Illuminating Lives

by Vivian Bickford-Smith

  Take Cape Town, which he celebrated in words and walks throughout his life, and in all weathers. Few have written of the city more elegantly, and his work is unimaginable without it. He believed that writers make their chosen city as much as it makes them – Charles Dickens in London, Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires, Constantine Cavafy in Alexandria, Charles Baudelaire in Paris – we recognise their home cities because writers helped to compose them.

  To widen recognition of Cape Town, he commissioned nineteen of his contemporaries to reimagine the city into singular life: nineteen writers as different as Marlene van Niekerk and Antony Sher, with nineteen ways of looking at Cape Town – some affectionate, some intriguing. But none match Watson at his most acerbic in his preface to the collection, or in the splendid astringency that he brings to his own views of the city. Cape Town, Watson observes, is ‘haunted by its own clichés’; it is a town where ‘beach culture takes effortless precedence over book culture’. Looking across the city’s Foreshore, as winter loomed and the sky lowered, his reaction was as damning as it was accurate: ‘What a dump!’9

  This did not make him love the place one whit the less. In his wintery view of the wind-scoured, sodden Cape Town Foreshore, he was expressing a disappointment many white South Africans felt: a sinking feeling when we confronted the place we called ‘home’ that we, or it, never quite came up to scratch. If Cape Town was his solace, if not his salvation, so, too, were his rural hikes into the Cederberg north of the city, but his deep affection was tempered, as in a perplexing love affair, by the suspicion that it might end badly.

  I think he probably felt much the same about his work and his life, but this did not stop him celebrating even the inevitable defeats. He was refreshingly aware of the unintended ironies, that theme music of life in South Africa, noting how newspapers will juxtapose, quite unthinkingly, a report on black victims of a white mass murderer in Pretoria, next to details of rape and famine, alongside self-satisfied news of fine weather in Cape Town.

  It was Watson who introduced the phrase ‘the politics of melancholy’,10 and I have good reason for remembering it because he applied it to my memoir, White Boy Running, published in the late 1980s. He attributed this form of melancholia to those who had gone into internal emigration and had lost their battle to adapt to South African realities. Once again, he and I saw things differently. After all, one may be disappointed in love without losing one’s belief in its power. I found that South Africa, however bleak it may have seemed, almost invariably lifted the spirits, and Stephen did not. The closest he came to conceding my point was to say, ‘Well, in your case, cheerfulness keeps breaking through.’

  Certainly, he was right when he dismissed with Watsonian scorn the idea that anyone sane could adapt to the ‘old’ South Africa, shaped as it was by demented racists. Nor could it be improved, as revolutionary warriors of that time pretended, by aping left-wing fashions of the liberal West, imported, Watson observed, in ‘massive shipments’ and regurgitated as their own. He attacked the slogans and precepts of fashionable foreign gurus, half-read and noisily misunderstood, as a blight on university campuses. Whether half-baked versions of Frantz Fanon (as seductive now as then) or minimalist readings of Karl Marx, these dilettante flirtations did not last, nor did they convince any but the naive or the converted. There was something ineradicably absurd, said Watson, in the local search for ‘a Foucault in the veldt’.11

  He was no less waspish about the exuberant tackiness of much South African architecture, so common in the years of white domination. He hated what one might call dorp decor, as well as the pseudo-Tuscan affectations of the rich in their gated estates. For Watson, the road north from Cape Town led straight towards disaster. ‘How can anyone stand it?’ he used to say to me when I reported on a trip to the Karoo, to the platteland, or to any of the great empty spaces where, in little towns, as Stephen quaintly pictured them, ‘postmasters get drunk every day out of grief at a human project that seems all in vain’.12 As for the Kimberley diamond fields and the gold mines of Johannesburg – these were the root of our malaise, and he railed against them with an almost puritanical anger, as hellholes where white settlers ‘sold their collective souls for gold’.

  There was a lot he got right – but it needed pointing out that what he called hellholes, some of us called home. Of course I could stand it, I told him. I’d lived for long periods in remote country towns. Even worse, I had grown up in Jo’burg, and I liked the look of the mine dumps – the only hills we had there. The city still was, in many ways, a rough mining camp, but to its citizens it was the greatest African metropolis south of Cairo. All my family had been, in one way or another, bound to the mines in Jo’burg and Kimberley. I could stand it, I told Stephen, because it was what had made me.

  But Stephen was from Cape Town and that made a world of difference. Cape Town, I went on to tell him, was a windy place with a hill in the middle of town. It was comely and shapely and populated with hill-worshippers, so proud of ‘their’ mountain that you’d think they’d built it themselves. It was a town suffering from the urban equivalent of multiple personality disorder, and because it did not know what it was, it tried out identities for size. Was it Mediterranean? Not really. European? Not much. African? Hardly ever. Though it liked to think of itself as all of them, at various times. Stephen was amused but not offended, and he put my take on his hometown down to my incurable Jo’burg blindness. One of the most agreeable things about our friendship was the pleasure we took in our disagreements.

  As to precisely where, or what, true home might be, he was as unsure as I was. To a degree, he was at home in high and remote places and among near-sacred mountains. Born in 1954, he had been walking in them since he was just seven, scrambling up Table Mountain or trekking through the Cederberg. I sometimes wondered if his way of rescuing himself from feeling very down was to climb high above it. But that was a guess about one of the sides he kept to himself. He wrote in 1990, with his usual precision, of his feeling of lifelong isolation: ‘Where others saw a continuous marvellous party, called life, I saw only the debris that would be left afterwards, the hangovers, those for whom there was no chance of an invitation.’

  Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that it was in a lost and excluded people that Watson found the subject and, even more poignantly, the voice for some of his very best poems. By rendering into verse the stories and dreams of three /Xam Bushmen, recorded by the nineteenth-century German linguist W.H. Bleek and his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, he reimagined a vanished people, listened to their echoes, and tried to give them a voice. Watson’s renderings of the testimonies of the /Xam Bushmen of the north-western Cape are unforgettable. It is, of course, a mad idea to resurrect an obliterated people, a dream almost certainly bound to fail, and that is why he refuses to accept their extinction and writes them back into being.

  At what seems a time not very long ago, I received a parcel from Stephen’s publishers. He had made a selection of his essays, Stephen wrote to me, that he felt ‘might be worth keeping’. As there was Watsonian wit, so, too, was there Watsonian understatement. His idea was that I would write a preface to the eventual book, and I started reading the manuscript. It was soon clear to me that the essays amounted to an autobiography as well as a testament to the writers who had made Stephen the writer he became, in particular those poets whom he believed repaired and restored our humanity by revealing ‘a crack in the cosmos while simultaneously plugging it’.13

  It was a rich mix. Here were all his great exemplars: Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Hemingway, Dante and Eliot. But here, too, was a veritable fiesta celebrating the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, as well as a ferocious reading of Allen Ginsberg. There were personal valedictory pieces about writers Stephen had known and liked – Alan Paton, Guy Butler and Lionel Abrahams. There was an essay, which was more a polemic, that he called ‘Bitter Pastoral’, about his walks in the Cederberg mountains, and it reveals Watson as a conservationist, and an angry one at that.
He deplores the ‘domination’ of the earth by one species, our destructive human selves. We have managed, he writes, to contaminate every place as well as everything on the planet. The price will be high, ‘a form of loneliness that no-one before our time had dreamed of’.14

  But what crowns the collection was the remarkable meditation on Albert Camus, the Algerian, Parisian, colonial exile, philosopher, footballer and rebel, whose novels, notebooks and essays Watson took so much to heart. He had published parts of the work in magazines like New Contrast, the literary magazine he edited and kept alive for many years, and in other fugitive journals. The Camus essay eventually grew over six years into seven lengthy, densely argued sections.

  ‘The Heart of Albert Camus’ is a summation of Watson’s faith in what it means to be human and a writer. He examines how both were intertwined in the tortured life of Camus, whose life and work, Watson says, came ‘to inhabit’ him.15 Watson appears almost to regard him as a secular saint because Camus faced up to the absence of a deity and accepted the loss, knowing that it was no solution. He held to his moral values of independence, rebelled against received ideas, and rejected tyranny with a tenacity that was almost other-worldly. Camus had found a way, Watson observes, ‘of holding one’s ground – in remaining undefeated’.16 This essay alone is worth the collection.

  An added bonus, among a big bag of them, is ‘Buiten Street’, the site of a humiliating long-ago love affair. This short story won him the English Academy’s Thomas Pringle Award, of which one can only say: and about time, too. With ruthless fidelity, Watson uncovers layer upon layer of pain and folly built into what looked like love, only to collapse into exquisite embarrassment and chagrin, and the galling truth that he had got it wrong, every step of the way.

  It was clear to me as soon as I closed the typescript that here was a book worth publishing – quite one of the best things to have come along in years. I knew that, in Alison Lowry at Penguin, Stephen had a publisher who backed his work and understood the importance of these essays in South Africa and to South Africans. No easy sell, of course, but a book of the first importance. Nevertheless, it needed to be given firmer shape or a timeline, so I suggested that Stephen divide the book into three parts: ‘Early, Middle and Late’. He said simply, ‘Late Watson is where I began.’

  At the time, the collection had no title. But a phrase by Boris Pasternak that Stephen had quoted in one of his essays stuck in my mind. Referring to the role of poets in Russia under Stalin’s Great Terror of the 1930s, Pasternak described them very beautifully as ‘the music in the ice’.17 Because somehow they stubbornly kept on making poems, even as their world went into deep freeze.

  That phrase seemed to me to sum up what Stephen stood for. He was intensely sceptical about his own country and unsparing in his attacks on those he saw as charlatans, in poetry and in politics. His scepticism shocked some who felt he should have been more positive about the great changes that followed the end of apartheid. But he was passionately dedicated to seeing things clearly, calmly and honestly. If anything, to those who read him well, his work was an antidote to despair, and he cheered me up because he gave me the feeling that someone in the asylum was in their right senses.

  Which of his writings will last best: the poems, the diaries or the essays? That question is hard to answer because these different aspects of his writing blend, almost as music does, into a distinct tone. That tone ranges from the lyrical, in passages where he looks at writers that he admires, especially several from Eastern Europe, to the astringent, when he attacks the impoverished values of his own country. His 1997 A Writer’s Diary is the record of a writerly life that he worked very hard to carve out for himself, as well as a love letter to the Cederberg, the mountains where he walked so often and so happily and which for him were both refuge and escape. But I think his most powerful work must be his renderings from the San originals in Return of the Moon, where he tried the admirable, impossible task of bringing to life the voices of the /Xam Bushmen of the Cape. These poems go beyond anything else he wrote because they engaged both his heart and his head. He had found a subject where what he thought and what he felt fused perfectly. Anyone who thinks that Stephen Watson had given up on politics should read his preface to the American edition of these poems, Song of the Broken String, where he flays those in liberal Western circles who, when the San still survived, accepted, with expressions of well-mannered regret, that the San might be written off as less than human and thus fit for extinction.

  Looking back now, I think Stephen’s early death was not only a tragedy for his family and friends. His country lost a sane and serious voice. He stood against violence and, in South Africa, there can be no better stand. As he pointed out in 1992, in ‘The Rhetoric of Violence in South African Poetry’, the country was eaten up by violence, ‘awash’ in blood.18 To offer as defence against bloodshed the well-made poem, the reasoned essay or the writer’s notebook might seem foolish – and Watson freely admitted to the apparent folly of it. But he believed that it pointed to a way out of the madhouse we have made for ourselves. In his rationality, his clarity, in his refusal to bow down before the eager advocates of blood and bullets, the brutality ingrained in the South African psyche and its politics, he lives out his rebellion. The more the shapely patterning of words as a form of resistance to the ubiquity of violence seems futile, the more defiantly he rebels.

  This desire to encourage and sustain was evident when he helped to form the Centre for Creative Writing in the Department of English at the University of Cape Town. Young writers lucky enough to have been helped to get somewhere useful are his best testament. He had an incurable desire to see how others said things, to weigh what they said, to celebrate when it was done well, and to insist that nothing was better, or harder, than writing well. J.M. Coetzee wrote once that Watson was a finer poet than the city of Cape Town deserved. With characteristic understatement, Stephen remarked, shortly before he died, that at the least he was leaving behind ‘a paper trail’. It is a trail that new readers will find and follow, and it will not grow cold.

  Further reading

  Stephen Watson’s prose can be found in Selected Essays, 1980–1990 (Cape Town: Carrefour Press, 1990); A Writer’s Diary (Cape Town: Quellerie, 1997); Cape Town: A City Imagined and the Meanings of a Place (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2012); The Music in the Ice: On Writers, Writing and Other Things (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2010). For his poetry, see Poems, 1997–1982 (Johannesburg: Bateleur Press, 1982); In this City (Cape Town: David Philip, 1986); Presence of the Earth: New Poems (Cape Town: David Philip, 1995); Cape Town Days, and Other Poems (Cape Town: Cecil Skotnes & Clarke’s Bookshop, 1989); Remembering the Night (London: Turret Bookshop, 1992); Song of the Broken String: After the /Xam Bushmen – Poems from a Lost Oral Tradition (New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1991); Return of the Moon: Versions from the /Xam (Cape Town: Carrefour Press, 1991); The Other City: Selected Poems, 1977–1999 (Cape Town: David Philip, 2000); The Light Echo and other Poems, 2000–2006 (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2007).

  Tyhini Robert Qengwa: A portrait of quiet courage

  Sindiwe Magona

  * * *

  ‘If I were running today, I would be very rich.’ These words stop me short, for I have heard them – heard them in their different and differing guises. South Africans of all colours, all creeds, all ages and status – the born-frees and those who lived through apartheid – are seized with the comparison, looking at their lives and wondering what those would have been like had they been born under different political skies. In this case, the gentleman I am talking to is, obviously, not a born-free.

  I look at the man before me. This is a man content with his life: a life well lived, praiseworthy. However, calm though he may be in demeanour, there is no denying that there is regret in the words he’s just uttered. Regret at what was missed, not done, not doable, definitely not doable at that time in this country, South Africa, the country of his birth, the country of his lifelong stifling, oppression an
d deliberate dwarfing.

  The greeting Mr Qengwa gives me says that he thinks of the world of athletes these days – what it means to be an athlete today – as opposed to what it meant not so long ago, in his childhood, youth and young adulthood. I ask myself: Do I detect or suspect any regret? I do. For although I only know him as a teacher, the profession he followed, and for which many amaXhosa in Cape Town certainly know him, remember him, I also know that he is an athlete – one of the few men of his era who did any sport apart from rugby or soccer. Certainly, in the days of my youth and well into my middle age, very few men who lived in our townships had time for such ‘sissy’ things as tennis. Mr Qengwa was one of those rare exceptions; and today he sees, looks at the present situation, re-evaluates his life and knows that he has been cheated. It makes one recall Langston Hughes’s poem ‘A Dream Deferred’, in which he ponders the question of an unfulfilled dream:

  Does it dry up

  Like a raisin in the sun?

  …

  Maybe it just sags

  Like a heavy load.

  Mr Qengwa’s ‘If I were running today …’ tells all with ears to hear that he is long past the stage where he could participate in running. That was his dream, the dream of his youth – to run. And run he could. ‘I would be very rich.’ He is not rich – hence the use of the subjunctive mood – the mood of dreams, wishes and hopes. He is not rich and that is somehow linked to the dream that did not manifest, the running that did not take place or, if it did, not as it is happening ‘today’.