|
In
the late fall of
2002, my book Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in
South African Literature was published by Heinemann Press, one of
the leading academic publishers of African studies. I had signed
a contract with Heinemann on October 13, 2000, and sent them a completed
manuscript on March 12, 2001. However, my book was not sent to the
printer until March 19, 2002-one year later. Although copyediting
took some time, most of this delay can be attributed to the difficulties
I experienced in obtaining the permissions that my publisher demanded.
After an avalanche of emails, phone calls, faxes, and letters; a
mounting tide of legal demands; and a tsunami of aggravations- to
stretch the meteorological metaphors-I resorted to severely editing
the manuscript so that it could finally be published. It was a frustrating,
nitpicking, and ultimately costly process. Although I readily admit
that I made several mistakes in the process, the current copyright
law and the unnecessarily stringent requirements of a publisher
anxious to avoid lawsuits contributed much to this mess. In my experience,
"fair use" policy is not very fair to a scholar.
Truth and Reconciliation traces a particular mode of literature,
which I call "the confessional," in South African writing
from the apartheid period through the 1990s. After a theoretical
discussion and an overview of historical, theological, and judicial
practices of South African confession, I conduct close textual analyses
of ten South African writers who have written confessional texts.
As a Bakhtinian critic, I am committed to allowing the multiple
voices of a text and author to speak along with my own assessment
and analysis. Furthermore, evidence of "confessional"
aspects often is revealed through diction and rhetoric. Hence, I
quote a lot.
Although my book is part of the Heinemann Studies in African Literature
series, its production was supervised by a team from Greenwood Press,
which had recently purchased Heinemann. With my initial contract,
I was sent Greenwood's "General Guide for Authors," which
included information about copyright and permissions. My initial
mistake lay in not studying this document in greater detail, for
it clearly states, "All permissions must be cleared before
the manuscript can be accepted and scheduled for publication. If
for any reason permission is withheld, you must either paraphrase
the quoted material or delete it from your manuscript" (their
emphasis). Greenwood's interpretation of "fair use" policy
and procedures for obtaining permissions were then detailed. I needed
to send Greenwood the permissions that I received in writing, along
with a copy of the original request and a detailed list of the manuscript
pages on which each quote appeared. I was to obtain permissions
to cover all editions in all languages, from all copyright holders.
Quoting more than one line of poetry and over 300 words of prose
violated "fair use" and so required permission. The Guide
also stated that if you quoted more than 10 percent of the original
source, you should request permission. But 300 words of a typical
book are far less than 10 percent of its content, which seemed inconsistent.
I've published four other academic books, each with a different
publisher, each of whom has had a slightly different interpretation
of "fair use." The amount quoted that necessitates obtaining
permission differs (ranging from 250-500 words in prose; from one
to ten lines of poety, in my experience), the definition of making
a reasonable attempt to find the permission holder differs, the
way of counting the words differs. There are no clear rules, only
interpretations-which often appear to be guided by publishers' fears
of legal action.
Recognizing Greenwood's stringent definition of "fair use"
with respect to poetry, I submitted the manuscript in March with
a note that I was in the process of getting permission to quote
the lines that I cited from Dennis Brutus's confessional poems about
life on Robben Island, collected in Letters to Martha. I also pointed
out in this initial letter that several of my discussions of prose
writers included over 300 quoted words, but never in one block,
as I often cited individual words, phrases, or sentences. I am interpreting
this as "fair use," I stated, asking that if Greenwood
disagreed with my interpretation that they inform me so I could
begin to request additional permissions.
Ironically, Brutus's Letters to Martha had been published by my
own publisher, Heinemann, but when I contacted the permissions editor,
I was told that the press did not own the copyright; Brutus had
maintained it. The first letter that I sent to the University of
Pittsburgh's English department, where Brutus was teaching, was
returned; several phone calls later I had a second Pittsburgh address
for Brutus and another request in the mail. Within a month, I received
a copy of my letter back with a note from Professor Brutus scribbled
across the bottom: "Permission granted. All good wishes. Will
write shortly. Dennis Brutus. April 3, 2001." He also enclosed
two new poems, which was a nice touch, I thought, and didn't charge
me a cent. (For an earlier scholarly book I had written on J.M.
Coetzee, I had to pay Adrienne Rich $50.00 to quote fifteen lines.)
Although I never heard from Brutus again, Greenwood accepted the
handwritten note as an official permission, and I was well on my
way. Or so I thought.
At the end of July, four months after I submitted the manuscript,
Kay (a pseudonym), an editorial assistant at Greenwood, contacted
me to correct my mistake regarding prose citations. I had failed
to read the Author's Guide carefully, for it stated that if I quoted
more than 300 words "either in one place or scattered throughout
the manuscript," I would need formal copyright permission.
Kay listed twelve additional authors from whom I would need to obtain
permissions or else cut my quotations of their prose to 300 words.
On August 5, she wrote again, stating that she could not send my
computer disks to production until the permission problems had been
cleared up. A day later, she relented, saying that at least half
of the passages would need to be cleared before production would
begin.
Cuts
I was on vacation during the first two weeks of August, but upon
my return, I immediately began re-envisioning the book. For reasons
I will explain below, I quickly decided to edit quotations from
three authors, but by August 20, I had sent out requests for permission
to quote the ten remaining authors. Thank heavens for the internet,
I thought, as I located the addresses of various permissions departments
on-line, and sent my requests via email. Kay had given me a new
deadline of September 15, so I requested a response by that time
and included all the information that Greenwood had prescribed:
copies of the exact passages I was quoting as they appeared in my
manuscript, and a request for permission for both hardcover and
paperback editions, and for all languages throughout the world.
If a publisher held only the U.S. and British rights, I asked for
information about the holder of world rights.
I decided to cut the quotes from three authors for strategic reasons.
I used Foucault fairly extensively throughout my first two theoretical
chapters, since I was arguing against his interpretation of the
power dynamic of confession, but I immediately decided to omit most
of the direct quotations and merely paraphrase his position. I just
couldn't face sorting through the various English and French permissions
that would be necessary. Besides, I reasoned, quoting the exact
wording of his theoretical position was much less crucial than the
later textual analysis. Quotations from Rian Malan's memoir My Traitor's
Heart were cut for a different reason. I knew that living authors
often either held their own copyright, as in Brutus's case, or else
instructed their publisher not to issue permission to quote until
the author had reviewed the request personally. Adrienne Rich, for
example, had wanted to see the exact context in which I was quoting
her before she would grant my request. J.M. Coetzee, fortunately,
had not been as demanding. Living authors thus can essentially censor
or at least mute those scholars who are critical of them. Given
this fact, I was especially worried about my discussion of Malan,
which criticizes his bad faith and self-righteous justification,
as well as uncovers his racist rhetoric and subtexts. Malan wasn't
going to like what I had to say, I was sure, so I didn't even try
to get permission to cite him. Instead I converted most of my quotations
to paraphrases and summaries. This did not silence my criticism,
but it did dull it by making me unable to allow Malan to damn himself
with his own words. And since a great deal of my point had to do
with the language that he chose, this weakened my argument.
I also decided to edit my use of material from Ruth First's 117
Days, an autobiographical account of First's detention by the South
African apartheid government in 1963. The book had been first published
in 1965 by Stein and Day, but, following the success of the film
A World Apart (a fictionalized account of First's life), 117 Days
had been re-issued with a new copyright in 1989 by Monthly Review
Press. I thought that I could quite easily cut down my use of quotations
from First's text without substantially affecting my analysis, and
I didn't know where to begin in tracking down the copyright holder.
Since quotations were more crucial for several other parts of my
book, I decided to concentrate my efforts elsewhere.
Each cut required extensive documentation. I couldn't merely revise
the manuscript on the computer and submit a new version. Instead,
I had to send Kay a copy of the original pages on which the quotes
appeared, with the cuts indicated, along with any new transitions,
summaries, paraphrases, etc. Every word that was omitted had to
be acknowledged, along with the changes that were consequently made.
Needless to say, this all took some time and much manual word counting,
especially of the specific individual words and phrases from Malan.
Even so, after my first attempt Kay informed me that I still quoted
355 of Malan's words, so I had to give that chapter a second go.
Nonetheless, by September 7, I thought I was in good shape. The
permissions for two American theorists-Harvard's Elaine Scarry and
Yale's Miroslav Volf-had been relatively easy to obtain: their publishers
replied promptly to my email requests. Scarry's publishers didn't
charge for the permission, and Volf's asked me for a mere $25.00.
(Since I was responsible for paying these fees, I was relieved that
they asked for so little.) I sent Greenwood copies of the documents
granting these permissions, along with my revisions of the Foucault,
First, and Malan material.
I was now waiting to hear from the publishers of Breyten Breytenbach,
Simon Farisani, Noni Jabavu, Antjie Krog, Nelson Mandela, Emma Mashinini,
and Ezekiel Mphahlele. These seven South African writers included
some with international reputations, such as Mandela and Breytenbach,
and others that were virtually unknown, such as Mashinini and Farisani.
Their books had been published in South Africa, Great Britain, and
United States, complicating the need for world rights. Several had
appeared in different editions, and, with one exception, each had
been published by a different publisher. Each request that I sent
in August necessitated a detailed letter (and pages of citations)
based upon Greenwood's instructions, but most publishers then sent
me their own form-each with a different format and requiring different
information. To complete these forms, I had to repeatedly go back
to Greenwood to find out additional details about publication.
Costs
On September 18 I heard from Random House, whom I had contacted
for permission to use material from The Country of my Skull, a moving
account of covering the Truth and Reconciliation hearings for the
South African BBC by Antjie Krog. Random House issued me a contract
charging $200 for using "specified excerpts totaling approx.
2 pages" (from a 365 page book). If Krog's fee was $200, I
wondered, how much would Nelson Mandela charge? Since I was worried
about my ability to pay the mounting permission costs, Kay suggested
that I talk with Jim Lance, the Heinemann African Studies acquisition
editor. Jim agreed to take my request for a permissions subsidy
to Heinemann's editorial director, and I also began exploring whether
I could draw on my university professional development funds to
pay some of the costs. I sent a copy of the Krog contract to Kay
and continued waiting.
As October and November went by, the costs continued to mount and
additional problems surfaced. Initially I was worried about locating
the copyright holder of Emma Mashinini's Strikes Have Followed Me
All of My Life, the autobiography of a black South African woman
who had been imprisoned and tortured in the 1980s because of her
trade union activities. Her book had originally been published in
1989 by The Women's Press, in London, but I was using a 1991 edition
published by Rutledge in the US and Canada. However, Rutledge's
eventual response to my August query explained that Taylor &
Francis, New York, controlled the rights. I simply needed to fill
out the permissions form available on the Taylor & Francis website.
I did, but the form was returned since I did not indicate a print
run. I need to know an estimated press run, I informed Kay. "Tell
them that the initial run will be 500, but ask permission for a
5,000 minimum," she advised. I did, and a contract arrived
at the beginning of October with a hefty $250 fee. When I wailed
to Jim Lance again, he suggested that I contact Taylor & Francis
and ask them to reconsider. I wrote, "My book is an academic,
literary study that will have a fairly small circulation among literary
scholars. It is neither a trade book nor a textbook. I analyze about
10 different South African works in depth, and if each publisher
were to charge $250, it would make academic literary criticism virtually
impossible." This appeal brought the fee down to $150. I changed
the amount in the contract and sent a copy to Kay.
Other requests were resulting in even longer delays. One section
of my book discussed The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
(1984), by Breyten Breytenbach, a world-renown Afrikaner poet and
novelist who had lived in exile in France for years. Breytenbach's
memoir about serving a seven-year term in a South African prison
was originally published by the British firm of Faber and Faber.
After sending out my first request in August, I waited for four
months and sent a second letter before being informed that Faber
and Faber had forwarded my request to Breytenbach. He retained personal
approval over all permissions. By the beginning of December, he
had not yet responded.
Faber and Faber also held the copyright for Es'kia Mphahlele's Down
Second Avenue, an early autobiographical account (1959) by a black
South African about life under apartheid. In October they faxed
me their permission agreement, which I was to complete and return
before they would issue me a license. Although I returned it promptly,
I didn't hear from Faber and Faber again until I emailed a follow-up
request in December. "I thought you had already been sent a
license for this permission, and I am sorry for the delay and confusion,"
read the response, which requested a 50 pound fee and enclosed a
contract, a copy of which I dutifully sent to Kay. She immediately
informed me that the contract only granted British Commonwealth
rights. "I know you requested world rights," she wrote,
"but they must have made a mistake. Email them back and refer
to your original request of August 20, that they grant world rights.
Tell them it's urgent and give them a deadline of one week. Sorry
this has been such a hassle for you." Faber and Faber replied
that the rights outside the British Commonwealth were controlled
by the author, but at least their letter supplied an address for
Mphahlele, who, after twenty-seven years in exile, had returned
to South Africa in 1977 to teach. But it was now December, and South
African universities were on an extended Christmas (and summer)
vacation, so I doubted whether I would get a response until the
middle of January, at the earliest. Nonetheless, Kay advised that
I should try to contact Mphahlele. If you don't hear from him in
a few weeks, she said, you can edit your citations of his work.
A web search did not turn up an email or fax address, so I airmailed
a letter to Johannesburg.
Kay's vigilant reading of the Faber and Faber contract led me to
examine more carefully the other contracts I had received, and I
discovered that although the Random House permissions agreement
for Krog's Country of my Skull covered the U.S., Canada, the Open
Market, and the E.E.C., I was to contact Random House South Africa
for the territories of PI and UK. (I still don't know what PI means;
UK I could figure out.) When I asked Kay about this, she replied,
"For some reason, I don't have the Krog perm although I have
a notation in my file that it was received-and cost $200! Will check
with [ ] to see if she has a copy so I can look at it. If it says
to contact Random House S.A. then you should do so or they would
not have mentioned it." I found a fax number for Random House
SA on the Random House website, and sent them a permissions request
in December, noting that I had already paid $200 to cite Krog, that
my book was an academic analysis, and that I hoped that their fee
not be too steep.
Disappearing Authors
The difficulties in locating reliable addresses and contacts for
a major South African publishing firm were magnified ten-fold in
my attempts to find Tshenuwani Simon Farisani, a Vendan Lutheran
pastor who had been imprisoned and tortured during apartheid. Farisani
was not a well-known public figure. His Diary from a South African
Prison had been published in 1987 by an American religious publisher,
Fortress Press, which I discovered had become part of Augsburg Fortress
Publishers. My initial query to this publisher made in August was
answered with a note that Dr. Farisani maintained his own copyright
and that I should contact him directly at Pacific Lutheran Theological
Seminary (PLTS) in Berkeley. My first letter there was not answered;
the second, sent several months later, came back with a note on
the envelope: "Return to sender, not at this address, unable
to forward to South Africa." From PLTS's website, I randomly
chose a professor to contact, explaining that I was trying to locate
Dr. Farisani and asking if she had an address, a fax number, or
email address for him. Dr. Carol Jacobson kindly replied, "It
has been a number of years since Dr. Farisani was a student here-yet
many of us have our 'contacts.' I'll do a little checking with some
of my colleagues." In the meantime, I spoke with Kay again,
explaining the difficulties. "I have two letters you sent him,"
she replied in November, "but if you have the cancelled envelopes
showing they were returned, that would help." I can only assume
that she planned to use these envelopes to demonstrate a "reasonable
attempt." I never received a response to the first letter,
I told her; the second had been returned. "Whatever you can
provide, after you hear from the California seminary will be good,"
she indicated.
Noni Jabavu posed equally challenging problems. She was a remarkable
writer-one of the first black South African women to publish for
an international audience, but a controversial figure who had largely
been ignored by the critics. A well-educated, middle-class South
African, Jabavu was sent to England for schooling in 1933, married
an Englishman, and did not return to South Africa until 1955, after
the formal establishment of apartheid. Her memoir, The Ochre People
(1964), was published in England and describes a visit to South
Africa that probably took place in 1956. Jabavu lived in exile for
twenty years but wanted to return permanently to South Africa in
the seventies; however, since she held a British passport, the South
African authorities labeled her an alien, and she was not permitted
to stay more than three months. She eventually settled in Zimbabwe,
and in 1982 The Ochre People was published for the first time in
South Africa by Ravan Press, an anti-apartheid publisher with close
ties to several oppositional groups. Jabavu wrote a new introduction
for this edition in which she addresses a new generation of South
Africans, expressing her sorrow that she missed knowing them and
her admiration for their anti-apartheid activities.
The Ravan edition of Jabavu's text, which I purchased in South Africa
in 1995, indicated that the copyright had been re-issued to Jabavu
in 1982. However, I had no idea if or where she was living. The
usual procedure is to try to contact an author through her publisher,
but an extensive web search did not turn up any information about
Ravan. This was in August, as the outset of my permissions quest.
I decided to email the head of African Literature at the University
of the Witwatersrand for information. Dr. James Ogude promptly replied
that he could not find an email address for Ravan, had "heard
rumours that they may have folded up," but that he had found
a street address and fax number, which he kindly sent me. I immediately
sent both an airmail letter and a fax, but the fax number was no
longer operational, and I received no reply to my letter. In September
I discovered that Ohio University Press was distributing some of
Ravan's publications in the US, so I contacted them; a month later
they told me that Macmillan Press, in Great Britain, had taken over
Ravan. By the end of October, I finally heard from a permissions
editor at Macmillan only to learn that in 1996 Jabavu had instructed
Ravan not to grant any permissions on The Ochre People. The Macmillan
staff did not know whether she was still alive or not, but they
would look into it..
Nelson Mandela's international best-seller, Long Walk to Freedom,
wouldn't pose such difficulties, I was confident. Little, Brown
had responded to my initial request with a standardized form, which
I returned by fax before the end of September. They then issued
me a contract, which I needed to sign and return with a $180 fee
before they would counter-sign and send back the completed contract.
I had requested this amount from my university professional development
fund, but it was taking some time to process, and Kay was pressuring
me to present a signed contract, so I sent off a personal check.
Breaking Point
If you've followed my somewhat convoluted chronology, you may have
noticed a confluence of events at the beginning of December that,
coupled with the papers and exams that accompany the final weeks
of an academic term, almost drove me to a breaking point. No one
at Macmillan had been able to track down Jabavu, I had not heard
anything from Breytenbach, and I was still trying to find a South
African address for Farisani. Both the Mphahlele and Krog contracts
were missing world rights, and the counter-signed Mandela contract
had not yet arrived. Kay had established a new deadline of December
17 by which I was to have at least half of the permissions cleared.
It was at this point that I cut large sections of material from
Breytenbach, Jabavu, and Farisani in order to bring my citations
for each below 300 words. Especially difficult to excise were 200
heart-breaking words conveying Farisani's physical pain and spiritual
agony, marked in red ink on the original pages and obediently sent
to Kay. "This is driving me crazy!" I emailed Kay on December
17.
January and February of 2002 elapsed with little activity on the
permissions front. Despite my additional cuts, the outstanding permissions
were still delaying production. No responses turned up to the letters
I had sent to South Africa regarding Mphahlele and Krog. At the
beginning of March, I sent a second letter to Mphahlele in care
of the University of Witwaterswand. This one was returned, with
one word written across the address, "LEFT." Kay finally
relented at this point, since I did have the British Commonwealth
permission and had been trying to locate Mphahlele since August;
his words were allowed to remain. This was the one instance in which
it was deemed that I had made "every reasonable effort . .
. to trace the owners of the copyright materials," as the disclaimer
that eventually appeared on the copyright page of my book stated.
In March I tried faxing Random House SA again about the Krog quotations,
but the fax number listed on the webpage was now out of service.
Consequently, I sent Stephen Johnson, the Managing Editor of the
permission department, an urgent email request. His assistant replied:
Mr. Johnson, the only person at Random House who could deal with
such a request, was currently overseas. She doubted whether he had
received my first request, but gave me his personal email address.
Finally, on March 18, I heard from Stephen, who gave the necessary
permission and-incredibly-didn't charge me a penny. (I had not repeated
my original plea for economic mercy in the subsequent communications,
so I wonder if he had indeed received my first request.)
On March 18, I wrote Jim Lance, "The permissions requests for
[my book] are almost all in, with the exception of one South African
writer who has not responded [Mphahlele]. We're going to go with
a disclaimer, and the book has finally been sent to the printer.
I do need to send off the permission check soon. Did you hear anything
back about Heinemann helping out with these? I paid one invoice
of $180; I have others totaling $448 yet to be paid." To help
with these costs, Heinemann sent me $500 that would be deducted
from future royalties. In addition, many of the publishers required
that I send them one or two copies of my published book. Once again
I was responsible for paying for these books and their shipping
costs, which totaled $249.03 even with my authorial discount and
were charged against my royalties. My most recent semi-annual royalty
report from Greenwood, issued on June 28, 2003, showed a negative
balance of $184.66. But then one doesn't write an academic book
for the income.
My story demonstrates the difficulties that are created when one
writes about texts written by living authors, who may object to
a negative critique of their work, as well as the trouble created
by writing about African authors, who may be difficult to locate.
Attempting to track down and receive the permissions that my publishers
deemed necessary delayed the publication of my book, I estimate,
by nine months to a year. My inability to locate two African authors
who held their own copyrights necessitated severely revising several
chapters of the manuscript. Another section was modified when I
realized that my sharply critical assessment would not be received
well by the author who held the copyright. A third fell to the red
pen when the author failed to respond to my request sent through
his publisher.
Another problem concerns the financial burden of paying hundreds
of dollars of permission fees for an academic publication. Even
with considerable editing to avoid having to obtain permissions,
I had to pay over $875 in fees and expenses in order to publish
my book. Fortunately, Heinemann was willing to advance me the fees,
but it is taking some time to recoup that advance, given the meager
return that an academic author receives from her work. My story
suggests several revisions in copyright law and/or interpretation
that would be necessary in order to facilitate scholarship on contemporary
writing that is not constrained by geographical contingencies, critical
sensitivity, and financial pressure.
|
