African pulp fiction

WORDS Nadine Theron

What is pulp fiction really, other than a cult movie by Quentin Tarantino? Nadine Theron speaks to two South African proponents on the lunatic fringe of African literature, who are fresh from a big installation at Milan Design Week. 

“I think it’s great that we are having this discussion in a church – it seems somewhat confessional,” Jenna Bass jokes. She is framed like a saint in a Byzantine painting, seated in front of the pulpit at the modest Congregational Church of Franschhoek.

Jenna and Hannes Bernard are the founders of Jungle Jim, an African Pulp Fiction magazine under discussion by literary critics and intellectuals at the culturally elite Franschhoek Literary Festival (FLF). Recently they presented the project at the Milan Design Week, including massive window installations at the centrally located La Rinascente department store (read more here).

The discussion in Franschhoek is called “Pulp Fiction”, and the programme invites one to “enter the exciting world of African graphic novels.” The panel also includes enthusiasts like Katie Reid, a doctoral student from the UK, Stacy Hardy of Chimurenga, and Ashraf Jamal, who teaches Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University. 

Art writer Sean O’Toole, moderator of the panel and a self-declared pulp fiction fanatic, poses the first and most logical question to the panel of experts: What exactly is “pulp fiction”? 

Katie, who literally stumbled across a small stack of Jungle Jim tucked away in a corner of the Book Lounge, offers her view: “It’s an aesthetic. It’s in the paper, the design and feel, and the slightly lurid appearance of the publications. It’s also in the speed of it; the short lifespan of cheaply printed books. It’s there and then it’s gone. Like dynamite.”

Pulp, Katie maintains, is like your trashy cousin: “It’s the cousin you want to hang out with at a wedding; it’s dangerous and fun.”

Jenna refrains from much of the heady intellectual banter that characterises the panel discussion, but a few days prior to FLF I spent some time with her and Hannes to tease out their ideas on this exciting sub-genre of African literature.

At the end of 2010, the duo were two struggling Cape Town creatives sharing a collective office space in Roeland Street. Jenna was making independent films, while Hannes had just quit his job as a senior graphic designer at The President. Both were struggling to make ends meet and keeping their boats afloat with difficult commercial clients. Jenna also didn’t know who would publish the kind of short stories she wrote in her spare time. With Hannes’s design skills and Jenna’s passion for literature and story-telling, they had the idea to start a magazine (“Any magazine!”) that could combine their passions and give them a creative escape away from frustrating client work.

“We wanted to gain access to contemporary African fiction and tune into a continental identity through a common language,” Jenna explains, with lively gesticulations. Hannes continues via Skype from The Netherlands: “We wanted to make reading pop again,”

“Genre writing is widely read and not culture-specific,” Bass tells me. “The Spaghetti-Western, for example, has been adapted incredibly well in Russia. Who is to say that Americans have exclusivity on certain kinds of stories? African writers feel pressured to write about serious social issues. But just because you’re African, why can’t you write a horror or a Western or a romance? When these genres are placed in Africa you get an interesting mix. Genres like the Western are worn out in America but we have so much to bring to it. The most exciting part is bringing African context into genre and grappling with that.”

But it’s not just about taking a genre and simply setting the story in Africa. A lot of South African crime writing is generic, Jenna thinks. She cites local examples of great genre-fiction as Lauren Beukes, S.L. Gray and S.A. Partridge. South Africa surprisingly also has a long tradition of non-English detective stories in Zulu, and the Afrikaans foto-boekies from before the Nineties are definitely pop-literature.

“We idealise the golden age of pulp; when people used to wait outside cafés at the end of each week for the next editions of their favourite serials. When it was ‘cool’ to buy fiction. We want to show that reading is a valid way of entertaining yourself cheaply; it’s not just for the well-educated. Pulp is cheap and accessible, and just because it’s popular does not make it bad writing.”

“We look at African Pulp as taking back the idea of Africa as a crazy place held by Europeans and Americans,” Jenna continues. “We want to show them that we can speak the genre language and show something true about our continent in it.” 

Perhaps this is the reason why Jungle Jim is now kept in the libraries of international institutions like Yale in the US and Leiden in the Netherlands.

Hannes has found that people overseas are incredibly excited about it. He saw this when speaking at a conference in Buenos Aires to which he took along a few copies of Jungle Jim; the excitement it generated amongst conference attendants surprised him.

The “pulp” element not only embodies the physical aesthetic of genre fiction, but is also just practical from a design and distribution point of view. 

“The tactile aspect of pulp made it possible for us to challenge the idea that printed products are losing value,” Hannes adds. “We think printing the magazine as opposed to an online magazine or blog adds value to it.”

“It’s mass, cheaply produced literature accessible to a working class audience. It’s popular literature,” Jenna reiterates to the audience in Franschhoek.

Ashraf Jamal, an entertaining yet intimidating presence, takes her up on this aspect: “If you say it’s mass-produced, how many copies of Jungle Jim do you publish per issue?”

“200,” Bass blushes into her microphone.

Earlier I asked Bass how successful Jungle Jim actually is. She said that they’re relieved to be selling enough copies to be able to continue, proud to be working on Issue 22 already now. The project is completely self-funded from Jenna and Hannes’s own pockets, and the income from each issue funds the publishing of the next one.

Hannes explains that their design strategy was tied to their economic strategy. They wanted to be able to publish the magazine twice a month and design was based on the amount of money they could both afford to lose every month. They would design the layout of the printed product so that one A3 page could be printed in colour while the rest of the pages were black and white A4’s. The distinctive red and blue became the trademark of Jungle Jim but was a creative choice dictated by frugality. 

While Bernard is completing his Masters in Design at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, Jenna is writing screenplays, directing and doing pre-production for a feature film she is producing. Jungle Jim is still just a side project for both. The team consists of a managing editor, a proofreader and even an intern from The States. “You know you’ve made it when you’ve got an American intern,” Bass chuckles. 

Their contributors are internet-finds sniffed out by Jenna, who curates each issue’s contents. She initially scoured sites like African Storytime and Something Wicked to source writers across Africa. “I now feel like I have friends all over Africa!” she laughs. 

“It has to be of a high standard, taking English to a different place,” she says in reference to their quality control. “It’s got to be interesting and new. We don’t really appreciate the most basic interpretation of a genre. We look for stuff where we feel we’re the only people who would publish it. We like writers who try to shake things up, who like to push the envelope.”

Back in the Franschhoek church, Ashraf remarks: “Pulp is about reading for pleasure and – let’s face it – South African writing is not blissful, not pleasurable and very unsexy. Our history has been shaped out of misery and it is very difficult to find pleasure in South Africa. We need to kill the resistance narrative. What we do not need is a breath of fresh air. What we do need is a putrid stench from a back alley.”

An elderly gentleman in the front row raises his hand: “For the past 52 years, I have been reading for pleasure. And what I have been reading is science fiction. I just cannot read Nadine Gordimer.”

It seems like Jungle Jim’s audience might potentially be wider than first envisioned.

Originally published on mblife.co.za.