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Jah Hills by Unathi Slasha
Black Ghost Press
Two stars
There’s a leaning towards Afro-pessimist approaches that finds expression in the artistic spaces that can be described loosely as “the underground”.
In hip-hop parlance, the tone and content of “the underground” has always evoked images of grit, grime, grief, alienation and all the other uncomfortable realities that inspire art nourished in the margins of society. Art that “keeps it real”.
In South African literature, with disillusion marking out the hangover after bingeing on dreams of the “rainbow nation” and a black youth doubly marginalised and increasingly disenchanted, this has seen the emergence of Afro-pessimism as a favoured outlook of some of the younger writers.
There’s a great deal in this new wave that’s not only admirable, but also undeniably authentic.
What this new generation of young, mostly black literary renegades reject is just as important as what they embrace. In rejecting false hope, they beckon unflinching honesty. By eschewing the establishment and all its norms, literary and otherwise, they seek to foreground and rebirth peculiarly African narratives and tools of storytelling. They seek to revive and retell African folklores and spiritualities.
Unathi Slasha. Picture: Supplied
Perhaps one of the most articulate and fearless among this new breed of writers is the Eastern Cape, Despatch township-based writer and critic Unathi Slasha. He’s ruffled many a literary feather in a number of recent essays, decrying the state of South African literature and what he has described as a kind of “camaraderie criticism”.
The state of writing in the nation is a sorry one, Slasha argues, and the fascination with and hegemony of realist fiction is largely to blame.
There are too many silences in the writing that contemporary South African writers are producing, he argues, and a fresh, new, revitalised language and method is required. What Slasha has called an “appropriate grammar to grasp the gaping grave that is the present moment”.
Many of the arguments Slasha has made have been forceful and eloquent and it is with great expectation that many have looked forward to his debut novella Jah Hills.
He has passionately criticised the creative attempts of other writers on the contemporary South African scene, sometimes scathingly. The only exception is his mentor Lesego Rampolokeng. One would think, therefore, that he would find a measure of redemption in his own fiction.
Slasha has insisted repeatedly on the text being supreme. His position (which I share) is that textual analysis should have pride of place in determining how we engage with literary works.
These are my impressions of the book.
The indications that the book attempts to paint a vivid, surrealist canvas is undermined by a pedestrian use of language early on. When a drunk S’fombo attacks his girlfriend (on page 14), it isn’t clear why he was “picking up stones and casting them at her” (biblical?) as opposed to “throwing”.
The narrator is guilty of spectacular failings of description, constant repetition and overwriting. So many things are “angering” that the result is a loss of meaning, of feeling.
Images that ought to terrify are rendered with a verbosity thin on detail. S’fombo’s bulldog is “the scariest, with its dripping (sic) jaws, a big and wide crocodile mouth and tough teeth”. The intention is clear but the language sabotages the aim.
Here’s no tickling of the senses in the reader to excite feeling — we’re being bludgeoned with adjectival flourishes that don’t amount to much more than playground hyperbole.
Sam Pink’s dystopian novella White Ibis comes to mind, or perhaps William Burroughs’ Ghost Of Chance, in which the descriptions of animals are tight, terse, leaving room for – rather than strangling – the imagination.
In drawing up a tapestry of sounds (on page 21), the description flounders: “High-pitched moos of the cows cut in correctly every time the chickens take a brief break from squeaking.” The attempt is forced, the overwriting a contrived spectacle.
Editorial failings must surely bear some of the responsibility.
What’s the meaning of a scene in which the narrator watches a woman bathe in a river (on page 27), when the only obstacle posited to the consummation of his desire is the pain his newly circumcised penis might suffer? What of rape? Is the bathing woman no more than the object of his male desire, stripped of or incapable of agency and consent?
How does our narrator drink “boiling” umdoko (on page 32) “in three gulps”? Without suffering agony and harm?
Should an editor not spot such instances of missing logic in the tale?
The representation of African spirituality does not rise above the level of caricature. If the kind of vengeful and malicious voodoo that serves for Jah Hills’ religion is accurate, then we really must be the most wretched among all of God’s creatures.
The images can’t just be cobbled together; an overpopulated cartoon strip of screaming Daily Sun tokoloshe stories.
There must be more to African spirituality than the gore and bloodlust that permeates the pages of Slasha’s tale.
The weaving in and out of hallucination and reality deserves, one feels, a greater linguistic fidelity to the task.
This is not achieved by the discordant notes of a Black zombie-child shouting “Yippy! Yippy!” on receipt of a blood-red concoction in a cup.
Yippy? Is the American Midwest intruding on the hallucinations of our African initiate?
The jarring register and pitch of the narrative voice fluctuates wildly, from stiffly formal to carelessly overstated. Sometimes simultaneously.
In the narrator’s dark dream world, Mthi picks up the narrator and then “he drops me down”.
As opposed to “dropping” him where? Up? One doesn’t know who to rage against, the writer or his editor.
A “dread-locked woman crouching in the sky” — “Her locks are erect like pillars” but they also “drag on the ground”, “twist and turn” and “spread out”.
The image is untidy, not vivid, not descriptive.
It’s unfortunate, because flashes of brilliance peek out, here and there, confirming that, behind these ramblings, Slasha has the gift of writing.
There’s a world Slasha is straining to write for us, breaking every rule to represent to us and, perhaps, in due course he will.
Jah Hills is, in this endeavour, a false start. But the vision behind this confusion deserves attention.
The vagaries of our age are sometimes captured with uncanny precision — “TV is talking to itself or to the empty room.”
The challenge of realist narratives can make our literature only richer. Afro-pessimism is a necessary lens through which to view these troubled times. Now, more than ever, one can apply to the state of this country, of the world we live in, the stunning caption captured on page 79: “Everybody can see this painting except the self-absorbed living.”
- Buy the book at African Flavour Books in Braamfontein, Vanderbijlpark or Vilakazi Street
