{"id":138271,"date":"2019-07-25T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2019-07-25T13:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=138271"},"modified":"2019-08-01T12:45:36","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T16:45:36","slug":"re-covered-the-protest-writing-of-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/07\/25\/re-covered-the-protest-writing-of-south-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: The Protest Writing of South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her monthly column<\/em>\u00a0Re-Covered<\/a>, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Republic of South Africa is a country divided into two worlds,\u201d wrote Miriam Tlali in the opening chapter of her debut novel, Muriel at Metropolitan<\/em>, which was published in 1975. \u201cThe one, a white world\u2014rich, comfortable, for all practical purposes organized\u2014a world in fear, armed to the teeth,\u201d she explains. \u201cThe other, a black world; poor, pathetically neglected and disorganized\u2014voiceless, oppressed, restless, confused and unarmed\u2014a world in transition, irrevocably weaned from all tribal ties.\u201d Set at Metropolitan Radio, a busy furniture and electric-goods store in Johannesburg, Muriel at Metropolitan <\/em>depicts the collision of these two worlds. It is narrated by one of the white-owned store\u2019s black employees, a typist named Muriel, who recounts, in dogged, meticulous detail, the reality of life in the \u201cblack world,\u201d the residents of which live on \u201cshifting sands\u201d as every parliamentary session brings in \u201cfresh, more oppressive laws\u201d that seek to dehumanize nonwhite South Africans while maintaining the power and privilege of their oppressors. The book is fictionalized autobiography, the verisimilitude of which can be traced to Tlali\u2019s own experience working as a clerk-typist in a Johannesburg store. \u201cThe sunny Republic of South Africa,\u201d Muriel notes derisively, \u201cthe white man\u2019s paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such truth-telling was radical at the time Tlali was writing, but she was a trailblazer. She was the first black woman to publish a novel written in English in South Africa, and her work was at the forefront of the new protest writing movement that emerged at the beginning of the seventies. For Tlali, writing was activism. She wrote in order to raise political consciousness and expose the evils of apartheid, both across South Africa and internationally.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time literary expression in our writing took on a completely political perspective,\u201d explains the activist and author Lauretta Ngcobo in her introduction to the Pandora Press edition of Tlali\u2019s 1989 short story collection, Soweto Stories <\/em>(published in South Africa as Footprints in the Quag: Stories and Dialogues from Soweto<\/em>). A contemporary of Tlali\u2019s, Ngcobo was forced to flee South Africa in 1963, and lived in exile for the next three decades. \u201cProtest writing had arrived, to the virtual exclusion of anything else that might engage the literary mind,\u201d Ngcobo continues. Both Muriel at Metropolitan<\/em> and Tlali\u2019s second book, Amandla <\/em>(1980)\u2014about a young freedom fighter involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising and the underground resistance\u2014deliberately subvert certain novelistic traditions. Exposition, for example, something often frowned on in literary fiction, is absolutely integral to Tlali\u2019s writing, while plot and character development cease to function in the ways we might expect. \u201cThe force of her work,\u201d fellow South African writer Richard Rive explains, \u201cwas its honest attention to detail and its complete lack of histrionic gestures.\u201d Tlali herself had this to say in a paper given in Amsterdam to the Committee against Censorship in 1984\u2014a full decade before the end of apartheid\u2014 addressing her comments to \u201cthe Philistines, the banners of books, [and] the critics\u201d:<\/p>\n

We black South African writers (who are faced with the task of conscientising ourselves and our people) are writing for those whom we know are the relevant audience. We are not going to write in order to qualify or fit into your<\/em> definition of what you describe as \u201ctrue art.\u201d Our main objective is not to receive ballyhoo comments on our works. What is more important to us is that we should be allowed to reach our audiences. Our duty is to write for our people and about them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Considering the importance of Tlali\u2019s work, the fact that none of her four published volumes are currently in print is really quite astonishing. It\u2019s all the more unforgivable given that both Muriel at Metropolitan <\/em>and Amandla <\/em>were immediately banned upon their initial publication in South Africa. This alone is evidence of their significance, for, as Tlali asks her persecutors in the closing comments of her 1984 paper, \u201cIf we write what you so readily describe as \u2018devoid of any artistic value,\u2019 \u2018too obsessed with politics\u2019 then why are you afraid to let our people read the books? Why do you bury them? Why does the truth hurt you?\u201d I could make a strong argument for republishing all her books, but it\u2019s the revolutionary Muriel at Metropolitan <\/em>that I think most warrants the rediscovery. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

As the academic Barbara Boswell astutely points out, Metropolitan Radio \u201cfunctions as a microcosm for apartheid South Africa.\u201d It\u2019s a workplace where the segregation laws of the land are played out in miniature, from the \u201cwhites only\u201d coatrack to the organization of the filing system. \u201cI had seen apartheid applied in many spheres in the Republic,\u201d Miriam observes early on, \u201cbut never before had I seen it applied to a ledger or record cards!\u201d European cards go in one section, non-European cards in another: \u201cIt was all very confusing for a person who did not know the different Coloured townships because that was the only clue to where the card could be filed or found,\u201d Muriel explains. \u201cThe Coloured names were the same as the European ones. Inevitably a lot of misfiling occurred.\u201d As an isolated anecdote, it verges on the absurd\u2014Tlali possesses the fine ability to write about discrimination in a way that reveals it to be as ridiculous as it is cruel\u2014but none of what Muriel describes exists in isolation. Indeed, the power of the novel\u2019s political message comes from Tlali\u2019s exhaustive detailing of the minutiae of everyday life, and with it the thousands of ways in which apartheid denied the humanity of nonwhite South Africans. As Rive points out, the tone of the book is \u201csubdued by comparison with the anger of earlier Protest Writers\u201d; this isn\u2019t a story that relies on a \u201cmajor calamity.\u201d What Tlali\u2019s documenting here is a steady war of attrition.<\/p>\n

Shortly after she begins working at Metropolitan Radio, Muriel finds herself in trouble for using the ladies\u2019 bathroom. There\u2019s only one bathroom for all the store\u2019s female employees, but by law white and black employees aren\u2019t allowed to use the same facilities, and thus the white women have been complaining. They expect her to use a \u201cfilthy\u201d facility that\u2019s \u201copen to anybody from the street,\u201d reeking with the \u201cheavy stench\u201d of \u201cstagnant urine on the floor.\u201d Understandably, this is too much to bear, so she\u2019s forced to leave the store and walk two blocks to the public facilities in the park every time she needs to avail herself, and pay two cents for the privilege. Her boss is pathetically compliant\u2014\u201cI am sorry about this, Muriel,\u201d he tells her, \u201cbut you see, we are not all alike. I <\/em>don\u2019t mind, but some people do<\/em>, you see.\u201d He\u2019s no Good Samaritan, his fangs come out when he wants to extract as much money as possible from his poorest customers, but as soon as he realizes that Muriel is not just a reliable worker but a well-educated and highly trained one at that, he increases her responsibilities, which in turn angers her white colleagues. Following an argument with one of them, she\u2019s convinced she\u2019s about to be fired. It\u2019s a depressingly familiar fear, we learn, one that \u201changs like a dark cloud over the head of every non-white worker.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is like that with everything you try to build up in every sphere of your life\u2014your home, your work, your future, the future of your children\u2014everything hangs on a thread. At any moment everything about you can be snapped off just like that. Your fate depends entirely on the whims of the white masters!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Muriel becomes increasingly frustrated by the way she\u2019s treated, but even more agonizingly, she\u2019s plagued by a \u201cgnawing feeling of guilt\u201d about her complicity in the system responsible for such oppression and persecution. Early on, a black colleague explains to her that the high interest rate the shop charges its black customers is \u201ckilling our people.\u201d Every time he brings in a new client he feels terrible, he explains, \u201clike I\u2019ve brought him to be slaughtered.\u201d It\u2019s a confession that leaves Muriel feeling completely hopeless. \u201cHow was I going to work with people who were not even prepared to give me a chance and who were squeezing as much money as they could out of my own black fellow workers?\u201d she wonders. Each time her boss asks her to be \u201cloyal to the firm,\u201d she feels sick. \u201cEvery time I asked for a customer\u2019s pass book,\u201d she explains\u2014identity cards that had to be carried by all nonwhite citizens, restricting where they went\u2014\u201cI would feel like a policeman, who, in this country, is the symbol of oppression. I would continue to feel like a traitor, part of a conspiracy, a machinery deliberately designed to crush the soul of a people.\u201d When, on the final page, she finally decides that she can no longer \u201ccontinue to be part of the web that has been woven to entangle a people whom I love and am part of,\u201d the penning of her resignation letter brings a rare moment of transcendence. Instead of typing it, she decides to write it in her own hand. Looking down at the finished work she experiences a revelation: \u201cMy handwriting had never looked so beautiful. I had at last decided to free myself of the shackles which had bound not only my hands but also my soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Muriel at Metropolitan<\/em>\u2019s publication was a hard-won struggle and the celebration of its appearance was both tainted and short-lived. Tlali finished writing the novel in 1969, but it took six long years to find a South African publisher. Raven Press took it on, but with a caveat\u2014they insisted on removing passages from the text that they thought would offend the country\u2019s literary watchdog, the Censorship Board. The title Tlali had proposed and preferred, Between Two Worlds,<\/em> was vetoed by Raven Press. When the book was reissued in 2004 under its original title, Tlali recalled in the preface just how disheartening the first publication had actually been. \u201cI returned to my matchbox house in Soweto, locked myself in my little bedroom and cried,\u201d she wrote. \u201cFive whole chapters had been removed; also paragraphs, phrases, and sentences. It was devastating, to say the least.\u201d Even more distressingly, this already drastic censorship didn\u2019t satisfy the Censorship Board. They took umbrage with the redacted text and the novel was swiftly banned in South Africa. Tlali\u2014who was born in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, in 1933 and studied at the University of the Witwatersrand (until it was closed to black students) and afterward at Roma University in Lesotho\u2014was often harassed by the secret police. Boswell writes that when she interviewed Tlali in 2006, the latter described being \u201cbrutally beaten in her home in Soweto by police on several occasions.\u201d Tlali also told Boswell how during these years she got into the habit of wrapping her manuscripts-in-progress in \u201cplastic shopping bags at the end of each day, and bury[ing] them in her back yard to avoid police confiscating them during [the] raids\u201d they made on her home, as well as being forced to find ways of smuggling them back into the country after traveling abroad. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Tlali refused to go into exile. Instead, she kept writing\u2014\u201cfighting the system with my pen\u2014the only way I could.\u201d She helped establish Skotaville Press (which published her third book, Mihloti<\/em>, in1984), and Staffrider<\/em>, the only literary journal in South Africa that published the work of nonwhite writers during apartheid, and to which she was also a regular contributor. She was a fierce advocate for women\u2019s rights\u2014central to her work is the demonstration of how the black woman is doubly oppressed, by the racial discrimination of apartheid and by the inequalities of the patriarchal society in which she lives.<\/p>\n

Although the significance of Tlali\u2019s work is increasingly being acknowledged within academic circles\u2014especially since her death, two years ago, in 2017\u2014wider readership is what had always really mattered to her. Tlali fought passionately for her own voice and that of other South African women writers to be heard\u2014\u201cWe must bring back living memories of our noble past (and true past) which have nearly been eradicated from our minds by the hatred, strife, and greed of others\u201d she argued in Amsterdam in 1984\u2014it behooves us to do the same for her now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily, the<\/em>\u00a0Financial Times,<\/em>The New York Times Book Review,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Miriam Tlali’s “Muriel at Metropolitan” was heavily censored, then swiftly banned upon its publication. That, alone, should be reason for us to recognize its importance today. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRe-Covered: The Protest Writing of South Africa by Lucy Scholes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 25, 2019 \u2013 Miriam Tlali's "Muriel at Metropolitan" was heavily censored, then swiftly banned upon its publication. 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