Keynote address presented at the seminar “Chick Lit in a time of African Cosmopolitanism” hosted by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) on 27 October 2016
by Fiona Snyckers
There is a meme doing the rounds on social media. It shows the front cover of Girls Life magazine, side by side with a ‘corrected’ feminist version of it.
The original cover focuses on fashion, hair, female friendships, relationships, and personal appearance. The ‘improved’ version focuses on charity work, careers, academic achievement, and winning the science fair. There is a broad consensus – at least on social media – that the second version is a vast improvement on the first.
The first version deals with the realm of the traditionally feminine. The second shows girls encroaching on the realm of the traditionally masculine. Placing the two covers side by side sets up a tension between the world of relationships versus the world of achievement, between the private realm and the public realm, between emotions and deeds.
What the reworking of the cover implies is that it is not enough for women to be freed from the confines of the traditionally feminine – they must also be taught to despise it. It implies that value resides only in the traditionally masculine, with anything else being trivial, irrelevant, vain and shallow.
It has become common for us to celebrate our daughters for being tomboys and to deprecate them for being ‘girlie-girls’. We prefer to see young girls wearing jeans rather than princess tiaras. The phase of ultra-femininity that many little girls go through is regarded as regrettable, as something to be endured. We prefer to see a child playing with Lego rather than with a baby doll, because clearly, to build a building is more ‘important’ work than to nurture a baby.
This well-worn habit of looking down on the traditional tropes of femininity encroaches on fiction too. A book is regarded as serious if it deals with war, but trivial if it deals with romantic relationships. A pink cover is the universal signifier of triviality in fiction. The domestic sphere is always less important than that of public life. Viewed through this lens, child-bearing and child-rearing cease to be epic or iconic moments in the human condition, but rather small and trivial things fit only for consumption by women.
Again, it is not enough for us to say that women should be free to write about war, murder, gangs, politics, public life, etc. They must actively turn their back on and despise the small, domestic, personal, interior narrative.
Interestingly, however, these themes become entirely respectable when executed by male writers. Then the writing becomes literature, rather than chick-lit. It is regarded as swooningly brilliant for a man to write a convincing portrait of a marriage. This elevates his novel to Booker Prize material – to Pulitzer material.
South Africa’s Moment of Opportunity
In the immediate post-apartheid era, South African fiction in English was much preoccupied with trying to make sense of the horrors that had gone before. And when the narratives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission became part of public discourse, those were woven into fiction too. It was only from about 2005 onwards that South African fiction really began diversifying into genres.
This was our moment of opportunity to do things differently to the rest of the world. It was our chance to establish an entirely new set of intersectional, non-gender-conformist genres. But in hindsight, it was probably too much to expect of a post-colonial democracy, still in its infancy, and labouring under fallacious delusions of rainbowism.
I will use the example of Zukiswa Wanner to track the genrefication of women’s fiction in post-apartheid South Africa because she has written consistently from 2006 to 2015 and is still writing today.
To be clear, this is not a discussion of Wanner’s writing, which has always challenged and defied genres. Rather, it is an analysis of the way in which her novels have been packaged and presented over the years.
The cover image of The Madams is very fashion-focused, and intensely feminine, with no indication that the book deals with cross-class, cross-race, domestic power relations between women. A decision was clearly taken at management level to market the book as chick-lit.
Behind Every Successful Man has the most chick-lit of all packaging. It is an illustrated cover in a cartoonish style. All the tropes of chick-lit are present – pinkness, fashion, high heels, a cell phone, and a woman with a preoccupied expression.
When it comes to Men of the South, however, the subject matter is clearly regarded as too serious for a pink cover. Wanner is writing about men, after all, not mere women. The cover eschews the feminine and explores the nature of masculinity itself.
In the case of London, Cape Town, Joburg, extreme seriousness is afoot. The cover is devoid of colour and of any feminine aesthetic whatsoever. It is a novel about personal relationships, romance, and motherhood, but also about politics and public life. It was received with more seriousness than any of Wanner’s previous books, and won the K Sello Duiker Award in 2015.
I would argue it is no coincidence that the book with the least feminine packaging is the one that received a major literary award. Yes, it is a fascinating book, but so were her others. Packaging affects how books are reviewed and by whom, which awards they are nominated for, and generally how they are received by the literary establishment. Women writers constantly have to renegotiate their position in the literary world, jockeying to be taken seriously.
The problems faced by South African women writers are predictably intersectional. To position themselves inside a particular cultural community, for example, is to be by definition niche. White and cis-gendered/heterosexual remain the default.
Part of the missed opportunity in 2005 was the failure to avoid sectioning fiction by women off into the genre known as women’s fiction. Until there is a corresponding genre known as men’s fiction, we should discard women’s fiction as an unhelpful term.
I have been trying since 2009 to reclaim “chick-lit” as a term of strength for a particular kind of popular fiction. I can’t claim to have been successful in this. The pushback comes from all sides, as most symptoms of patriarchy do. It comes from men and women who despise the feminine, who look down on it, and regard it as unworthy, lesser, and trivial. It comes from the perception that freedom for women lies in the ability to move into the traditionally masculine domain, rather than claiming worth and equality for the traditionally feminine domain.
Perhaps the opportunity for South African fiction to be different is not lost forever, but merely deferred. As decolonisation flexes its muscles, the literary establishment may start to regard books by women differently. Maybe a book by a Muslim woman set in a Muslim community will cease to be niche Muslim literature and become merely literature.
In her keynote this morning, the writer Lesley Lokko talked about how black writers are continually having to perform their blackness for a white audience.
There are encouraging signs in recent South African fiction that this is changing. Authors like Carol Mohale Mashigo and Panashe Chigumadzi are not looking over their shoulders at any implied white audience. They are producing books that defy easy genre classification. Thanks to these pioneering young writers, South Africa is well positioned to take the lead as a country in which writing by women ceases to be ‘women’s writing’ and becomes merely writing.
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My fifth novel SPIRE is published by Clockwork Books.
Click here to buy it on Kindle. The trade paperback will be available in May 2017.