Ishtiyaq Shukri
EU Literary Award Address
Goethe Institute, Johannesburg
2nd February 2005

Ever since the shortlist for the European Union Literary Award was announced, people have been asking me:

“How do you feel?”

I expect that question will increase in frequency now that The Silent Minaret has been awarded the prize.

I feel many things. For a start, it feels strange that a novel that was written in secret, is now so fully in the public domain. In short, I feel the elation we all feel when we receive praise from those we respect. I have been reticent and anxious about this story for so long, so a literary prize like this is an enormous privilege. It is going to take a while to get used to.

But there is another feeling that burdens me, an overwhelming sense of sadness and despair, because, to be entirely honest, The Silent Minaret is not the kind of story I ever thought I’d write. There are parts of it I simply cannot read, and the rest feels to me as though the words were written by somebody else, not me, with these hands, with this pen.

Do you remember 24th April 1994? Are we allowed to remember dates other than a certain date in September anymore? On that day, as I stood in the dignified queues that were admired by so many, but emulated by so few, I thought:

“I want to write a fun, post-apartheid novel free of trauma and free of strife.”

How incredible it felt that that prefix could finally be attached to that noun.

But that was not how things turned out. On 7th October 2001—remember that date?—on 7th October 2001, I felt besieged once again, this time, by a far mightier force than the apparatus of the apartheid state. It became apparent to me that the main political themes of my generation would be apartheid and the infinite retribution of the endless “war on terror.”

That was when the decadent road journey I had been writing, despite my best efforts to keep it going, ground to a halt and mutated into The Silent Minaret. My plans for my frivolous post-apartheid story were seized upon, taken over, hijacked. I had a loaded pen pointed at my head. I had no option but to comply.

I forget who it was who said:

“Writers don’t choose their stories. Stories choose their writers.”

I used not to know what that meant. I do now, and however elated I may be that The Silent Minaret has received this recognition, part of me mourns for my amusing post-apartheid road journey. How funny it was. How it made me laugh. How, I’m sure, you would have laughed too.

And while I am happy that, after my travels I have returned home with a story for you, I am sad that instead of tummy-clenching laughs, what I have to offer you now instead is a story about yet more alienation, anger and loss, the very themes we all queued up to put away on 24th April 1994.

It makes me sad that there is a burning Bush that burns and burns, a burning Bush that burns without itself being consumed, a burning Bush that tore its way through the United Nations and the European Union, fuelled by its minions in the EU along its destructive path to Kabul and Baghdad, a burning Bush that burnt right through my laugh-a-page road story, as the EU country in which I study declared itself to be at war. When cities crack, do stories too, their scaffolding collapsing?

I don’t know when I’ll revisit my funny post-apartheid story—the earth remains too scorched and the treatment of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine has made me cynical of the promise of the post-prefix. “The past is eternally with us.”

While I am elated that The Silent Minaret has been awarded the inaugural European Union Literary Award, it is, at its heart, a novel that grew out of disillusionment at the treatment, which refugees—some of them fleeing Britain’s wars—face when they knock at EU borders seeking sanctuary. The stories, which my Afghan and Iraqi students tell would make you weep; access to Europe’s fortressed sanctuary is prefixed by the detention camp. And once inside, the EU is not equally accessible to all its residents. For my part, I have yet to pass through an EU border without interrogation.

I don’t know when I’ll write my carefree post-apartheid story, when twelve men are being detained illegally without trial by the British government under anti-terrorist legislation, the kind of legislation, which blighted South Africa for so many decades, legislation under which I too could be held because the law, recently forced into review, applies only to foreigners.

In the EU, I have several times been held to account in the way I was by security forces on Modderdam Road when I was an undergraduate student at the University of the Western Cape. I don’t know when I’ll write my decadent post-apartheid story. “The past is eternally with us.”

I would like to congratulate Ronnie Govender, Alvaro Konrad, Kirsten Miller and Cynthia Kross alongside whose works The Silent Minaret was considered. I hope that they above all will find it worthy, and I would like to wish them all the best.

And I would like to thank the European Union, especially the Dutch Ambassador, Frans Engering, and EU Ambassador, Michael Lake, the judges, the Goethe Institute and Jacana for this remarkable opportunity and the recognition they have bestowed on The Silent Minaret with this award.

I am grateful to the National Missing Persons Helpline in Britain, a charitable organisation, which supports the family and friends of those who have gone missing.

And I would also like to thank my readers, family and friends who supported and helped me bring this novel to fruition, most especially, Colette.

Thank you all very much.