In The Shadow of the Springs I Saw by Barbara Adair

Modjaji Books, 2022

I read this over a week ago while on holiday and looking at elephants and rhinos and other more-or-less imminently doomed animals in Kruger National Park, in the east of South Africa.

I’m back in England now, in a country and a city that I hate and feel embarrassed to be living in, but that sense of shame at not having escaped my own personal circumstances is much less fraught and troubling than the experience of being a white tourist in South Africa…

I say that, plenty of white tourists slash remote workers do go and vacuously and free of discomfort enjoy themselves in the Western Cape, but to be willing to do that you have to embrace intentional ignorance or exhibit quite extreme naiveté of the political context/realities in that country…

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Springs is a city or suburb or town just outside of Johannesburg, and has one of the largest collections of Art Deco buildings in the world (only just behind Miami, the city what Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is based off of). A mining town that was rich and flush and full of European immigrants during the rise of the white supremacist politics prior to the formal introduction of Apartheid, it continued to be a first stop for immigrants to South Africa as the 20th century and its expansion of globalised capitalism marches on.

As the country became less stable as the deeply racist government ramped up their dehumanising policies and political repression, civil disobedience naturally increased in response, and Springs experienced “white flight”, and a bit of deindustrialisation and the beautiful Art Deco buildings slowly fell into – sometimes – disuse, but other times remained key occupied buildings in a busy and thriving (populationwise, if not economically?) town.

That, at least, is what I remember about the context of Barbara Adair’s difficult to categorise (in a good way!) book, and any factual errors are mine, and the way in which I’ve oversimplified a very complicated contemporary situation is, yes, probably in itself worthy of scorn.

Apologies for any offence caused.

But if you’re looking for detailed and nuanced histories about anything other than my ever-shades-of-terrible mental health, TriumphOfTheNow.com is not the place to be.

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In The Shadow of the Springs I Saw is, then, part polyphonic novel, part social history, part architectural monograph, part photo essay, part exploration of the creative process, and probably part a few other things, too.

The text is composed of contemporary photos of the Art Deco buildings of Springs and (sometimes) the people who live and work in them now; architectural diagrams of the buildings; definitions of key architectural terms related to Art Deco; poems/verse excerpts from various perspectives about life in Springs; essays/fictions/interviews/prose pieces from a variety of perspectives going into great detail about life in Springs, both now and in the past, with some passages written from the perspective of the educated researcher looking at/into these buildings and the spaces within them.

Some of these pieces feel like psychogeography, some feel like verbatim/Svetlana Alexievich – style reportage, and the perspectives vary here from people who have lived in Springs for decades, people who have worked there for long periods, white people who left it decades ago but still come back occasionally, people who own property there, people who rent property there…

With a focus on buildings and economic ties, Adair definitely includes here a non-representational percentage of the speech/histories of property owners, but this is basically the only remotely critical thing I can think to say about the book, so I suppose it’s either forgiveable or not even necessarily a thing it’s legitimate for me to dislike?

Also included in the book is a series of unidirectional emails (I’m using “unidirectional emails” to mean “emails from one sender to one recipient only”, which may be incorrect) sent to a friend/colleague overseas about the research and composition process of the book as a whole, which does acknowledge/explore the prejudices and privileges Adair – an acclaimed writer and now academic – brings to this project.

It also doesn’t seek to “resolve” these conflicts – Adair is not “of” Springs, yet she is seeking to offer a detailed and diverse depiction of it due to academic and creative interest, and as this book will likely do nothing to alleviate the inequality and inequity demonstrated by her text, there’s no false bragging or smug saviour-type posturing: Adair is open and reflective and creates a book that not only offers a polyvocal composite of her understanding of the contemporary reality and history of Springs, but also offers space to cede that this is subjective historicising, that it is creative writing not objective truth, that it’s atmospheric and layered construction, rather than image captured in print.

I’m, of course, also not “of” Springs, and I’ve never even been there (I didn’t start reading this until I’d already left that part of the country and was off looking at elephants and stuff a six hour drive away), so I’m not best placed to assess the validity or tonal/literal “accuracy” of this version of Springs, but I can offer an opinion on its literary merit and value (the merit and value of which is a totally separate discussion), and it is as follows:

Adair’s book is a beautiful, complex, engaging text that offers difficult (sometimes offensive (to me, a detached foreigner with terrible mental health)) opinions and voices about people and politics, alongside an engaging exploration of an architectural style that is highly recognisable and in a location not usually associated with it.

I thought In The Shadow of the Springs I Saw was excellent – emotive, personable, but also articulate and smart and self-aware.

By the end of the trip, I’d purchased several more books from other South African indie presses, so expect more reflection on my summer trip over the coming months…

Buy direct from the publisher via this link