Years ago, during my first years as a hired hand in academia, I was more careful about doing The Right Thing. I’d read JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians as a student, and something clicked for me – the colonial mentality, the hopeless fantasies of each successive militarised ‘civilisation’ – in a way that no amount of theory had done. I became an instant acolyte of the Master’s writing. In 2005, attended my first JM Coetzee conference, at Royal Holloway: the university for those sons and daughters of the wealthy who didn’t make it to the Oxbridge universities (this according to a friend who went to Oxford on scholarship).

Anyhow, it was an all-white affair. I was the token brown person there, except for a British Indian student who flitted in and out of a few sessions. (Another academic leaned over and said, conspiratorially, that this young man sends him “fawning emails”. Right. Not only was I being handed the ubiquitous racist caricature of the arse-kissing Indian, but I was being invited into the ‘club’: my sarcasm had permitted me to leap over the Indian hurdle, and into white acceptability. Goody for me.) During a couple of sessions, when some students from continental Europe were presenting (albeit somewhat poorly constructed papers), the UK-and South Africa-based white academics trashed them publicly, right there during the session. This was not a place to come to be informed, gently directed, or invited to an ongoing conversation, but a location in which territory was reinforced, and the ‘right’ of the few to belong staked out.

At the end of the conference, everyone gathered in the large auditorium to take a group photo. I didn’t get in on that. Someone asked me why I didn’t want to be in the picture, and I said that it was because I’d lose my Coloured People’s Credentials. Weirdly enough, though my own paper was quite rubbish (it was my first year as an academic, and I spent a lot of time writing drivel), I was invited to send in a revised version for a collection of essays, compiled from that conference. I never could get motivated to do it. I guess I realised, even then, that I was being asked to be the Sole Brown Representative in a book of essays about JM Coetzee. I couldn’t do it.

Instead, I wrote about how that experience taught me a thing or two about the reification of ‘white’ culture by scholars of Southern African literature, via the objectification of JM Coetzee – using his person, as well as his writing. I presented that paper at a Chimurenga Session in 2009, in Cape Town. It was a liberating experience.

[Read more...]