A brief auto-ethnography* of the Franschhoek Lit Fest

AKA an extended artist date**

After spending a night at my parents house, they packed me off to Franschhoek with a bank bag of nuts, a bottle of Ken Forrester chenin, bananas and hot cross buns. Bless them.

At the first event, in the NG Kerk, I’m sitting next to a elderly couple (reader: there was no other kind of couple there this weekend, almost).

‘Hello, anyone in there?’ says husband to his very alert wife, who is doing something on her phone.

‘Yes, yes, just confirming our lunch booking, we have a long gap between this and our next session.’

‘Good, we can have long lunch and stay out of the sun,’ (is this guy my father?').

Behind me I hear a mother say to her adult son,‘I’ve had the most terrible diarrhoea this morning’.

Just sitting here people watching is the stuff of gold.

‘Oh look, there’s the rabbi.’

The demographic is mostly white and I’d say on average 60+. Lots of good textiles, crisply ironed shirts and statement jewellery. All healthy and vital and like they cycle and take sunny holidays at the coast and eat organic food. Cheerful bunch. Upbeat. And who wouldn’t be with all this sunshine and mountain and vineyard.

There are two ways to read this. 1) It is a festival that excludes the young and non-white because of expense and geography or 2) It is great to see older white people excited about what is happening culturally in our country and supporting events. They have money to spend, let them spend it on local authors.

Like everything, it is a bit of both. But one thing is for sure, this weekend makes anyone’s reasons for The Groot ‘Tsek to the US look even more ludicrous.

As I left home my father asked about what venues were being used and I said a lot of church halls. He said, ‘you see, the church does more for society than you think’.

Take homes¹

• One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

• Sitting in a church with old white folk is comforting. It reminds me of my childhood. (I debated whether to include this observation, because it might seem offensive. But if you have read anything here in the last year or so you might realise that I am very interested in questions of comfort and identity and how we regularly feel ‘the wrong’ emotion, but don’t very often speak about it. So, I hope it goes without saying that I am immensely discomfited by the fact that sitting in a church with old white folk is comforting. It is worth highlighting these moments of cognitive dissonance if we are to really understand who and what we are.)

• Who is the other option for ANC president in 2027 other than Paul Mashatile? No-one could answer this question.

• Always keep comparative constituencies and real numbers in mind. We have about 9 million private medical aid subscribers. 6 million people voted for the ANC. The ZCC has a membership of around 12 million people. We have about 7 million tax payers. And an estimated 19 million on social grants of some kind.

• As we walked out of one venue I heard someone say to their friend, ‘I couldn’t understand him, maybe it was the accent,’ about the only black panelist in the session (see point 1 above about being discomfited by my familiarity with this kind of talk).

• Bookish totes are the go-to festival accessory: Marian Keyes totes, Sally Rooney totes, New Yorker totes.

• When writing (or even thinking or reading) about abuse is it helpful to look at it from multiple perspectives. John Boyne’s new quartet of novels does this. He looks at the perpetrator, the enabler, the victim and the accomplice. For each of these perspectives we need to ask, ‘What happened to you?’

• I learnt from Abi Daré that the middle class in Nigeria is just as blinkered as our own, often not knowing the surname or birthday or pretty much anything about the maids that work in their homes.

• Memoir is not autobiography. Peter Godwin said that in memoir, the camera is on your shoulder. It is your view on the world that makes it memoir, not that it is the story of your life.

• A theme across sessions for me was that one’s childhood feels normal and the further you get from childhood psychologically and geographically, only then are you able to see the fault lines in a life.

• Also, that pain and sadness are the real source of humour.

• The object of the book enables us to approach subjects that we wouldn’t be able to talk about directly.

• Accent is an abiding identifier.

• Deprived of community your old wounds reopen.

• Apparently JM Coetzee has written that you can only really have one landscape that is imprinted on your mind. [I resisted the urge to ask ChatGPT about where this reference comes from, so if any of you know, please fill me in.] For him it was the Karoo, for me is it the Cape Fold Mountains?

• To suffer a ‘moral injury’ is to have seen too much of man’s inhumanity to man. I think we are all sufferers in this regard.

• Someone (can’t remember who) spoke about someone (can’t remember who) who would type out Earnest Hemingway novels to get the rhythm of his prose at the level of the sentence in his head and hands. Mimicry is part of the process as a young writer. I guess it would be the equivalent of practising your instrument? I actually want to give this a try.

• Writing is form of self-regulation. AMEN.

• The writer’s job is not to provide answers but to ask questions.

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* Autoethnography is a qualitative research method where researchers explore their own personal experiences to understand broader cultural and social phenomena. It combines elements of autobiography and ethnography, using the researcher's lived experiences as data to interpret cultural meanings, practices, and beliefs.

** An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness. From Julia Cameron’s incomparable The Artist’s Way.

1. These are my messy notes typed up almost verbatim. I have chosen not to fact check them, or reference them too heavily. They are here to provoke thought, not as a statement of fact.