Arts & Culture
Cape Town author shares apartheid era stories
Whitney Light
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| Rozena Maart’s book The Writing Circle is now available from Tsar Books. |
Canadians don’t imagine violence the way South Africans do, contends Rozena Maart, but writing could help us understand. Born and raised in Cape Town in the apartheid era and now a resident of Guelph, Ont., Maart is a writer and scholar who knows the extent to which aggression, fights, rape and even murder intrude into the everyday lives of South Africans. As a social worker in emergency and gynecology at a Cape Town hospital in the late `80s, Maart saw cases of rape and sexual assault daily; helping end violence against women has become her life’s work. Partly this has meant sharing stories, as Maart does in her most recent novel about the lives of five South African women, The Writing Circle.
Maart read the opening chapter of the novel for an audience at the University of Winnipeg last week. Set in the present, a group of women who gather weekly to discuss their writing about the body wait for their final member to arrive, who unbeknownst to them is being raped at gunpoint in her own car, hijacked only a few metres away. Though she escapes after turning the gun on the rapist, the members of The Writing Circle must deal with their emotions and reflections after the awful scene.
Such instances of violence in South Africa, said Maart, are never as easy as black and white because crimes were occurring against a backdrop of apartheid and the fight against it, and continue to occur. At the Cape Town hospital, Maart said, she recognized that the perpetrators of sex crimes were often men in positions of power within anti-apartheid political organizations. The villain in The Writing Circle likewise turns out to defy all stereotypes.
“That was one of the horrors of working [at the hospital]: of knowing the people who came in and who they were raped and sexually assaulted by because I had to apply through the court system for abortions, because [abortion] was illegal.”
After the white South African government banned the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela was jailed following the 1963 Rivonia Trial, the anti-apartheid struggle intensified, said Maart, with the unsettling side effect of silencing talk of violence against women. To combat this silence, Maart, with a group of other women, started Women Against Repression (WAR), the first black feminist organization in South Africa. Some criticized WAR’s mandate at the time, but Maart’s efforts were vindicated in 1987 when she was nominated for South Africa’s Woman of the Year.
“There were a lot of challenges [to WAR] because it was during the anti-apartheid struggle,” Maart said. “I think men in positions of authority within political organizations were completely opposed [to it] because it was taking away from the emphasis on the struggle.”
During apartheid, the world imagined South Africa primarily through the writings of white major literary figures such as Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Now, however, with writers such as Maart, the literary scene is quite different.
“My generation, who were involved politically, has a very different set of interests,” Maart said.
Her previous novel, Rosa’s District Six, for instance, depicts life in a suburb of Cape Town through several short stories about different women’s lives that are connected through Rosa, a young girl who runs about the neighbourhood with a notepad and a pencil around her neck. It’s a story with the jumping, playing, laughing and skipping of childhood, and for Maart, that’s as much a part of apartheid history as any other story.
But why write fiction and not history? In Maart’s view, history is the stuff of historians, sociologists, and political scientists concerned with important dates, leaders, and oppression at particular moments. Fiction, in some ways, offers something more powerful.
“Fiction allows you a particular insight as a reader to understand a society, a culture, an environment, by the people who live in it.”
So through her characters, Maart communicates something that is much more than simply a picture of violence. Through them a window opens, into the rich histories of people who may well encounter violence more often than most Canadians’ imaginations can conjure, but who live and work and love and carry on.
Maart read the opening chapter of the novel for an audience at the University of Winnipeg last week. Set in the present, a group of women who gather weekly to discuss their writing about the body wait for their final member to arrive, who unbeknownst to them is being raped at gunpoint in her own car, hijacked only a few metres away. Though she escapes after turning the gun on the rapist, the members of The Writing Circle must deal with their emotions and reflections after the awful scene.
Such instances of violence in South Africa, said Maart, are never as easy as black and white because crimes were occurring against a backdrop of apartheid and the fight against it, and continue to occur. At the Cape Town hospital, Maart said, she recognized that the perpetrators of sex crimes were often men in positions of power within anti-apartheid political organizations. The villain in The Writing Circle likewise turns out to defy all stereotypes.
“That was one of the horrors of working [at the hospital]: of knowing the people who came in and who they were raped and sexually assaulted by because I had to apply through the court system for abortions, because [abortion] was illegal.”
After the white South African government banned the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela was jailed following the 1963 Rivonia Trial, the anti-apartheid struggle intensified, said Maart, with the unsettling side effect of silencing talk of violence against women. To combat this silence, Maart, with a group of other women, started Women Against Repression (WAR), the first black feminist organization in South Africa. Some criticized WAR’s mandate at the time, but Maart’s efforts were vindicated in 1987 when she was nominated for South Africa’s Woman of the Year.
“There were a lot of challenges [to WAR] because it was during the anti-apartheid struggle,” Maart said. “I think men in positions of authority within political organizations were completely opposed [to it] because it was taking away from the emphasis on the struggle.”
During apartheid, the world imagined South Africa primarily through the writings of white major literary figures such as Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Now, however, with writers such as Maart, the literary scene is quite different.
“My generation, who were involved politically, has a very different set of interests,” Maart said.
Her previous novel, Rosa’s District Six, for instance, depicts life in a suburb of Cape Town through several short stories about different women’s lives that are connected through Rosa, a young girl who runs about the neighbourhood with a notepad and a pencil around her neck. It’s a story with the jumping, playing, laughing and skipping of childhood, and for Maart, that’s as much a part of apartheid history as any other story.
But why write fiction and not history? In Maart’s view, history is the stuff of historians, sociologists, and political scientists concerned with important dates, leaders, and oppression at particular moments. Fiction, in some ways, offers something more powerful.
“Fiction allows you a particular insight as a reader to understand a society, a culture, an environment, by the people who live in it.”
So through her characters, Maart communicates something that is much more than simply a picture of violence. Through them a window opens, into the rich histories of people who may well encounter violence more often than most Canadians’ imaginations can conjure, but who live and work and love and carry on.