Sven Christian (SC): To begin, I’d first like to find out what attracted each of you to the written word, and how your understandings of the written word and art shape your understanding of the world?

Nick Mulgrew (NM): I’ve been writing semi-seriously for about ten years now. My interaction with the publishing industry — in terms of co-founding the magazine Prufrock, and a poetry press, uHlanga — has been a direct response to the material conditions of the publishing industry in South Africa. In my view, these conditions have remained sufficiently unchanged — or insufficiently changed — since the end of apartheid, or former apartheid.

Like many things in the country, the publishing industry, in the mainstream sense, essentially fails the majority; in terms of content and accessibility, both financial and physical. Growing up in Durban I came from a very do-it-yourself culture. We used to play music whichever way we could because there wasn’t really much of a live music or performance culture that we could plug into. We had to try and create our own. When I entered into the publishing industry — into writing as art — I had to try and create or contribute some sort of infrastructure to allow writers to flourish. That really informs much of my publishing practice.

As far as the writing practice goes, that’s more of a thematic reaction against society in Southern Africa. But publishing in particular is a direct response against the way that the literary industry currently operates in the country.

SC: As a way of claiming agency and finding a space for the type of content you want to see?

NM: Exactly. And also the kind of books that we want to see, because books as a technology are centuries old. They have been refined and refined over generations, both of book-makers and of the individual components — the type-setters, the graphic design, the way in which books can now be mass-produced digitally, in small runs and large runs… The book as an object has so much potential for both social change and personal enjoyment in this country that isn’t really there yet.

SC: Palesa, were your motivations for starting Sematsatsa Library much the same?

Palesa Motsumi (PM): I agree with Nick. I’m not a publisher, but I admire their work — they have the time to read our scrappy scripts. I got into writing because I read books. I was attracted to certain characters, certain realities. I must also confess that I get a sense of being myself when writing. It’s not just for other people but also for my own enjoyment; trying to get into my own psychological and emotional well-being. It’s a very therapeutic exercise. Wanting to make that writing part of somebody else’s reality is something that I am still grappling with and nervous about.

Most of the time it relates to how I was brought up. It’s mostly in terms of the context of ‘then’, after 1994. Our democracy played a role in people wanting to know more. I was brought up in a very interracial environment, with white kids, black kids... I was part of that group of young people who wanted to know their history, their past. That shaped how I look at the world, but more and more I’m drawn to the library as a space for creative imagination.

SC: When I was doing research for this panel I came across a paper by Jean-Paul Sartre called “Why Write?,” win which he writes that “if we ourselves produce the rules of production, we measure the criteria, and if our creative drive comes from the very depths of our heart, then we never find anything but ourselves in our work. It is we who have invented the laws by which we judge it. It is our history, our love, our gaiety that we recognise in it. Even if we should regard it without touching it any further, we never receive from it that gaiety or love. We put them into it. The results which we have obtained on canvas or paper never seem to us objective. We are too familiar with the processes of which they are the effects.” Does such a statement ring true for you? Do you feel the need to create a space that is subject only to your own criteria?

Mirene Arsanios [MA]: Writing comes from a place of necessity, right? The work of the writer is to find a language to express a certain voice, vision of the world, context… Usually there’s this necessity, and often it requires a familiarity of voice, to create your own criteria, your own position in the world and in your own practice. That is the task of the writer, but it can take a lifetime just to reach that. I feel that language is something we create collectively. Languages carry so much within them. They don’t belong to us. Nothing belongs to us, ultimately, but I feel like determining your own criteria could mean finding a position within language that allows us to express the things we want to express in a certain way that speaks to the present we’re in. This all sounds abstract, but I don’t think that criteria can ever be individual. It’s more about choosing the criteria that you want to be read, rather than inventing your own. You establish the rules of your own game, so to speak, rather than inventing completely new rules. We’re never completely alone so we’re always in conversation with other people — history, traditions, etc.

With Makhzin I think that more or less the same things apply. Criteria is established. I think there needs to be some necessity or urgency at the start, and probably a frustration with existing systems. From there, you respond to what is failing you, and what you think is lacking. With Makhzin we thought, “Ok, we need a literary platform that can speak to various readerships. We also need to make work available in a region that is extremely fragmented.” I don’t think there was any such platform. I think it’s more a case of, what is needed right now, in this moment, and how we could connect ourselves to previous examples of literary magazines that have done work that we find interesting. For Makzhin we had done our research on historical magazines that were published in Lebanon in the 60s and 70s, and positioned ourselves in relation to this history. We didn't want to come out of a vacuum. We wanted to be in conversation with previous historical examples of similar endeavours, but with new means and new urgencies.

NM: I agree with that wholeheartedly. There have been a lot of literary magazines in South Africa — a lot of which didn't make it past one issue — but we have this tendency to think that we are cut-off from, or in a bubble from history; that our particular historical moment is in some way fundamentally different to what has come before. With Prufrock, and then later with uHlanga, I didn't want to feel that me or my colleagues’ work was isolated; that it was its own creation. We had to look carefully at the history of magazines in South Africa. We might be tempted to think that all literary or art magazines in South Africa have been oppositional, or anti-apartheid, or revolutionary, but there was a literary and arts magazine called Lantern which was edited by Hendrik Verwoerd, that I think a lot of people of a particular age, or who had a particular interest in publications, read. It was disseminated every month and it was South Africa’s government-issued arts magazine. You can’t claim to be ahistorical. You cant say “We’re in a decolonial moment, so therefore everything goes out the window.” It’s more about trying to establish which criteria apply best to you, which criteria apply to the project, whether it be physical, philosophical, or political.

PM: Mirene touched on two things that I am very interested in at the moment, and that is, how do I position myself and my voice? The work that I do requires one to actively pay attention to what is happening in our writing, particularly in our media. Where has the argument shifted? Where did it begin? How has South African writing changed from being about post-apartheid South Africa to being about the individual, their views, their opinions, their observations?

The second part that Mirene and Nick touched on is the archive. How do we see ourselves in comparison to the archive? What is the archive to us? Is it a person? A room full of books? Is it a room full of documents with dates, times, people, and places? How do we get into that space and discuss that, and talk about it using the tools that we have today?

SC: Our last discussion with Pages centred on the archive and whether we can rely on it as a historical premise. One thing that Babak Afrassiabi said was that today, humans have almost become redundant to the archive. Platforms like Facebook exist as active archives, but whenever content is uploaded onto the internet it’s often copy-pasted, reproduced, and disappears almost as quickly as it appears, under the weight of new material…

PM: With social media we’re not actively consuming any content — we just scroll through. The argument of whether the book is dying…

SC: Mirene, with Makhzin, you’ve made a point about putting a lot of your content online. Was this simply to make it accessible to a wider audience?

MA: Yes, all of our content is accessible online. We started as an online magazine. We print a few copies, for various reasons. One is financial. It’s pointless to print a magazine if you can’t distribute it, so we decided to go online. We want our content to be accessible and free. It doesn’t mean that if your content is online that you will have more readers. We’re still trying to build a readership — both digitally but also one that connects to the various locations we’re engaged with, like Lebanon and New York, where I am now. We’re trying to build up an audience but it’s slow.

NM: We kind of have the opposite with Prufrock. We decided not to put any content online, zero. You can have all of these discussions about whether the online space is actually accessible. A lot of people still use very simple phones that don’t have particularly advanced browsers, and there’s no real easy way to get people to visit your online magazine if your only tool of doing so is social media or something that is going to cost a lot of money to access. We’ve had to rely on traditional and non-traditional modes of physical distribution, using the book for what it is, which is portable information. A phone is portable information, but a book is too.

To me a book is the more accessible format in this country and at this time. And I say this as someone who consumes all of their news online. The big problem is physical distribution, which really isn't working. There are two main book distributors in South Africa. Book stores ask for 40% off on the RRP, so 40% of our RRP goes straight to the bookstore, then 10 to 15% goes to the salesperson, not the person working at the bookstore but the middleman. Then another 10 to 20% goes to the distributor. You’re left with around 40%, and distributors will only distribute the books to bookstores, which of course are not present in places outside of cities and wealthy suburbs.

Books need to be available everywhere. They need to be in supermarkets, in clothing stores; everywhere that newspapers are, essentially. And you can buy beer everywhere. You can get beer which has a much lower cost margin, is way heavier, and is actually pretty cumbersome — you can get that anywhere in the country. I mean, the ICC sub-contracted South African Breweries (SAB) to get election materials in 1994 out to far flung places. We need something robust like that. There’s a tendency in our country to think that we are closer in our technology, in our thinking, to places like the U.S. and the U.K. than we are to Zimbabwe or Mozambique. I think it’s because of this imperialist attitude, and this media imperialist attitude. As such we want to take distribution models and ways of being which are just not suited to our country, and to our readers, for want of a better word.

PM: I’m really passionate about how we distribute books and material related to storytelling. The more we shift away from the idea of distributing to a massive amount of people, we also shift away from the fundamental issues surrounding language; how to distribute books, pamphlets, and art magazines in different languages? At the end of the day, Nick, you’ve touched on a point that really is important, which is of financial bearing. As a publisher, we let the bigger mass know that these are issues that we deal with on a daily basis.