Shakespeare and the Coconuts. Natasha Distiller
of power that span time and place, and are imbricated with the markers of culture invoked by the poem’s descriptions as well as by its title:
Merchants in Venice
We arrive in Venice to ancient acoustics:
the swaddling of paddle in water,
thud of the vaporetto against the landing site,
and the turbulent frescoes of corridors and ceilings,
belief and power sounding history
with the bells of the subdivided hour,
on water, air and all surfaces of light.
What have we Africans to do with this?
With holy water, floating graves and cypresses,
the adamantine intricacy of marble floors,
gold borders of faith, Mary’s illuminated face
and the way Tintoretto’s Crucifixion is weighted
with the burden of everyday sin and sweat,
while the city keeps selling its history and glass.
On the Rialto, tourists eye the wares
of three of our continent’s diasporic sons,
young men in dreadlocks and caps, touting
leather bags and laser toys in the subdued dialect
of those whose papers never are correct,
homeboys now in crowded high-rise rooms
edging the embroidered city.
How did they get from Dakar to Venice?
What brotherhood sent them to barter and pray?
And on long rainy days when the basilica
levitates, dreaming of drowning,
do they think of their mission and mothers,
or hover and hustle like apprentice angels
over the shrouded campos and spires?
Into the city we have come for centuries,
buyers, sellers, mercenaries, spies,
artists, saints, the banished,
and boys like these: fast on their feet,
carrying sacks of counterfeit goods,
shining in saturated light,
the mobile inheritors of any renaissance.1
De Kok’s poem brings to the surface what is hidden beneath the beautiful veneer of European culture, ‘the way Tintoretto’s Crucifixion is weighted / with the burden of everyday sin and sweat, / while the city keeps selling its history and glass’.
Commerce and its patterns of exploitation, and the real lives of real people lived above, beneath, and within the layers of art and history that comprise the physical and cultural architecture of Venice, inform Europe’s beautiful objects and invest them with a different meaning to their commodified claims to fame. The poem insists on this without reducing Europe’s artistic accomplishments to instrumentalist objects of power and overpowering. At the same time, the poem makes visible the human struggles which belie any easy celebration of intrinsic worth. It brings history and politics into art. It also stakes a claim for what Africans are entitled to inherit from this history, by insisting that they have always been a part of the grubby, painful human living which makes high art, which enables it to exist as object and as artefact. Europe’s art would not mean what it does without Africa, that is, without its exploited human and other resources, and its symbolic position in a global history and economy. With this acknowledgement, Africans’ relationship to Europe’s texts and treasures becomes participatory. At the same time, ‘art’, ‘Europe’, and ‘Africa’ are all located in the realities of daily life, within the dynamics of which each concept is constructed.
The poem allows for a discussion of the ways that people produce artefacts and ideas. Some of the most celebratory writing about Shakespeare can make it sound like we are products of Shakespeare’s texts, which become ahistorical and unimplicated in politics and materiality. This book describes some of the ways Shakespeare’s texts have been implicated in South African history, politics, and materiality. In addition, it explores how and why this history matters.
Let me say from the outset that while I am arguing against seeing Shakespeare’s literary or philosophical influence in South Africa as proof of ‘his’ universality, I am not therefore arguing that ‘he’ has no ‘authentic’ place in South Africa. Indeed, the anxieties about authenticity and belonging raised by debates on Shakespeare are far more interesting to me than what I consider to be historically inaccurate and theoretically naïve statements that rely on essentialised versions of concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘African’, ‘European’. De Kok’s poem makes it clear that these ideas are always products of material history, of people’s investments (financial and emotional), of complex human processes.
Shakespeare and coconut logic
There is a long tradition of South Africans appropriating Shakespeare, which goes back to the colonial mission schools. The nature of that appropriation is complex, and involves sociopolitical interactions and aspirations, including specific colonial, South African, incarnations of the dynamics of class mobility and modernisation, their relation to Christianity, to English as a language of social and therefore economic power, and to English Literature as a formalised field of study. South Africans who have entered into this tradition have been seen as selling out to a kind of colonial coconuttiness which enabled the entrenchment of a racist social system, or as transforming the master’s tools in order to dismantle his house. However you want to read their behaviour, the fact remains that they read, loved, and used Shakespeare in their own lives and works. So Shakespeare has an African history, which is as African as any other aspect of the region’s cultural development. To say this is to take a political stand, one which refuses to see colonial history and its aftermath as containable by binaries: coloniser/colonised, oppressor/oppressed, European/ African. I am not for a moment suggesting that the multiple violences of colonial history, the apartheid regime which it enabled, and the ongoing inequalities which are our legacy were or are in any way excusable. I am suggesting, as have many other cultural critics and anthropologists, that human interactions and the artefacts they produce are always complicated. To say that South Africa’s history has always been a history of complicities and complex engagements and influences is not to ameliorate the racist, gendered, classed violence of the region. This book argues that exploring aspects of the ways Shakespeare has been used, appropriated, symbolised, and reproduced in post-apartheid South Africa is one way to begin to see the complexities and paradoxes of our national history. This is a particularly apposite argument now, as raced identities are increasingly reinscribed in public discourse, encouraged by the posturing of some of our leading politicians.
Many of our writers have appropriated Shakespeare. It is not a question of looking for a South African writer who is ‘like’ or ‘as good as’ or ‘trying to be’ Shakespeare. And it is certainly not a question of finding evidence of Shakespeare’s universality in the fact of ‘his’ having been used by Africans. If we dispense with the too-easy answer of ‘universality’ (which is too easy not least because it is disingenuous), we can explore more interesting answers to the question, why was it Shakespeare these writers appropriated, and with whom we are still concerned in sometimes quite highly charged debates? This question draws us into a cultural history which teaches us about how cultural value is invested and perpetuated, bought and sold, if you like, as well as experienced and owned by individuals (think again of De Kok’s poem). It also enables us to trace the power relations in English Literature as a field of study, and English as a language of social and political power, in our region. Looking at these processes, amongst others (such as the history of Shakespeare editing practices), enables us to see why the language of universal relevance is disingenuous,