Welcome back
NEWSPAPER readers were greeted yesterday by the still familiar if somewhat more increased features of a quintessential Cape writer who has been absent from the public conversation, by choice, for many years.
The silver-haired Adam Small, poet, playwright and chronicler of a wretched recent past that we live with still, made a deservedly celebrated return to public life – in the qualified way that such people occupy a public role – when he earned a standing ovation for his appearance at the Breytenbach Centre in his home town of Wellington as the guest of honour at the weekend’s Poet Festival.
He read a selection of poems from his latest anthology, Klawerjas; by all accounts, the audience was entranced.
Small made his debut as a poet in 1957 with Versevandieliefde. But since writing and staging the play OosWesTuis
Bes:DistrictSes in 1973 he has been all but silent. It was a silence of distress.
Some remember him as a scholar, the recipient of an MA cumlaude from UCT on the philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann and Friedrich Nietzsche, others as a defiant adherent of Black Consciousness, or a much-loved and admired figure on the campus of the University of the Western Cape where he filled numerous roles, not least as a dramatist/director who helped young actors realise on stage the anguish and futility of the apartheid years.
Far beyond these confines, he is known as the crafter of an extraordinarily expressive vernacular Afrikaans, the memorable vehicle of his acclaimed play of 1965, Kannahykôhystoe.
WRITERS, the best of them, are not crusading figures concerned primarily with service delivery, say, or achieving this or that more or less utilitarian objective for which governments are voted in and out of power and administrators are paid sums of money that literature has never had lavished on it.
But nor are they dispensable, for without their enriching our collective mental life we are immeasurably impoverished. Adam Small’s thoughtful, satiric, sad, celebratory, distinctive voice has been missed. We applaud his return.