Note Itala Vivan

Itala Vivan

GEOGRAPHY, LITERATURE AND THE AFRICAN TERRITORY. SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE WESTERN MAP AND THE REPRESENTATION OF TERRITORY IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN LITERARY IMAGINATION


1. On this aspect, see the interesting historical survey of geographic thought in classic antiquity in James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought. Geography, Exploration, and Fiction, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992; and also Francesco Prontera, "Prima di Strabone: materiali per uno studio della geografia come genere letterario", in Strabone: contributi allo studio della personalità e dell'opera, vol. 1, ed. by Francesco Prontera, Ist. di Storia Antica, Med. e Mod., Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università di Perugia, 1984, pp. 187-256.
2. Umberto Eco, "Sofri e l'onere della prova", Micromega 3:97, January-September, p. 250. The translation from Italian is mine.
3. Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), from The Works of Lewis Carroll, London, Spring Books, 1965, pp. 608-609.
4. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad (1875), New York, Harper and Brothers, 1924, p. 23.
5. Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter (1844), in Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, New York, The Library of America, 1984, p. 694.
6. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1895), from the Penguin Classics edition, Harmondsworth, 1974, pp. 11-12.
7. Swift's well known passage is quoted and commented upon by Graham Huggan, "Decolonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism, and the Cartographic Connection", in Ariel, 20, October 1989, pp. 115-131; here from p. 120.
8. Ibidem, p. 119; see also Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse", in October, 28, 1983, later collected in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York, Routledge, 1994, pp. 85-92.
9. See especially, by Edward Said, Orientalism, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978; but also, by the same author, The World, the Text, the Critic, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983, and Culture and Imperialism, London, Chatto and Windus, 1993.
10. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1964; Cecelia Tichi, New World, New Earth. Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Walt Whitman, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979.
11. John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, London, Thomas Davis, 1782 (with maps); see Itala Vivan, "L'Autre et son entrée dans le text européen. Naissance and rénaissance du regard américain", in La rencontre des immaginaires entre Europe et Amérique, ed. Jean-Jacques Wunenberger, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1993, pp. 155-165. Before he moved to the English colonies in America, Crèvecoeur served as a cartographer with the French army in Canada. His direct knowledge of native American populations was quite remarkable and can be inferred from, among other things, his last book, published in 1801, Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie et dans l'Etat de New-York, par un membre adoptif de la nation Onéida. Traduit et publié par l'auteur des Lettres d'un cultivateur américain, Paris; Imprimerie de Crapelet, 3 vols., with splendid maps and illustrations. It is now accepted that Crèveceour was the primary source for part of the famous Voyage en Amérique by François-René de Chateaubriand (1827) and earlier for Les Natchez by the same author (1826). Among the textual elements proving a derivation from Crèvecoeur we find a usage of maps as reference points - once again, the text is construed on the map and around it.
12. Among the vast literature on this subject, see Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994. On virtual space of the colonial encounter as a 'contact zone', see Marie Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, London and New York, Routledge, 1992.
13. Flaubert organizes his tale on the grid of a very precise map of ancient Carthage and evokes a powerful fictional space, to which he adds an important historical setting, based - as we now know very well - on an extremely accurate background documentation.
14. See Franco Moretti, Atlante del romanzo europeo 1800-1900, Turin, Einaudi, 1997, pp. 61-68, where in the colonial novel with an African setting the author finds a linear fable leading to a 'finding': a treasure, diamonds, the witch-woman ("a kind of equatorial Dracula", writes Moretti) or the European Prisoner, as in Heart of Darkness, with a variation on the finding of David Livingstone by Henry Stanley.
15. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, London, Chapman and Hall, 1883; here from the Penguin Books edition, Harmondsworth 1971, pp. 27-28.
16. On this point James M. Coetzee gives a very perceptive analysis in White Writing. On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988; see especially "The Picturesque, the Sublime, and the South African Landscape", pp. 36-62, and "Farm Novel and Plaasroman", pp. 63-81.
17. See Christopher Heywood, "The Story of an African Farm: Society, Positivism and Myth", in Itala Vivan, ed., The Flawed Diamond. Essays on Olive Schreiner, Sydney/Aarhus/Coventry, Dangaroo Press, 1991, pp. 26-39; and also Itala Vivan, "The Treatment of Blacks in The Story of an African Farm", ibidem, pp. 95-106.
18. John M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country, London, Secker and Warburg, 1977; here from the Penguin Books edition, Harmondsworth 1982.
19. Ibidem, pp. 70-71.
20. Ibidem, p. 5.
21. Ibidem, p. 55.
22. Pauline Smith, The Little Karoo, London, Jonathan Cape, 1925 (Introduction by Arnold Bennett), and The Beadle, London, Jonathan Cape, 1926. Smith however left South Africa when she was sixteen and wrote her novels in England.
23. Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist, London, Jonathan Cape, 1972. Gordimer's novel July's People (London, Jonathan Cape, 1981) is also relevant if we look for a textual representation of the African territory. On this matter see Itala Vivan, "Gli scrittori sudafricani nella transizione verso il nuovo", in Itala Vivan, ed., Il Nuovo Sudafrica dalle strettoie dell'apartheid alle complessità della democrazia, Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1996, pp. 333-374.
24. Sipho Sepamla, The Land, in The Soweto I Love, London, Rex Collings, and Cape Town, David Philip, 1977, p. 17.
25. Rushdie's striking definition has become the title for a founding analysis of postcolonial literatures, The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, London and New York, Routledge, 1989.
26. See Liz Gunner, "Names and the Land. Poetry of Belonging and Unbelonging, a Comparative Approach", in Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, Sarah Nuttall, eds, Text, Theory, Space. Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, London and New York, Routledge, 1996, pp. 115-130.
27. Ancient chronicles and historical documents prove that the areas mentioned here were densely populated by African people characterized by settlement cultures.
28. Oral texts transcribed, and quoted and translated by Liz Gunner, op. cit., p. 119.
29. Ibidem.
30. Ibidem.
31. Ibidem, p. 120.
32. Mongane Wally Serote, City Johannesburg, in Yakhal'inkomo, Johannesburg, Ad. Donker, 1972, p. 12.
33. On this issue see, among other critics, Jeff Opland, Xhosa Oral Poetry. Aspects of a South African Black Tradition, Johannesburg, Ravan, 1983; and Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane, Introduction to Mongane Wally Serote, Selected Poems, cit., pp. 7-14.
34. Sipho Sepamla, Soweto, in The Soweto I Love, cit., pp. 22-24.
35. Sipho Sepamla, Home, in The Soweto I Love, cit., p. 15.
36. Sipho Sepamla, Measure for Measure, in The Soweto I Love, cit., p. 14.
37. H.I.E. Dhlomo, Valley of a Thousand Hills (1941), in Voices from Within. Black Poetry from Southern Africa, ed. by Michael Chapman and Achmat Danghor, Johannesburg, Ad. Donker, 1982, pp. 54ff.
38. See on this matter the philosophic analysis of such experts as Barry Hallen, Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft. Analytic Experiment in African Philosophy, London, Ethnographica, 1986; Tsenay Senequeberhan, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy. Horizon and Discourse, New York and London, Routledge, 1994; and Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Postcolonial African Philosophy. A Critical Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997.
39. See Christopher L. Miller, "Literary Studies and African Literature. The Challenge of Intercultural Literacy", in Robert H. Bates, Valentin Y. Mudimbe, Jean O'Barr, eds, Africa and the Disciplines. The Contribution of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 213-33.
40. A negative example may be the essay by Guglielmo Scaramellini "Raffigurazione dello spazio e conoscenza geografica: i resoconti di viaggio", in Elisa Bianchi, ed., Geografie private. I resoconti di viaggio come lettura del territorio, Milano, Unicopli, 1985, p. 59.
41. Both novels were printed by missionary typographies in expurgated versions: Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, Morjia, Basotholand, Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, 1925; Solomon T. Plaatje, Mhudi, Lovedale Press, 1930. The chapters lost in the first edition of Chaka were never recovered, while the original and complete manuscript of Mhudi was found fifty years later in the store of the Lovedale Press and published in 1975 by the Quagga Press and then by Heinemann in London, editors Tim Couzens and Stephen Gray. Both novels had been written years before the dates of publication, Chaka around 1909 and Mhudi by 1918.
42. Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, translated by Daniel Kunene, London, Heinemann, 1981, p. 1.
43. Ibidem, p. 3.
44. Ibidem.
45. Solomon T. Plaatje, Mhudi, ed. by Stephen Gray, Introduction by Tim Couzens, London, Heinemann, 1978, p. 25.
46. Ibidem, p. 27.
47. John Ruskin, Lecture I, 'Inaugural', Lectures on Art, lesson given at the Slade School in 1870, Hilary Term.
48. Mhudi, cit., p. 28.
49. Sol. T. Plaatje published Book of Homage to Shakespeare (Oxford, 1916) and translated into Tswana, under the general heading of Mabolelo a ga Tsikinya-Chaka (The Sayings of William Shakespeare), the following Shakespearean plays: The Comedy of Errors (Diposhoposho, publ. 1929), Julius Caesar (Dincho-ncho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara), The Merchant of Venice (Mashoabi-shoabi), Much Ado about Nothing (Matsepa-tsepa a Lefela), Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Of the last four titles, only fragments have survived.
50. Chaka, cit., p. 138.
51. Ibidem, p. 167.
52. Mhudi, cit., pp. 175-76.
53. Wilma Stockenström, Africa Love, "Vir die Bysiende Leser", Reijger, 1970; translated from Afrikaans by Johann de Lange.

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