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.
‘It was disappointing,’ I told Greg that evening. ‘I wanted it to be moving.’
‘You can’t buy catharsis,’ he said, feeding Dylan spoonfuls of yogurt. ‘To think you can is perverse. The tour guide, the bus driver, the ex-prisoner, all of them, they spend every day there. They have an endless stream of people like you wanting to hear the stories, expecting to be moved, to be made to feel less or more responsible, depending on who you are and where you’re from.’ He catches a drip of yogurt before it rolls from Dylan’s chin to hisshirt. ‘ You complain about not being moved. Imagine what that must do to them. Maybe it was an off day. Maybe they spent all their energy moving people yesterday and didn’t have anything left to give but the automatic narrative. Maybe they spent all their energy on the lone American dignitary. Think what that means to the local people,’ he said, shaking his head. Dylan squirmed in
*
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.
‘It was disappointing,’ I told Greg that evening. ‘I wanted it to be moving.’
‘You can’t buy catharsis,’ he said, feeding Dylan spoonfuls of yogurt. ‘To think you can is perverse. The tour guide, the bus driver, the ex-prisoner, all of them, they spend every day there. They have an endless stream of people like you wanting to hear the stories, expecting to be moved, to be made to feel less or more responsible, depending on who you are and where you’re from.’ He catches a drip of yogurt before it rolls from Dylan’s chin to hisshirt. ‘ You complain about not being moved. Imagine what that must do to them. Maybe it was an off day. Maybe they spent all their energy moving people yesterday and didn’t have anything left to give but the automatic narrative. Maybe they spent all their energy on the lone American dignitary. Think what that means to the local people,’ he said, shaking his head. Dylan squirmed in
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