Time of the Writer
I’ve been at the Time of the Writer festival in Durban, South Africa (http://www.cca.ukzn.ac.za/Time_of_the_writer.htm) for the past week. It was a bit of a random decision to come, as many of my travel plans end up being – I was on the website of Raj Patel, a well-known food security activist and academic, and learned that he would be speaking at this festival. At the time I had a plane ticket booked into Gaborone, Botswana and a plane ticket out Johannesburg, and nothing planned in the middle.
From the first night of the festival I realized I was not only going to learn about writing, but I was also going to look through a window to South Africa, and other countries (Zimbabwe, Senegal, France, St. Kitts, Nigeria, Angola, and several more), using their artists as a medium. There were large auditorium-filling sessions in the evenings, and smaller venues with 2-3 writers speaking during the day. I became known as a festival groupie as I made my way around Durban to attend sessions. And, of course, to buy books – with each author I heard, I felt I needed to read their words. (I had to buy a new bag to accommodate my purchases)
The writers spoke of how their lives, the personal and the political, shaped who they were and how they wrote. The township in black South Africa that led to a book trying to explain how a poor teenager can end up seeing carjacking as an option. The genocide in Rwanda that leads to a fictional novel with a spectrum of chapters of how different people experienced their personal tragedies. The science fiction/urban fantasy (the author doesn’t like labels – in fact no author did) where Capetown is ruled by a corporate-apartheid. The desire to have South African apartheid literature stop having a predictable format, to stop having everything written in the name of political activism – instead, to tell peoples’ stories, which are permeated both by the ordinary and universal as well as the net of apartheid.
I found myself drawing parallels to my life in Canada as a point of reference – when I could. From inner city Toronto to northern First Nations and Metis communities there were many connections: poverty, lack of options, desire for change, oppression, discrimination, strength, pride. I spoke with one of the authors who did not know that there were “indigenous peoples” in Canada – just he would struggle to comprehensively explain race history in South Africa, I was challenged to explain simply what it means to be Aboriginal in Canada, a topic that I am just beginning to learn about.
Now I am moving on to the next phase of my travels – spending time with physicians in Johannesburg who work with patients who have HIV. Another window into life in South Africa.
