*Local Adult Fiction (2010): R59 029 (25.6% of the local market)
*Local Adult Non-Fiction (2010): R171 211 (74.4% of the market)
Annual Book Publishing Industry Survey Report, 2011
(The Publishers’ Association of South Africa)
Nonfiction, in post-apartheid South Africa, seems to have eclipsed fictive forms. Of course, fictive writing has had its ups and downs before and after apartheid; the argument, however, is that the trend towards nonfiction, always powerful in South African literary history, has accelerated significantly in the post-apartheid period.
*Antjie Krog: “I want to suggest that at this stage imagination is overrated.”
*Marlene van Niekerk: Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree “almost convinces one that fiction has become redundant in this country”.
What underlies such assertions is a sense that the sheer scale of the post-apartheid failure to deliver on its promises – and the need to document this perceived condition – has edged out imaginative fictive writing as the country’s leading form of literary intermediation. The imperative for writers is more often found to be the exploration of actual, material conditions; to establish the veracity of the event.
In the face of an event such as Marikana (where, on the platinum belt, police shot 34 striking miners), what is more urgent – ‘reimagining’ the event, or finding out the deliberately obscured facts behind the catastrophe? What, indeed, is left for the imagination?
And yet, despite the sense that one simply cannot “make this shit up” (Twidle), it is precisely because this ‘shit’ is so egregious that a crucial question begs to be asked: how might fiction respond to such conditions, and what form might this response take?
(Adapted from Leon de Kock, Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Post-Apartheid Writing (2016), 177–8)
*Krog, quoted in Hedley Twidle, “‘In a Country Where You Could Not Make This Shit Up?’: Literary Non-Fiction in South Africa.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 13.1/2 (2012): 5–28.
*Van Niekerk, extracted from the blurb of Albeker’s book.
Current Writing, 31(2), 2019, invites papers (± 6 000 words) on the above-mentioned question.
By 31 March 2019 to: