There’s a lot going on in the literary world – but you might not know it if you attended the most recent South African literary festival.
There, it was a celebration of local Anglo booming, almost as if the recent floods had washed up cruise ships loitering around the Azores filled with progressive retirees to the Cape Winelands. Ken and Jenny from Val de Vie, Dave and Sue (the ladies captain at Clovelly Golf Course this year with a dedicated parking space) just loved the “anti-racism” stuff News24’s editor felt the urge to post about the following morning. ‘Dear @realDonaldTrump”, Adriaan Basson wrote, “the white genocide” didn’t reach Franschhoek. We had a wonderful discussion about non-racialism, the legacy of 1976 and the danger of nationalist projects. The Afrikaners are alive and well.’
If you close your eyes, you can imagine this being shrieked in the manner of a demanding queen eyeing up all the butch boys at a biker bar in De Waterkant before scolding his chief of staff about his rosé being tepid.
Unfortunately, whilst du Preez was lamenting that if George Floyd hadn’t died in 2020, he would have led the latest NASA mission to the moon as its chief engineer, very bad things were happening in the wider literary world: things that could mean a hard stop to festivals in future.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is the type of award most sensible people would rather catch a painful strain of the clap than win. Nonetheless, it favours stories of “resistance”, “identity” and “discovered power”: basically all the things you’ll read on a bottle of jam from Meghan Markle (translated from Urdu).
This year’s shortlist is odd, because there are two men on it (relax: neither is white). One of the men is called Jamir Nazir, and whilst the other (John Edward diMecol) looks sensitive and cultural, Jamir resembles an Interpol red notice, or the manager of an illegal plastics factory in a heavily polluted area of Pakistan. But is he anything at all?
That’s the question being asked of his shortlisted entry entitled Serpent in the Grove, which was published by Granta, a magazine founded by Cambridge university students in 1889 and which has published 31 Nobel laureates.
Serpent in the Grove is – possibly – a parable about the violence of dispossession and the resolve of those who refuse it to surrender to it. Themes explored include poverty, the legacy of selfishness, the agency of the ignored: all lying under a thick camouflage of metaphors. But you can’t quite be sure: at times it sounds clever, then pathetic, then weird, then cringingly ridiculous if not awful (“a story is a well…it eats sound until somebody throws a rope”).
“Prolific poet”
This is where our wanted slavedriver Jamir Nazir returns. His biography claims he “explores the cultural intersections of the Caribbean and the Indian diaspora” and is a “prolific poet”. This introduction would endear him to a landscape of grievance academics, righteous boomers and sniffy media types. However, if he wanted to cover his tracks from folks with an eye for a scam, he should have claimed something like “my thesis is on the residents of the remote island of Tristan de Cunha, in other words, Englishmen who speak in the vernacular of Cape Coloured.” That would have been more convincing.
That’s because “Jamir Nazir” is, according to sleuths, 99% likely to be AI. Granta, the Commonwealth Creatives and anyone moved by this stinking language model bollocks, this whirlpooling sewage in manically cerebral fancy dress, have all been fisted by technology, worn like a puppet.
Or more appropriately, Shelley Garland-ed: the gift published by the failed Huffington Post my esteemed colleague Marius Roodt bestowed on South Africa in 2017 when he sought to warn the country that some of its media was corrupt and stupid. He subsequently paid the price, possibly through illegal means (that’s in the armoury, for the day News24’s emphasis on “values” and “law” starts giving us hives).
So is “Jamir Nazir” issuing a warning like Marius, or just a caper? Here it’s fair to examine the hyper-scammy environment we are exposed to everywhere – from OG BBBEE, to USAid, Minnesota, California, and the millions of benefits cheats that the UK government treats as a protected species.
The problem is that if you put this stuff in the hands of Basson, du Preez et al to read in front of progressive Anglo boomers, chances are they’ll all fall for it. The mere mention of balls like “the danger of nationalism” gets them all navel gazing and mumbling and nodding. Current application of “white genocide” is thus already Serpent adjacent; note how only multiple media apologies slyly shifted that conversation from accusing AfriForum and Solidarity of casting the aspersion to saying that they’re not doing enough to challenge it.
But in reality
It’s tempting to blame bad actors exploiting AI, but in reality, actual, live humans beat the path to it, with processions of victims and endless punching down. Either way, it’s bad news for literary prizes and festivals. These trust publishers and committees, most of the time taking sound judgement for granted.
On that note, I’m thrilled to announce that a writer from Uganda, a one-legged black lesbian, is planning to publish her brave debut (funnily enough) a few weeks before the Franschhoek literary festival next year. The book is about how she hobbled to South Africa on a crutch and discovered a group of white students pledging allegiance to Hitler. She went to the Union Buildings to report them but was asked for a bribe. Although this wasn’t good, she accepted it as the inheritance of violence. She then made friends with Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea, who happened to be in the country on the make for her family’s foundation, and the two converted to Islam, and now make jam on a boat.
As she’s at sea (revelations next year’s festival guests will nod approvingly about), she won’t be physically there, but there will be copies to purchase at universities and at News24’s offices: cash only. Also at golf clubs.
[Image: Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend