“A garden had been left to grow wild there”: considering nature in Ivan Vladislavić’s Johannesburg

Abstract

Johannesburg has frequently been subjected to critical examinations that conceive the city as a metropolis dominated by late capitalist excess and gold mining hyperbole. Along these particular lines, much of the literary scholarship that considers Vladislavić’s city texts have focussed on his conception of the built environment that critiques its exploitative extractive history and its simulacral tendencies. However, sustained critical attention of his treatment of nature in the urban space has largely been neglected or underplayed. The natural Highveld environment, for Vladislavić, occupies a fraught and liminal space in the city, pushed to the margins of a brutalizing modernity. Nature in Johannesburg, he opines, is a construction, an imposition and inheritance that belies the city’s colonial and European settler history. However, there are moments in which, when human attention is turned away, nature in its untended and generative capacity works to unmake the structural obduracy of the settled city. This manifests in episodes that embrace the quiet potency of wild gardens that disrupt the urban status quo.

Keywords:

• Ivan Vladislavić
• Johannesburg
• gardens
• urban ecology
• postcolonial ecocriticism

Notes

¹ Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys, 181–2.

² Poplak, “Writing Johannesburg,” online.

³ Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys, 182.

⁴ Adams and Mulligan, Decolonizing Nature, 5.

⁵ Ibid., 3.

⁶ Casid, Sowing Empire, 241.

⁷ DeLoughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 5.

⁸ Save, most notably, for Gerald Gaylard’s “Migrant Ecology in the Postcolonial City.”

⁹ DeLoughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 3.

¹⁰ Davie, “Zoo Lake,” online.

¹¹ Per Palestrant in Ibid.

¹² Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys, 94.

¹³ Foster, “From Socio-nature to Spectral Presence,” 194.

¹⁴ Ibid., 196.

¹⁵ Ibid., 200–1.

¹⁶ Casid, Sowing Empire, 241.

¹⁷ Foster, “From Socio-nature to Spectral Presence,” 200.

¹⁸ Ibid., 202.

¹⁹ DeLoughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 12, 13.

²⁰ Ibid., 12.

²¹ On this front, Shane Graham (2011) writes that “Vladislavić’s treatment of billboards does invite discussion in terms of surface images and simulacra,” 236–7.

²² Vladislavić, The Exploded View, 186–7.

²³ Ibid., 174.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid., 7.

²⁶ Ibid., 187.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ibid., 188. A number of other scholars have considered the simulacrum in Ivan Vladislavić’s work, including Titlestad and Kissack, “Secular Improvisations”; Gaylard, “Migrant Ecology in the Postcolonial City”; Graham, “Layers of Permanence”; and Manià, “On the Brink of the Mundane.”

²⁹ Vladislavić, The Exploded View, 187.

³⁰ Foster, “From Socio-nature to Spectral Presence,” 206.

³¹ Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys, 94.

³² Vladislavić, The Exploded View, 174.

³³ Mbembe and Nuttall, “Writing the World from an African Metropolis,” 368.

³⁴ Titlestad and Kissack, “Secular Improvisations,” 15.

³⁵ Renato Rosaldo in DeLoughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 183.

³⁶ Coetzee, White Writing (1998) as discussed in: Huggan, and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 99.

³⁷ Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 104.

³⁸ Ibid., 98.

³⁹ Ibid., 110.

⁴⁰ Huggan and Tiffin cite Coetzee’s example of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm in support of this point: “To Schreiner … Africa is a land of rock and sun, not of soil and water” (1988, 7). In Ibid., 98.

⁴¹ Ibid., 110.

⁴² Gaylard, “Migrant Ecology in the Postcolonial City,” 294.

⁴³ Ibid., 294.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 293.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 294.

⁴⁶ Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys, 160.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 103.

⁴⁹ Mulligan in Adams and Mulligan, Decolonizing Nature, 2.

⁵⁰ Richard Grove in Adams, Decolonizing Nature, 29.

⁵¹ Adams, Decolonizing Nature, 35.

⁵² Unless we decide to invoke the Biblical Garden of Eden, of course.

⁵³ “As part of this foundational articulation of urban culture and rural life, there developed the construct of ‘three natures’ – the untamed ‘first nature’ of wilderness, the work-a-day ‘second nature’ of cultivation and the highly manipulated, symbolic ‘third nature’ of the garden.” Foster, 194.

⁵⁴ Foster, “From Socio-nature to Spectral Presence,” 194.

⁵⁵ Gunn and Owen, Introduction, 492.

⁵⁶ Cooper, A Philosophy of Gardens, 99, 100.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 99.

⁵⁸ Gaylard, Marginal Spaces.

⁵⁹ Vladislavić, Double Negative, 99.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 28.

⁶¹ Ibid., 46.

⁶² After leaving Mozambique, Dr Pinheiro’s credentials did not allow him to continue practicing medicine and thus he had to find work elsewhere, but his poor English and inability to speak Afrikaans severely compromised his sorting abilities. Rather than admitting his shortcomings, he hid the letters with addresses he could not discern.

⁶³ Vladislavić, Double Negative, 131.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys, 148.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 150.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 148.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 150.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 148.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Foster, “From Socio-nature to Spectral Presence,” 194.

⁷² Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys, 149.

⁷³ Ibid., 148.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 170.

⁷⁵ Ibid.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ Ibid.