By Mursi Saad El-Din After the fall of apartheid in South Africa I wondered what topics South African writers might now broach in their pursuit of the production of literature. It is a thought, I remember, that I expressed in this column at the time that those momentous changes. were happening. More recently I discovered that it is a thought Seamus Heaney shares. Following a recent visit to South Africa Ireland's celebrated Nobel laureate spoke to Shawn Johnson, and the interview appeared in the British newspaper, the Independent. An outspoken opponent of apartheid, Heaney was visiting South Africa for the first time. As a poet, Heaney has for years wrestled with the question of what political role, if any, poetry should play in society. Now he has reformulated the question in light of how it applies to South Africa. "The crisis in South Africa," he told Johnson, "the wondrous change and wondrous intervention of Nelson Mandela -- that was a magical moment in the 20th century. In 1989," he went on, "I remember watching as one regime after the other gently came down in Eastern Europe. And the following February Mandela came out of prison and it was a memory- marking moment for anybody. The world was entranced with South Africa." Heaney compared Mandela to the hero of Sophocles' play Philocteles. He supports the Greeks who have betrayed him, helping them win Troy. "It seemed to me to mesh beautifully with Mandela's return. The act of betrayal and then the generosity of his coming back and helping with the city -- helping the poles to get together again. Of all the heroes, he's the great one." Mandela changed something even more profound in South Africans than their political system; he brought them together. "It's more of a household now," Heaney said, "you're all in the courtyard. One isn't at the gate with his sword. It's an image of possible change, of a household coming together." What might come of South African literature now that the "struggle genre" is no longer viable? More than ever the success of South African literature comes down to individual talent, to a far greater extent than political relevance. "The only one true thing about writing is that individual talent is the most important thing, and I suppose it exposes the reality of that truth when you take away the political situation. Once every 20 years you expect something big, maybe once every 50 years, the big writer who changes writing, and then the people who imitate him or her for a while." Heaney's implication here is that if such a person is to emerge in South African literature, they will do so outside the context of anti- apartheid writing, leaving a whole generation of South African writers, if not quite high and dry, then certainly stranded in something that looks unmistakeably like the past. But how does one know whether one has read (or indeed written) a good poem? Heaney concedes that, to poets themselves, this is an inscrutable puzzle. There are simple answers, of course, "but they don't really help. The sense of something coming right. The sense of something moving for you, a little ahead of yourself." Heaney then raises the age- old question of the importance of technique, of rhyme and rhythm, in writing poetry. The basis of poetry, he claims, is utterance. Poetry is more than its line-turning and its pirouettings. It's a combination of some form of truth, wisdom and a new way of seeing and saying it. "I believe," he asserts, "that people can enter the kind of thing that poetry is without the slightest technical knowledge." Poetry is not a profession, it is a vocation; and Heaney distinguishes between the two. "You have to commit yourself to it, there's no degree- awarding body that will say you're a poet and you're not. It's the common consensus among readers and poets." And the Nobel laureate is not just talking theory, either. You only need to go through his collections Gifts of Rain, Tradition, A New Song, Alphabets to know exactly what he means.