A PLACE TO CREATE

Namibia as an artistic place

Of 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.

I have learnt about these big cities in travel documentaries. I have read about them in literature and seen them in films, or heard about them sung in songs. They hold particular places in popular culture and creative imagination. They have T-shirts dedicated to them, monuments that straddle postcards, and nicknames every child in the world knows about before they finish the seventh grade.

Windhoek is……it is…

Yeah, Windhoek is a blank slate. A flat heartbeat line - it is terminal.

Whatever Windhoek is, it is none of these big places. It cannot be. Because those places and those spaces are already taken. Lagos is the only Lagos. Only Johannesburg can be Johannesburg in the special way that it is - that big, gritty city in neighbouring South Africa. Windhoek’s character is quite different, it is shaped by its particular geography (arid for the most part, which gives it vast, bleak and beautiful landscapes); its history of struggle and liberation (which makes the people fiercely independent); its unique outlook on the future (hopeful and quietly optimistic); and its own way of doing things (slow and relaxed - this is non-negotiable).

As an aspiring writer and photographer, the majority of my youth was spent consuming art from the metropolises of the world. The impressive big cities formed my perceptions of what was good writing, transcendental music, arresting photography, and dance that could be a universal language. 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 be the quintessential English pastoral landscape. I thought I could not write unless I had spent a day smoking and drinking coffee in a Viennese café. Art, for me, was what the big cities made. When it was my turn to express myself through my craft, it was the big cities I channelled 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 was wrong. Terribly wrong.

What the city lacked in terms of noise, clutter, speed and size, it more than made up for with solitude and space for independent and reflective creation. It freed me from the distractions of Cape Town or the hustle of Johannesburg. It was, dare I say it, like being in a writer’s residency, with peace and quiet from which to mine my own artistic vision. For the true artist, the creation of art lies not in the pursuit of existing art spaces, but to create them from nothing, to push on into foreign frontiers to explore the self and the community.

While all the big places in the world are saturated with creators and dreamers and doers, Windhoek is fresh ground. It is still finding its own identity, and the chance to be a part of it, is a different kind of thrill.

Windhoek is far from the madding crowd.

It is artistic terra nullius.

Windhoek is… a place to create.

Rémy Ngamije is a Rwandan-born Namibian novelist, columnist, essayist, short-story writer and photographer. He also writes for brainwavez.org, a writing collective based in South Africa. He is the editor-in-chief of Doek!, Namibia’s first literary magazine.

His debut novel The Eternal Audience Of One is available from Blackbird Books and Amazon.

His short stories have appeared in Litro Magazine, AFREADA, The Johannesburg Review of Books, The Amistad, The Kalahari Review, American Chordata, Doek!, and Azure. More of his writing can be read on his website: remythequill.com