Books on the Bay: www.booksonthebay.co.za/
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Books on the Bay this weekend in Simonstown was a pretty special literary festival. Run with great vigour, insight and love by Darryl David, David Attwell and Karin Cronje, it brought together 30 South African and international writers and matched them with expert interviewers.
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There’s something so awe-inspiring, so heart-enlarging, about seeing talented people do what they’re good at. And when that thing is writing – and talking about writing – the interaction between the speakers and the listeners creates its own atmosphere: you see it, warm and opaque, moving above the heads of the audience like a sea mist. We hope that some of its truth and generosity stays with us when we leave.
Books on the Bay this weekend in Simonstown was a pretty special literary festival. Run with great vigour, insight and love by Darryl David, David Attwell and Karin Cronje, it brought together 30 South African and international writers and matched them with expert interviewers.
The sheer amount of labour can’t be exaggerated: the writers, who’ve always spent decades on their oeuvres; the curators – often also writers, lecturers and industry pundits – who must read, analyse and facilitate the satisfying discussion of many books for the interviews; the tuk-tuk drivers and sound engineers and publicists and bartenders and booksellers and carriers of chairs; the volunteers who deal with traffic and logistics and sustenance and crowd control in oppressive weather. It’s a ship, but it’s also a theatre, a circus: the literature festival is a big tent, and we all shelter under it because others have worked hard to set it up.
And the performers are well worth the price of entry. This year’s 24 events featured prize winners and record holders, and these were just the ones I managed to see in their elegant flesh: Njabulo Ndebele received the cleverly named and richly deserved Lifetime Achievement Award (O captain, my captain!); the political cartoonists Gado and Zapiro, under the baton of Anton Harber, played to a packed town hall that posed some tricky questions (and deposed some tricky questioners); Andrew Brown spoke about the nature of evil and whether Israel has a right to exist (buy his award-winning The bitterness of olives for a sensible overview of nationalism, tragedy, guilt, friendship and love); John van de Ruit was by turns hilarious and contemplative in his Spud: The reunion talk with the impish and deft Darryl Davids, whose own book on the Karoo was also at the festival; Ingrid de Kok read from Unleaving some of the finest, strongest and most moving poetry of her career. I had to have a quiet weep of gratitude and wonder on the walk home.
Another of Books on the Bay’s advantages is the beautiful, simple church settings for the locations of the smaller, more intimate panels. These places of resistance but also peace and gravitas lent their light to the discussions. Hedley Twidle’s event, the first on the Saturday morning and led by the brilliant Wamuwi Mbao, left us in a dwaal of loveliness, changed perception and sheer intelligence. Really excellent writers help us to see differently: sometimes we need new eyes, and authors such as Twidle lend us their telescopes. His lyrical essays in Show me the place are a career high, easily as good as their Leonard Cohen opener, saturated with purpose and multiple meanings: surfing and physics and grief.
The troubles came, I saved what I could save
A thread of light, a particle, a wave
Similarly, Yewande Omotoso spoke to veteran broadcaster and writer Nancy Richards about her life in writing so far. Omotoso referred particularly to the quiet confidence that her variegated, bookish heritages – Barbados, Nigeria, South Africa – have given her. That additional information adds another layer to the architecture of her work, most recently the novel An unusual grief. The stranger, the outsider, “often brings clarity that we miss because we are possessive”.
Omotoso is so much herself, and has such a clear vision: after seeing both her and Twidle, I understood how definitively writing is about understanding yourself and your own preoccupations. “Mothers and death,” said Omotoso, joking but not joking, “that’s all I have. Mothers and death.” She went on to designate different kinds of awareness when we choose our writing subjects. “Sometimes it can be right there” (she gestured to her forehead); “sometimes it’s more embedded” (she indicated her chest). The work of us all – writers and readers – is to expose that deeper why, to try to answer that question, to share our star maps and instruments of calibration.
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Many of the authors spoke about the right distance from their material. Political cartoonists necessarily have to be quick and reactive, but novelists often need years to think about things. We can be too close to the sharp rocks of family and work and government, lost in the everyday fog.
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Many of the authors spoke about the right distance from their material. Political cartoonists necessarily have to be quick and reactive, but novelists often need years to think about things. We can be too close to the sharp rocks of family and work and government, lost in the everyday fog.
Similarly, many of the panels regarded the cure for solitude, which is solidarity – the answer to the cry of all marooned mariners, and the question that Gado posed about his human helplessness in the face of inhumane dictatorship: “Am I alone in this?” At the poetry event, grande dame Betty Govinden called this journey of pilgrimage “the via dolorosa”, a response to “the barbed wire of reason” and “the weight of history pressing on your breast”. Kobus Moolman reiterated these ideas about suffering and endurance: “Skin is a machine for feeling things, the slow process of losing, losing, losing.” Yet, still he writes poetry. Every constructive act – every act of creation – is a lighthouse against the ugly lies, the casual brutality, the banality of the world’s waters in which we lie becalmed.
We do not suffer and endure without also feeling empathy and pleasure and joy – and access to clear, true writing is a blessing. The final word goes to Finuala Dowling, who performed her other great poems, but not this particular one, “The listening Olympics” (though it does feature in her fantastic best-of collection, Pretend you don’t know me). For the three days of Books on the Bay, we found safe harbour.
Speak.
There is no end to what we can take in one sitting.
We have had many hearings; we can no longer discriminate.
This is the listening Olympics,
you are team South Africa
and this is your captain,
listening.
- Diane Awerbuck was a writer featured at the festival. She is the award-winning author of Gardening at night. Her most recent works are the short story collection Inside your body there are flowers and the collected conversations of her family, Tears before bedtime (both Karavan Press).
Also read:
Books on the Bay Festival 2024: an interview with Darryl David
Books on the Bay Festival: The literary riches of Simon’s Town
Kommentaar
Congratulations to the organizers and volunteers: a brilliant festival.