Can the Sum of an Anthology be Greater than Its Parts?

Books Discussed:

Indaba: Interviews with African Writers By Stephen Gray Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2005. 223 pp.

The End of Unheard Narratives: Contemporary Perspectives on Southern African Literatures By Bettina Weiss Heidelberg, Germany: Kalliope Paperbacks, 2004. 260 pp.

Stephen Gray's volume of interviews reflects a convergence of his opportunities and his interests. It is organized chronologically and the earlier interviews are longer and more focused in their exploration of writers' work and ideas. Of the first twelve writers (Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Guy Butler, Douglas Livingstone, Sipho Sepamla, Fatima Dike, Alan Scholefield, Ross Devenish, Doris Lessing, Jeremy Cronin, Gcina Mhlophe, and Dennis Brutus), all but three were, when interviewed, resident in South Africa. Then there is a sudden shift and of the remaining eleven writers (Edouard J. Maunick, Taban Lo Liyong, Luis Bernardo Honwana, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nuruddin Farah, Ahmadou Kourouma, Goretti Kyomuhendo, Michèle Rakotoson, John Mateer, Sheila Roberts, and Véronique Tadjo), only two have South African origins while another (Tadjo, and that very recently) lives here. This re-focusing is not entirely of Gray's own making, for, as he says, the annual literary festivals held at the University of KwaZulu-Natal brought many of these writers to South Africa, and the newspaper for which he currently reviews publishes regular but short interviews.

The publication of a series of interviews with writers that have been conducted by one person over a period of forty years inevitably makes the interviewer, rather than the writers, the collection's center of gravity. Gray does not tackle directly the question of why he has collected these interviews (1963–2002), all of which have been published at least once before; there is, however, a hint of an explanatory narrative. Gray's intentions for his title emerge when he refers to his collection as an "imaginary indaba" (a meeting or discussion) that has gradually taught him "how to be an African writer" (11). His status as a writer is beyond question: he is an astute, widely published poet, short-story writer, novelist, literary historian and critic, biographer, journalist, editor, and anthologist. But what evidently concerns him here is his identity as a writer. This note sounds again when he concludes with Véronique Tadjo's comment that African writers form a "big, big . . . family" (223). This is where Gray wants to feel he belongs, but the shaping experience of conducting these interviews, bringing him to this point, is not something that he makes explicit. Rather contradictorily, I think, he leaves it to his reader to find his path.

If the raison d'être of this collection is the process by which Gray has been guided to his African identity, then it should have been served by more self-reflection. What, in all that he recorded and published, were the key pointers for his journey? And what were its false starts, sloughs, or dead ends? How does he now respond to, for example, Guy Butler (when interviewed in 1970 considered the leading South African English poet) commenting that the primary, if not the only, cultural tension is that between English and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. Butler seems not to have recognized the actual cultural complexity of the country, and nor does Gray ask him to recognize it. I am not suggesting that Gray should have had an anachronistic insight into cultural and other relations of power, but that he now use hindsight to reflect on what has changed him. Nadine Gordimer, interviewed in 1972, was angered by the banning of the black writers of the 1950s, and saw that aspirant black writers now had "no one to build on" (21). So the recognition that South Africa contained multiple, unevenly competing and interacting cultures was dawning three decades ago. It is a pity, and not fair on himself, that Gray has allowed this book to suggest that he...