one of my main aims was to share the joy of reading with them too, so that reading could provide for them what it had for me. I wanted reading to impact their lives as it had mine. And, on a more immediate level, I also knew it was one of the best ways to improve their English. But, unlike me, most of these learners had never been initiated into the pleasure of reading. They came from homes where there were few books, where reading aloud wasn't part of their childhood experience. They associated reading with school—they knew it was good for them, but it was a chore, something most of them left behind with relief when school was done. Some learners in my classes did get hooked on the lovely books in our little book collection, but many struggled with my weekly reading periods, surreptitiously checking their cell phones under the desk rather than losing themselves in a book. The glossy covers, with mainly white protagonists, had lives far removed from those of my students, and in many cases the language was too sophisticated, as my students didn't speak English as a home language. And the books with English that my students...

Decolonization and popular poetics: from Soweto poetry to diasporic solidarity

This article reads Soweto poetry in terms of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness thought. I argue that Soweto poetry develops dialectically. It uses popular cultural theorizations of shared daily experience to formulate black solidarity, while remaining attuned to historical change as the Soweto uprising and the murders of Onkgopotse Tiro and Steve Biko unfold. The implication of Biko’s dialectic is that we need to consider Soweto poetry’s volumes not as settled texts in themselves, but as texts in history whose modes and values are constantly re-formed by the very environment of historical impermanence and political contestation from which they emerge. In line with Biko’s dialectic, I argue that Soweto poetry’s affinity with the wider black diaspora is in keeping with its project of developing a fuller humanity after Apartheid, and that its lasting influence on South African artists and poets is but one sign of its sublation. Biko’s dialectic, I argue, offers South African literary history a way of thinking a genuinely multiracial, transnational canon via a national experience of political conflict and contested cultural value. Moreover, I suggest, the presence of a suppressed women’s poetic tradition after Soweto 1976 means that we ought to complicate Biko’s thought by contemplating the South African literary canon via polythetic, intersecting dialectics. Keywords: Steve Biko, Black Consciousness, dialectic, literary canon, Soweto poetry, Mongane Wally Serote, Oswald Mtshali, Mafika Gwala, Sipho Sepamla

Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry

This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic—in relation to the philosophical, the political or the psychological. The poems examined here are in dialogue with dogs, their embodiment, their subjectivities, their contiguities with humans. This article considers how trans-species entanglements between human and canine, whether convivial or adversarial, manifest poetically in myriad ways in gendered and/or racialised contexts and analyses how the vulnerabilities of both humans and dogs are made to intersect. Ruth Miller portrays dogs as divine creations who are uncertain and “embarrassed”. Ingrid Jonker’s poems intertwine human and canine, foregrounding gendered vulnerabilities. Where dogs are figured metonymically, entanglements of human and dog break down binary categorisations, in Jonker’s poems as well as in those of other poets. Mongane Wally Serote’s creatural humans, for example, seem both animal and human. Oswald Mtshali figures dogs within apartheid structures as antagonists, protectors or savage scavengers. More recent poems, influenced perhaps by new thinking about the animal subject, imagine dogs in compassionate interspecies connections. Many of these recent elegiac poems, in particular those by Jenna Mervis and Harry Owen, are attentive to beloved dogs but without sentimentality or the imposition of an anthropocentric focus.

The train as motif in Soweto poetry

This article considers protest poetry written between 1961 and 1976. I argue that the Soweto poetry of the 1970s enabled activism that would change Johannesburg’s landscape, facilitating the racial mixing of inner city areas and eroding the segregationist policies that had defined the city from its beginnings. Concomitantly, the paper focuses on representations of the train as a site through which black localities were produced as resistance. Via close readings of poetry by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla, and Mongane Wally Serote, I show how the train establishes Soweto as a “neighbourhood”, while also constructing a white “other” against which its identity is affirmed.

Reconciling Racial Revelations in Post-Apartheid South African Literature

Offering a reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s Revelations (2010) alongside other recent novels by black South African writers, this essay answers calls for more careful analyses of the roles that race plays within post-apartheid literature and culture. As it questions the shift away from a concern with institutional racism and white supremacy that is evident in much contemporary South African criticism, the essay contends that post-apartheid literature is not only racially marked, but also continues to produce knowledge on racial inequality, racial ideology, and resistance. In the process, it illustrates that grappling with colorblindness challenges pervasive understandings of nonracialism, reconciliation, and post-1994 literature. Revelations portrays nonracialism and reconciliation as necessary and inevitable, yet shows that the discourses are in conflict with demands for equality and justice. Concurrently veiling and revealing paradoxes inherent in South Africa’s dominant racial discourses from within, Serote’s novel demonstrates that enforcing colorblindness is an act of epistemic violence: not even at the diegetic level is nonracialism achievable.

That Loose Canon: Rumours of South African Writing

The case has been made that through the post-apartheid transition, notions such as ‘South African literature’ have come to outlive their usefulness. Transnationality, the global knowledge economy, and the influence of poststructural and postcolonial theory are cited as factors which have diminished the analytic worth of a nationally defined canon. Critics have also pointed to an emergent cultural heteroglossia associated with the loss of the anti-apartheid project. Since 1994, many literary and popular texts written within or about South Africa, or by South African authors, have explored a wide range of themes and genres, lending support to this view. I argue, however, that growing instability around matters of social justice will continue to impose itself on the attention of writers, and that the conventions of South African writing will be modified rather than abandoned. I argue further that a case can be made for a criticism that is cognisant of the conversation between local and global, but is equally cognisant of how the national space itself both concentrates and splinters the material with which it engages by more cross-cutting forms of theory. The argument is related to ‘post-transition’ narratives that show elements of continuity and rupture: Rumours (2013. Auckland Park: Jacana Media) by Mongane Wally Serote, Wall of Days (2012. Cape Town: Umuzi) by Alastair Bruce, The Smell of Apples (1995. London:Abacus) by Mark Behr and Bad Sex (2011. Johannesburg: Umuzi) by Leon de Kock.

The Present in Pain: “Temporal Poiesis” in Mongane Wally Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood (1981)

SummaryWhile the phenomenon of apartheid has been extensively explored in terms of topographic designs and spatial separateness, its multiple and complex “temporal geographies’’ still need to be explored and assessed. This article seeks to investigate Mongane Wally Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood (1981) from a temporal perspective – more specifically, how lived time is experienced by the subject under apartheid. Through a close textual analysis of the urban setting and of the characters’ rich and nuanced psyche as well as their physical and affective lives, this article shows how, at the basis of Serote's novel, there lies an intricate, dynamic and multi-layered phenomenology of time. Serote's model is one that sees different temporal dimensions at work simultaneously: external time, inner psychic time, and the temporal complication brought about by the apartheid regime (with its unpredictable, pervasive and terrorising methods). This complex temporal tapestry unfolds while being sustained and contained by Serote's own temporal vision, which is always future-oriented; it is a vision of hope, of individual and communal renewal.

Silence, Music, Revolution: Jazz as Narrative Agent in Mongane Wally Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood

SummaryWith To Every Birth Its Blood, Wally Mongane Serote has written one of the greatest jazz novels. Music is a character in the book that has voice and impacts the plot. It speaks not only to provide context or colour, but also participates in dialogue with the interior consciousness of the principal protagonist Tsietsi (Tsi) Molope. Tsi develops from a state of alienation and impotence to a purposeful actor. And the protagonist grows from a single person to a national community. The music develops from jazz to soul, from impotence to sexual agency, from alienation to political action. The importance of music is explicated more prosaically in a subsequent novel, Revelations, in which the youths of the Soweto uprising become the adult actors in “the new South Africa”. Democracy has brought not only the stresses of addressing historical injustice and the responsibilities of governance, but highlights a series of philosophical issues and cultural practices which are attendant to many uncertainties about the social reality in South Africa – questions that music can help answer.

Binding grammar to horror: considering trauma in the poetry of Ingrid de Kok, Alicia Partnoy and Mongane Wally Serote

This article argues that it is possible to capture the nuances of traumatic experiences through the medium of poetry, rather than through fiction alone. Because of its ability to be elliptic, its reliance on symbolism and especially syntactic interruptions, poetry can be an effective medium by which trauma is examined, especially in the postcolonial context. Studies have indicated that poetry is effective when used as therapy, that is when victims of traumatic experiences are encouraged to write the trauma out of themselves. Journals such as Traumatology and Journal of poetry therapy attest to the fact that poetry is a credible medium and can be effective as an aid to healing. The article explores the poetry of Ingrid de Kok, Alicia Partnoy and Mongane Wally Serote, who reflect on and write haunting poems showing the multifaceted perspectives on traumatic experiences in South Africa and Argentina. Trauma studies, an area of cultural investigation that came to prominence in the early to mid-1990s, prides itself on its explicit commitment to ethics and can with justification be regarded as the reinvention in an ethical guise of the much-maligned textualism (Craps and Buelen 2008). It is to this end that the article, using the prism of trauma, undertakes a close reading of the poets' impassioned poetry and concludes that trauma, when examined through poetry, is as ethical as literature hopes to be.

On the Margins of the Black Atlantic: Angola, the Eastern Bloc, and the Cold War

In this essay, I set in dialogue a documentary film, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda (1997), and a novel, Mongane Wally Serote’s Scatter the Ashes and Go (2002), to examine the role of the war in Angola in the cultural imaginary of African intellectuals. Angola was the site of one of the hot conflicts of the Cold War; yet it evokes not only tensions between the superpowers, but also political solidarities and cultural alliances that incorporate and go beyond the black Atlantic. These texts show that the Eastern Bloc is a constitutive part of the contemporary diasporic routes taken by black intellectuals. By taking into account diasporas routed through the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, these texts also expand and modify the conceptual tools and theoretical perspectives of black Atlantic and postcolonial studies.

Liberation struggle, memory and freedom in Mongane Serote's Freedom Lament and Song

Often described as the longest and last struggle against western colonialism on the continent of Africa, the South African liberation history was also characterised by an unparalleled persecution that translated into exile – literal and metaphorical – for both victims and perpetrators alike. It also accounts for why the liberation history provides a strong motivation for reflections on many planes in the wake of the official collapse of apartheid in the 1990s. One such was the state-instituted Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) shortly after the inauguration of the first democratically elected government in 1994. Nevertheless, writers and artists in general have also intervened in response to the imperative of reconciliation from a contrastively private angle as a counterweight to the official brief of the TRC. This article therefore examines what can be read as Mongane Wally Serote's response to the mandate of reconciliation in his poem Freedom Lament and Song (1997). It points to the poem's value, particularly in the way it engages with memory, racial victimhood, liberation struggle and the eventual attainment of freedom with the collapse of apartheid, all in a manner that espouses a more pragmatic approach and recommendation for the management and maintenance of reconciliation and freedom in a new South Africa.

This I Remember

was fortunate indeed to be present at the inaugural meeting of the African Literature Association in Austin, Texas in the spring of 1975. remember it was a cold spring in New Hampshire so going to Texas was a double blessing! remember that visiting guests were housed in dormitory rooms-it was inexpensive; it was personal; it was friendly. It said a good deal about the ALA in the beginning.The first meeting was unlike any that were to follow in that writers, not academics, sat on center stage. do not remember any other conference with so many distinguished writers. It was like being present at a meeting of the gods. And the writers wrestled with no holds barred.Today some of the principal issues facing Africa include systematic rape, corruption, civil conflict, China's role on the continent, the need for transparency, and democracies that are democrazies. In 1975 the struggle against apartheid dominated. In 1974 Portugal was forced to let go of her African territories. Now all attention turned to South Africa and to the man whose long walk to freedom paralleled that of his continent.In 1975 Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country was often taught in American schools, but non-white voices were seldom heard. The Austin Conference told South Africa's story from Sharpeville to Soweto by writers old and young. Veterans Ezekiel Mphahlele, Mazizi Kunene, Dennis Brutus and Cosmo Pieterse shared platforms with a younger generation, mostly of poets, who were strongly influenced by strident rhythms and social activism of the African American community-writers like James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Three dynamic young South African poets Willy Kgositsile, Wally Serote and Oswald Mtshali stood up in Austin, stood up to declare, I fling the gauntlet at your feet. This remember.In the beginning the ALA was not just another academic organization. There was passion and a sense that literature mattered. Scholars were there to serve Africa and that meant forming networks to help each other. Something important was happening. From Africa, from Europe, from Canada, from Australia, from the Caribbean, from USA, scholars and literary people came together. This remember.In the beginning the ALA was exciting. Each spring eagerly looked forward to our annual meeting to renew friendships, to meet with publishers, to be stimulated by writers and academics who knew more than I. would always leave the Conference with new books to read, new avenues to research. Over the years, however, as the ALA grew, it lost, or seemed to lose, that personal sense, that intellectual integrity that characterized the early years. …

The Road Trip of 1975: How Far We Have Come, How Close to Austin We Remain

In March of 1975, perhaps four or five of us students from U Wisconsin- Madison climbed into a station wagon, rented for us from the UW car pool by the Department of Languages and Literatures, and traveled south toward the sun in Austin, Texas.We leftin the dead of night. The thought of real spring weather, the increasingly warm temperatures as we headed south, and the long drive made us giddy enough. But we were also nervous and excited about the fact that we would soon meet faces and bodies to match some of the famous names we knew . . .I had largely moved to as a French PhD student, because, as I often say, the faculty in Studies-literature especially- would invite you to their homes. And you could actually MEET the writers and filmmakers you were studying. You could ask them questions, and they'd answer you (more or less), whereas in French, the writers we studied were mostly dead, and none of the living had ever come-during my years, at least- to Madison.It was also obvious that African literature, as we then called it, mattered. These texts we were reading and debating were part of something real, something critical. They clearly made a difference. This was proven to us in the worst way: Writers, like political leaders, could censored, jailed, tortured, exiled or murdered.So, a historic occasion was brewing and we students would a part of it. We would in fact, if I may shiftmetaphors, getting in on the ground floor.I don't remember much in the way of detail, except that I would the guest of a UT graduate student, Patsy. I slept on her floor. She was a wonderful hostess.It was only the second professional meeting I'd ever attended, the first being the 1974 ASA meetings in Chicago when the ALA was born. It had seemed a radical break at the time, even though it was presented as a caucus more or less, which is to say that we would all still attending ASA but would hold a separate meeting in addition, where no longer overshadowed by political science and policy wonks, could come into its own. I didn't grasp then what a difference this would make and how much the ALA would shape me professionally and personally, nor how invested I would become in this little association, how it would give institutional credibility to the work we do, how it would enable women to also be somebody.Students might in awe of these household names (household, among Africanists at least), but they were never treated like junior members: They were full-fledged participants in the debates, on the Exec Council right from the beginning. And so were women. Although it would take twelve years before the election of the first woman president of ALA.The theme of the Austin meeting was Contemporary South Literature. Among writers and scholars from West Africa, there were Chinua Achebe, Emmanuel Obiechina, Romanus Egudu, Pol Ndu, KofiAwoonor, Ama Ata Aidoo, and a Wole Soyinka protege, Biodun Jeyifo. From East Africa: Peter Nazareth and Ali Mazrui.What I remember most clearly of that first iteration, of course, was the overwhelming presence of South Africans-Dennis Brutus, Cosmo Pieterse, Mazisi Kunene, Ezekiel Mphalele, Wally Serote, Oswald Mtshali, our own Daniel Kunene. Many of these giants would presidents of ALA over the following decade. And the ALA's next twenty years, with all their excitement, discovery and growth, would painfully tethered to the evolution of South politics.The tyranny at home in South Africa reached over and shaped the course of the ALA, located in the U.S. in those years. Individuals were silenced, expelled from meetings and membership on the basis of positions they took in or trips they took to South Africa. It was wrenching. But such was the acuity and urgency of the South debacle, standing in for the whole continent, that it is hard to imagine how it could have been otherwise. …

In anticipation of tomorrow: Globalisation and ‘transnation’ in Mongane Wally Serote's history is the home address

In view of the collapse of institutional apartheid, post‐liberation South African literature can be appropriately limned as literature of return, going by the preponderance of its engagement with exile in the years of the struggle. I read Mongane Wally Serote's History is the Home Address (2004) against the backdrop of migration, paying attention to the way the poem anticipates what should be the right attitude of those it may affect, especially with respect to the nation‐state. I argue that the assumptions of this anticipation are true for South Africa as they are for all other postcolonial African states. While privileging the idea of space and time, my position in this paper benefits significantly from Bill Ashcroft's concept of “transnation” and the way it makes for the inadequacies of the notion of diaspora and other similarly configured abstractions.

Literary profile

In the post-Sharpeville era, Mongane Wally Serote is one of the most accomplished and committed of South African poets. He is profoundly dedicated to the culture of the oppressed and exploited, as well as being actively engaged in asserting the highest ideals of the revolution. The development of Serote's poetry is indeed consonant with the momentum of the liberation struggle against apartheid. The poetry of Mongane Serote, as well as that of his contemporaries, has suffered critical neglect outside South Africa. Serote's poems deserve wider attention not only for having incisively anatomised the socio-political maladies ruthlessly afflicted upon black lives by a racist oligarchy, but also for their intrinsic poetic range and quality. Serote was born in 1944 in Sophiatown, the vibrant downtown multiracial Johannesburg township which was ruthlessly bulldozed by the apartheid regime in the 1960s and ironically renamed Triomf, meaning 'triumph'. The result was the shameless destruction of a community, with its concomitant dislocation of families, homelessness and abject deprivation. Serote pugnaciously exclaimed: