‘The WHITES ONLY Bench’ by Ivan Vladislavić

A playful, clever, and witty writer, Vladislavić’s writing of the 1980s and 1990s closely chronicles the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa, and plays close attention to the country’s urban spaces. The WHITES ONLY Bench (his capitals) comes from a collection whose original title is particularly telling: Propaganda by Monuments.

Set in a museum, we learn through the wittily-conveyed horror of some of the staff that the example of the titular bench of which they had been so initially proud – featuring so prominently in a press photograph (captured, of course, in black and white) – is a fake, created in their own workshop as ‘the real thing’ had proved so hard to find.

What follows is a satire of bureaucracy and of urges to be ‘correct’ and ‘authentic’, a reminder that cities are palimpsests where histories are continually overwritten, and an exploration of the horribly complicated nature of ‘truth’. Under the wit, there is true horror: as well as the day-to-day cruelties of the now defeated apartheid, the story also takes in the victims of the Soweto Riots. The objects that remind us of the past have not entirely lost their potency, even if their meanings have grown more complex. Not as playful with form as some of Vladislavić’s work, the story is perhaps an accessible entry point for those unfamiliar with his writing (they should purchase The Restless Supermarket immediately), and one that may delight lovers of Kafka and Terry Gilliam in equal measure.

Published in Propaganda by Monuments, D Philip, 1996

‘Propaganda by Monuments’ by Ivan Vladislavic

In ‘Propaganda by Monuments’, Vladislavic bring into focus a similar dilemma, but in the context of apartheid. Told from two points of view, the story contemplates the fate of discarded statues: what would happen if they were exported to another country, and how it would affect the identity of the sender and recipient. In contrast to the parochial setting of the other stories, Vladislavic’s is an international drama between South Africa and Russia. In Pretoria, one of the protagonists, Khumalo, has a brainwave when he reads a newspaper advertisement: Moscow City Council is giving away ‘surplus’ statues of Lenin. Khumalo reflects that apartheid has ended and his café now needs “a change of clothes”. He writes to Moscow asking if he could be gifted, or purchase, a “spare statue” for his renamed “V.I. Lenin Bar and Grill”. In Moscow, Grekov, a bored translator in the Administration of Everyday Services, receives the letter and sets out looking for the unwanted statues, in the “scrap heap… of history”. He tries but fails to imagine what will take the place of Lenin’s statues in the squares, and reflects “how soon people become bored with the making and unmaking of history”. This casual observation made flippantly by Grekov is in fact a profound realisation: the reader recognises that ordinary citizens are disinterested in history because it makes them feel nervous, insecure and irrelevant. When Khumalo receives Grekov’s response, he drives through a white neighbourhood, and stops to examine the monument of J.G. Strijdom, an Afrikaaner, and proponent of apartheid. Khumalo sees the sun shining through the statue’s “finely veined bronze ears”, and understands “how, but not necessarily why, the impossible came to pass”. Khumalo has comprehended less than he realises, and a broader and deeper understanding of historical consequences is the reader’s alone.

Published in Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories, David Phillip, 1996

‘A Labour of Moles’ by Ivan Vladislavić

A business of ferrets, a skulk of foxes, a drudgery of lexicographers: everybody loves an evocative collective noun. It was for this most chirpheaded of reasons that I clocked this slim, red-spined Sylph Edition in a secondhand bookshop. Vladislavić was not a name I recognized and it was purely because of the pamphlet’s pleasing title, the fact its pages had a beautiful weight to them and the wonderful illustrations — watercolour splashes across technical illustrations from the Duden Bildwörterbuch‘ pictorial dictionary, printed on tracing paper — that my idle curiosity became a more committed browsing. By the end of the first paragraph, my jaw was on the floor.

A strange narrator explores the strange limits of a strange new world: indexed language itself. This short story has all the charge of a murder mystery, the playful wince and winch of Carrollian rabbitholes and the whirl of a prose-poem. ‘A Labour of Moles’ changed my relationship to the alphabet.

Cahier Series #17, published by University of Chicago Press through Sylph Editions with the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris in 2012