The Black "I" Book

Handy compilation of lectures and writing.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions. - Salman Rushdie

How shall we look at each other then? - Mongane Wally Serote

The ceaseless adventure - Jawaharlal Nehru

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Seamus Heaney

prudery had twisted religion to the service of racism and identified the church with the security of the state, including its morality based on the supposed “purity” of one race

religious persecution -- the denial of people’s right to follow their faith in freedom -- is turned on its head, and religion persecutes freedom -- not alone freedom of expression but a writer’s freedom of movement, finally a writer’s right to life itself.

We page through each other’s faces
We read each looking eye…
It has taken lives to be able to do so
Mongane Wally Serote

George Orwell alerted us to the insidious destruction of truth in the distortion of what words mean. Harold Pinter spoke of ‘a disease at the very centre of language… so that language becomes… a tapestry of lies. Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality -- to distort what is -- to distort what happens -- because we fear it?... It’s because of the way we use language that we have got ourselves into this terrible trap, where words like freedom, democracy and Christian values are still used to justify barbaric and shameful policies and acts.’


Swedish writer Per Wästberg: help people understand their own natures and know they are not powerless… Every work of art is liberating.


Where seats are assigned to passion and vision
on the day of the great assembly
Do not reserve a poet’s position:
It is dangerous, if not empty. - Pasternak

writers: Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, Edward Said, Umberto Eco, Günter Grass.

Russian writer Nikolai Gogol: Our books show both the writer and his or her people what they are. The writer is both the repository of his people’s ethos and his revelation to them of themselves. This revelation is what regimes fear, in their writers. But if our status as writers is to be meaningful, that fear is proof of our integrity… And our strength.

What you expect me to sing, I will not,
What you do not expect me to croak, I will - Amu Djoleto

Rosa Luxemburg: Freedom means freedom to those who think differently.

We write the books; to come alive, they have to be read. To be available, they have to be competently distributed, not only in terms of libraries, but also commercially.

Certainly in the 20th century of political struggle, state money has gone into guns, not books; literature, culture, has been relegated to the dispensable category. As for literacy, so long as people can read state decrees and the graffiti that defy them, that has been regarded as sufficient proficiency. How can we ensure that our implicit role -- supplying a critique of society for the greater understanding and enrichment of life there -- will be respected?

We’ll have to concern ourselves with the quality and direction of education -- will our schools turn out drones or thinkers?

In Barthes’ brilliance, with its element of divine playfulness - in his structural analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine - there remains a blank where the reader is supposed to be reading ‘what is not written.’

The Baudelairean correspondences of earlier literary theory cannot work for them because ‘correspondence’ implies the recognition of one thing in terms of another, which can occur only within the same cultural resource system.

We can be ‘read’ only by readers who share terms of reference formed in us by our education -- not merely academic but in the broadest sense of life experience; our political, economic, social and emotional concepts, and our values derived from these; our cultural matrix.

This is not a matter of misreading or misunderstanding. It is the substitution of one set of values for another, because the reader cannot conceive of these otherwise.

Günter Grass: My professional life, my writing, all the things that interest me, have taught me that I cannot freely choose my subjects. For the most part, my subjects were assigned to me by German history, by the war that was criminally started and conducted, and by the never-ending consequences of that era. Thus, my books are fatally linked to these subjects, and I am not the only one who has had this experience.

The Snail is the icon of the slow and painful trail, when, as Günter’s companion in great achievement, Bertolt Brecht, says: “The travails of the mountains lie behind us./Before us lie the travails of the plains.”

Genius is always controversial, no matter in what context it occurs. The iconoclasm of painters who rearrange the perceptions of the eye is attacked from whatever is the current conservatism - abstraction, conceptualism, neo-expressionism, whatever. In literature, for the writer as for the painter, there is the same basic imperative: we have to find the way to ‘say’ in our medium, what can deal with, express our time in its particularity and in its place fatally roped to human history.

We are all formed by the social structures which are life the corridors through which we are shunted and it is a reflection of the power of bureaucracy… his allegory of death ~ ‘Why did you to prepare yourself when you knew it was your inevitable destiny?’ Life takes up the eternal, discards the temporal.


Politics: almost as inevitable as death, in account of a lifetime in Mahfouz’ span and ours, children of the 20th century. The morality of politics is intricately and inextricably knotted to the morality of personal relations in Mahfouz’ masterpiece, The Cairo Trilogy, and in some of his lesser works. In ‘Layla’ (the title is the woman’s name in a tale in Echoes of an Autobiography) sexual morality is another strand. ‘In the days of the struggle of ideas’ Layla was a controversial figure. ‘An aura of beauty and allurement’ surrounded her and while some saw her as a liberated pioneer of freedom, others criticised her as nothing but an immoral woman.

Layla laughs and enquires, ‘I wonder what you have to say not about immorality.’ The essential question, ‘When will the state of the country be sound?’ is answered: ‘When its people believe that the end result of cowardice is more disastrous than that of behaving with integrity.’ A minister in government is asked, ‘Can you show me a person who is clean and unsullied?’ and the answer comes: ‘You need but one example of many -- the children, the idiotic, and the mad -- and the world’s still doing fine!’

“With the setting of each sun I lament my wasted days, my declining countries, and my transitory gods.” It is a cry of mourning for the world that Mahfouz sounds here; but not an epitaph, for set against it is the perpetuation, no choice, of this ‘wicked but fascinating life.’

Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of an Autobiography
The back-and-forth of a mind creating its consciousness expands and contracts, roves between past and present, with a totality which is not merely memory. Mahfouz meets memory as ‘an enormous person with a stomach as large as the ocean, and a mouth that could swallow an elephant. I asked him in amazement, “Who are you, sir?” He answered with surprise, “I am forgetfulness. How could you have forgotten me?”’

The totality is comprehension of past and present experience as elements which exist contemporaneously. These pieces are meditations which echo that which was, has been, and is the writer Mahfouz.

In this present echo of the values of Mahfouz’ lifetime, woman is the symbol not only of beauty and joy in being alive but also of spiritual release. This is personified as, in celebration, not male patronage, ‘a naked woman with the bloom of the nectar of life’ who has ‘the heart of music as her site.’ The Proustian conception (let us grant it, even if only in coincidence with with Mahfouz’ own) of love as pain/joy, inseparably so, also has a Mahfouzian wider reference as a part of the betrayal by time itself, let alone any lover.

Entitled ‘Mercy,’ the aperçu reflects on an old couple: They were brought together by love thirty years ago, then it had abandoned them with the rest of expectations.

aperçu - a comment or brief reference that makes an illuminating or entertaining point.

Love of the world, ‘this wicked but fascinating life,’ is the dynamism shown to justify itself as essential to religious precepts sometimes in its very opposition to them. The greed for life is admissible to Mahfouz in all his work; against which, of course, there is juxtaposed excess as unfulfillment.

It is detachment that sins against life. The Sheik answers: ‘Love of the world is one of the signs of gratitude, and evidence of a craving for everything beautiful.’ Yet this is no rosy denial that life is sad: ‘It has been decreed that man shall walk staggeringly between pleasure and pain.’ Decreed by whom? The responsibility for this is perhaps aleatory, cosmic rather than religious, if one may make such a distinction. Paradise is not an end for which earthly existence is the means. This life, when explored and embraced completely and fearlessly by tender skeptic and obdurate pursuer of salvation Naguib Mahfouz, is enough. ‘There is nothing between the lifting of the veil from the face of the bride and the lowering of it over her corpse but a moment that is like a heartbeat.” And after a premonition of death one night, all the Sheikh asks of God, instead of eternal life, is ‘well-being, out of pity for people who were awaiting my help the following day.’

If sexual love and sensuality in the wider sense of all its forms is not an element opposed to, apart from, spirituality, there is at the same time division within that acceptance, for life itself is conceived by Mahfouz as a creative tension between desires and moral precepts. On the one hand, sensuality is the spirit of life, life-force; on the other, abstinence is the required condition to attain spirituality.

‘The choice of a faith still has not been decided. The great consolation I have is that it is not over yet.’ For Mahfouz, life is a search in which one must find one’s own signposts. Told he will find the saint Zaabalawi (who is also dissolute: see unity-in-dichotomy, again) in a bar, the weary man falls asleep waiting for him to appear. When he wakes, he finds his head wet. The drinkers tell him Zaabalawi came while he was asleep and sprinkled water on him to refresh him. Having had this sign of Zaabalawi’s existence, the man will go on searching for him all his life.

dissolute - lax in morals; licentious

One of the Sheik’s adages is ‘The nearest man comes to his Lord is when he is exercising his freedom correctly.’ Many of Mahfouz’ parables are of the intransigence of authority and the hopelessness of merely petitioning the powers of oppression. With the devastating ‘After You Come Out of Prison’ one can’t avoid comparison with Kafka, although I have tried to do so since Kafka is invoked to inflate the false profundity of any piece of whining against trivial frustrations. In answer to a journalist’s question, ‘What is the subject closest to your heart?’ Mahfouz gave one of the rare responses in his own person: Freedom. Freedom from colonization, freedom from the absolute rule of kings, basic human freedom in the context of society and family. These types of freedom follow one from the other.’

‘a struggle towards truth aiming at the good of mankind as a whole… life would be meaningless without that’

‘The Believer derives his love for these values from religion, while the free man loves them for themselves.”

Wisdom. Mahfouz has it. It dangles before us a hold on the mystery.

Men are not born brothers; they have to discover each other, and it is this discovery that apartheid seeks to prevent.

An American analyst of world problems wrote recently: The choice of what to remember… is also a way of recommending choices for the present and the future.

There is a lot of forgetting to do in South Africa. Yet it should not begin before we face what we are in relation to what we wish to become.