(To the memory of Helen Fernand-Ntabeni, 1970–2024)
The thing I appreciate most about Ivan Vladislavić’s latest book, The near north, is that it is not a whinny book. Superficially it is a book about walking, mostly, in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Comprehensively and by depth it is much more. Reading it provides an opportunity to tour the makings of one of South Africa’s great minds, getting to know how he ticks, his outlook on the world and more. The book’s landscape, life experiences and all, is distinctively South African. But the mind that forged it is clearly globally cosmopolitan.
Vladislavić makes us understand that to write well you have to speak with your whole life. He quotes from the memoir of Georgi Gospodinov, The story smuggler: “Well, we’re all emigrants from the homeland of our childhoods.”
Upon reading this quote on my social media page, my friend and fellow scribe, Eben Venter, reminds us of the popular lines from the American poet, Louise Glück: “We look at the world once, in childhood / The rest is memory.”
Writers are in the business of making sense of the world. Stories they tell (fictive or historical, putting narrative to our experiences) are a means by which, through memory (echoes of experience), they accomplish this. Nowhere is this more clear and made more pertinent to our national psyche than in The near north.
A book that sparked an essay.
There are tools writers employ to situate us into the atmosphere of the place they’re writing about. The most common is the use of a vernacular of the place you’re telling stories about. The other, which Vladislavić employs fantastically, is landscape descriptions and narrative demonstrations of what English lazily calls a worldview, but is better defined in German as Weltanschauung. Xhosa does even better by calling it ingqiqo, a word that encompasses not only your intellectual capacity, but also traditional/cultural wisdom that you inherit from your family/clan/national line, those who birthed you in more ways than one to be the person you are. This, in a strict sense, forms aspects of what we refer to as ubuntu bakho, what makes you human because of others.
The near north, though sharing similarities with other flaneur books, like Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, is also characteristically distinct from them. For one, it zooms in on the history of one city, its northern suburbs in particular. Another thing is that books of flaneurs almost always betray a sense of uneasiness with their surroundings.
They remind one also of what Vladislavić calls “visceral sensations” we get from walking. He quotes Michael Sorkin who is of the opinion that walking provides a “natural armature” for sequential thought. The unease is clearly demonstrated in the 2003 movie which Sofia Coppola directed, Lost in translation, where “... Scarlett Johansson plays a familiar figure in American literature. She is the culture-shocked American abroad, trying to connect with the local culture but unable to. Like me, Charlotte has come to Tokyo with her partner, and is left to her own devices while he goes off to work.” Left alone in a hotel she comes to a slow realisation of her crumbling marriage as she walks the mega streets of Tokyo: “He was extremely concerned about the way we stood out. The way I stood out. In the winter my nose is always running. He got embarrassed whenever I pulled out a tissue. Either you’re not supposed to blow your nose in public, or you’re supposed to excuse yourself before you do, I never learned the exact protocol, but sometimes I couldn’t wait or there was no one to apologise to. I dabbed at my nose as delicately and unobtrusively as I could. Dirty gaijin, he called me.”
Vladislavić, despite grave experiences like being a crime victim, like many of us who dwell in the city, speaks about it with deeper love and ease of being home, particularly in Johannesburg. His favourite flaneur author is the Scottish naturalist philosopher Robert Macfarlane.
Excuse my necessary digression a bit to explain my deeper association with Macfarlane. This will also explain why I have included the phrase “my near north” in the title of this essay.
I first met my late wife, Helen, who was Scottish, at a friend’s birthday party in Green Point. From there we proceeded to spend almost the whole night together, club-hopping and getting to know each other better. We went to sleep in the early hours of the morning, at about two, and only because she was going hiking at Lion’s Head with her friends at six. She managed to drag me into it. I was then staying in Gardens. She felt it her duty to kidnap me out of my sleep to meet up with her friends even though I had indicated to her I would probably be too babalazed to hike a mountain that morning. I am forever grateful to her stubborn heart that earned me a wife two years later because of that day.
After the hike we went for lunch at Chapman’s Peak Hotel in Hout Bay. The peri-peri prawns we had did not agree with me. We traversed the beach walk through the harbour to her house at Harbour Heights. This is where the inkab (umbilical chord) of our first daughter, Umtha, who was home-birthed on that house, is still buried.
Vladislavić recalls a time when Bulgaria was part of the Soviet Bloc, when long-distance lorry drivers smuggled back “forbidden goods, like denim jeans and books, from other European countries into Bulgaria. They smuggled things out too, notably children’s ‘belly-buttons’, the scab left when the umbilical cord has shrivelled up. Some Bulgarians believe that a child’s future lies where the cord is ‘cast’ and everyone then wanted to be ‘abroad’.”
The Xhosas believe a person’s home is where their umbilical cord is buried.
When we reached the house, Helen fixed us a drink. While I waited, I surveyed her bookshelf, something I always do to get an insight into ingqiqo of other people when I visit their homes. Then she brought the drinks, gin and tonic – her g&t was the best, sumptuous, with added drops of Owl’s rose geranium cordial. As we drank, she took a book titled Landmarks, by Robert Macfarlane, from her bookshelf. I eventually thought it fitted perfectly the happenings of the day and my architectural field of interest. She was always brilliant in such things, making quick connections, thinking on her feet and all. As we parted later on she lend me the book, and never asked for it back. I even thought she had forgotten about it until when we were merging our libraries for our married life, she commented that we needed to frame that book. The book, indeed, had everything to do with our ending up together after the weekend I met that girl from the North who had come to South Africa four years earlier on an academic whim – a story for another day which I would probably title A girl from the North, Bob Dylan style.
That story would most certainly involve her bravery in birthing our daughter herself as I froze, stunned before her, remembering only to boil water to start the process of home birth the midwife had drilled us in. When I told the story to others, making myself into a know-all heroic husband who knew what to do and kept calm all the time, My Girl From the North maintained a knowing silence, or even augmented my version sometimes to boost my ego even though she knew better.
Robert Macfarlane, whose book The old ways Vladislavić quotes most from, believed words to be ingrained into the landscapes. And landscapes are grained with words. Vladislavić proves this time and again in The near north. Macfarlane’s and Vladislavić’s writings are about how the power of language shapes our perception, our sense of place and permanent association with it. Their books are a field guide into literature of perception and passion that entwines with history and memory. From Macfarlane you get a glossary of nature’s eloquence and humanity’s strife to know the planet we call home though we sometimes feel, somehow, stranded on it. The two write with elegance, working through and with our vital senses to show us the transcendental power of language into giving meaning to our experiences. In a Paris Review interview the Irish novelist and short story writer John Banville said, “The world is not real to me until it is pushes through the mesh of language.”
The near north begins with a now familiar thing by a South African privileged class member when loadshedding hits, that of going out to a restaurant for not only food, but power of normalcy and lights. There’s no doubt in all non-fanatic individuals that whatever the gains it brought us, the ANC has also, in less than 30 years, destroyed the political trust fund we gave it post-94. In a way this has helped us to disabuse ourselves of the mentality of African exceptionalism we carried ourselves by. In The near north Vladislavić goes further. He compels us to acquire humility as a nation without excusing the ANC government’s failures. He tries to move us beyond the politics of alterity. He talks about our national problems without the boring “othering” tone. It is as if he’s saying we rise or fall together here. Without being too presumptuous I explain this as the genic Slav spirit in him; the resigned wisdom learned through the fire of harsh history. This point is very difficult to explain to people who are raised on ingqiqo of the West. Because their spirit is carved by the rage against the nature of whatever oppression comes their way. In history they’ve also been triumphant from as far back as when Rome defeated the external threats of Carthage, or Christianity that of Islam in the Crusades, or the working class in the French Revolution against the oppressive feudal system of aristocrats and kings. The modern Slavic and African history is that of defeat from the Cold War and colonialism respectively. We sometimes feel there’s no way out of the oppressive nature of things. Even the specious triumph over colonialism is fast proving to be a Pyrrhic victory for Africans; the more the hegemony of Late Capitalism reigns, and the continent falls into post-colonial traps Frantz Fanon warned our African states in vain about. This doesn’t mean The near north is a propaganda book for the politics or government of the ANC. Far from it. Vladislavić does not shy away from constructive criticism. He criticises when merited and with respect and greater understanding of the challenges with face because of our messy past within this faltering interregnum. And albeit with subdued anger, when merited as he recalls his feelings of anger passing through the Guptas’ Sanxonwold shebeen: “This blind-looking suburban house is where the cancer of corruption took root before it metastasized into every organ of state.”
At the Books on the Bay Book Festival in Simon’s Town, where The near north was launched, I shared my unease with Vladislavić about walking in most city suburbs of South Africa as a black man, especially the posh suburbs with their gated streets. In them I mostly find myself racially profiled as a potential crime suspect. In the Pretoria suburb of Waterkloof, for instance, I once found myself being escorted by two security vans until I walked out of the gated street boundaries. I shared this with him only to raise his awareness of our different experiences even on simple things like the love for walking the streets. And to point out that, in this country, even simple pleasures like those, for a white man still has certain privileges I am not allowed because of the colour of my skin. Naturally, his deep sense of empathic justice was shocked and horrified that this was still happening in 2024 of our so-called Rainbow Nation.
Most of us associate walking with what we call clearing one’s mind. Writers in particular walk to get over the writer’s block slumps. But Vladislavić takes it further, as always, when he says, “There is a deep congruence between walking and other aspects of our humanity, including story and song, history and prophecy, remembering and hoping.”
In 2021, that horrible culling year when my mother died, walking saved my life. My family had spent the terrible months of lockdown under the shadow of our mother’s last months before she succumbed to breast cancer. I took to hiking the Wild Coast of the former Transkei as a means to get rid of the ringing tinnitus on my life’s ear. The pretence was that I was doing research along the river mouths, the sacred grounds of the Xhosa. The whistling along the Gxarha River mouth in the 19th century led Xhosas into fomenting their greatest historical national disaster, The Great Cattle Killing. This became the last nail in the coffin of defeat by the British colonialism they had resisted for over a hundred years. In the Ngqabarha River mouth, along the banks where the British killed and decapitated the Xhosa king, Hintsa, I, like Nongqawuse, also heard the rustlings of the storm still headed my way. Suffice to say, its yawning eye gave me sufficient prescience to understand that within a short period the insatiable Reaper would visit again. In late 2023 he came for my brother, and my wife in early 2024. The point I am trying to make is that I do not think it far-fetched when Vladislavić tells you about the “deep congruence between walking and other aspects of our humanity, including story and song, history and prophecy, remembering and hoping”.
The near north is a book of memory, about life and death, joy and sadness, spatial geography and the thinking and not thinking behind human settlements. The foundation of cities as vast and various as Rome with its settled ways and Johannesburg and her fluid still evolving ways. It is about living side by side with the so-called Cradle of Humanity in the Sterkfontein Caves. And it is about books, books that have marked our life’s way. About our unsung heroes and heroines that make it possible for us writers to indulge our fantasies of observing and reporting on and to the world. In this book Minky, Ivan’s life partner, stands as a quiet force and backbone that makes everything in his life balance: turning the soil of their gardens, preserving and planting the seeds, quarrelling with those who scar our environment. And, of course, this is a book about yawning and blowing our noses to get rid of the tinnitus ringing that life deposits on our ears sometimes:
Tinnitus
I learned
For a loved one,
Waiting
For the loved one
To depart,
Is a deep injury.
Is like hearing
The gunshot before
The gun goes off.
It leaves you
With tinnitus,
A memory
You can’t locate
On the chambers
Of your eardrum.
(This poem is for Nosipho Brenda Ngcukayitobi and her family, with my deepest condolences on the recent loss of their mother and matriarch of the family.)
Title: The near north
Author: Ivan Vladislavić
ISBN: 9781770109025
Publisher: Picador Africa
See also:
Still beating: reflecting on heart attacks and writing in the City of Gold
Inexplicable Present: Post-Apartheid Subjectivity in Vladislavic?’s City
Hidden Johannesburg by Paul Duncan and Alain Proust, a review