Litnet

Johan van Wyk with Wessel Pretorius in Johannesburg (Bez Valley), early 1980’s (picture: Nikos Konstandaras)

A picture of Johan van Wyk, from the family farm outside Boksburg (photo: Nikos Konstandaras)

Below, Nikos Konstandaras shares a tribute he wrote to his friend, Johan van Wyk, who passed away earlier this year.

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Johan moved in another dimension. In his world, the world that he drew us all into, everything was possible. All time became one. For him, past, present and future, Africa, Europe, his life, our lives, every art movement, existed in a universe free of the limits of time and place and energy and desire that others lived by.

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Johan moved in another dimension. In his world, the world that he drew us all into, everything was possible. All time became one. For him, past, present and future, Africa, Europe, his life, our lives, every art movement, existed in a universe free of the limits of time and place and energy and desire that others lived by. Johan saw unlimited potential in the unlikeliest places, and superpowers in his friends. This was his great generosity – from the time and effort that he devoted to nurturing talent, to his pushing people to do things that they might think impossible. That is how there was an explosion of creativity around Johan, from his own poetry and plays to a rock festival on a Boksburg farm, Kabelkarnimfe Books, Possession Arts, SA in poësie/poetry, the photo book Trollop and many other initiatives in those early years – right up to the hive of academic activity that he created at an unsuspecting Durban Westville later.

Just over a year ago, I sent Johan the manuscript of a novel that I had spent the past few years writing. It didn’t take him long to realise that he hated it. No surprise there. I want to share the message that he sent me in October last year:

Dear Nik

My main criticism of your text so far is the absolute absence of the world in it, the absence of things. Too many boring ideas which dominate the text. Where are the things, the touchable things? That should be central. I know it is difficult to understand. Make a notebook of things, conversations, but mainly things. Do that for one day and forward it to me.

Johan

His points were honest and right, his suggestions brutal and useful. We spoke on the phone. He proposed that I come to South Africa to work on the book with him.

This was Johan as we all knew him. From the beginning to the end. Nothing – no work or family or financial constraints – should stand in the way of getting something right. He did not consider his own possible difficulties in inviting someone to move in with him indefinitely to work on that person’s book.

This was how we were from the day we met in 1979 at Wits. I was very sure of myself when I showed him the first poems that I had written. He grabbed them, greedily, out of my hands, lowered his head and started scratching away on the page with his pen, whittling the words down to something else, something different, something that worked. That is how I learned to write – to the extent that I did. That is how I became a photographer, a scriptwriter, a driver for a group of wildly creative misfits, a props guy, a fixer, the lucky friend of the most remarkable, most talented, stubbornest and kindest man I have known.

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Because Johan saw things that others did not. He knew that only when you do things, those things get done, not when you sit around talking about them, waiting for the perfect moment. There is no creation without work. And no work without the will to make things happen. Writing is a shot in the dark, a dot seeking another in a sky of alienation.

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Because Johan saw things that others did not. He knew that only when you do things, those things get done, not when you sit around talking about them, waiting for the perfect moment. There is no creation without work. And no work without the will to make things happen. Writing is a shot in the dark, a dot seeking another in a sky of alienation. Perhaps the only thing worth doing – along with collecting obscure, underrated records, he would add, probably.

And so, his life became his work, and his work his life.

This was all there from the start. The first poem in his first anthology, “Hieronymous Bosch se koringwa”, anticipates all of Johan’s later work and life. From Genesis to today, yoking together the vision of a Middle Ages seer with his own sharp understanding, anger and sense of irony, Johan paints his own tableau of humanity’s meaningless struggle in a harsh world made even more hostile by cruelty, greed and unnatural conventions. He wrote his way through the trauma of his very public, very personal, rebellion against authority.

The climax of this immersion into everything was his novel. Here, there is no separation between life and art, between the writer with his narcissism and his craft and his naked, disoriented conscience. Johan dives deep into a world of emotion, danger, expectation, frustration and humiliation, with no safety net. Knowing how meticulous Johan could be about collecting things, how dedicated he was to his art, how sensitive he was to others’ feelings and how content with simple pleasures, this rampage across every societal border was an act of supreme self-destruction, a test of resilience and self-effacement, an experiment in unfiltered experience, a rejection of convention, reportage from a world with neither justice nor mercy, a shredding of every layer of skin that sheathes our fear and loneliness. As he had written many years earlier:

… in die hel
is elkeen bang hy word nie meer verkrag of gemartel nie
want, dat pyn bestaan is nodig

These were my thoughts when, so far away in time and place, I read an early draft of Man bitch. Today, I believe even more firmly that this season in no man’s land, this gamble with his life, this place where things happen without thought, created at great cost to his loved ones and himself, devoid of all ambition and pretension, deserves a far more careful reading than it was granted – and a significant place in South African literature.

Dear Liesbet, dear friends, thank you for having me join you tonight. I wish I were with you. Tears filled my eyes as I wrote this. Being away for so long, I got used to not seeing Johan, while knowing he was “there”, in a special place in my life and thoughts. Tonight, I feel the full pain of his loss. I send all of you my love and my gratitude for being with him, for being part of his world – and my world. I know how much you all meant to him. Andreas and Katrina, he would speak of you in a kind of speechless wonder.

In Johan’s unique dimension, we are still together, each in our own way. Let’s make sure we meet again.

Your friend

Nik

Also read:

Herinneringe aan Johan van Wyk – nuwe beginne en ’n bestel begin stuiptrek

Johan van Wyk was elusive, mercurial