Chris van Wyk’s legacy was extraordinary and the memory of this engaging writer, friend, comrade, teacher and mentor will be deeply cherished, writes Maureen Isaacson.
Chris van Wyk, who died last Saturday after a battle with pancreatic cancer, will be remembered as a poet, novelist, translator, editor, memoirist and, above all, a storyteller of great impact and verve.
His 2004 memoir Shirley, Goodness and Mercy was a runaway success, selling over 25 000 copies and translated into Afrikaans; it was followed by Eggs to Lay Chickens to Hatch (2010), not a sequel but a book that “filled in the missing bits”. His 2006 children’s book, Ouma Ruby’s Secret sold over 50 000 copies and his children’s version of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (2009) sold 55 000 copies.
His 1996 debut novel, The Year of the Tapeworm, attempted to describe the impact of apartheid on ordinary people; he told the story the other way around. Achmat Dangor, reviewing the book in the Sunday Independent said the novel had been a long time coming. Van Wyk was on a roll when I interviewed him over tea and “jam squares”, baked by his wife Kathy, at Number 1 Arno Street, Riverlea, where they lived with their sons Kevin and Karl at the time.
Van Wyk was derisive of the top-down “political vantage point” he said many South African novelists adopted as their starting point. “People come home from work and say, ‘I need a holiday’, they don’t come home and say, ‘I want to put on a Free Mandela T-shirt’.”
His impatience with the political correctness straitjacket hardly meant that the rage that fired his activism in the United Democratic Front had subsided. Certainly, it fuelled the febrile imaginings in his debut novel, with its quirky twists, its flirtation with magical realism and its subversion of the traditional presentation of apartheid’s final paroxysms. “I don’t want to know what Cyril Ramaphosa said to the workers, I want to know what they said to him,” he said.
For full tribute by Maureen Isaacson see Mail & Guardian
