This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

5th May 2007

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Doubt is important, even necessary, to all artists. The creative process is stimulated by the challenge of holding multiple – possibly contradictory – ways of seeing the world in balance. This anticipates the various ways in which a work of art is ultimately viewed: ambiguity is, after all, prerequisite to interpretation. Writers hold doubt especially dear: Robert Graves’ poem “In Broken Images” celebrates the achievement of “a new understanding of my confusion” rather than the false (and dangerous) assurance of unshakeable opinions. Samuel Beckett avowed neither religious belief nor agnostic disbelief, thinking instead that “it is better to live, and to admit to living, in uncertainty: better because more honest”. South Africa’s Lionel Abrahams, after the 9/11 terrorist strikes, bemoaned the “divergent certainties” that led to and were aggravated by those attacks, noting that those who cling to “passionate convictions” cannot abide “the insult of questioning, the chill treachery of doubt”.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

24th February 2007

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During last year’s inaugural Cape Town Book Fair, I attended a panel discussion chaired by Helen Moffett. With characteristic verve, she welcomed us and requested that we put our cellphones off, before apologising and informing us that she would be keeping hers on, as she was awaiting news from her publisher about a forthcoming book. I remember grumbling: it had better be worth it. Well, her phone didn’t ring, but the book has since appeared, and it certainly was worth the risk – Lovely Beyond Any Singing: Landscapes in South African Writing (Double Storey) is a timely anthology that makes a valuable contribution to local literature. A compilation of extracts from the works of seventy-odd writers, the book contains texts covering a range of genres (novels, short fiction, poetry, history, drama, autobiography, journalism) and periods (1881 to the present day). Given this scope, it’s hardly surprising that the anthology evokes questions debated at length by South Africa’s writers and critics. I tracked Moffett down in Atlanta, USA – where she is currently pursuing postdoctoral research at Emory University – to ask her some of these.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

27th January 2007

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(NOTE: A longer version of this review will be appearing in the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa later this year.)

In his Director’s Note for this year’s outdoor Shakespeare at Maynardville, Fred Abrahamse affirms that Romeo and Juliet is pertinent to a twenty-first century “beleaguered by civil unrest and violence” and “wracked with disease and famine”. The programme maps out the play’s complex patterns of murder and inter-familial strife with a CSI-style storyboard of mugshots and criminal convictions.