Soul and Guts: Lauren Beukes talks Johannesburg in Brussels

[franceslievens]

A country has a soul. It's the thing you advertise in the pretty brochures to attract tourists. Bruges could be the soul of Belgium, or maybe the Belgian soul consists of world famous oil paintings that in fact predate the nation state. South Africa advertises its landscapes, it's wilderness. That's the soul of the country.
But for native South African author Lauren Beukes the soul isn't interesting. She counters this romantic notion with a search for the "guts" of South Africa, which she finds in the city of Johannesburg. The guts are where the people live. They make up the living material of a country.
In a gripping talk Beukes gave at Recyclart* on Wednesday, she explored her own vision of Johannesburg. She meandered through history that was written, oral history and her own experience of growing up in South Africa under apartheid.
Beukes took her audience to Hillbrow, a vibrant, cosmopolitan part of Johannesburg. The home of the first identifiable gay and lesbian scene (says Wikipedia). But Hillbrow is also known for its poverty and crime. It sits at the heart of Beukes' novel Zoo City as the home of protagonist Zinzi December. Zoo City was Beukes' way of coping with xenophobe violence that rose up in South Africa. History started to repeat itself. Director Neill Blomkamp's short film Alive In Joburg (video link) uses the same themes. You see and hear people talking about the others, which one can assume are the aliens pictured in the short film, but in fact they are real life people talking about immigrants, not actors. The other person gets dehumanised as a simple "them versus us".
In her work Beukes tries to "find the individual stories and the humanity". She tries to sympathise with what is difficult to understand. In this light, her novels take on an extra layer of meaning: storytelling becomes an instrument of moral reimagining. The story carries a message about the current world we live in.
This way Lauren Beukes' talk carries a message as well: it's a story of Johannesburg beyond clichés of crime and segregation. Beukes says: "Johannesburg is indeed a city of pioneers", but their innovations are reconciled with traditional belief systems. People reinvent, reimagine the world they live in. The stories we tell shape our world.

As an afterthought: I had a nice chat with Lauren Beukes about teaching morality. At the heart of that subject is the will to understand others, humanise the other side of ethical questions and think beyond clichés. And of course we usually find these other voices in stories.

*Recyclart is an urban cultural project housed in an old train station in Brussels (Kapellekerk). They operate in several venues in Brussels and always try to pull down the borders between different art forms. On Wednesday the venue was the functioning train station Brussel Congres.

Comments

[nwhyte]

Darn! If I'd known that was happening I would have loved to go. Though I was out of town on Wednesday in any case. Where did you find out about it?

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

I follow Lauren Beukes on twitter where she announced she was coming to Belgium some months ago. Then my sister, who works for Agenda Magazine, got the information from Recyclart. Big Sis did an interview with her for Agenda: http://www.agendamagazine.be/en/blog/lauren-beukes-explores-dark-side.
You should pick up Agenda if you want to know what's happening in Brussels. ;-)

[nwhyte]

Thanks!