‘Were your own books ever threatened with censorship?’
‘Threatened in what sense? If you are asking whether the censors ever came to me and said, “We will ban this book unless you delete x, y, or z,” then no. No one ever did any such thing. It didn’t quite work in that way, although I know that the censors reviewed several of my books and in one case there was an import ban until they could read the text in question and conclude it offered nothing that might threaten to destabilize the country. I have seen the reports. They’re quite amusing in their way — amusing and depressing and strangely, perversely, flattering. Woe to the writer who is flattered by the praise of a censor. But this is beside the point, really,’ she says, pulling her body into focus again, ‘because, as I say in “Black Tongue”, any writer working under the threat of state censorship, no matter how general, how diffused, is effectively threatened at all times. It is back to the battered wife syndrome. Worse, even, because as a writer living under the old government, I — and doubtless many other writers in the same or similar positions — found that the censor infected my consciousness, like a worm. It lived in the brain, and ate around in the skull, living side by side with me, inside me, occupying the same mental space. I was always aware of the worm. It exerted a kind of psychic pressure that I experienced physiologically, right here in the sinuses, between and behind the eyes, and in the frontal lobe, pressing against the brow. It was toxic, excreting hallucinatory chemicals that twisted my thoughts. I became obsessed by its very presence: the heart raced, the brain erupted, trying to purge itself of the worm; I have often thought it was like a brain storm — but not in the sense you Americans mean, not a storm of ideas, but a literal electrical storm, raging inside the skull, trying to strike down the worm with a fatal bolt. When I went outside, out in public, I was embarrassed, horrified and disgusted lest anyone should guess that the worm had infected me — as if such infection could be seen on the face and betray the fact that I had become host to the terrors of the censor. The terror suggests — or the afflicted writer fears it suggests — a kind of guilty conscience that betrays guilty acts, and this makes the infection all the worse. One begins to scrutinize every word written, every phrase, trying to detect meanings hidden even to the mind of the writer, and this is the source of real madness. A friend of mine, a fellow writer, has described his own mental relationship with the censor as that of a tree (he, the writer) being embraced by a strangle-vine. One thinks of the love-vine, Cassytha filiformis, leafless and tangled, overtaking an entire tree, smothering but not killing it. For me the love-vine is too external a metaphor. In my case, the censor was a bodily invader, always with me, entirely within me, internally bloodsucking. I knew what the censor would look for in my words, and the kind of mind that would undertake the looking; it would see suggestion where there might only be document, though my work could never be accused of being documentary, perhaps because I knew what attitude the censor would take to the documentary form, to journalistic writing. My own evasion of social documentary is itself a symptom of the illness that is the relationship with the censor. If one looks at the writers who were banned and the books found “undesirable”, a great many fall into the social realist school, representing in fairly unmediated terms the state of this country in the period of its emergency. And while our censorship was often arbitrary and inconsistent and changed its targets over the decades, it was no less malign and wide-reaching for all that. I spent decades writing in such a way as to avoid having my books banned. I wrote books, effectively, which the censors could not understand, because they lacked the intelligence to read beyond the surface, and the surface itself was almost opaque to them, darkness etched in darkness. Is that the confession you were hoping to extract — that I consciously wrote evasively, to remain in print? I did. I don’t consider it a crime. I consider it a means of survival, a coping mechanism, in the language of pop psychology, and one at which I seem to have excelled.’
‘And if one reads the censor’s reports on your books, they’re all judged too “literary” to pose any risk of fomenting unrest among “average” readers.’
‘By this they mean the majority. I have read the reports. Books and pamphlets in simple, polemical language, books that outlined in undisguised terms the realities of this country under the old government — those were the books the censors were most inclined to ban, not mine. They could have condemned my books, found them “undesirable” in that peculiar erotics of the language of their censorship, on any number of grounds: indecency, obscenity, offensiveness to public morals, blasphemy, ridicule of any particular racial or religious group, being harmful to the relations between races or a threat to national security. Instead they found them “not undesirable”, which is not to say that they were judged in any way “desirable”, only that they were not offensive enough to be actively undesired. They were tested and found, simply, passive things, hanging in the liminal space between desire and repulsion, want and rejection. It is a curious way to think of literature, particularly for people — the censors I mean — who so naively fancied themselves sophisticated arbiters of the literary. But all of that does not mean I was immune to the effects of censorship.’
*
On Greg’s suggestion I went to Robben Island on my own yesterday to see the former prison buildings. He thought it might help me ‘reconnect’ with the country. It was overcast and the views of the city were obscured by cloud and mist. I couldn’t see anything beyond the boat, and visibility was even worse on the island. After disembarking we were loaded onto a tour bus and a young man, tall and thin with dreadlocks, began giving his prepared speech. He showed us the settlement, the Maximum Security Prison, the old leper colony, the house where Robert Sobukwe had been isolated, the quarry where prisoners did hard labour, and where we spent far too long because a visiting American senator was having a private tour and holding us up.
With only twenty minutes left of our allotted time on the island, we were allowed to walk around the cells with a former political prisoner as our guide. Greg told me this would be the most moving part of the visit, but our guide was reticent. When people asked him pointed but polite questions about the movement, he became defensive and parroted the party line. Whatever the leaders said was right must be so. I began to feel ill.
The most famous cell moved me only insofar as it represented the place where so much of one exceptional life had been spent, but it was difficult to feel the trace of any presence there. It is bleak and small and cold. It contains no life or spirit of its own.
I paused to photograph the office where the prison’s censor read all the inmates’ incoming and outgoing correspondence. I tried to imagine the experience of receiving a letter that might begin with the normal salutation, in the hand of the beloved, only to discover two lines later that the body of the letter has been deleted by the censor’s hand, that the very words meant to give succour in a time of enforced isolation were judged too great a risk — or to know that anything one might write to those on the outside could itself be obliterated, that attempts to reassure, console, answer what could not be answered because of the censor’s obfuscations, would be blacked out anyway.
We were hurried back to the boat. I hoped the fog and mist would clear, but everything was grey and all the passengers hung around inside sulking.