S***storm in South Africa

My interview last month with Caryl Férey about his novel Zulu has caused a firestorm of criticism in South Africa.

Author Mike Nicol reproduces portions of the interview over at Crime Beat/Book Southern Africa, interpolating his own scornful reactions to Férey's answers. Among the milder of these: "Ag no, my bru! Now you’re talking kak."

Nicol's post generated a string of comments, the gist of which was that Férey didn't know what he was talking about, especially when he suggested that tacit agreement bars discussion in South Africa of the apartheid-era war between the Zulu Inkatha Party and the mostly Xhosa African National Congress.

Férey brought the subject up when I asked about the advantages of writing about South Africa as an outsider. (He's French.) The vitriolic — and, in Nicol's case, funny — response suggests that such a detached vantage point may carry dangers as well.

Here's my interview with Férey. Here's Nicol's reply, along with a string of comments from readers including Margie Orford, another South African author whose short fiction I've read and whose novels I want to read.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Shadow cities

I wonder to what extent South Africa's emergence from apartheid has let the country's authors look clearly at the divisions that once existed and that still remain.

Here's a bit from "The Meeting," the heart-pounding short story by Margie Orford that opens the Bad Company collection of South African crime writing:

Claire Hart turned off the freeway, the off-ramp sinking her into Khayelitsha, Cape Town's teeming shadow city sprawling unmapped across the sand dunes south of the airport. The houses, makeshift cubes of corrugated iron and wood, roofed with black plastic, homed half a million people, maybe a million. No one was counting.

Roger Smith sees Cape Town in similar terms in his novel Wake Up Dead, where the city's dangerous Flats have resolved themselves into antagonistic territories defined by gang rule:

A woman in a Muslim headscarf scuttled across the road, carrying a plastic shopping bag and a tub of Kentucky chicken, and disappeared into Dark City. Otherwise the road was empty and silent.

Dark cities, shadow cities, alternative cities. Sounds something like those dirty towns Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett used to write about, doesn't it?

As always, read up on the latest South African crime writing at the Crime Beat site, including a discussion of Orford's novel Daddy's Girl.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010