Political fight was backdrop for my story

May 7 2010 by The Journal

Michael Cawood Green is a reader in creative writing at Northumbria University and the recent winner of a prestigious literary prize.

I WAS born and have lived much of my life in South Africa. My early creative work was mainly in the writing and performing of songs, the urgency of the anti-apartheid years seeming to demand the immediacy of this form of creativity.

The songs drew more attention from the security police than any wider audience, and led to the one album I recorded being restricted from airplay.

I continued to perform songs both personal and political as a student and young lecturer in South Africa and during periods of study in the United States and Britain.

My first major piece of written work started out as a song, but developed into a verse novel, Sinking, a kind of postmodern allegory in which the actual story of an Afrikaans mining family disappearing into a massive sinkhole echoed both the end of a political era and, more obliquely, an unrelated sense of personal loss.

The novel intended as a quick follow-up to this work ended up taking 11 years to write.

For the Sake of Silence required a massive amount of research for its reconstruction of the largely lost history of a group of Trappist monks who came to South Africa in the 1880s.

The Trappist Order is a strictly contemplative one, bound to cloistered silence and thus specifically forbidden missionary activity.

The colonial context became too much of a temptation in this regard, and drew this group into founding Mariannhill Monastery and a chain of mission stations that were extraordinarily successful, despite an often fraught relationship with both settler and indigenous groups in the region.

The speaking and writing necessary for missionary work also led to their being expelled from the Trappist Order and For the Sake of Silence traces the hidden, often suppressed storm that broke out as the silent life of the monks drifted inexorably into the world of words.

Despite its fictional status, the novel is perhaps the most complete history ever written of this period of Mariannhill, a period in which faith, contemplation and grace became intimately intermingled with demonic possession, madness and murder.

The story became, for me, one that caught the tension between the ethics of speaking and the various forms of silence and silencing rife in both the old and the new South Africa.

It led me to rethink my own position in the country, and informed my decision to leave my post as a professor of English and head of the School of Literary Studies, Media, and Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and come to Northumbria University as reader in creative writing.

For the Sake of Silence has just won one of the most prestigious South African literary awards, the Olive Schreiner Prize, given by the English Academy of Southern Africa.

Olive Schreiner’s most famous novel is The Story of an African Farm (1883), which is considered a founding text of South African fiction. Schreiner, a radical liberal and pacifist, opposed racism and struggled for women’s rights, and saw literature as deeply engaged in broader social issues.

For this reason I am particularly honoured to have won this prize, and hope that the association with Schreiner’s name will be a reminder that, in its own small way, For the Sake of Silence participates in the intimate relation of fiction with history, past and present.

Although I will return to South Africa to participate in community development projects in the remote settings in which much of the action of For the Sake of Silence plays out, I look forward to carrying this commitment over into the North East region.