Ashraf Johaardien: A brief meditation on uniqueness and talent.

The world only spins forward.

Prior Walter says it at the end of “Angels in America”. Tony Kushner put it there long before Isaac Butler and Dan Kois borrowed it for the title of their book. Good lines get around. Eventually someone publishes them.

Spinning forward doesn’t necessarily equate with progress. A washing machine spins forward. So does a dog chasing its tail. Both can be quite busy without getting anywhere. I’ve had entire careers like that.

I’m twelve years old, which means I have no business owning a credit card, but somehow I’m already a fully card-carrying Madonna fan.

My dad walks through the front door with the Argus tucked under his arm like he is carrying classified information. He calls my mom into the dining room, sits the two of us down, and opens straight to the Tonight section, the music pages.

And right there, printed in actual ink, is my review of True Blue.

For about five seconds I don’t even process that I’m published. I just sit there thinking oh great, what did I break, I’m in massive trouble. My dad is looking at me like I just got a matric exemption. The paper smells of ink and something metallic. I keep waiting for the part where they take it back.

Publishing, I thought, was a form of confession. You put something down you might otherwise have kept to yourself, and somebody says yes, keep that. Sometimes they even pay you. Not much, but enough to make the humiliation feel professional.

There were gatekeepers, of course. Editors. Publishers. People with ledgers and opinions about margins. You could spend years trying to get through a door, only to find it locked from the inside. Now the door has been replaced by a prompt box.

A kid in Benoni or Bangalore can type

Write me something powerful in the voice of Baldwin meets bell hooks, with a little RuPaul on the side.

And there it is. A whole righteous sermon, fully dressed and already knowing its own ending. Charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent, delivered without the inconvenience of having to possess any of them.

I’m not angry about it. I’m not standing in the garden shaking my fist at the cloud. I’m in the lounge at midday, in the mustard leather Italian egg chair beside the window that looks onto the garden, reading “Angels in America” again. Instead of opening my manuscripts folder.

It’s been a while since I’ve let a play out. I wrote two last year, “Happily Ever After” and “War Stories”. I’ve written two this year, “Provenance” and “Kairos”. All four are waiting for the wings. The craft has come by osmosis. Reading plays, watching plays, years of torchlight at the back of the house until it rubbed off. Or maybe I just haven’t had the nerve to send them anywhere that matters.

I have tea. Actual tea. It’s going cold while I contemplate the future of human creativity, which is a very serious activity and should not be interrupted by snacks.

Hey Fubu, write a love letter that doesn’t sound desperate but has a haiku in it.

Done.

Even your desperation can now be outsourced, haiku included. Progress.

AI can write. It can spell-check the soul, although I wouldn’t let it near the plumbing. It can even astonish you on a Tuesday afternoon, which is more than some writers manage, including me.

But it doesn’t ache.

It doesn’t know what it is to be almost published. Too queer. Too coloured. Too complicated. It doesn’t know the particular humiliation of being rejected by someone who has clearly not read the work, or the more advanced humiliation of being accepted by someone who has.

I carry the tea to the kitchen. The laptop is on the island and the sun is coming through the window. The jar of Haribo sugared apricot jellies is beside it. It belongs in the snacks cupboard. It lives next to me whenever I’m in the kitchen, like a very sticky familiar.

I press F5. One hand on the keyboard. The other in the jar.

The little circular arrow turns into an X and starts spinning. Everything freezes. The page goes white.

Slowly the folders return, then the messages, one by one. The bold ones are still bold. Sometimes there is a new one sitting right at the top, like a small threat or a small hope, it is hard to tell which.

A fellowship application for “Provenance” is out there somewhere. I’m checking that nothing has bounced.

Then the spinning stops and it looks exactly the same as before. Of course it does.

For me, the pleasure has always been in the mess. The T.S. Eliot allusion sitting next to a bit of RuPaul. The question you’re still too frightened to put on the page, let alone on a stage in front of people who have paid for tickets and are now looking at their watches with the particular intensity of people who paid for tickets.

That is where the work begins. Not with a revelation. Sometimes with a bad sentence. Sometimes with a footnote that has somehow become longer than the thing it was meant to explain. Sometimes with a contradiction you can’t resolve because you are the contradiction, and the contradiction would like another jelly.

AI can’t insist that something matters. It can’t tell you why a first love, or any memory like it, has stayed with you for fifty-two years, or why that particular sentence still makes you angry. It doesn’t have to live with what it says. A considerable advantage, really. I would like that advantage for myself.

So publish. Post. Prompt the robots. Let them write your love letters, your resignation letters and your explanations for why you haven’t replied to a WhatsApp. Let them write your artist statement. Nobody was enjoying that.

Just don’t confuse the machinery with the source.

Charisma. No nerve. On a good day I can manage the first. The second is still mostly theoretical. The jellies, however, are real.

The world only spins forward. Sometimes in circles. Sometimes towards something. Sometimes so fast that you forget where north is.

I pick up the mug.

The rooibos has gone cold.

I drink it anyway.

Image/ Illustration by M\e.

Ashraf Johaardien is a South African writer\artist working across literary, dramatic and visual forms.

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e.
http://www.ashrafjohaardien.com

Disclaimer: Artslink.co.za encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views published do not necessarily represent the views of Artslink.co.za.