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Intertextuality and Memory in Yizo Yizo

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Intertextuality and Memory in Yizo Yizo CONTENTS PAGE Title Page i Abstract ii Declaration iv Dedication v Acknowledgements vi Chapter 1 Intertextuality: getting to the G-spot of African popular culture 1 Chapter 2 Towards the producerly text 47 Chapter 3 The fidelities and infidelities of memory within a hierarchy of violences 87 Chapter 4 A dialogue of violence/s in red and green, or black and white 134 Chapter 5 Transitional twins, violent archetypes and action heroes 200 Chapter 6 You ve got a fast car, I want a ticket to get out of here : consumption, lifestyle violence, youth and sugar daddies 230 Chapter 7 Risking the city (in yellow) 264 Chapter 8 Audiences have their say 287 viii Chapter 9 Conclusions 323 Bibliography 344 Appendix 1 367 ix INTERTEXTUALITY AND MEMORY IN YIZO YIZO FB Andersson A PhD thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, 2004. i ABSTRACT Intertextuality is used to engage with the ‘already said’, which according to Umberto Eco is the hallmark of postmodernism. African popular culture in 2005 is frequently created through a dialogue between multiple partners. It is heteroglossic in expression, is capable of withstanding multifocal scrutiny and is fluent in the conventions of the form it chooses. It expresses itself by allusion to the ‘already said’ and through inclusion of increasingly sophisticated popular audiences. Intertextuality is generally used as a smart tool to express and comment upon hidden narratives relating to, for example, African identities, class relations, corruption and the taboo: abuse, incest, Aids, archaic traditional law practices as well as the not-so-hidden topics of necropower, global capitalism and so on. This study looks at the various uses of intertextuality, including the way it is used as a mechanism to access political memory, in the South African youth TV drama Yizo Yizo. It is argued that a text must be read in relation to the dynamic and interaction between the producer of the text, the text and the audiences of the text. To understand what producers bring to the text, one must understand the universe of the producers. In trying to understand why Yizo Yizo appears to depict “violence”, one needs to understand the experiences and ideologies of the producers in the physical space known as South Africa and reproduced as memory in the chronotope occupied by Yizo Yizo. In analysing the term “violence”, it becomes clear the word is inadequate if it is used in the singular only. What is explored here is rather, a hierarchy of violences. Violence is embedded in the very construct of the rainbow nation and returned as the political memory of violence in representation. The pecking order of these violences is identified as political violence, the relations of abuse, sexual violence, violence silence, dialogic violence, violence towards the self, traumatic violence revisited, lifestyle violence, criminal violence and retributive and restorative violence. Yizo Yizo works with the consequences of the apartheid ii past in the present and forces one male character after another to take a stand against the continuing violences of their present. Two characters (Papa Action and Chester) become the archetypes of criminal violence. Another two (Thulani and Gunman) answer reactionary and victimising and criminal violence with violence intended to free those it oppresses. But the proof of the pudding is in the audience tasting. We know from Henry Jenkins that fans rewrite texts in ten different ways—by recontextualisation, expanding the series timeline, refocalisation, moral realignment, genre shifting, cross overs, character dislocation, personalisation, emotional intensification and eroticisation. Using comments by fans, focus group results and media reports, the research looks at the way these rewrites take place in relation to Yizo Yizo. Ultimately it is suggested that the producers of this particular text are able to reach their audiences because they are also fans of movie and TV and of African popular culture. Moreover, they share a country in which a multitude of violences are experienced but invisible, hence the need for the development of a language and aesthetic of violence. iii DECLARATION I declare that this PhD is my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any other degree or examination at any other university. _________________________ (Name of Candidate) _________day of______, 2004 iv For Camilo Zain Saloojee Since we leave school at the same time, my hope is you will read this one day and enjoy it. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Teboho Mahlatsi, Desiree Markgraaff and Angus Gibson for allowing me access not just to their work but to their thoughts. They are brave. This research was made possible by the National Research Foundation (NRF), which renewed a prestige scholarship every year of my full-time study. I am deeply grateful the NRF took my proposal to unpack a TV drama seriously and hope my study justifies their financial investment. I also thank the Harold and Doris Tothill Fund for bestowing and renewing a scholarship, and the University of the Witwatersrand, for the Merit Award. My greatest debt is to my supervisor, Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson, who has guided me through both my MA and my PhD, and to Professor Isabel Hofmeyr, who has mentored me as part of her group of audience watchers over the past six years. These two individuals have been inspirational in setting standards, encouraging me to participate in conferences and workshops, and in providing an intellectual home for me within the department of African Literature. Professor Peterson, in particular, has helped to focus my interest from a general fascination with popular culture to a specific engagement with the reproduction of political memory within African texts. Thanks too to Professors James Ogude and Tawana Kupe for their interest in my research and Professor N. Chabani Manganyi, of the University of Pretoria, for his encouragement of it. Merle Govind, the administrator in African Literature, and Pam Kissane, now retired but previously the administrator of the NRF at the University of the Witwatersrand, have helped me many times over the years. I am grateful to them both for their efficiency and kindness. vi Thank you, Camilo Zain Saloojee, for being patient, humorous and accepting. It cannot have been easy to be raised by a parent permanently seated behind a computer, glued to a TV screen or reading a book. Many thanks too to my neighbour Micheline Philippides for being the unpaid taxi driver for Milo when my head was deep in text. Finally, I wish to thank the author Troy Blacklaws, who is based in Germany, for providing me with extraordinary support and insight via email during the seven- month period in which I was writing. The discussion with Troy began with an attempt to interview him online about his novel Karoo Boy. It evolved into an intense and rich exchange about writers, the unconscious and ethics. In the course of this dialogue, Troy read some of my research, commented on it and corrected my spelling and grammatical errors in one chapter. The exchanges with Troy Blacklaws have convinced me that a writer’s ideology, however disguised, creates a link by content to critical audiences; while the form of the work determines whether it will be embraced by popular audiences. During the period we were writing Troy turned down a lucrative international film offer on his novel in favour of a modest offer by a South African producer and Zimbabwean film director. His choice hinged around three major issues. He was sure a Southern African would understand Eastern Cape light and apartheid-divided space better than a visitor but also, he liked the idea of risking his project with a young black film director passionate about making his first feature rather than handing it to a seasoned British director. Speaking to Troy helped me to understand the instinctive and hard choices similarly made by the Yizo Yizo producers in the name of African audiences. Producers understand fan audiences because they are fans themselves of the emerging popular culture they help to define. They appear to experience the world as producers and as fans. vii Chapter 1 Intertextuality: getting to the G-spot of African popular culture1 Any text that has slept with another text…has necessarily slept with all the texts the other text has slept with (Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, 2000)2. Yizo Yizo: the backstory The case study in this research is the award-winning3 Yizo Yizo drama series flighted on SABC1 between 1999 and 2004. The three-season series includes Yizo Yizo 1 (13x24-minute episodes shown for the first time between 3 February and 28 April 1999), Yizo Yizo 2 (13x48-minute episodes shown between 20 February and 15 May 2001), and Yizo Yizo 3 (13x48-minute episodes shown between 8 April and 1 July 2004). This programme, which ran over three seasons from 1999-2004, was groundbreaking in its use of African languages, its claiming of new, ‘cool’ black youth images which have subsequently informed ‘the look’ of a spate of other TV youth dramas and the glamour industries, its intervention in terms of local music, its ability to make links between the apartheid past and the post-apartheid present and its unprecedented reception by youth audiences. 1 The term 'intertextuality' was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1967 in her work on Mikhail Bakhtin and heteroglossia. The researcher supports Anker Gemzøe's explanation (translated online by Agger, 2000, but written by Gemzøe 1997:36) that intertextuality involves replacing a single narrative with a textual mosaic, with its own reference systems, to engage other texts.
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