A Sharp Stick
The Mail & Guardian JHB Literary Festival is taking place on 3, 4, and 5 September this year in an apparent attempt to resurrect the literary festivals of the 1980s. Those festivals of twenty years ago – I am told by those who remember them – were noteworthy for their almost total exclusion of women writers.
However, the world has moved on since then. One would certainly expect this testosterone-centric approach to have been confined to the history books, not so?
One would be sadly disappointed if one did. I had an informal flick through the final programme and discovered that of the thirty or so writers featured, precisely four are women. Of those four, one is from the Ivory Coast, and one is not actually a writer at all, but an artist. So, in case you’re keeping score, the M&G literary festival features exactly two South African women writers – Zukiswa Wanner and Margie Orford. There is also a (very) light sprinkling of female academics and journalists on the panels.
Both Margie and Zukiswa are excellent choices – being fine writers and experienced, eloquent panelists. They are, however, just two of the many talented female writers in South Africa.
I noted with pleasure that the spread of participants is quite culturally representative of our post-apartheid country. Is it greedy to wish that it could be gender-representative too? Or was it simply a case that, with the best will in the world, the Mail & Guardian could not scrape together any more women writers to make the cut? Somehow, I find this difficult to believe.
South African fiction is in an unprecedentedly vibrant and influential state, and women writers are responsible for at least fifty per cent of that impact. There really is no excuse for not including more of them in the festival line-up. The fact that women are so woefully under-represented has not gone unnoticed.
SAFM presenter Karabo Kgoleng remarked on Twitter today: “Mail & Guardian Johannesburg Literary Festival – where are the female voices?” Journalist Marianne Thamm commented on Facebook that the heavily masculine line-up looks “as bad as a comedy festival”. Writer and editor Helen Moffett suggested, also on Facebook, that the M&G needed poking with “a sharp stick” to draw their attention to the howling gender imbalance of their programme.
Consider this blog the requisite stick. I just hope it’s sharp enough.
