A Place To Create
O
Namibia as an artistic place
f the many fascinating things that Windhoek is, it is not New York. It is not London. It certainly is not Paris. You can be sure it is not Rio De Janeiro, Buenos Aires, or Tokyo. Windhoek is in no way like any of the big places in the world. New York is touted as the greatest city on Earth. “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere,” we are told by rappers and business tycoons. Paris is the city of love and baguettes and haute cuisine - that is what films and cookbooks say. Rio has the carnival, Christ the Redeemer and Copacabana Beach. Tokyo is a tech mecca, a place of traffic and trains, Harajuku, anime and cherry blossoms.
the big cities made. When it was my turn to express myself through my craft, it was the big cities I channeled and attempted to imitate. I failed dismally. Whenever I tried to write a corporate espionage thriller I failed because I did not know the nuance of a New York minute. I did not know the smell of the air in Lisbon on a cold day. I had never felt the breeze blowing off the Spanish coast. I knew the white cliffs of Dover, but I did not know what it felt like to be part of their history. All I knew was Windhoek’s extreme temperature and its languid pace of life. I thought those were the poorest mediums for artistic creation.
I have learnt about these big cities in travel documentaries. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. I have read about them in literature and seen them in films, or heard about them sung in songs. They hold particular What the city lacked in terms of noise, clutter, speed and places in popular culture and creative size, it more than made up for with solitude imagination. They have T-shirts dedicated to and space for independent and reflective What the city them, monuments that straddle postcards, creation. It freed me from the distractions and nicknames every child in the world knows Cape Town or the hustle of Johannesburg. lacked in terms of about before they finish the seventh grade. It was, dare I say it, like being in a writer’s of noise, clutter, residency, with peace and quiet from which to Windhoek is… speed and size, mine my own artistic vision. For the true artist, the creation of art lies not in the pursuit of it more than …it is… existing art spaces, but to create them from nothing, to push on into foreign frontiers to made up for Yeah, Windhoek is a blank slate. A flat explore the self and the community. with solitude heartbeat line - it is terminal. While all the big places in the world are and space for Whatever Windhoek is, it is none of these big saturated with creators and dreamers and independent places. It cannot be. Because those places doers, Windhoek is fresh ground. It is still and those spaces are already taken. Lagos is finding its own identity, and the chance to be and reflective the only Lagos. Only Johannesburg can be a part of it, is a different kind of thrill. creation. Johannesburg in the special way that it is - that big, gritty city in neighbouring South Windhoek is far from the madding crowd. Africa. Windhoek’s character is quite different, it is shaped by its particular geography (arid for the most part, It is artistic terra nullius. which gives it vast, bleak and beautiful landscapes); its history of struggle and liberation (which makes the people fiercely Windhoek is… a place to create. independent); its unique outlook on the future (hopeful and quietly optimistic); and its own way of doing things (slow and Rémy Ngamije is a Rwandan-born Namibian novelist, relaxed - this is non-negotiable). columnist, essayist, short-story writer and photographer. He also writes for brainwavez.org, a writing collective based in As an aspiring writer and photographer, the majority of my South Africa. He is the editor-in-chief of Doek!, Namibia’s youth was spent consuming art from the metropolises of first literary magazine. the world. The impressive big cities formed my perceptions of what was good writing, transcendental music, arresting His debut novel The Eternal Audience Of One is available photography, and dance that could be a universal language. from Blackbird Books and Amazon. I thought a street could not be called a street if it did not have a long row of brownstones on it or that fields had to His short stories have appeared in Litro Magazine, AFREADA, be the quintessential English pastoral landscape. I thought The Johannesburg Review of Books, The Amistad, The Kalahari I could not write unless I had spent a day smoking and Review, American Chordata, Doek!, and Azure. More of his drinking coffee in a Viennese café. Art, for me, was what writing can be read on his website: remythequill.com
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