20 - Writing in exile

Summary

Nineteen years I’ve roamed the continents / Renting one glasshouse after another / whence I’ve gazed and gazed / upon the wilderness of exile / all around me . . . / still turning round in circles / sowing seed / on borrowed land / for crops we’ll always have to leave behind.

(Es’kia Mphahlele, ‘A Prayer’)

The initial impetus for exile by a South African writer was provided Peter Abrahams's decision in 1939 to skip the country in order to live a more ful-filling life in Britain. Abrahams's poignant ending of his memoir, Tell Freedom (1954), at a time when he is barely 21, touches on the core reasons why autobiographical writing seems to be especially made for the South African situation: alienation. Well before apartheid became state policy in May of 1948, the alienating effects of living in a racialising world touched on people such as Abrahams, presenting physical exile as a better option. He writes: ‘I needed, not friends, not gestures, but my manhood. And the need was desperate … Also, there was a need to write, to tell freedom, and for this I needed to be personally free’ (Tell Freedom, p. 311, emphasis added). The reader is drawn to a sense of emasculation that the alienated youth feels, as much as to the sense of a quest to be free by any means possible in order to be able to speak truth to power. He was actually shunned for being ‘a dangerous radical’ by newspapers such as Bantu World and Umteteli wa Bantu and, as he narrates, he was at one point ‘homeless and near starvation’ (Return to Goli, p. 14). In a sense, Abrahams's needs for exile provide the template within which to view much writing from the exilic condition: a repressed personality suffering from insistent infantilisation through racism and a sense of personhood.