002 · Borders
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New studies of life writing that think of border crossings in a larger sense—not only between nations but between languages, genres, texts, and epitexts—have much to tell us about the intersections of self, society, storytelling, and the world.1
The initial question was whether a scholarly text could cross into the personal and still retain academic rigour. Whether that fluidity could say something about mixed ancestry. Nationality. Inheritance.
At first, I considered the languages and dialects I grew up with. Afrikaans. German. Cape Town slang. I abandoned that plan for the reader’s sake. The thought was to use footnotes as passage. Translation at the edge of the page.
The abandoned plan returned in PostScript. Twenty thousand words drawn from voice notes exchanged with an old friend from Cape Town. The same memories, told again in speech. Slang held in the text. Translation pushed into footnotes.
Jeez, bru, I remember all those stories, fucking hell.2
Cape Town speech entered the project intact.
Then the larger question.
Could a text move between voices and styles without collapse. Surreal dream sequences. Journal entries. Notes from the Barthes reading group. Rigorous academic prose. Theory. Philosophy. Sarcasm. Irony. Self-deprecation. Poetry. Banal description. Truth. Lies. Flash creative non-fiction. Micro creative non-fiction. Visual analysis.
The Barthes notes were supposed to become research material. Instead, the notes remained notes. The Preparation of the Novel3 was itself a record of preparation. My preparation with his preparation.
Could I write South Africa without saying too much. Travel without producing travel writing. Loss, pain, drugs. Without heaviness, yet without evasion.
Could the same text hold a catalogue of quotations. A personal study of Roland Barthes. Private research on Walter Benjamin. A manifesto for photo-sketching. An insistence on three recurring terms: the photo, the fragment, and drift / barre oblique.
The submitted text had an outside. PostScript. The longer travel cycle. tokyo! Tokyo!! TOKYO!!!. Voice notes. Correspondence. Drafts. Parts cut away so the work could appear to hold.
Could it all hold.
Philip Holden, ‘The Transnational, Global, and Planetary’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 32.2 (2017), 167–69 (p. 169).↩
Bru is South African slang for a male friend, similar to ‘bro’. The line comes from PostScript, an unpublished sequence assembled from transcribed voice notes in 2023.↩
Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980), trans. by Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).↩