I've just listened to a broadcast of a show in South Africa where I was one of five finalsit for a short story competition in SaFm (national radio) Express Yourself. I'm now inundated with emails and calls from friends who offer me their heartfelt regrets for not winning the competition. What I did not expect is how most of them interpret the whole thing as being another racial issue. I had thought it was just a literature thing. Most are saying I did not win because black people do not have access to the voting apparatus, and that most black people do not listen to SaFm anyway, at least not for literature shows. This baffled me, since from listening to phoning talk show programs in SaFm it is mostly black people who phone in. “That's for political discussion;” one of my friends put it thus.
For the record, I'm of the opinion that the story that took the prize, The embarrassment of Dead Grandmothers was a worthy winner. It carried itself lightly with fluid language, and certainly grammatical superior than the rest of us. It had humour also, albiet black humour that most black people, like myself, feel too perverse. Dead relatives are not trivial things in my African culture, but that is just cultural idiosyncrasies, besides the stories is fiction, or at least I'd hope.
I've created this blog for people who want to take the argument further to have a platform of interacting with each other. I would love to reproduce the letters I received from my friends here but cannot do so for now since they were written in confidence and thus I still need their permission to do so. Meantime the five stories can be viewed at www.safm.co.za for those who are interested. Read them and then perhaps we can discuss the issue further.
Keep up the faith,
Mpush
