kagablog

After my brother’s death in Sydney I was devastated. I retreated to Donegal on the west coast of Ireland and wrote my first novel, Foxtrot van die Vleiseters/Foxtrot of the Carnivores (1993).

My Beautiful Death (1996)

My editor said: why don’t you go to Prince Albert in the Great Karoo. There’s a lovely tannie(auntie) who rents houses. I wrote Ek stamel ek sterwe in 3 months there. Later it was translated as My beautiful death.

My Simpatie Cerise (1999) and Twaalf (Twelve) (2000), a collection of short stories, followed. Now my stories were either set in South Africa or Australia or on both continents. Like all migrants I had a history in one country and a life in another. On old Italian woman in a $2 shop smelled a plastic rose with a fake dew drop on it. It’s not in vain, she said when I asked her why she was doing it. She wanted to prove to herself – she started crying - that the roses here will never smell like the ones in Calabria.
Prince Albert house where I wrote My beautiful Death
Prince Albert house where I wrote My beautiful Death

Begeerte (2003) My parents and I travelled to north western Cape, to a town called Hartswater. This was where my new novel, Begeerte(Desire), was to start. After WWii the South African government handed out plots of land to returning soldiers here. Conditions were harsh. Only the most essential tools and a house the size of a match-box were provided. Now the area seemed lush and rich with its citrus orchards and fields of peanut plants.

On our way back it poured and the dirt road was very slippery. At times you could hardly see anything through the sheet of brown rain. Every now and again a deserted farm house would appear this or that side of the road. I had the feeling of being utterly forlorn. As if we were the last of the living pushing ahead through a land that had been deserted long ago.

Trencherman (2006-2008) Gerard and I packed up and moved to Prince Albert. He thought he’d give South Africa a try. I had come home.

Discomfort – My father died and our beloved farm was sold. Sometimes it seemed that my father’s prophecy (South Africa will sink) which I fiercely opposed at the time, could just come true. In this town the disparity between the haves and the have-nots was still about colour. It made us uncomfortable. We’d stand in the supermarket queue with chocolates and red wine and behind us would be a mother and children with flour and sugar.

On summer afternoons the breeze from the mountains used to be cool. But at that time the evening breeze turned hot and when it stopped a fierce northerly blew sand into town from the plains of the Great Karoo.

Dystopia - I got the idea of writing a Heart of Darkness story set in a future South Africa where the infrastructure had collapsed and peoples’ chances of living a decent life were destroyed by AIDS, hunger and greed. I called the novel Horrelpoot (clubfoot). Two years later it was published in English as Trencherman.

eben venter’s website is here