Review: Ways of Travelling – Kharys Ateh Laue’s ‘Sketches’ (2023)

By Africa in Words Guest on 24 May , 2024 • ( 0 )

AiW Guest: Kris Van der Bijl.

^{Sketches front cover. Illustration: Alhyrian Laue.}

Kharys Ateh Laue’s debut prose work Sketches (MDL SEE, 2023) is recognisably a travelogue. In it, a South African protagonist-narrator travels across three countries, accompanied by her friend, Raph. Like most travelogues, it utilizes the trope of a narrator being placed in an unfamiliar setting to discover, or uncover, aspects of themselves, the spaces, and the worlds that they are traversing.

But Sketches is made up of a series of short, poetic texts, which the book then pieces into nine sections, each beginning with a place title and a hand-drawn sketch by South African artist, Alhyrian Laue. The experience of reading Sketches is heightened by this blend of written and visual elements, with the titular ‘sketches’ but one in a range of strategies that bring forward the more unique qualities of the book.

The text-to-page ratio creates a sense of incongruity, while the poetic prose adds a mythical quality to the worlds depicted. An entire page might only say:

“On the beach women in blue and yellow saris stand with their feet in the sea. Later, daylight draws away from the stone buildings like water and we see it happen. We are the witnesses to it” (p. 18).

The text moves us with it against such a simultaneously blank and busy backdrop.

If anything, this emphasis adds to the weight of the words. Precise and terse descriptions of travelling, and of others, mainly male tourists, feel like the narrator is being careful, fearful of a wrong word, or foot, ever placed. Although young and travelling freely as a tourist, the “I” expressing this journey is clearly tense, not simply about where but also how they travel.

Page 18, ‘Sketches’ by Kharys Ateh Laue.

And they have reason to be. Raph and the narrator’s travels expose them to new social realities. They grapple with their own gendered and raced existence, and how this can alienate them from the worlds around them. Scenes of beauty, for instance, become marred by a guide named Abhi unwantedly touching both women in the guise of a massage. They find themselves in an uncomfortable position where their position as tourists and women affect how they are treated and how they can engage with their surroundings. When they confront Abhi about this, he notes, “You must punish me now in front of the whole community. It is the only way. We rise from the table and his English comes apart in his mouth.” (p. 69).

Note how English “comes apart”, as if Abhi might have been misunderstood by the same language that the narrator travels, writes, and, so, is positioned by. The discomfort turns, coming not just from what Abhi did, but from the greater potential miscommunication that occurred, which is firmly in the hands of the ‘I’ that is telling. The language of Sketches is rendered in ways that both shore up and complicate the narrative self-positioning of the first-person perspective.

Other characters share these complex repositionings, allowing for a great degree of ambiguity in what the narrator sees, redirecting the expected, more conventional traveller’s ‘gaze’. In another scene, Raph and the narrator witness an American, with blonde dreadlocks, yelling at a group of Indian men after he finds them taking pictures of him. One of the men says that tourists often come and take photos of them without their consent, and the American responds with a curt “Do I look like I’m taking photos of you?” (p. 55). While the events that led up to this encounter are not known, it mirrors an earlier scene where Raph and the narrator have a similar argument about a photo she has taken where Raph later notes that she “should have asked first” (p. 19).

Such self-awareness and self-consciousness, also offered up through associative links from scene-to-scene, is common. And Raph, the narrator’s companion, becomes part of this narrative experimentation. While the common role they share with each other is of friend and protector, there are instances where the text explores their deeper bond. A scene where the narrator inhales the smoke from “the eternal fire of Shiva” is followed by one in which Raph’s chest becomes “thick with mucous” (p. 104), a sickness that she bears until the book’s close. When she must leave, the narrator reads a letter where Raph writes: “It feels like either you are coming with me or I am staying with you” (p. 104). These subtle interconnecting tissues between the women run throughout, functioning as an aspect of connective narrative experiment in a text where content relies on crossing borders.

Laue’s tight and careful prose, alongside the ways Sketches can and does push at its limits, blurring the lines between text and referent, seeing and experiencing, marks her debut as a fresh and welcome voice in travel writing, one that is consciously seeking new forms and expression for current realities. Already, demand for Sketches has surpassed the limited edition first print issue of 100 copies, with all proceeds from its sale benefiting organisations that support women’s and animal rights.

Published by Model See Media – a relatively small indie press founder-run by Masande Ntshanga, established in 2020 and self-defined as “the world’s first pop-up publisher of experimental literature, art and code” – Laue’s book is the latest in their as yet early run; the first, Native Life in the Third Millennium by Ntshanga, is also a genre debut for him, of poetry-prose, in which “a poet, a philosopher and a programmer wrestle with systemic oppression and themselves”.

The desire to publish newly exploratory, generically crossing texts, with the size of the print issue magnifying the distinctive and special quality of what you are holding, marks Model See Media out in the African and the global publishing industry right now. Laue’s Sketches personifies this profile, and does so rather remarkably. Anyone seeking an experimental, in-tuned narrative voice, will find it throughout this complex and beautiful little book.

[Bio and photo, c. LinkedIn]
Kharys Laue is a writer and editor based in Cape Town. She is the author of Sketches (2023), and has written for various literary journals, such as Pleiades, Isele Magazine, and Brittle Paper. Her academic work, which examines the depiction of race, gender, and animals in South African fiction, has been published in English Studies in Africa and the Journal of Literary Studies. She is the senior editor at Botsotso and currently studying an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town.

Kris Van der Bijl is a writer from Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. His personal writing interests tend towards Southern African storytelling. He has written for the likes of Wasafiri, Brittle Paper, and New Coin Poetry Magazine.

With limited availability, see purchase details of Laue’s Sketches over at Model See Media: