Maverick Life

Narrative resistance — writing authentic stories of resilience and identity in diverse communities

15 Nov 2024

What does the landscape and climate for creative writing and freedom of expression look like in five different African countries today?

This year, PEN Afrikaans is participating in the Right to Write project together with four other PEN centres, at the invitation of PEN International.

The aim of this Unesco-funded project is to promote public dialogue on issues affecting writers in five African countries (Malawi, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe).

As part of this project, PEN Afrikaans asked five Afrikaans writers to reflect on pertinent topics. This is the second of a series of five articles. Here, Chase Rhys writes about Kaaps and about narratives of resistance.

***

Translated by André Trantraal

I video-called my friend Trudy to share the monumental moment.

“Sweet Jesus. Look at this, girl. Who would’ve imagined?”

I switched selfie mode off to show her Columbia University campus. I turn slowly, zooming in on Butler Library’s façade; Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Dante and Shakespeare’s names are displayed on the old building.

I show her the iconic Columbia steps, with the massive Alma Mater statue in the middle, and the lawns. Ooh the lawns! Two long strips of pitch with perfectly manicured bright green grass running parallel to each other in the heart of the campus.

Trudy actually gasps. “Oh my word, it’s just like in the movies!”

The lawns are pristine, no one would dare to step on them. That is, no one except for four white guys who stood in the middle of the lawns with a speaker at their feet. Nicky Minaj’s song, Super Bass, blasted out the little box. The quartet had their eyes glued to their phones, as they read and mumbled Minaj’s lyrics. They danced by bending their knees, each of them missing the beat every time.

“The f***?” Trudy and I ask simultaneously.

A couple of girls were recording the guys. Maybe the boys lost a bet or perhaps it’s a singing telegram type of thing. Either way, I am underwhelmed and offended.

“Oh, no. I am supposed to be at one of the best art schools in the world. But look at this. The first Ivy League performance and it’s this s***.”

Read more: Poetry keeps us safe from barbaric non-thinking

In April 2024 I was invited to Columbia to teach my masterclass (Narrative resistance: writing authentic stories of resilience and identity in diverse communities) to their master’s students.

I’ve been saying for years now that although my work is quite specific – meaning I write in Kaaps, about Kaapse people, for Kaapse people – it remains “universal”.

I took my Kaapse content to New York to see if my theory of universality would hold true.

My students come from all over the world; the States, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland and a few rootless army brats. In my first class I share the story of how, in 1994, I became one of the first non-white kids to go attend my primary school.

I tell them about my first Athletics Day and how hot it was. I won all of my races, which was thirsty work. The other kids were all sucking on bompies. My grandmother gave me a rand to get myself one but the two mothers who had volunteered to be in charge of the tuck shop that day didn’t understand me when I asked for a bompie. I realised that they probably had another name for it, so I asked them for a sakka instead. One of the volunteer moms took my rand and handed me a Fizz Pop lollipop. In Ocean View a sakka is what you call an ice cream, but at school a sucker is a lollipop.

It was at that moment, when I was all of five years old, when I realised that I would need to split myself in two because the people at school did not understand the language that we spoke at home. If I wanted to navigate that space I would need to learn a different language, a whole different way of speaking.

The school provided me with elocution lessons to soften my natural Kaapse accent, they kept saying that the way that I spoke was wrong.

I tell my students that it is that five-year-old child that comes out to play whenever I write in Kaaps. It is for the benefit of that five-year-old version of myself that I insert Kaaps into all of the places where it doesn’t “belong”: in the classroom, in the literary canon, on stage, on television, even into the Ivy League.

I invite the class to talk about the first time they realised that they had a culture.

Everyone’s answers go back to when they started school. That was when they first became aware that they were different.

Primary school was the first place where we were taught the necessity of changing ourselves to fit in. And it became worse as we grew up in structures and institutions that constantly sought to reinforce that we speak and write “properly”.

In my second class we spoke about how to resist that type of conditioning.

We discussed language and mother tongues. We spoke about the politics of translation. Why are our languages italicised? Who is a glossary for? I tell them about the anarchic roots of my Kaaps and how good it feels to be able to express yourself without rules.

In my third class we speak about place.

Most of us come from underdeveloped communities. We learn that the fletse of Cape Town are the same as the projects of the US which are the same as the flats of South America. We encourage each other to write about our places so that we can document their historicity, because we live in a time where places change rapidly, as with gentrification, and genocide, where in a split second, a place can cease to exist.

In the next class we talked about representation.

I played them an audio clip of Chantel Daniels. She’s a woman from Ocean View on the Cape Flats, who stood up at my Misfits launch, and through tears and a shaky voice said: “The way that you showcase Ocean View, that is our home, and it’s always been ostracised and our people have always been seen as nothing. And here you bring that light to what is truth in our community. So thank you for being so proudly Ocean View. You are showing us who we are, and thank you, for the bottom of my heart, for doing that for us.”

I played that clip on the speaker’s loudest setting, so that her Kaapse accent could reverberate through New York’s Ivy League. My students and I all bawled our eyes out afterwards. This is why I do what I do, I tell them. I could write in standard Afrikaans, in English even, I would sell a lot more books and make a lot more money that way. But I write in Kaaps for a reason.

Later we also interrogate the concept of universality: do we want it? “If a right-winger can relate to my work, then what type of work am I making?” asks Stephanie, one of my students.

As the end of my course approaches the Columbia students start to erect tents on the campus lawns.

The first Palestinian solidarity encampment.

It’s my final day of class. My students have been working on their stories of resistance the entire semester and today they’ll read it to each other. The faculty received an email from the university. We have to teach our classes over Zoom because they’ve decided to close the campus. The encampment is apparently so dangerous that they’ve had to involve the NYPD and private security.

Mike Orgill is one of my students who stays in the encampment. He asks if he can read his story first. There has been talk that the National Guard might be deployed to disperse the encampment, and he would like to read what he wrote before anything happens.

Mike sits on the grass, holding his laptop, and begins reading his story. It’s about a young man who is about to leave the Philippines to live and study in America. He lives up in the mountains, in a secret place where certain people can grow wings. He has wings on his feet, he can fly. Although he has the ability to fly, his parents warn him to keep it a secret while he is there. Otherwise the police officers – or the “searchers”– who patrol the place will catch him.

We are astonished: Mike wrote this story weeks before the encampment started. What we are listening to feels prophetic.

Mike writes about the pain of having to crush and hide the most special part of himself every day. While Mike reads he starts taking off his shoes. He reveals his wings, they clap with each syllable coming out his mouth.

The other students and I stare in slack-jawed wonder as Mike begins to float over the lawn. Columbia’s lawns are now teeming with life. The perfectly manicured grass is gone, it has turned brown. The earth holds hundreds of tents. The more Mike reads the higher he flies. In the encampment below someone plays a guitar. Somebody else shakes a tambourine. People dance. Two students walk around with Pop-Eyes and hand them out to whoever wants. There’s a group of people busy painting. Some students laugh while others listen to the outdoor lectures of the day. People pray, perform salah. Students help a rabbi to set up another tent. A couple of kids, none of them older than five years old, run around between the tents, to get their kite to soar. The kite flies around Mike as he reads.

Mike is now higher than the Alma Mater statue.

He glides past the names of the great thinkers and philosophers on Butler Library. Mike is not only reading a narrative of resistance; he has become a narrative of resistance. DM

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