That was the heading of an email that was forwarded to me recently, but with the fuck replaced with those exclamation marks and asterisks that people use when they don’t actually want to type the word. There are some peeved, though delicately-minded, people out there. I know the delicious pleasure of self-righteous anger as well as anyone – the ego is a delicate thing when it comes to one’s writing – but there is a larger matter at stake here: the kind of atmosphere in which we wish to write and read.

 

Reading a good piece of writing gives me a shock of illumination, the pleasure of feeling the delicate and continually modified line between inside and outside shift under the impact of someone else’s imagination. Writers need to know this about the reception of their work – not how many books sell, but what has moved people. Such an untrammelled exchange is sadly rare. Where do we find honest conversations about pleasures and disappointments about our writing in a circle wider than our friends? It should be our larger culture, where discussions, reviews, literature courses, prizes, lectures, fellowships, books of the week, radio interviews, readings, excerpts in newspapers and long conversations can form part of an expansive, honest exchange.

 

In this spirit, I welcome Rosemund Handler’s necessary, difficult questions about the opaque system for assigning cultural value to writing in South Africa. I agree with her that we need a healthier reviewing culture. Regular, well-written reviews increase the number of times books are seen, discussed, talked about, bought and, most importantly of all, read. I think novelists, poets and playwrights should be able to write reviews if they wish – this is certainly among their skills – but a culture that goes beyond gossip and favouritism makes it as important how reviews are written as who is writing them. We need more reviews, but also good ones, by which I mean substantial engagements with the books, graceful writing and bracing truth-telling.

 

Can writers take it? A friend of mine, a brilliant, award-winning writer, resolutely avoids review-writing because many of us take criticism so badly. Yet we need generous, impartial criticism because writers, editors, scholars, friends, writing groups, readers and, certainly, critics are part of a community that circulates and makes creativity possible. When this system works well, we are all immeasurably improved by one another.

 

I have heard riveting discussions of books on radio and encountered reviews in the Sunday Independent, Cape Times and Mail & Guardian that make me a better reader – in fact, I buy those newspapers for their reviews (editors and publishers, please note). On the other hand, because editors think the space can’t be justified, reviews can be breathtakingly short and, if that were not enough, some critics cultivate a brusque and disdainful tone that passes for erudition. As a writer I have learned most from responses to my work that were attentive and honest – both the affirming comments, which I keep close, and the critical ones, which alert me to flaws that had eluded me but also expand my understanding of my own writing.

 

Handler is also right to say we need the full panoply of contributions to South African writing. But it is fair, and just, to observe that our current panoply of writers (and reviewers, editors, publishers, publicists and tastemakers), while showing clear signs of change, has been considerably loaded.

 

Despite what is suggested by the exclamation marks in the email above, I also welcome the article by Celean Jacobson that has prompted such varied responses. In her forthright piece Jacobson aims her gaze at a range of contemporary South African texts, discerns patterns among them, buttresses her readings with comments from Binyavanga Wainana (the witty, insightful Kenyan writer who lived for five years in Cape Town) and Sarah Nuttall (a critic of undoubted substance), and cites some pointed examples. Just the kind of bold but reflective writing we need, as this debate seems to prove.

 

Expanding on a matter obliquely raised by Handler, Mark Espin of the Centre for the Book notes that the success of the trade aspects of the Cape Town Book Fair (for which, congratulations to Vanessa Badroodien and the other organisers), draws attention to the role of the festival aspects, such as readings. It seems to me that this exemplifies the challenges of the current stage of our literary culture. Do we follow the route toward media-alert celebrity authors and the draining formality of the publishing culture in the US, or can we craft an agile local model?

 

It seems to me this kind of debate allows us to consider big questions, and the requisite scale of answer.

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