Minor Genres in Postcolonial Literatures

Delphine Munos, Bénédicte Ledent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429516429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Moving beyond the postcolonial literature field's traditional focus on the novel, this book shines a light on the "minor" genres in which postcolonial issues are also explored.

The contributors examine the intersection of generic issues with postcolonial realities in regions such as South Africa, Nigeria, New Zealand, Indonesia, Australia, the United Kingdon, and the Caribbean. These "minor" genres include crime fiction, letter writing, radio plays, poetry, the novel in verse and short stories, as well as blogs and essays. The volume closes with Robert Antoni's discussion of his use of the vernacular and digital resources in As Flies to Whatless Boys (2013), and suggests that "major" genres might yield new webs of meaning when digital media are mobilized with a view to creating new forms of hybridity and multiplicity that push genre boundaries.

In focusing on underrepresented and understudied genres, this book pays justice to the multiplicity of the field of postcolonial studies and gives voice to certain literary traditions within which the novel occupies a less central position.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

“The advent of a genre”: Crime fiction and the state of the nation in South Africa^*

Geoffrey V. Davis

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on how South African crime fiction reflects and critiques the state of the nation. It recapitulates the history of the genre under apartheid, referring particularly to Wessel Ebersohn and James McClure, before reviewing its subsequent development, which is characterized in part by a concern to embrace the social and political problems of post-apartheid society. Taking account of crime statistics, and of the ambivalence some writers feel about their writing in such a violent society, this article illustrates the genre’s engagement with issues like fear of crime, loss of faith in the police, widespread corruption, abuse of women and children, the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, and the complexities of social transition. The success of the work of Angela Makholwa, Deon Meyer, Mike Nicol and Margie Orford lies in the way they reconcile the demands of good entertainment with searching social and psychological insights.

What remains uncertain is whether or not we will ever overcome the enormous weight of the crimogenic legacy of apartheid. (Altbeker 2001, 38)

Margie Orford has often stated that fiction about crime in South Africa is essentially a study of why it is such a violent place – a “whydunnit” rather than a “whodunnit”. (De Kock 2012, n.p.)

At the end of Mike Nicol’s (2010a) South African crime novel Killer Country, Pylon Buso tells his fellow security agent, Mace Bishop, a joke. It goes like this:

The traffic cops’ve mounted a safety check one night on a highway. Pulling over all the cars. A sort of Arrive Alive thing.

So this traffic cop walks up to a smart Jetta. Black car, tinted windows, new model. He can see two young guys in the front seats. The window comes down. The young guys are both buckled up.

The cop’s impressed. “Hey guys,” he says, “you’re the lucky ones tonight.” Tells them Arrive Alive’s running this surprise reward, they’ve won five thousand bucks for wearing seat belts. He’s got this envelope bulging with big notes in his hand, gives it to Sipho, the driver.

“Wow,” goes Sipho. “That’s so cool. I’ve never won anything before. This’s magic.”

“So what’re you gonna spend it on,” says the traffic cop, all friendly, doing good PR for the department.

“I’m gonna buy a driving licence,” says Sipho. “Be legal.”

Hendrik, in the passenger seat [ … ] leans across to speak to the traffic cop. “Don’t listen to him, officer, he always tries to be funny when he’s drunk.”

The traffic cop’s getting a squinty look on his face.

Sipho’s saying, “I’m not drunk. Strues, officer. You can test me.” Running his words together.

This wakes Ravi, who’s been sleeping on the back seat. He pops up, sees the cop and groans, “Oh shit, I told you guys. You gotta keep off the highways in a hot car. There’s always roadblocks.”

The traffic cop shines his torch in the back, checks out Ravi, sees bloodstains on the headrest from the hijacking.

Before he can do anything there’s knocking from the boot and a voice calls out “Please tell me, buti, are we over the border yet?”

Now the cop’s got this frown on his dial. “My brother,” he says to Sipho, “seems we’ve got a little problem here.”

Sipho says, “I can explain.”

“For sure,” says the cop. He puts out his hand, palm up. “This is a good explanation.”

Sipho says, “How much?” starts counting the notes into the cop’s hand. When he gets to five thou, the cop says, “Is that all?”

Pylon waited.

Mace said, “Ja, okay.”

“State of the nation,” said Pylon. “Geddit?” (Nicol 2010a, 362–363)

* For the phrase “the advent of a genre” in my title, I am indebted to Jennifer Crocker’s (2013) review of Bloody Satisfied.

The “state of the nation” and its thematization in the country’s crime fiction provides the focus of the present article, although it is to be feared that the crimes plaguing the real world of contemporary South Africa and those described in fiction will sometimes prove to be a good deal more heinous and offer far less occasion for humour than those referred to in the security agent’s amusing joke.

During the apartheid era, crime fiction was seldom considered a major genre in South African literature. Most writers, black or white, devoted their energies primarily to opposing apartheid. What they wrote was not of course usually crime fiction. Indeed, to be writing work in such a supposedly lighter vein which did not in some manner engage with the “system” was viewed by some as politically somewhat irresponsible. As the Afrikaner crime writer Deon Meyer has suggested, in the apartheid era,

you could not really have police crime thrillers [ … ]. It is very difficult to have a cop as a hero if he works for an evil regime. You don’t tend to find crime thrillers in any community where a “non-democratic” situation prevails. (quoted in Groenewald 2007, n.p.)

Mike Nicol (2014) agrees: to have made your protagonist a policeman under apartheid, he suggested, would be “akin to sleeping with the enemy” (n.p.).

Nicol thus inclines to the view held by most commentators that “not much has happened in South African crime fiction over the last five decades” (le Roux 2013, 136). Margie Orford (2013a) has also suggested that “prior to 1994, apart from a couple of exceptions, there was no actual ‘genre’ crime fiction” (220). I, too, shared that impression, believing that, beyond Wessel Ebersohn and James McClure, there were really no other crime writers in apartheid South Africa.

This view has now been disproved by Elizabeth le Roux in a 2013 article in which she looks at crime fiction in South Africa from the perspective of publishing history. This is not an easy task since the local market was small during apartheid and much was published overseas. Le Roux (2013) has unearthed such forerunners as Ernest Glanville and Bertram Mitford whose works, she notes, “are now almost completely unknown” (139). Mitford, she believes, is “a good contender as the first crime writer in South Africa”, and she counts his 1899 novel The Weird of Deadly Hollow: A Tale of the Cape Colony as “the first true South African crime fiction” (139).

Since 1994, the year of South African liberation, everything has changed in the world of crime fiction. The crime novel has become what Michael Titlestad (2012) describes as a “post-apartheid publishing phenomenon” (691). Other writers and critics concur. Karina Szczurek declared that “the crime genre is taking the literary scene by storm”.¹ Christopher Warnes (2012) remarks that “the number of crime novels [ … ] is starting to assume the ‘epidemic proportions’ some believe characterise actual crime rates in that country” (981). Mike Nicol welcomes what he calls the “explosion” of crime fiction in South Africa since the 1990s, which he puts down to the greater readiness of publishers to bring out local work matched by a greater willingness of the public to read it. It is also noteworthy, as Deon Meyer (2013) remarks, that crime fiction is, for the first time, being produced by “writers of all ethnicities” (7). It would seem, therefore, legitimate to wonder whether South African crime fiction may any longer be regarded as a “minor” genre.

In this article I am going to follow Julian Symons’s (1993) principle expressed in his standard work Bloody Murder that “crime fiction is a hybrid, and that too much categorization is confusing rather than helpful” (258). I shall also bear in mind Matzke and Mühleisen’s (2006) wonderful coinage “postcolonial genre-bending”, which they use to describe the manner in which “many authors have [ … ] broadened the theme of investigation to address issues of community, beliefs and identity constructions across geographic and national boundaries, including gender and race relations” (5). This is a notion Margie Orford seems to espouse in her own, feminist-oriented work when she suggests that “crime fiction is [ … ] a flexible genre that can be bent enough out of shape to tell women’s stories too” (2013a, 225).

It has been argued that “the phenomenal popularity of crime fiction in South Africa demands serious scholarly critical attention” (“South African Crime Wave” 2013, n.p.), and indeed there are signs that this is beginning to happen. A number of publications have recently appeared, most notably Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen’s Postcolonial Postmortems (2006), which has been described as “one of the most influential publications in the last decades” (Naidu 2013, 124), and Anja Oed and Christine Matzke’s Life is a Thriller: Investigating African Crime Fiction (2012). Both these volumes include essays on South African crime fiction. More recently there have been special issues of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2013) and of Current Writing (2013) on South African crime fiction, as well as symposia at Yale University (“Crime and its Fictions in Africa”, 2012) and Cambridge University (“Writing Crime”, 2013).

As an outsider I find that the manner in which South African crime fiction addresses contemporary social issues of great moment, while by no means the only quality of such writing, is one of the prime sources of interest it holds for the reader. This was certainly true of the few authors who wrote crime fiction during the apartheid era, and it holds true today. Two early examples of the extent to which South African crime novelists incorporated a political statement in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: “Minor” genres in postcolonial literatures: New webs of meaning
• 1 “The advent of a genre”: Crime fiction and the state of the nation in South Africa
• 2 From Jay to Bee to Daughter Buffalo: Outlining ekphrasis in the work of Janet Frame
• 3 Radio drama and its avatars in the work of Caryl Phillips
• 4 The tremors of genre in G.J. Resink’s poetry
• 5 “Keeping my slave side well versed”: Fred D’Aguiar’s use of ottava rima in Bloodlines
• 6 The danger of a single short story: Reality, fiction and metafiction in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Jumping Monkey Hill”
• 7 Twisting the Australian realist short story: Murray Bail’s “Camouflage”
• 8 Minor genres and marginal realities: Kei Miller’s blog posts and Facebook notes
• 9 Claiming a hybrid language, seeking a hybrid form: From the vernacular to digital media in Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys (2013)
• Index