Prize-winning novel a campus of ideas
The University of Johannesburg Prize for Literature has been awarded to Etienne van Heerden’s Die Biblioteek aan die Einde van die Wêreld (The Library at the End of the World).
On the shortlist was, among others, the last novel of the winner of the 2018 Barry Ronge Prize awarded by the Sunday Times, the late Harry Kalmer’s In ’n Land Sonder Voëls (In a Country Without Birds).
Set during the #FeesMustFall upheavals, Biblioteek at about 700 pages is a big book, one with which you could take out a security guard on campus, or on which you could stand to incite a crowd, or raise as protection against a student’s fist.
But it is also a page turner; 100 pages flash by as half a dozen interweaving plots keep one riveted.
The student uprisings of 2015-2017, which are still continuing if you add the sputterings at campuses before the lockdown, are generally regarded as a seminal series of events of the past decade, up there with the Marikana massacre in tearing to shreds the last remains of the Rainbow Nation and its Madibaphoria.
Van Heerden found himself in a position that must be enviable to journalists of the war correspondent sort. As a professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT), he was in the middle of the most contentious happenings; as editor of the successful website LitNet, he was also in the vanguard of the infotech explosion that played such a fundamental part in consolidating local effulgences of student ire into a national movement. As head of the creative writing department at UCT, he must have had access to multiple resources, not least his own formidable oeuvre and a panel van of literary tools probably unparalleled in SA literature.
There was also a personal event that got the juices of the imagination going. In the back of the book and at launches, Van Heerden recounted a visit to the student lovers’ haunt Jonkershoek outside Stellenbosch. He fell head over heels, but it was nothing romantic — he was on his bicycle trying to handle his cellphone. With several cracked ribs, he made it back home, but the tumble triggered a connection in his subconscious with the slogan of the #FeesMustFall movement,.
He started putting responses and musings on his Facebook page, in the process initiating a process with various virtual dimensions. These became the seedlings for a range of characters all responding with passion and drive of different sorts to the students, with the spine of the whole enterprise the asymptotic stories of two central characters.
The first is a white Afrikaans speaker, Ian Brand, with an identity crisis and delayed posttraumatic stress syndrome from the Angolan war. Politically he is progressive and at odds with his property mogul father, but also with the collapsing government and social services around him.
As a lawyer he is grappling with the neo-colonialisms of infotech — should he take part to help regulate it properly or duck out altogether and stay ethically uncompromised? He also takes part in a translation group at UCT, where he finds himself pigeonholed as a white race denialist for questioning the oddities of student dogma.
Van Heerden turns him into a comprehensive representation of the disaffection common among progressive whites aghast at state capture and the decadence of the current iteration of BEE.
Brand is balanced by the second central character, one that is sure to become one of the more attractive fixtures of a future Madame Tussaud’s of SA literature.
Thuli Khumalo’s family is ANC royalty, and the uprisings have pushed her forward as a student leader lionised as the new Winnie Mandela. Like many among the oppositional forces of today — EFF, students, unionists, tweeters — her revolutionary fervour gets her stuck in ideological hairsplitting beyond the point of no return, but also infused with a will to honesty and an integrity driving her to root out the truth.
Her weaknesses are those of many real-time student rebels: a puritanical fear of seduction by any alternative rationality, which engenders the tactics of nonstructure, of avoiding any hierarchy or formalities, to sabotage any possibility of compromise.
Asked at a launch in Pretoria about the more well-reported aspects of the uprising, the idiocies expressed in the quest for a base for decolonisation, Van Heerden responded quickly, with a hint of irritation, that many #FeesMustFall students are people of great integrity. There can be no doubt that Thuli is a representation of this core of true rebellion, and that Van Heerden has much empathy with the students to share through her.
Thuli is also part of the translation group, in which she constantly butts heads with Brand. Van Heerden is too smart to let any romantic affection develop, but they do come to occupy space in each other’s thoughts in ways that go beyond rainbowism.
Another participant is Jerome Maarman, the downand-out shack dweller who supplies petrol to the students and who, still classified as “coloured”, refuses to compromise with anybody.
These core characters are augmented with a rogue’s gallery of Van Heerdenesque eccentrics and vibrant livers of life, including revisitations from previous novels such as Snaar, the transgender denizen of the underworld out for revenge.
All happens against the background of the latest waves of the infotech revolution, which has now progressed to the stage of “surveillance capitalism”, the phrase created by Shoshana Zuboff in her analysis of the havoc its “disruptions” are causing. Van Heerden melds the occidental origins of this type of capitalism with the near futuristic versions coming out of China, the country with whom the governing SA elite has such special ties.
Tragic events occur, and leave us with the uncomfortable question: to what extent have the student uprisings been steered by surveillance capitalists from both the West and the East? Van Heerden calls the work an ideas novel, but it is probably too well written for that to stick. Still, he puts a lot on the table of the national debate, especially issues on the infotech revolution.
Our virtual world has only grown in importance during the past few weeks, and Biblioteek provides enough overlap to keep it relevant also in the age of the virus.
THE TUMBLE TRIGGERED A CONNECTION IN HIS SUBCONSCIOUS WITH THE SLOGAN OF THE #FEESMUSTFALL STUDENT MOVEMENT