kagablog

On the weekend of 15 to 17 May, Franschhoek experienced two notable events: the first winter storms of 2009 and the third annual Franschhoek Literary Festival. Both are worth talking about and perhaps for the same reasons. They were both important events and they were both received with mixed feelings.

Many positive reports about the Literary Festival have done the rounds and the organising committee deserve words of praise for their efforts. There were a number of highly acclaimed authors and publishers in the village, many of whom were happy to engage with their audiences and speak openly and honestly about their work, their views and their souls. I felt that the intimacy of the Festival was heightened by the foreboding weather as we metaphorically ‘huddled together’ and got on with the business of the festival; which in the words of Christopher Hope, the Festival Director, was “to share [our] passions and prejudices.” Local chefs Reuben and Neil Jewell; favourite Max du Preez; entertaining Tom Eaton; lovely Pippa Green; the knowledgeable Tim Noakes; humble Vikas Swarup. My list is longer and I intend no disservice to those I have not mentioned here. I have no doubt that every panellist hosted by the FLF Committee did their bit to make for an entertaining and worthwhile event. The facilities were put to the test, with large numbers seeking entry to the events and shelter from the rain. A visit to Drakenstein Correctional Services, the off the wall poetry (soon to be a regular in Franschhoek); Maid in Franschhoek and the Spelling Bee all added to the rich tapestry that was about more than writers writing or readers reading. This was a festival about communion. Intimate sharing.

But author, Aryan Kaganof, appears to have a different take on events and it seems that storm clouds may be brewing in the aftermath of the festival. Kaganof appeared as a panellist in “Re-writing the Writer’s Mind” at the Hospice Hall (event 17, Saturday 16th May). He says “The last time I saw so many so-called [white] faces staring back at me in a hall was in 1980, just before I matriculated. But granted, that was the high period of apartheid and the so-called blacks weren’t allowed in then. So what is going wrong with the Franschhoek Literary Festival?” He does add a counter by asking: “Could one read this startling demographic as a sign that the so-called blacks aren’t interested in literature? Or perhaps that they aren’t interested in paying to see writers talk about literature? Or that so-called black audiences are only interested in attending panels where there are so-called blacks to look at … I don’t know the answer to these questions.”

Mark Solms of the Delta Trust, the headline sponsor of the festival, stated that the festival is set to become even bigger and better. I have no doubt that this is true and can’t wait to see what develops in the years to come. But the words of Pippa Green at this year’s festival, quoted on the FLF blog are worth noting: “When someone else writes about your life, there will always be parts of the portrayal that you do not like.”

What she didn’t discuss was the accuracy of the portrayal. Franschhoek is undeniably one of the finest tourist attractions in South Africa. We have it all: the food; the wine; the setting; the environment and each other. Any yet at least one person failed to see the most important of these in his visit to the village. No doubt a couple of sunny days and a clear evening would have afforded him the opportunity to sit at a side-walk café and watch the locals mingle – black and white, English and Afrikaans and all colours and voices that span those apparent divides.

Will the 2010 festival bring a threatening storm or welcome relief? Perhaps the hosts of the Festival, who are the people of Franschhoek, need to write the next chapter of the story.

this article was first published in the franschhoek month

BOOK SA’s Ben Williams chaired a panel of what he termed “web artists”, writers who use the web in wierd interesting, and sometimes just brilliant ways, at the FLF today. Out of the session, Williams drew three words, one from each writer which can be used to describe the effect of the internet on writers and writing: violation, communication, and introspection.

Aryan Kaganof, whose blog Kagablog is packed with material from all over identified the ability of the internet to create writers out of readers. Lauren Beukes, whose book Moxyland has been “translated” into Ebook format by Electric Book Works, furthered this with a description of the kind of reciprocity/mutual feedback that the internet is able to facilitate.

Finally, the audience was wowed by a presentation by the writer and artist Stacy Hardy. Hardy, who is involved in the production of the literary magazine Chimurenga, has “translated” JM Coetzee’s Disgrace into images word-for-word using Google Image Search. Does Google not then allow us to be more clever?

BOOK SA will follow-up with Hardy to bring you a more in-depth treatment of her conceptually brilliant work.

this article by sophy first appeared on book.co.za

i

the last time i saw so many so-called whites (only) faces staring back at me in a hall was in 1980, just before i matriculated. but granted, that was the high period of apartheid and the so-called blacks weren’t allowed in then. so what is going wrong with the franschhoek literary festival? and yes it is true that victor dlamini was in the audience and he did make a point about skin colour not mattering in the digital domain because, well, it doesn’t; and it’s true that karabo kgoleng was almost in the audience - the hospice hall was sold out and there was a queue to get into the event leading back out the hall and into the scullery where karabo was standing. a packed event, well over 70 paying people, and only two of them “of colour” as the euphemism goes. and both of them are being paid to be there, are attending in their official capacity.

but does that matter anymore?

i think it does. in south africa, in 2009, 15 years on from the so-called “end of apartheid” it strikes me as unhealthy, perversely so, that an event which carries the kind of cultural cachet as the franschhoek literary festival should be playing to all white houses. could one read this startling demographic as a sign that the so-called blacks aren’t interested in literature? or perhaps that they aren’t interested in paying to see writers talk about literature? or that so-called black audiences are only interested in attending panels where there are so-called blacks to look at. (curator ben williams selected the panel i was on, which also included lauren beukes and stacy hardy, based on his impressions of who was actively involved in the new media expanded literature environment). i don’t know the answer to these questions. i suspect that there are a lot of so-called black and coloured readers and writers out there (and especially in the western cape) who simply feel alienated by the festival. i don’t know if that perception is fair - probably the organisers of the festival will have something to say on this point - but i believe the perception to be real and therefore it should be addressed.

ii

eben venter, the author of one of the most intriguing and disquieting south african novels ever, horrelpoot, was in the audience and he disagreed vociferously with my observation that in holland literary books are purchased voraciously as a mark of class consciousness but rarely, if ever, actually read. i believe this phenomenon to be not only true in the netherlands, but increasingly so here in south africa. who has the time to read all of the new south african novels that are being pumped out by the dozen? is the current publishing boom indicative of a real wave of interesting fiction or the frenzied twitching of an industry that is hoping to sustain itself against the challenge of the new digital media by using the bulldozer combination of volume and hype?

iii

i have been reading fernando pessoa’s book of disquiet for two years now. i’m only halfway through the book. and before you rush to complain that pessoa wasn’t a south african author - well, he was. he lived in durban until he was 19 years old and attended the same high school as i did, durban high school (dhs). pessoa’s modernist masterpiece was not even published in his lifetime, it was never part of any mass market concept, never part of a publisher’s hype to sell books. it’s the most extraordinary book i’ve ever (not yet fully) read. the use of language is glorious, painstaking, enhanced by a complete lack of interest in the market, in readers, in selling itself. it is language from thoth to hermes and back again. pessoa writes for the gods of writing. how much of what is being presented at the franschhoek literary festival is literature at all, in this sense? i don’t honestly know, i don’t have the time to read all these books. does anyone?

aryan kaganof

stacy hardy and abraxas caelan kaganof

The novelist tells Mick Brown that his writing is like carpentry, built with solid facts.

interview by Mick Brown

When I say to Justin Cartwright that I would like to interview him where he works - the novelist in his lair - he suggests we meet in the London Library. Cartwright lives in Islington, where he commits his final drafts to the word-processor in a small study. But most days he is to be found at the same small wooden desk on the library’s first floor, a footstep away from the endless shelves of reference books he frequently employs. The quiet hum of cerebral industry, the discreetly clubbable air, appeals to him. But you do have to get there early. “Somebody,” he whispers with mock indignation, as he walks me around, “is sitting in my desk.”

Over the past few years, Cartwright - a tall, diffident, dome-headed man of 59 - has quietly joined the ranks of Britain’s leading novelists. He has been shortlisted for the Booker; won the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year in 1998 with Leading the Cheers, and was shortlisted in 2002 for White Lightning. Yet his name is seldom mentioned in the same breath as Boyd, Barnes or McEwan.

His new novel, The Promise of Happiness, is his most ambitious yet. Charles Judd, in his sixties, is an accountant who has been “let go” by his company and is now living in disgruntled retirement in the Cornish village of Trebetherick with his wife, Daphne. While Charles struggles with ageing, life’s injustices and finding the moral order of the universe, Daphne struggles with church flower-arranging and Rick Stein’s recipe for mackerel with gooseberry sauce.

Their son, Charlie, is an entrepreneur, making a fortune selling socks on the internet, and about to fall into misguided marriage to a South American beauty. The younger daughter, Sophie, is “much too thin”, snorting coke and sleeping with her boss while struggling to write a book about life in Hoxton.

The problem child is Juliet. Brilliant and beautiful, a graduate of Oxford and the Courtauld, she is about to be released from prison in America, where she has been serving time for her part in the theft of a Tiffany window. The family await her return with a mixture of eagerness and trepidation.

The book is a departure for Cartwright, whose previous novels have tended to be loosely autobiographical, their principal protagonists following the trajectory of Cartwright’s own life: born in South Africa, educated at Oxford, an early career in advertising and as a film director. They have often been told in the voice of a man in the grip of mid-life crisis, disillusioned, world-weary and given to existential self-interrogation.

“It’s true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree,” says Cartwright. “I really wanted to get away from that, and write a novel about a middle-class family, which was also about England, but in an American way, not done with irony. So often in English fiction people are either upper-class twits or else they’re knockabouts, less than human. I wanted to treat the family seriously.”

Cartwright’s father was the editor of the Rand Daily Mail, who impressed on his son that journalism was anything but a worthy profession. “His joke was, don’t tell your mother I’m a journalist: she thinks I’m a piano player in a brothel.” Cartwright dreamed of being a film-maker. After reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, he worked as an advertising copywriter, moving on to direct commercials, party political broadcasts for the Liberals and a soft-porn film, Rosie Dixon, Night Nurse. But he says he was unsuited to film-making. “I was interested in the ideas but not the technique. I didn’t want to talk about film-speeds and dollies and tracking. And I wasn’t very good at it.”

Cartwright had written a couple of thrillers, but it wasn’t until 1988 that he published his first “literary” novel, Interior. “I felt a terrific relief; here was something I could do that I was good at.” Cartwright has written seven novels since, all providing dependable pleasures. He is an astute observer of social tics, mannerisms and signals: the clothes people wear, the make of espresso machine they use, the symbols of corporate fatuity and the proletarian hairstyles. “Cockneys,” he notes in The Promise of Happiness, “had already begun to shave their heads, so that now a species of small, pot-bellied, close-cropped men had appeared on the streets. The short hair on the short people indicated a mood of defiance: we don’t give a toss how we look.”

A certain worldly air breezes through his work, with digressions into such topics as native American tribal rituals, the work of Levi-Strauss or - in The Promise of Happiness - the history of stained glass and the symbolic language of flowers. His great gift is to smuggle in big themes in the most effortlessly readable manner: the thin line between civilisation and barbarism in Masai Dreaming; the conflict between rationalism and faith in Leading the Cheers; the essential unknowability of ourselves and others, in just about everything.

Cartwright maintains that all his books are about “consciousness”, or more simply people struggling to find their place in the world. “That to me is the theme of the modern novel. I write from what I take to be the realist’s point of view, looking at life as it really is, or the way I see it to be. John Updike said that his job as a novelist was to record the ordinary and out of that make the extraordinary. I think that’s right.”

Cartwright says his books tend to grow from what he calls “carpentry - something solid, and possibly factual”. Leading the Cheers resulted from a newspaper commission to go back and write about his high-school reunion in America, where Cartwright studied for a year, and learning that there had been a serial killer loose in the town. The Promise of Happiness was inspired by a chance reading of a newspaper report about an old school-friend who had been imprisoned for stealing a Tiffany window - an idea that he appropriated as the central motif for the book.

Setting the novel in Cornwall – and, more specifically, Trebetherick, where John Betjeman is buried – was a way of establishing the essential Englishness of its themes. For the Judds, Cornwall offers what Cartwright describes as “the last stand of what could be termed English traditional”, in the face of the crumbling certainties of their lives.

Cartwright has been married for 29 years to Penny, a special-needs teacher. They have two sons, Rufus, a doctor, and Serge, a television researcher. “The family is a strange organisation,” he says, “in which different people have different expectations: children, for example, always want their parents to behave in a conventional way; at the same time they don’t want to be criticised. And all families have this idea that there’s a kind of nirvana which is going to be reached; the children are going to get into Oxford, marry well, or whatever. And that’s very strong in this novel - the hope that somehow everything can be resolved.”

It also suggests that families are endlessly changing organisms: Charles, the patriarch, his potency waning, sliding towards depression and dependency; Charlie, the son, rising to become the family’s pillar of strength. Shades of autobiography, after all? “I went on a fishing trip with my younger son the other week,” says Cartwright, “and discovered a lot of things. One, he’s far more grown-up than I’d thought; and two, he had a lot more sense than me. It was very nice, but also disturbing, because I could see myself slipping down the hierarchy. My eldest son, the doctor, is clearly number one. I’m probably number two, but I can see now I might have slipped even further.”

this interview was first published by the telegraph

Multi-talented writers from all walks of life will once again come together to share their stories, lives and passions at the third Franschhoek Literary Festival (FLF), held from 15 – 17 May 2009.

This year’s festival has an exciting line–up of acclaimed national and international writers who will be part of panel discussions and debates hosted by various well-known media and publishing personalities.

Some of the world–renowned speakers who will be part of this year’s programme include Zimbabwean Alexandra Fuller (now living in Wyoming USA), legendary South African novelist André Brink, popular columnist Fred Khumalo, Lebo Mashile (actor, TV presenter and performance poet), Zimbabwean lawyer, novelist and short story writer Petina Gappah, as well as the Deputy High Commissioner for India, Vikas Swarup, whose novel Q&A has been made into the Oscar nominated movie, Slumdog Millionaire. Vikus will be introducing a benefit showing of the movie at the Franschhoek Festival with the proceeds going to the FLF Library Fund.

Other well-known South African authors like Max du Preez, Koos Kombuis, Justin Cartwright and Mike van Graan will also be joining the long list of established and emerging writers on this year’s weighty festival programme.

Bookings for Franschhoek Literary Festival opens in March.

Full list of Franschhoek Literary Festival speakers

Alexandra Fuller: Zimbabwean writer now living in Wyoming. (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Scribbling the Cat, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant)

André Brink: leading South African novelist (recent memoir: A Fork in the Road / ’n Vurk in die Pad)

Andrew Brown: Cape Town advocate, novelist and police reservist (Coldsleep Lullabye, Street Blues)

Aryan Kaganof: Cape Town novelist (Uselessly) and poet

Blaq Pearl: Cape Town performance poet

Christopher Hope: South African novelist now living in France (My Mother’s Lovers) and FLF Director

Dennis Davis: Cape Town judge

Diale Thlolwe: thriller writer from Ekurhuleni, East Rand (Ancient Rites)

Dianne Stewart: author of children’s books (Folk Tales from Africa), creative writing teacher and compiler (Durban in a Word) from KwaZulu Natal

Eben Venter: Afrikaans novelist now living in Australia (Horrelpoot /Trencherman)

Edyth Bulbring: Johannesburg journalist, and writer of young adult novels (The Club)

Elwyn Jenkins: retired Pretoria professor who specialises in South African children’s literature and has served on official SA place naming bodies (Falling into Place)

Finuala Dowling: Cape Town academic, poet and novelist (Flyleaf, Notes from the Dementia Ward)

Fred Khumalo: Johannesburg journalist and novelist (Seven Steps To Heaven, Touch My Blood)

Helen Moffett: Cape Town writer and editor (The Art & Science of Cricket)

Henriette Rose-Innes: Cape Town novelist and short story writer (The Rock Alphabet, “Poison” won the 2008 Caine Prize)

Jeremy Gordin: Johannesburg journalist, editor, publishing executive and biographer (Zuma: A Biography)

Justin Cartwright: South African novelist now living in England (The Song Before it is Sung, To Heaven by Water – due in April)

Koos Kombuis: rock star and satirist from Somerset West (The Complete Secret Diaries of God)

Lauren Beukes: author, cartoon scriptwriter and journalist (Moxyland)

Lebo Mashile: actor, TV presenter and performance poet (Flying Above the Sky) from Johannesburg

Mandla Langa: ANC activist, ex-Icasa chairperson and novelist (The Lost Colours of the Chameleon), now based in Johannesburg

Max du Preez: journalist, columnist, political analyst and documentary film maker, now living in the Western Cape (Of Tricksters, Tyrants and Turncoats)

Michiel Heyns: Stellenbosch academic, novelist (The Typewriter’s Tale) and translator (Agaat)

Mike van Graan: playwright (Green Man Flashing, Bafana Republic) and Director of the African Arts Institute

Petina Gappah: Zimbabwean lawyer, novelist and short story writer (An Elegy for Easterly) now living and working in Geneva

Pippa Green: Johannesburg journalist, broadcaster and biographer (Choice, Not Fate : The Life and Times of Trevor Manuel)

Rajend Mesthrie: Cape Town academic and linguist

Reuben Riffel: Franschhoek chef at Reuben’s (Reuben Cooks … Food is Time Travel)

Roger Smith: screenwriter, film and TV producer and thriller writer (Mixed Blood) now living in Cape Town

Ronelda Kamfer: Cape Town author and poet (Noudat Slapende Honde)

Shaun Johnson: Cape Town journalist, CEO of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation and novelist (The Native Commissioner)

Sindiwe Magona: motivational speaker, poet, playwright, actor, author of children’s books and novelist (To My Children’s Children, Beauty’s Gift)

Stacy Hardy

Suzette Kotze-Myburgh: editor who lives in Stellenbosch

Tan Twan Eng: advocate and novelist from Malaysia (The Gift of Rain)

Tim Noakes: Cape Town sports scientist and academic (The Art & Science of Cricket)

Tom Eaton: Cape Town satirist, scriptwriter and novelist

Tracy Gilpin: short story writer and novelist (Double Cross), now working in communications in Cape Town

Vikas Swarup: diplomat, Deputy High Commissioner for India in Pretoria, and best-selling novelist (Q&A – now the award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire – and Six Suspects)

Willem Anker: Stellenbosch academic and novelist (Siegfried)

Zubeida Jaffer: journalist and political analyst from Cape Town (Our Generation, Love in the Time of Treason: The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood)

1. In just over four years you have produced three novels: after the semi-autobiographical The Children’s Day came The Reluctant Passenger, a-laugh-a-minute romp that reached cult status in gay circles, and recently Jonathan Ball launched The Typewriter’s Tale, a novel which reflects a lifelong intellectual engagement with the world and work of Henry James. Could you reflect on this extraordinary rate of publication and the “writer’s logic” of this sequence of works?

A blocked pipe gushes when you unblock it. For most of my adult life, which I spent as an academic, I felt that writing fiction was an indulgence that I couldn’t afford. So when I got over that inhibition there was a lot of pent-up energy. As for the logic of the sequence: well, of course most first novels are to some extent autobiographical, so I had to get that out of the way. The Reluctant Passenger was written as a response to publishers who complained that The Children’s Day was “too quiet”; I thought, well, let me write something very much not quiet (the publishers then said they missed the gentleness of The Children’s Day). Having done that, I was free to turn an academic passion (Henry James) into something other than a research article.

2. What I find extraordinary is your ability to inhabit vastly different worlds, and your way of writing fluently from “within” entirely divergent moral and cultural spheres, from the deep rural areas in South Africa to the South African urban gay scene to Victorian England. Any comment?

It’s tempting to blush modestly and mutter something about Keats’s “chameleon poet”, the “negative capability” that enables the imaginative writer to enter into and blend with a variety of backgrounds, but that sounds a bit presumptuous. More simply, then, my three different settings are just slightly more extreme instances of the kind of imaginative flexibility that comes with any writer’s territory. Consider, after all, Triomf and Agaat.

3. It is not only The Reluctant Passenger that was funny. Your readers marvel at the specific type of dry ironic wit that you wield in your novels, also in The Typewriter’s Tale. Could you say something about the place and use of humour in your work?

Humour happens. I didn’t think, when I started writing The Typewriter’s Tale, that there was anything particularly funny in the material, but somehow it turned out that way. Of course, few situations are inherently funny: the poor bugger who slips on the banana skin and breaks his coccyx fails to see why the rest of the world is laughing. It’s a matter of the perspective one adopts, and again I can only say that it happens: I see these people and they’re funny. It’s possible that reading authors like Jane Austen and Henry James schooled me in a certain oblique way of looking at things, so that the more seriously people take themselves, the funnier they are. In any case, in the South Africa I grew up in, in which some people took themselves very seriously indeed (”Dit is ons erns”), humour was a mode of survival.

4. When one reads your work one soon falls under the spell of the well-chiselled Heyns sentences, wittily elegant in the qualifications, the oppositions, the exclusions, the symmetries that they propose. Often one despairs at how stylistically poor a lot of what one reads these days is. It makes me think that if you were to give a young writer an exercise, it might be something like the following: “Write seven long sentences (three subordinate clauses each) about a black cat in which you show that you know your grammar and your rhetoric and that you are interested in uncommon words.” Comment? Any other advice to young novelists?

Yes, although for the cat I would suggest a colour more conducive to qualification, opposition and exclusion than black. Since you invite me to be pedantic: a long sentence is not just three sentences perversely strung together, it’s a complex proposition of which the parts cohere, as you suggest, in a variety of logical and emotive relations. The wisdom of the ages has evolved the colon and the semicolon to fulfil a particular expressive need; doing away with those leaves the writer with only two rather blunt tools in his tool-box. And to me a verbless sentence remains a headless ox stuck in the mud. Advice to young novelists? Learn a foreign language, any foreign language, to make you aware of language as a structure.

5. Whom would you like to distinguish as the three writers you most admire in the international world of English letters today?

Phew. Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Philip Roth have had time to establish themselves with a long and impressive back-list; but I’d like to see, say, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers in ten years’ time.

6. You are entirely bilingual in English and Afrikaans, and come from a half English, half Afrikaans background. The Children’s Day is about to be translated into Afrikaans, an uncommon move in the local publishing world. Could you motivate the move? Would you ever consider writing in Afrikaans?

Actually, my background is entirely Afrikaans, apart from my having an English grandmother. When The Children’s Day appeared, quite a few people told me it should really have been an Afrikaans novel, given the Free State kleindorpie setting and the characters. I had, in fact, tried writing it in Afrikaans, but found, oddly, that it seemed artificial. Perhaps because I’ve spent my adult life teaching English literature, that’s the language that comes naturally to me in writing. I think that answers both your questions: the publishers thought here is a book that would go well in Afrikaans, and yes, I have considered writing in Afrikaans, but it somehow wouldn’t gel.

7. If you had to dream a little dream of a South African literary scene that would be most beneficial to your needs as a writer, what would it look like?

A writer needs, more than anything else, readers (the publishers will follow). So my dream is of a literate society, a society in which books are read, books are news, and this is reflected in the media. Consider the place of literature in schools; consider the meagre half-page devoted every week to books by a paper that aspires to quality status like the Mail and Guardian; consider the recognition given to creative writing (as opposed to “research outputs”) by institutions like the University of Stellenbosch, and despair. Conversely, change all that, and you have my dream.

this interview first appeared on litnet

Blind Man’s Bluff

When I look in the mirror I wrinkle up my nose and squint my eyes into thin slits. I like how I look that way more than with my eyes wide open — through my slit eyes, my face appears blurry, a ghosted image with wavy dark patches instead of eyes or a mouth. “Expressionistic,” is how my painting teacher would describe the image, “a rejection of refined pictorial naturalism in favour of bold distortions of form and exaggerated imagery.” It’s the kind of face I’d like to have, a Munch Face rather than the round nose and soft chin I was born with.

One day Miles walks into the bathroom while I’m brushing my hair and catches me squinting into the mirror. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

I want to tell him about the Munch me, about the Expressionistic visage that lurks behind my plain features, about the vivid, jarring, violent me. But Miles is staring with a face that I know means he doesn’t approve, so instead I snap the brush through my hair and say, “I don’t know, I can’t see things this close unless I squint.”

The next day Miles takes me to the Eye Doctor. The offices are crisp and white with charts displaying dislocated letters hanging on the walls. I’m to look into the machine, not to blink at the tiny torch shining in my eyes, estimate the distance between two green dots, read the tiny print half way across the room.

The Eye Doctor tells me I have Macular Degeneration, a degenerative condition caused by the deterioration of the central portion of the retina, the inside back layer of the eye that records the images we see and sends them via the optic nerve from the eye to the brain. Symptoms can include: blurry or fuzzy vision, straight lines — such as sentences on a page, telephone poles, and sides of buildings — appearing wavy; an empty dark area that appears in the centre of vision.

The Eye Doctor tells me that there is no current cure for Macular Degeneration but that glasses or out-patient laser therapy may stabilise the condition.

Bobbing for Apples
I order an Iced Coffee and drink it all in one go, sucking up the flecks of cream through my straw and running my finger around the foamy rim. After that I dig around in my bag, light a cigarette and draw doodles on my note pad. I try to look busy, but everyone can see I’ve been stood up.

Hide and Seek
Finally home, I run to our room, shedding my jacket on the floor. I find Miles on our bed, the muscles in his face are still and beautiful. For a moment I think that he’s asleep … or dead? I throw my body down beside him. But he opens his eyes, grins, just joking. Then with a strength that jars my breath, he pulls me to him, nestling my head beneath his chin. It’s our little game — playing dead, pretending to be asleep. The thrill of getting caught in the act.

Spin the Bottle
Miles asks what everyone would like. Jesse and Ramon have popped in for a visit and we’re sitting in the lounge. Jesse says she wants Bourbon and Ramon says he would like some red wine. I say I want a gun because it’s the only thing I can think of that will hit hard enough, that might really blast through my awkwardness. We don’t have a gun, so Miles brings me a knife instead. It’s a big chopping knife with a stainless steel blade and a lifetime guarantee. He carries it in on the drink tray along with the Bourbon and red wine and everyone laughs. I spend the rest of the evening nursing the knife on my lap, wondering if I’d get more attention if I plunged it into my stomach or slit my throat. In the end I don’t need to do either because the way Miles and Jesse spend the evening staring at each other cuts deeper than any knife possibly could.

Kissing Catches
Miles says I have breasts like a fourteen year old, teenage breasts. He licks at each nipple, lapping until they stand hard and erect, then he puts my whole right breast in his mouth, his tongue still fingering the tip, sucking until it aches and I’m wet and dripping and dying to fuck. “Not a handful, a mouthful!” Miles says, “Teenage breasts!” He buys me teenage magazines that he gets from the kilo-shop down the road. He chooses ones with names like Bliss, Just17 and More that carry tips on dating and endless fashion shoots with thin limbed teenagers pouting their half-formed tits at the camera. We’re lying in bed together doing a quiz called “Love Him or Shove Him” that we find in Bliss. It’s meant to determine if you’re seeing the right guy or not.

1. Tick three words that best describe the boy you’re mad about:
Childish
Bossy
Shy
Quiet
Creative
Mature
Loud
Funny

2. Where is he most likely to spend his free time?
With his mates
Watching TV
In a bar
At home reading

3. What’s he most likely to say in the first few moments of a date?
“Sorry I’m late.”
“You look nice.”
“What shall we do?”
“Is it okay if one of my mates comes along?”

4. Tick the topic you and your boy usually find yourselves talking about:
Friends
The future
Your relationship
Problems

5. Tick three words your friends use to describe him:
Sweet
Childish
Funny
Selfish
Bossy
Laddy

According to Bliss my answers mean: “You may have thought everything was fine, but it’s time to question those feelings. It’s crucial that you don’t stay with him just because you want a boyfriend. After all you could be missing out on somebody loads better or having a great time with your mates.” The verdict worries me, but only for a few seconds, because Miles is already licking at my breasts, suckling and teasing until I moan.

Doctor, Doctor
Miles inspects my fingers, rolling each of them over in his hands. He holds them just above the first knuckle, tight, so the tip goes white and twists them to examine every angle. Normally he starts with the pinkie — moves on to the ring, middle, index and then thumb — but today he starts on my thumb. I’ve just made supper and my fingernails are strained with the black of mushrooms, tiny flecks of white cheese and blue ballpoint pen. It’s not the dirt that bothers Miles though; it’s the way I chew my nails.

At age ten, my mother had my habit diagnosed as a form of tension release/reduction. Our family doctor suggested she discourage the behaviour by having me wear cotton mittens or gloves. I liked the gloves, they made everything feel very far away, like there was a thin barrier between the world and me. Everything felt the same: smooth and soft like strong cotton.

Miles holds my thumb in his hands and shakes his head. The nail is chewed down to the quick and the skin around the sides has been bitten into. “I don’t mind the chewing on your nails, but why do you have to do it until you bleed? You’re hurting yourself. I just don’t want you to hurt yourself.” Miles is using his stern but sensitive voice.

While he gets up to look for a plaster I examine the damaged thumb. The nail itself isn’t so bad but I’ve ripped the skin to the right of it leaving the pink of exposed flesh and a smidgen of blood. It burns when I put it in my mouth. We’re out of Jungle Book plasters so Miles brings back the Elastoplast Dressing Strip and a pair of scissors. “I want you to stop doing this to yourself.”

I stare down at my bandaged thumb and then I slide my fingers across his lap, slipping them in the gap at the top of his pants: our making-up ritual. Through the thin strip of Elastoplast Dressing on my thumb his penis feels strange; half erect and smooth like strong cotton.

Pin the Tail on the Donkey
Miles says he wants to take some photographs of me, erotic photographs like Richard Kern’s. “You mean porn pictures?” I’m terrified, Miles sees me naked every night when we fuck, but the thought of posing for him terrifies me.
“Well, yes, but not like that.”
“Well, like what?”
“For starters, you have nice legs.”

The next day I go to the library and look at pictures by Richard Kern. I look at a series entitled “Submit to me, submit to me now” from 1996. In the photographs Kern has asked people to act out their fantasies for him while he acts as audience and provocateur. In one, a woman stands seductively under a shower, but something about her expression belies her total availability. In another a smirking brunette is tied with thongs to a home gym. All the girls in the photographs look tough yet beautiful; self assured and mildly amused. According to the book it is Kern’s personalised treatment of his female subjects that transcends the pornographic.

I’m posed in front of the mirror wearing the white lace panties Miles bought me for my birthday. I stare at my reflection, sliding one hand down the front elastic, my other hand resting against a cocked hip. Sexy yet blasé like the girls in the Kern shoot.

Miles tells me I look great but a little stiff. “Baby, you need to relax, stop thinking about it and just, you know, let it happen. You’re worrying too much about the camera, forget about it, just do something that turns you on, act out a fantasy or something.”

In my fantasies Miles has me tied to the bed. My hands are tied with cords to my right leg, which is folded in under me. My left leg is free, bent at the knee and my eyes are blindfolded. He has a knife in his hand, I can’t see it, but I can feel the cold of the metal against my skin, the blade just nicking the surface. In my fantasies Miles pushes my face down on the bed, his left hand slapping against my raised ass while he forces his right hand up my cunt. The heel of a boot strikes. Now both heels. In my fantasies Miles throws me against the wall, biting at my neck, spitting and chewing on bruised nipples, yanks me by the hair, shoving cheeks and lips up against his glistening cock, making me suck, suck all the while, suck, pounding on my skull with both fists, suck, while he pulls at my hair and slaps my pink, teary face.

“You ready?” says Miles.
“Sure,” I say and I smile and cock my hips, because actually I’m nowhere near to ready.

this short fiction first appeared on litnet

Zimbabwean lawyer and author Petina Gappah has been writing from an early age.

Some of her work has been published in anthologies that include Laughing Now (Weaver Press, 2008), Women Writing Zimbabwe (Weaver Press, 2008) and One World: A global anthology of short stories (New Internationalist, 2009) .

Her debut collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly (Faber and Faber, April 2009) has been described as “a stunning portrait of a country in chaotic meltdown”.

In this email interview, Petina Gappah talks about her concerns as a writer.

When did you start writing?

Like most writers, I started writing as a child.

I was not, however, as precocious as some that I have read about who started writing at age 5 or 3 or even before they were born. I started writing at about 10 or 11, and my first published anything was a story in the St. Dominic’s Secondary School magazine when I was 14.

I started writing seriously in May 2006. I joined the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, a story I posted there caught the attention of an editor at the online journal Per Contra, I entered some stories in competitions, I did well in one competition, and when I was sufficiently confident, I looked for an agent who looked for a publisher on my behalf.

Becoming a published writer was not so much a decision as it was the consequence of my writing.

How would you describe your writing?

I write literary fiction. There are various kinds of writing within this broad genre, for instance, I recently came across the term hysterical realism, which I thought was a wonderfully apt description for a certain type of contemporary fiction. I will leave it to critics and others to further categorise my writing within literary fiction, but I am disappointed to say it is not hysterical realism.

Which authors influenced you most?

I never really know how to answer the question about influences, so I will say I have enjoyed reading many writers, and have been influenced by any number you can think of in different ways, from David Lodge to Charles Mungoshi, from J. M. Coetzee to Ian McEwan, from Toni Morrison to Paul Auster.

What writers write is as important to me as how writers live, the writers that I am trying to emulate are those who manage to combine writing with a full time, unrelated occupation, writers like John Mortimer who very sadly died recently, and P. D. James.

How have your personal experiences influenced your writing?

Most of what I write is based on something that happened to me, to someone I know, or something I overheard or read.

What are your main concerns as a writer?

My main concern, which is probably not as lofty as this question assumes, is to write every day, to finish whatever I am working on at the time, and to find time and space for the next bit of writing.

As I have a full time job as a lawyer, and I also have a young son, my biggest challenge is to find time to write. The solution I have found is to sleep as little as I possibly can.

Do you write everyday?

I try to write every morning before I go to work, I stop when I have to get my son up and prepare him and myself for school and work.

I work directly on my computer, sometimes transcribing from notebooks. When I revise, I find it easier to do so in longhand.

How many books have you written so far?

I have written one book, An Elegy for Easterly, which is published by Faber in April 2009 in the U. K. and Commonwealth and June 2009 in the United States.

It will also be published in France, Finland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Easterly is a short story collection about what it has meant to be a Zimbabwean in recent times, it attempts to particularize through the stories of ordinary people what it has meant, on a day-to-day basis, to be part of a crisis that has gripped the attention of the world.

How long did it take you to write the book? And, how did you find a publisher for it?

I wrote the stories over a period of about one and a half years. They were written at different times, I had no idea I was writing a book, I was busy working on my novel. Then my wonderful agent Clare sent out the stories together with some chapters of the novel, Lee Brackstone and Mitzi Angel, two editors at Faber absolutely loved them, so the decision was made to go with them before the novel.

Why Faber? When they made the offer, I had no hesitation. In fact, I felt more than a little dizzy at the prospect of being a Faber author: Faber is just about the last of the great independent literary houses.

I received a very warm welcome from Stephen Page, Faber’s publisher, and the whole team has just been absolutely fantastic. The most wonderful thing about being published by Faber has been working with my two editors who are both committed, gifted and brilliant. If my stories hummed before, they sing operatic arias now.

The only disadvantage is that Faber is the house of T. S. Eliot and William Golding, of Ted Hughes and Ezra Pound, of Paul Auster and Orhan Pamuk. To paraphrase Stephen Page, the weight of the ghosts of Faber’s past is more than a little daunting. I can only hope that I will not disappoint.

What sets An Elegy for Easterly apart from other things you’ve written?

This is the first book that I have published, so unlike the other “novels” and book ideas in my head, notebooks or computer, it is word made solid, corporeal, concrete.

What will the next one be about?

My next book is called The Book of Memory. If all goes well, it will be published in August 2010. It is set in Salisbury/Harare between 1960 and 2000.

That is as much as I will say as I do not want to jinx it by waxing lyrical prematurely. The last novel I talked about enthusiastically died from all the exposure.

Who is your target audience?

I do not have a target audience. My work is for anyone who enjoys reading.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer?

I would say it is being published by Faber. Oh, and being read, and approved, by J. M. Coetzee. That is a huge achievement.

this interview first published on conversations with writers

It takes some getting used to, but if one wants to venture into the realm of ebooks, the electronic version of Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland is an exciting take-off point.

I’d first read Moxyland in its original paper book form (published by Jacana in early 2008) and thought I would browse through the Electric Book Works ebook edition just to get the feel of the e-experience, but instead I ended up rereading almost the entire book.
Don’t get me wrong, it will take more than that to convert me to the new publishing trend, but the Moxyland ebook certainly made me more curious about the emerging industry and the opportunities it offers. For the price of $5.99 you not only get a – in this case truly fabulous – book, but an entire soundtrack.

The first time I found myself wishing for a soundtrack to a novel was with Haruki Murakami’s After Dark (2007), in which jazz, smoke-filled bars, and the pulsating city darkness are so palpable that one can almost hear the music in the text; a CD sold with the book to accompany one’s reading somewhere softly in the distance would have enriched the experience. With the Moxyland ebook all of this becomes possible, as you click yourself from one page to another, the music embedded in the PDF file – compiled by Honey B of African Dope, it captures the futuristic urban vibe of the novel – streams from the loudspeakers of your computer. One can, of course, still buy the paper book and the existing official soundtrack CD, but the price will be at least fivefold. The ebook offers a much more affordable reading adventure. And it’s really user-friendly. I don’t consider myself a particularly clued up computer user, and am usually wary of trying out new gadgets or programmes, but this experience was not only totally painless, but fun.

Initially, Moxyland was one of the fastest book deals ever. After some unfortunate false starts, the manuscript ended up on the desk of one of Jacana’s editors and was accepted for publication literally within hours. It is a brilliant, generically pioneering (in the South African literary context) novel which can be compared to the best of its kind worldwide – whichever label one applies to them: SF, techno or dystopian fiction. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) or Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) come to mind immediately. Pioneering also in terms of its marketing, with an entire merchandise industry behind it, Moxyland and its enterprising author are reaching new frontiers in the South African literary landscape.

The book presents a frighteningly believable near-future vision of the city of Cape Town and has all the ingredients of becoming a cult novel. It is narrated alternately from the perspectives of its four protagonists – Kendra, Lerato, Tendeka, and Toby – whose lives intertwine into a thrilling story, which culminates in one of the best novel finales I have read in a long time. Theirs is a dystopian Cape Town ruled by ruthless corporate networks; a world were the individual is seen only as either a possible marketing device or an exploitative unit for greed-driven accumulation of wealth and power. All four have their own ways of subverting the social, economic and political structures surrounding them and are prepared even to risk their lives in pursuit of their own dreams. Daring, incredibly well-written, Moxyland will knock you off your feet before you know what’s coming.

Whichever version – paper or electronic – you decide on, Moxyland is a must-read. Just as the colourful and cuddly Moxy toy, a mutant clone of the Moxyland cover monster, is a must-have. The toy is produced by the Montagu Sew & Sews, a collective of impoverished women in the Klein Karoo set up by Lauren’s friends especially for the project, and is exclusively available from The Book Lounge in Cape Town (booklounge@gmail.com, international shipping possible). One of its clones is sitting in my study and scaring off all three of my cats.

The ebook is available through online ebook retailers including Powells and Ereadable. For more details visit Lauren Beukes website and the official Moxyland website.

this review first appeared on itch.co.za

Henrietta Rose-Innes, winner of the Caine prize for the best short story by an African writer in English, tells Lindesay Irvine the attention is more surprising than her actual victory. Click here to read Poison

“It’s fantastic - I really never expected this level of interest,” says Henrietta Rose-Innes, still slightly giddy 48 hours after winning this year’s Caine prize for her story Poison.

The award for a short story in English by an African writer is perhaps optimistically described by organisers as the continent’s equivalent of the Booker, but Rose-Innes is nevertheless enjoying a fairly full beam of spotlight.

The 36-year-old South African’s surprise, it should be said, is at the quantity of press attention, rather than her own victory.

“I had a bit of an inkling it might win,” she says.

The usual British etiquette for prize winners is to bashfully express how amazingly amazed they are to have walked off with the laurels before hastening to credit a hundred helpers. Rose-Innes, who even while carrying a fairly heavy post-celebration head has a quiet but striking self-possession, is not burdened with such self-consciousness.

“I was shortlisted last year [for her story Bad Places] and I had a feeling I had more of a chance this year. I was really pleased with the story. I’d worked on it over a long time and it’s a good example of what I can do.”

Rose-Innes’s confidence is not misplaced. In starkly understated prose, Poison zooms in on a motley crowd of Cape Towners marooned out of petrol at a middle-of-nowhere service station as people flee a chemical explosion in the city. Central character Lynn looks on numbly while her fellow refugees cut deals and improvise team efforts - across Cape Town’s established social divides - to get away from the toxic smuts spreading across the veld. Something of a blank human space, Lynn baffles even herself by failing to take any of the possible escape routes. A compellingly enigmatic story, Poison’s few pages are also an eloquent vignette of the “new” South Africa.

“In times of crisis, people have to make new connections, but Lynn is stuck. She fails to step into a country and beyond her knowledge. I never set out with a conscious political programme, although I never wanted to be seen as ‘apolitical’. And it became clear as I wrote that the story was not really about an environmental disaster, and I was pleased that it developed an allegorical point,” Rose-Innes says.

Rose-Innes does not yet have a UK or US publisher, and so is a fresh voice for British readers, but she has published two novels in South Africa, Shark’s Egg (2000) and The Rock Alphabet (2004). The latter, which follows an archaeologist who stumbles upon a pair of apparently feral boys, reflects her university training in archaeology and biological anthropology, and her abiding preoccupation with Cape Town.

“The social and geographical connections are fascinating. It’s a unique, physically overwhelming city, with this giant mountain cutting into the middle of the city, and its position on the very tip of Africa, between two oceans, has always really affected its history,” she adds.

As with the political dimension of her work, this interest in Cape Town is unconscious - she only registered it when she read back over her stories.

Nor was her literary career deliberate. “I never really felt like I had a vocation. I always enjoyed writing as a child, but it never really seemed like something I was going to dedicate myself to. Then at some point - I really can’t remember why - I entered a story competition and won it. So it began to seem like something I could and should be doing.”

She then enrolled for Cape Town University’s creative writing MA, largely because JM Coetzee, who became her tutor, was on the faculty. She credits him with teaching her “the discipline of not letting anything past that seems substandard or that lacks integrity. And of course to revise and revise and revise!”

“I still don’t think I have a vocation - and writing is a way of avoiding one. To do it you need a lot of different interests, without really committing to any of them. Which suits me.”

Meanwhile, planned or not, Rose-Innes’s looks well positioned to break into US and European markets. She is awkwardly aware that this is something African writers in English must achieve if they are to make a living - one of the few concerns that authors gathered under the Caine banner have in common.

But while she seems very confident of her stories’ achievement, she’s not certain that her books will find many international readers.

“I don’t expect to discover massive markets, but I’m hoping that a few people will get what I’m trying to do, and there’ll be a small, steady group of people who follow what I write.”

She may, I think, soon have cause to be genuinely surprised again.

this interview first appeared on guardian.co.uk

Last year Koos Kombuis recorded an album of furious protest songs called Bloedrivier. It contained fist-in-the-air rock anthems such as Die Fokol Song and Reconciliation Day about the murder of his friend Taliep Pietersen.

The album was conceived during those gloomy pre-Polokwane days. As Kombuis recalls: “The songs were written when Mbeki started propping up Mugabe and going for third term of leadership of ANC. I was starting to think: oooh, this is looking very dark. I began to feel quite racist. Every time I saw blacks on the street I thought: why can’t you vote for someone else, dammit.”

He touched a raw nerve; Bloedrivier with its loud guitars and thundering choruses became the best selling album of his career, which spans more than twenty years. “I got pretty big cheques and we paid off our house loan, almost all of it,” he says, grinning at the paradox of turning rebellion into money.

This house, where he lives with his wife, two kids and dog Griet, stands on the outskirts of Sommerset West. Or as he explains in an email with directions: “The very last street of the very last suburb where the very last Voëlvry survivor lives…” He goes on to describe the house as “a mock Tuscan double-storey, and you might get barked at by a very stupid but perfectly pedigreed Boxer dog who sometimes responds to the name of Griet.” The mail ends with: “Welcome to my world!”

The world of Koos Kombuis is a very peculiar one. His history as an Afrikaans icon is long and winding, and includes school rebellion, drugs, soul searching, journalism, more drugs, girlfriends, more soul searching, electro shock therapy and a stay in Ward 6 of the Weskoppies mental hospital.

But interesting enough, it was his stint in the army that was his real epiphany. It opened his eyes to a different world, one beyond suffocating Calvinism and dysfunctional families. “Suddenly I would sleep next to a bed with a Portuguese guy and then a soutie and then someone else, rich and poor, all together. I loved that. I thrived on that deurmekaarigheid. I thought: this is how it should be.”

In the 80s he started strumming his guitar, learned a few chords and composed touching, often satiric songs such as Boer in beton which appeared on the 1987 cassette Ver van die ou Kalahari. Not much later he met like minded musicians Ralph Rabie (Johannes Kerkorrel) and James Phillips (Bernoldus Niemand). Together they embarked on the seminal Voëlvry tour in 1989. When the whole thing imploded due to conflicting ego’s, debauchery and exhaustion Koos became an endearing alternative Afrikaner troubadour, a true bohemian with a pocketful of songs and a sweetheart in every town.

For a long time it seemed he would be the first of the Voëlvry guys to collapse under the self-destructive lifestyle. Instead, James Phillips died in 1995 in a car crash and Kerkorrel committed suicide in 2002. Koos, meanwhile, cleaned up his act, found a caring wife and made fame as a folkie, a gifted writer and a sharp columnist, finally finding solace in suburbia.

Well over fifty, he was tired of kombies, drugs and dirty socks. He had paid his dues. And then, all of sudden there was this return to angry rock. First he and his band played Oppikoppi and drew a bigger crowd than the Violent Femmes. Next he received a loan from his friend Dutch singer Stef Bos to record the album. He got his old buddy bassist/arranger Schalk Joubert in, and the process began.

“We went to the studio and all sorts of people just phoned and said: I heard you’re doing a CD, can I be part of it, I’ll do it for free or for very cheep. Next moment all these huge names in the studio, even Anton Goosen.”

The title raised a few eyebrows. Bloedrivier… Was Koos, the affable vagabond going the same nationalist route as Bok van Blerk with De La Rey or Deon Opperman with his play Ons vir jou, appealing to the Afrikaner laager mentality? “I was terrified of that,” he says. So what he did was make a distinctly multi-racial video for Reconciliation Day and start an on-line war with Deon Opperman. “I thought: this is the ideal opportunity, let’s stage a fight with this guy. Because in the public eye they will see me as separate from him. It was perfect. The right wingers didn’t go for it.”

Still, the title is rather ambiguous. He nods. “I’m not an Afrikaner, but I am Afrikaans speaking, and the history of the Afrikaner is my history. But obviously I see what happened at Bloedrivier in a very different way. I see it as a lot of violence and I see it as a misunderstanding between Dingaan and Retief. A big tragedy. I don’t see it as God making us win and all that crap. But it’s part of the history and a powerful symbol. I saw it as about the water being dirty, the pollution, the violence and all the crime. It was a perfect metaphor. But it was dangerous because I didn’t want it to be: grrr, fok julle, ons is blankes. So I picked the fight with Opperman, and it worked: intelligent people bought the CD.”

Afrikaners and Afrikaanses. Two years ago Koos wrote a column for Rapport in which he gave up his Afrikanerdom. “So many people hated me for that. I betrayed die volk. But I found it hard to live with the word Afrikaner. I don’t like the fact that when you speak a certain language you should have all this cultural baggage. I know that for traditional Afrikaners it’s not just speaking Afrikaans: you’re white, you like rugby and you go to this church and you abuse your children in some way, hahaha. I love the language. I have spoken it all my life. But when I think of who my real friends are, they’re people like Taliep, people outside the fold, urbanised people. The fact that I’m white or Afrikaans is very low on my list of priorities.”

Even though much of the anger he felt last year has evaporated (“The other day I almost bought an ANC T-shirt, coz I really like and trust some of these new guys.”), the making of the album, the fulmination against ANC’s arrogance, has had a cleansing effect on Kombuis. He got rid of the guilt and the liberal knee-jerk of “I’m so sorry I’m white”.

“You mustn’t put black people on a pedestal. Because then, when they disappoint you, you become more racist than you would’ve been. And for a while this was happening in my head, even while I was doing this recording, trying to understand my anger. Afterwards it sort of righted itself, and I realized it’s not an issue anymore. Before I used to overcompensate. I’ve stopped doing that. Which is a relief.”

An example? “Like there’s a black beggar who comes at my door. I’ve been helping him to get a job. At one stage I caught him lying to me. I got him a job and he never pitched. I was so angry at him. I scolded him. And I felt so relieved. Hier die ou is ’n doos. When I was shouting at him I told him: ek is nie ’n fokken racist nie, maar jy het my teleurgestel, don’t come back. And it was like: ha, I’m free. It became just a guy, not a black or white guy.”

this interview first appeared here

‘It’s really one of the few books that I have written that I really enjoyed [writing]. It has been a labour of love. I really enjoyed allowing my mind to wander, to break rules and to get out of constraints and boundaries. In a sense it was the spirit, which just transported me. I know its sounds mystical and all that, but ja, it really took me and transported me,” says Mandla Langa of his fifth novel, The Lost Colours of the Chameleon (Picador Africa).

Announced as the winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book: Africa Region at the Time of the Writer Festival in Durban on Wednesday, The Lost Colours of the Chameleon gave Langa much enjoyment in the creative process, which can perhaps be attributed to its allegorical nature.

Langa’s previous works were steeped in the South African reality, whether in stories of the armed struggle (A Rainbow on a Paper Sky, 1989) or internecine violence in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal (The Memory of Stones, 2000).

The Lost Colours of the Chameleon transports one to the fictional Indian Ocean island of Bangula as it examines the individual’s and society’s relationship with power in a fragile, newly formed nation suffering from a “Blood Plague”.

Langa says allegory allowed him “to dream, to paint on this plain canvas, to paint as much as you can without there being restrictions”.

As with all his books, Langa says he read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon during the creative process of The Lost Colours of the Chameleon: “There is something about the structure, the style. There is something about the irreverence of language and the ability to turn everything upside down and not follow convention — for me, that is refreshing and I hate boundaries, so it takes me out of the possibility of sticking to boundaries.”

He was challenged “to create the landscape that takes the reader into the country, into the mythical land and the fictitious place … succeeding in peopling that place with characters people can identify with”.

Langa later says that researching the dynamics of an Indian Ocean island — weather patterns or the prevalence of vultures — was “one of the hardest parts of writing this book”, which took three years to complete.

“The struggle was in the research; even though you have a mythical and fictitious place, it has to have the characteristics of a real place.”

The other struggles included having “to try to think of how to carry forth ideas of what is taking place in your own world into another realm and how not to be banal and pedestrian about it … To translate your own real circumstances into another reality — that takes a lot of doing,” says Langa.

CONTINUES BELOW

“This book has been in the making for a number of years … I have really travelled around and seen quite a number of incredible jurisdictions and had conversations, and even in my previous incarnations when I was at Icasa [as chairperson of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa], I met some of these composite characters who have ended up as some of the players in my novel,” says the 59-year-old who spent much of his exile years around Africa. (Langa went abroad in the late Seventies; he is part of the anti-apartheid struggle aristocracy and Constitutional Court Chief Justice Pius Langa’s brother.)

The book was written while Langa was living in South Africa, with the impetus to sit down at the keyboard coming after considering socio-political events in “Africa, Latin America, Asia and, of course, some of the more egregious kind of stuff like the war in Iraq and the Palestinian question. But much more importantly, there was the stuff unfolding in Zimbabwe, there was our own possibilities of ‘if we don’t watch it as South Africans, we might be also heading down that route’.”

It is apparent that for Langa the “dysfunctional use of power” is a universal problem, which eventually becomes “indexed by the number of corpses that pile up”, thus making politics a “mortuary industry”.

“The book in some sense was an outburst from inside myself to comment on the post-colonial malaise where we finally achieve power, and the big question then, which is the big question of leadership all over … It is sometimes easy to get power, but it is insuperably difficult to deploy it. To handle it, and to not let it go to your head. In a sense I started to see glimpses in our own political make-up towards power becoming a burden.”

The allegorical nature of The Lost Colours of the Chameleon meant Langa was able to “criss-cross” cultures and lands to create a “new living people”, the Creoles of Bangula, which allowed him to “move away from the run-of-the-mill black-white contestation: even though it’s implied, it is not as glaring and in-your-face as has been the problem with South African literature”.

It was a deliberate attempt to “move away from that canon” of apartheid or anti-apartheid literature: “Racism is a universal sickness; it’s not only endemic in what is going on in South Africa. But I wanted to move away from what I can call favourite tropes of South African, sometimes even African, writing.”

On considering that the Commonwealth Prize shortlists for Africa were dominated by South Africans, Langa is effusive about the state of new South African literature: “It’s getting younger, it’s getting brasher, it’s getting much more inventive, dealing with themes you would never have dreamt of. The political circumstance in South Africa has thrown up, to my mind, a lot of creativity.”

this interview first published on mg.co.za

(Mike van Graan recently won the Fleur du Cap Theatre award for the Best New South African Play for Die Generaal, a searing drama about the effects of violent crime on race relations in post-apartheid South Africa. Below is an extension of his acceptance speech.)

By Mike van Graan: Last year’s winner in this category - Lara Foot-Newton’s excellent Karoo Moose – and Die Generaal were both commissioned by the Aardklop Arts Festival to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2007 – with generous sponsorship from ABSA. These consecutive awards affirm the important role that festivals and the private sector play in producing contemporary South African theatre.

A combination of government policy that has transformed publicly-funded theatres into “receiving houses”, robbing them of funds to produce new work; the sheer bureaucratic ineptitude of the Lottery that presides over vast resources for the arts but lacks the vision, will and capacity to use these resources effectively, and the reactive and limited nature of funding from the National Arts Council, have placed the burden of theatre production largely on the shoulders of the country’s three largest festivals: the privately-funded ABSA Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudsthoorn, the Aardklop Arts Festival in Potchefstroom and the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, that nowadays receives its core funding largely from public coffers.

The nature of arts funding has also ironically polarised theatre-makers in post-apartheid South Africa with Afrikaans theatre generally sustained through the extensive circuit of Afrikaans festivals, with only a limited number of the annual harvest of Afrikaans plays being seen in the country’s premier theatres. Theatre in other indigenous languages is often the preserve of “community theatre” ghettoes that prevent them from eligibility for professional theatre awards, while theatre in English – irrespective of the home language of the theatre makers – is the primary vehicle to access the markets of the National Arts Festival (with its roots in celebrating the English language), the major theatres of the country and the international markets still interested in South African theatre.

Given the proliferation of Afrikaans festivals and their private sector muscle (at least until the recent economic crisis), it is probably no coincidence that three of the four plays nominated in this year’s “Best New South African Play” category are in Afrikaans.

According to an article in the Sunday Times of 8 March 2009, ABSA – a major player in arts funding - is under fire from some politicians for its decision to make funding available to political parties only after the elections. I’m not sure why the private sector funds political parties at all.

In the arts sector, we often hear that business is reluctant to sponsor the creative activities of artists because of the potentially controversial nature of artistic work. Yet, business happily spends millions on sponsoring sport where hardly a fortnight goes by without some damaging boardroom controversy, or where there is some indiscretion by a leading sports star “role model” or where the sponsored team embarrasses the country – and the sponsor - on the playing fields.

If reluctance to be associated with controversy is a criterion for determining private sector sponsorship, then it is even more inexplicable why business funds biographies of sitting politicians, or political parties that – certainly during election campaigns – sling and attract mud, both for themselves and their sponsors. It is also political parties – particularly those that govern at whatever level of society – that often, simply by virtue of having political power, do controversial things that compromise our nascent democracy and undermine our country’s constitution.

Born nearly a hundred years ago, Gillo Dorfles, an Italian painter (and prolific essayist) wrote that “…art, however one defines it, must mirror, favourably or with hostility, the development of the society to which it belongs. Inevitably, contemporary art too, reflects the complex and divisive social, political and ethical state of our civilisation”.

In his powerful Nobel Prize for Literature lecture in 2005, the now late playwright Harold Pinter said “When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move one millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision, we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.”

Another leading British theatre-maker, John McGrath, writes that “…theatre is, or it can be, the most public, the most clearly political of the art forms. Theatre is the place where the life of a society is shown in public to that society, where that society’s assumptions are exhibited and tested, its values are scrutinised, its myths are validated and its traumas become emblems of its reality. Theatre is…a public event, and it is about matters of public concern.”

This, then, is to thank the Fleur du Cap judges for their recognition of Die Generaal which is not easy, escapist entertainment to which to take clients and key service providers to build corporate relationships, for it deals with some of the more challenging questions of our time: violent crime, its adverse effect on relations between different communities and the racism it breeds, poverty, corruption, and the like.

South Africa has a long tradition of theatre that is intimately linked to the political, social and economic fabric of the society. During the apartheid era, there was a commonly held view that the “personal is political”, that the life experience of individuals was directly impacted upon by broader social, economic and political forces; that individuals could in turn impact on these forces; that the individual and the collective, the micro and the macro existed in a dialectical relationship with each other. This is no less true in post-apartheid South Africa where macro political, economic and social forces impact directly on individuals with deeply moral, psychological, physical and emotional consequences - the stuff of dramatic exploration.

Ours is a country full of contradictions, of irony, of complexity - a great place for writers, for artists. Yet there are those who argue against socially-engaged theatre work, offering a variety of reasons, from the superficial “audiences are tired of politics”; the denialist “the days of protest are over”; the defensive: “the main purpose of theatre is to entertain” and the attempt at political literacy: “there is now a legitimate government in place and a free media so theatre no longer needs to play the conscientising role it had to under apartheid”. Still others believe that progressive theatre makers should not give ammunition to “the enemy” to feed criticism of the government, or that while it is one’s constitutional right to criticise those in power, the time is not right to do so. Political correctness has become a new form of censorship. But the choice to disengage art and theatre from the prevailing social, economic and political conditions, is itself a political act.

By its very nature, art – and theatre in particular – poses hard questions, reflects the difficult challenges being grappled with by individuals within particular historical moments, poses alternatives and celebrates life, optimism and human endeavour even within trying circumstances. It is thus inevitable that the arts and artists will be “controversial”, particularly if the alternative visions they present counter the prevailing dogmas and political, social and economic interests of hegemonic forces.

The struggle for democracy, for human rights, for freedom of expression is never truly won. All that changes are the conditions in which the struggle for these takes place. It is a struggle we are obliged to engage in, not just as citizens, but as artists. For ultimately, democracy exists for us, not for politicians or ruling parties or those who fund or sponsor them in their elitist interests. When we retreat from these struggles, we allow others to define democracy in their self-serving image.

The right to freedom of artistic creativity and the right to freedom to receive or impart information or ideas are now guaranteed in the Constitution. Yet, this right is meaningless unless one has the resources to be able to create and to distribute one’s ideas, views and values through the arts, including theatre.

this speech first published on artslink.co.za

Towards the end of last year Diale Tlholwe hit the crime fiction scene with his private investigator Thabang Maje being drawn into some mysterious goings-on in a remote village. His book Ancient Rites (Kwela) was well received and in May he’ll be among the crime writers featured at the Franschhoek Literary Festival. Somewhat belatedly we have to admit, but some of the delay is due to a snailmail situation, Crime Beat caught up with Tlholwe for a chat.

Crime Beat: Ancient Rites starts with a jaded urban PI Thabang Maje heading for the deep rural areas. Why did you decided to set the story in a timeless landscape among people with strong ties to the land and the past?

Diale Tlholwe: The setting was not really planned. Thabang Maje was merely supposed to stay only a day or two in the rural areas but while writing new ideas surfaced as I remembered the two years I had spent in a place very much like Marakong. I also felt that such places and people are rarely represented in our literature. The jaded urbanized detective seemed like the perfect person to go there. Like many urban people who are rootless the rural areas are attractive and tempting. Many urban people have this yearning for them and look at them maybe too romantically as places that may renew them.

I suppose that is why we have this situation where rural people are flocking to the cities while city born and bred people are dreaming of settling in the rural areas and are building homes there. This is where the missing teacher comes in. Her attachment to the land and the old traditions is what is also fascinating about a lot of people in this country though it is something very rarely spoken about though most people both in the rural areas and the cities have the same attachments. The contrast between the rural folk and Thabang also appealed to me. The seeming fatalism of the rural folk and Thabang’s refusal to leave matters alone. Also his reluctance to believe in what the villagers believed in. I’ve been always interested in the people who after centuries of ridicule and even persecution by the colonialists and even by their own have never abandoned the old beliefs or traditions. And the fact that many are highly educated well read and well traveled. And those who are ‘coming out of the closet’ so to speak.

The next thing was the constant ambivalence of many people regarding religion. The way most people have one foot in one culture and another foot in a different culture I think leads to interesting possibilities in writing crime fiction. I thought Thabang fitted this picture perfectly of the typical urbanized person who is however not sure of the truth of these matters. While he often ridicules them he does not dismiss them altogether. The setting is also unchanging while the city bred Thabang is a product of the ever changing city. The patience of the rural folk is also indicative of the ancient landscape that has remained almost unchanged over a very long time. On the other hand Thabang is filled with the city impatience to get things done.

Crime Beat: There is much in Ancient Rites which is new to the typical SA crime novel in English. There’s the setting for one thing, the sense of a supernatural world for another. In fact the book’s reality seems to slip between the ‘real’ world and the world of the ‘spirits’. It’s a fascinating theme, what led you to it?

Diale Tlholwe: The supernatural is always with us in this country. It does not matter what the particular religion someone professes in many situation one is often confronted with this ‘slip’.

Between the ‘real’ world and the world of ‘spirits’. I suppose the person who one said that sometimes the theme of your novel chooses you was right. I have been deeply interested in traditional belief systems for some time now - but not in a sustained or systematic way.

So it was natural for me to try and explore this theme. I had not started out to make it central in the novel but as I was writing it somehow became important and I ran with it. The memories of that time I had spent in the rural areas came vividly back to me. I remembered attending some of these ceremonies. Things that I had thought I had forgotten were back with me once again and had a meaning they had not had when they were actually happening all those years ago. References to this tradition were suddenly on all sides of me. It seemed as if I could not get away from it. It was the old story of you getting diabetes and suddenly everyone you know has suffered from diabetes or had been cured of it or had died of it. So in a way the book wrote itself.

Crime Beat: Thabang is a man of the city. In the village he is without any reference points. He is a man facing an illogical would. You clearly wanted this contrast?

Diale Tlholwe: I wanted this contrast because it brings out clearly the contrast between the old and the modern. It also challenges Thabang’s own preconceptions and prejudices about this illogical world. He slowly appreciates that he has got to look at this illogical world according to its own terms instead of imposing his own points of reference on it. The rural folk have also got to realize that they also have to face the outside world eventually. The question is how to harmonize the two worlds or even if this is possible and desirable. The arguments are still raging on these things.

Crime Beat: There is an intriguing passage towards the end of the novel that is as much about language as it is about Thabang and our justice system. In fact it seems to summarise most of the books themes.
I held my gun in both hands and positioned my feet firmly on the ground. ‘Why, Mogae?’ I asked him. ‘She let you go.’
‘She…was…always…a lying…proud bitch.’
That was all I really needed. Even as I raised the gun I wondered why his last words sounded so much worse in English. Maybe if he had said it in Setswana I might have let him take his chances with a judge. Maybe.
I shot him twice in the chest, then I sat on a cold rock and waited for him to die. I looked into his confused eyes and debated with his diminishing soul the problems and paradoxes of good and evil, of loss and alienation, the pain of a possible rebirth and the burden of a threatened immortality. Then, when they lost their puzzlement and froze in the certainty of death, I stood up and left him lying there.

Firstly, you’ve written in English but no doubt would rather have written in Setswana. Secondly, Thabang has no hesitation in acting as judge and executioner. Do you feel the judicial system is out of place in some situations in South Africa? Or do you feel that the judicial system isn’t coping?

And finally, the passage says much about Thabang and our reaction to him. He has shot a man – albeit a man deserving punishment – yet it doesn’t diminish his humanity. In fact it leads him to contemplate the meaning and complexity of life. Was this a crucial scene for you?

Diale Tlholwe: I wondered if anyone would notice this. Yes, I would have liked to have it in Setswana. But the difficulties are many. I have been told the books in African languages are not popular and are difficult to get them published. One problem in writing in English is the difficulty of translation. Some very fine expressions can’t be put in English successfully without an active imagination. The other problems are those regarding the language purists who scare many people from using their own languages. What we need are more editors who can help out here. Editors who will live in the book and not simply look for the easiest, but sterile direct translation. I saw this with Ancient Rites when Setswana experts wanted to explain some of the expressions and words with flat unimaginative English substitutes when there were livelier alternatives. Hopefully things will change one day before its too late.

The judicial system in South Africa quite honestly perplexes a lot of people. It is as someone said a roll of the dice. It is a lengthy expensive process in which anything can happen. That I suppose is why so many complaints are never laid and a lot of disputes are sorted out independently of the judiciary. However Thabang surprised me.

This was indeed a crucial scene for me. Thabang has to live with himself afterwards. I don’t see him as someone who could just let this killing drift away without giving it some serious thought. What those thoughts are determines who he is and what has happened to him since arriving at this place. He might have laughed and boasted about it to everyone including Lesego.

Crime Beat: Are you working on another crime novel and will we be seeing more of Thabang?

Diale Tlholwe: I am busy working on another novel and yes Thabang will be in it. I had thought of giving him a rest but I then felt that he had been launched and with a proper story in his own urban environment he can go farther. People who have read the book liked him though some are angry with him for not saving Mamo’s life.

this interview first appeared on crimebeat.book.co.za

SINDIWE MAGONA

South Africa

Sindiwe Magona , born in the Transkei , grew up in the harsh surroundings of the Cape Flats . Magona’s writings recall her impoverished youth in South Africa , and her personal and political struggles, as a Black South African woman living under apartheid, to achieve racial and gender harmony in South Africa . Magona draws on the traditional Xhosa storytelling techniques remembered from her early childhood. It is a distinctive style of writing that prompted this description from The Washington Post Book World: To My Children’s Children “ is a delightful poignant, feisty and uplifting story that chronicles in a refreshing and authentic voice, what it means to attain womanhood in a society where patriarchy and apartheid often conspired to degrade and enslave women.”

This extraordinary woman obtained her matric by correspondence, as a single parent, mother of three, with no fixed abode, and working as a domestic servant. She finally graduated with a BA degree from the University of South Africa as well as a Master of Science Degree in Organizational Social Work from Columbia University. In 1993 Hartwick College (USA) awarded her an honourary Doctorate in Humane Letters and in 1997, she was a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow in the non-fiction category.

In 1976 Magona’s commitment as a community activist was rewarded when she was invited to the International Women’s Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Brussels, and in 1977 the Cape Argus, recognized her as one of the 10 finalists for its Woman of the Year Award. At the height of her political activism, however, she found that the pen is mightier than the sword, as her writing allows her to challenge or influence public opinion while empowering black youths and especially women for the roles they should play in the new South Africa . Recently retired from the United Nations’ Department of Public Information, New York , where she was based for many years, Sindiwe Magona has now returned to her homeland and is living in the Cape.

Publications:

To My Children’s Children, David Philip, 1990

Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night, David Philip, 1991

Forced to Grow, Women’s Press, London, 1992, David Philip, 1992

Push-Push and other stories, David Philip, 1996

Mother to Mother, David Philip, 1998

1. You are a journalist as well as a fiction writer. Do you find that the two kinds of writing are different? Do they complement each other or not?

The imagined world of fiction tends to render itself in powerful imagery and colourful language … whereas dealing with dry facts can be intimidating, as the writer is wary of exaggeration. So, writing fiction can be a pleasure in that it opens a new world of images that you had never thought you would be able to enter, to delve into. Fictional language is liberating, entertaining to the writer. Because I am a full-time journalist, the experience of writing Bitches’ Brew, which I completed in a period of just over a year, was an experience touched by many contradictions. I would leave my newspaper office drained, tired … only to be reminded when I got home that I had to get ready for the fictional world of Bitches’ Brew. Sometimes it was inspiring, as it helped me forget the world of daily journalism; it offered me a necessary respite. But sometimes it was way too challenging to get out the world of non-fiction and journalism into that paradise of fiction writing. But by and large, I have found over many years of writing both fiction and non-fiction that the genres can sometimes complement each other. While writing Bitches’ Brew I found that when I got stuck I could always go back to Touch My Blood, which was in its umpteenth draft. The books were written almost concurrently.

2. In the concluding pages of Touch my Blood you describe a typical family get-together in 2005 when you gently reproach your mom for working too hard, and this sentence jumps out at me: “I tell her to sit down now and let her daughters do the serving.” Well, what about her sons (including you) doing the serving for a change?

There is an allocation of duties where I come from. Being the eldest, I was taught at a young age how to cook and clean the house. But when my sisters grew up, the skills were transferred to them – giving me a respite. Then I graduated to “manly” duties – chopping wood, collecting coal from the traders, and buying groceries. In the particular instance that you refer to in the book, the boys (men) had already done their duties. We had bought all the provisions needed for the umcimbi (function) – things like flour, maize meal, wood, coal (for the open fire) – and we had collected the huge Zulu black pots from relatives. But most importantly, we had also slaughtered the beast. Now it was time for the women to “come to the party”, so to speak.

3. At one point you tell us that after qualifying as a journalist you were more comfortable writing in English than in Zulu. Please elaborate.

This is a contradiction, I admit. English is my second language, Zulu my first. In the 12 years I spent at school, Zulu as a medium of instruction featured prominently, as the school that I went to was a typical Bantu Education school, where teachers were generally ill-trained. Some of them who taught us subjects like Business Economics and Biology could hardly express themselves in English, so they would translate English concepts that were found in the textbooks into Zulu. This then posed a problem for the pupils as they had to write their exams in English at the end of the year. That was the tragedy of Bantu Education. Which is why many black people of my generation who went to the same kind of schools are still not adept at expressing themselves eloquently in English. There were, of course, exceptions – people who went the extra mile in teaching themselves English in their own time, through continual reading and writing for pleasure. I was one of those. As fate would have it, the technikon at which I studied journalism was predominantly white. Those days black students had to obtain a special permit from the minister of education in order to be admitted to technikons and universities not designated for their race. In the three years I spent at technikon our studies were in English, our conceptualisation of news values was in English. Our reporting was in English. By the time we graduated, many of us who were first-language Zulu speakers struggled to “translate” the concept of news values into Zulu. When I started making forays into creative writing, therefore, English became the tool I found most effective and “easier” to resort to. Also, the market for Zulu writing was limited, so as a youngster who wanted to be published, one tended to resort to English – there was a plethora of English language publications looking for fresh voices in English: Drum, Bona, Pace, Tribute and, incidentally, Staffrider, which you edited at that time and which was one of the first publications to publish my short stories and poems. But in the rage of my growing up as a writer I gradually moved towards Zulu as my other weapon in my literary arsenal. Today I write fluently and competently in both languages – be it a piece of journalism, an essay or work of fiction. Among other projects, I am in the process of translating Touch My Blood into Zulu.

4. You call Touch my blood your personal Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the book you recount some very harrowing stories regarding the conflict between the United Democratic Front and Inkatha in the turbulent eighties, including being personally sjambokked by Inkatha supporters. Have you forgiven your assailants? Have any of them read your book? If so, how have they reacted to it?

I regard Touch My Blood as my personal Truth and Reconciliation Commission because in it, and through it, I have found a platform through which I can effect a reconciliation between the many personas that reside in this entity called Fred Khumalo. I have done things in the past which I am now ashamed of. Through the book I am taking stock of those misdemeanours. But I am also reflecting on “the struggle” and how it impacted on people of my generation from both sides of the political divide. Ever since the publication of the book I have, of course, received accolades from people I grew up with. Those who have been forthcoming with their comments, however, come from my neck of the woods. Not one of my erstwhile adversaries has come forward and contradicted what I have to say in the book. However, I recall being interviewed on SABC when a woman from my province phoned in and said Touch My Blood was anti-Inkatha propaganda. She obviously hadn’t read the book, but was basing her criticism on some of my utterances during the interview. Yes, I have forgiven my assailants. In fact, I have been to drinking places where people from both sides of the political divide in my township have broken bread together, laughing about the bad old days and making self-deprecating remarks about how they had been used by the politicians who wanted to fulfil their own narrow political agendas.

5. You mentioned that you have been commissioned to write a biography of Jacob Zuma. Have there been any interesting reactions to this project and how is it proceeding?

Yes, I have been commissioned to write a biography of Jacob Zuma. Let me first point out that is unauthorised. As a result, I have been having a torrid time getting access to him – especially when his rape and corruption cases got underway. I have therefore been using stuff from my previous talks with him, but have also been doing extensive interviews with people who were with him on Robben Island, people who were with him in Mozambique, people who were with him in London, and, very crucially, people who knew him as a kid. It’s tough going, but I am writing the book. People have been encouraging, saying that the Zuma story has to be told so that the nation can know who this man is, what makes him tick, how he got to where he is … Yes, it’s the most difficult piece of writing I have ever committed myself to … but it has to be done.

this interview first appeared on litnet

The out-of-tempo indignation of a liberal: a semi-serious deconstruction of André Brink’s “Glad to be alive”

It must have been hard for renowned author André Brink to keep locked inside his heart all the resentment and the grudge against the “ignorant” and “swaggering” individuals who have occupied the seats of power in post-apartheid Mzansi. Yet, short before migrating to safer shores in Australia, fellow writer J.M. Coetzee had made the very effort to write a whole book to subtly warn his homies: “Leave, buddies, before it is too late. The barbarians are coming”. Message left unheard by brave Mr Brink who, unlike smart Coetzee, decided to stay, because – he writes: “this is the place of my birth and my ancestors, and I happen to love it”.

Courageous Mr Brink stayed. And he gutsy endured almost silently the barbarism of the “New South Africa” for more than a decade. Until something too outrageous to be handled by his bullet-proof liberal heart happened. One last drop fell on the vase, making it to overflow. This forced Mr Brink to hold his pen and burst out on paper all the anger accumulated in these years. Finally. Once and for all.

The above quoted and the following excerpts are taken from an article published by Rome-based liberal newspaper La Repubblica in 2006, maliciously translated into Italian with the title “This is how South Africa has betrayed Mandela’s dream” from André Brink’s original article “Glad to be alive” (http://www.finistere.se/blogg/entry.asp?ENTRY_ID=469)

Though a little outdated, it’s a story worthy to be read:

A story that goes like this :

It’s “late in the evening on a quiet weekday night”, and Mr. Brink’s daughter Sonja and her husband Graham are having dinner in a “small restaurant in a peaceful suburb in the town of Somerset West, near Cape Town”. They are “discussing their two small children and how to occupy them during the winter holidays which have just begun; and reminiscing about the reception at the French embassy earlier in the evening”, where they had met “the members of the French rugby team”. The world – continues Mr Brink – “seems to be a pleasant, relaxed and generous place”.

NOTE 1: This is the set of Mr Brink’s story, which immediately makes me – an immigrant living in a township – wonder: what are we exactly talking about here?!? But it’s too early to drop the newspaper in the dust bin, and curiosity pushes me ahead. So – I think to myself – let’s give Mr Brink a chance.

Proving to be a navigated poker player, in this first part of the story Mr Brink plays the first good card in his hands, “the children card”, which is always a good one to capture the reader’s sympathy. Poor Mr Brink’s bored grandchildren… Let us imagine the hypothetical conversation:
“Graham, my darling, Sakhile hasn’t yet cleaned the swimming pool. I asked him to come over two weeks ago and he said there was no transport… Plus, the Playstation is at the shop for repairs, and kids have already been to the US during last winter’s holiday. How are we going to keep them busy this year?”

Already at this point, I can’t stop thinking about Ntate Nhlanhla and Ma Agnes (who live in the squatter camp 500 mt far from my section in Tembisa) and their sleepless nights, for they don’t know how to put three meals together for their kids the next day…. How unpleasant, unrelaxed, and ungenerous place the world must be for them…

But then again, at least I know from the very incipit of the story that Mr Brink is speaking about someone whose world is a pleasant and generous place to live in… someone who definitely belongs to a South African elite.
Still driven by curiosity more than any other sentiment, I am determined to read further.

The couple’s carefree conversation is violently interrupted by a “sudden commotion”, the bursting of “five men, armed with pistols” who “start shouting, in a cacophony of voices, orders and instructions which are at first quite incomprehensible”. In the next minutes, some of the people in the room are “attacked, beaten to the floor and savagely kicked in the face”. Then (and here comes the climax of the first part of Mr Brink’s painful story) “everybody is ordered to strip themselves of rings and jewellery, watches, cell phones, wallets”, while. “ the manager is forced to hand over the keys to the safe; the cash register is smashed”.

NOTE 2: I figure out that the set of voices seems to be “cacophonic”, and the given orders and instructions “incomprehensible” because, most probably, they are spoken in one of the (allegedly) nine South African official languages which the diners are unable to speak (unlike their domestic workers, their gardeners and the waiters serving at their tables who, I bet, are all fluent in at least three of them ).

There’s a racist innuendo in the description of the robbery but, whatever the case, Mr Brink, as the Latins said: Dura lex, sed lex (“A tough law, but a law”). You got to know it the hard-knocks way, but at least now you know that South Africa is a country where it’s seems quite hard to enjoy a dinner. In fact, it’s hard to enjoy it if you get assaulted between a filet and a mousse au chocolat, your diamonds gets stolen and the Italian wine you were sipping stains your silk dress. But it’s even harder when papa has no job, mama is sick and there’s no food on the table. Yes Mr Brink, bejewelled people do find hard to enjoy their dinner sometimes. But don’t forget that many times poor people don’t have dinner at all.

“Apart from a single paragraph on an inside page of the small local newspaper” – the story goes on – “the incident will not even be reported in the press: it is too insignificant, too banal, too commonplace in the New South Africa. No-one has been killed, no-one raped. It will not even rate as a statistic”.

NOTE 3: I guess the incident will not be reported because, amongst the thousand crimes committed on a daily base in the New South Africa, the theft of a few cellphones and gold rings, though disturbing, is indeed a totally irrelevant or, as you called it, “insignificant” and “banal” piece of news, given the socially troubled situation of the country. I guess that most readers (not to mention “the everyday people”, those who can hardly afford to buy newspapers) simply wouldn’t care.

Nevertheless, I also have a small daughter, and the Goddess knows how much I, as any other conscious parent, care about her safety. In a glimpse of parental solidarity, I feel pity for Mr Brink’s preoccupations. I can actually visualize him.

Genuflected, clasped hands, in front of an altar with a giant effigy of Rudolph Giuliani, “the sheriff of NYC”. The one who, when the mayor of the Big Apple, with his “Zero Tolerance” doctrine, “cleaned the streets” of the city by targeting micro-crime. In other words, by throwing into jail thousands of people (mainly black, latinos, or, to cut it short, poor people), while leaving untouched the “white collar crimes” which, on the contrary, flourished in the same years. As they say in Italy: strong with the weak ones and weak with the strong ones… “Ah, Rudy, if you were here, instead of that useless…”

Then the story takes a sudden turn. A new character appears in the texture of Mr Brink hot-hearted story. Now the issue is no more daughter and son-in-law’s indigested dinner. The target has shifted to “the large, beaming, bearded face of the Minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula” whom from now on becomes the scapegoat character of the story’s dramatic plot. Scary individual indeed, Mr Nqakula is depicted as a vulgar, gross brute with “a singularly unremarkable career as a politician”, who displays an “almost criminal indifference” towards the “complaints against violence” and holds a bizarre grudge against “people (mostly whites) who ‘winge’ about the level of violence in South Africa” who – Nqakula declared, “would do better to leave the country”.

NOTE 4 : The narrative construction of a monster-figure has started, and goes on in a crescendo of anger and disgust which flow from Mr Brink’s outraged and enraged pen.

Poker player Mr Brink plays then card number two, “the apartheid card”, to induce a sinister subliminal concept.

Mr Nqakula is emphatically equated to ancien régime “Minister of Justice Jimmy Kruger” who, in a notorious, “infamous remark” claimed that “the murder of Steve Biko by Security Police in September 1977, ‘left him cold’ ”.

NOTE 5: According to Mr Brink’s fuzzy logic, Nqakula and Kruger are as one. They are both insensitive towards the tragedies that occur to their people; therefore they belong to the same family of monsters. Yet, Mr Brink forgets to remind that Kruger’s commented the heinous murder of one of the most brilliant revolutionaries of Mzansi’s history, while Nqakula was speaking about minor crimes. Unless Mr Brink wants to put the assassination of Steve Biko and the “Somerset West restaurant incident” on the same level. But I am sure that’s not his intention.

At this point the story has already turned into a tragicomedy, but at least the picture starts getting clearer, as I start wondering to myself: isn’t that the futile story of Sonja and hubby is being used to convey another, between-the-lines message? In fact, it sounds to me as the agenda Mr Brink’s has (unsuccessfully) tried to keep hidden, is finally starting to surface.

As a matter of fact, the whole central part of the article is occupied by Mr Brink’s vehement anathemas against Mr Nqakula and his colleagues of the ruling political class. “One expects, of course, lapses of intelligence or plain common sense in politicians” writes Mr Brink “And experience in recent times has revealed in Mr Nqakula both a limited capacity for understanding and an unlimited capacity for arrogance. He does not seem to consider that his professed ignorance about the unlamented Kruger implies also an ignorance about the life and death of Biko: surely the one memory cannot exist without the other. And this may be a key to the full scandal of Nqakula’s attitude. He is ignorant about his own history.”

NOTE 6: I was starting to miss the part where the civilized liberal lectures the savage native about the latter’s own history. But here it is. It’s only a coincidence that it was Biko himself who warned about the patronizing attitude of liberals when it comes down to “educating” “the Native”. A very sinister coincidence, indeed.

“[I]n the process” Brink goes on “he [Nqakula] betrays everything the ANC has for so long claimed to stand for… In one callous, off-the-cuff remark, he has betrayed the legacy of Mandela”.

NOTE 7: Here we are! We had to wait for 51 (fifty-one) lines before poker master Mr Brink played card number three, the most powerful one in his astute hands: the “Mandelaring-card”— which is always an “Ace takes all”!… But he finally did it! Great move… worthy of the most expert of players.

“Of course not all members of the power establishment are like [Nqakula]” concludes Mr Brink, “[t]here are other members of the government who are humane and generous and understanding, and dedicate their considerable talents to realising Mandela’s dream”.

NOTE 8: Ok. Can someone please tell me once and for all what is this so-called “Mandela’s dream”? Please, Mr Brink, tell me, because I still don’t know what’s all about. I will not say, as Trevor Ngwane did, that Mandela was the one “who sold out the country”. Mtate Trevor has definitely gone too far. But then again: what was this beloved Mandela’s dream? Was it to build, as Rachel Donadio has confusedly stated: “a multicultural democracy (sic!) where the leadership is black, money is mostly white (sic!!!) and the line between power and exploitation extremely thin?” Was it to set up a country where the townships and the “informal settlements” (which are, according to Sabata-Mpho Mokae “of all the results of apartheid and colonialism […] the most hard-to heal and deepest of wounds” ) have not only disappeared, but rather mushroomed? Was it to found a new nation where the rich get richer and the poor poorer?

And it’s always funny to see how liberals like mandelaring these days! (For further documentation on the recurrent issue of “Mzansi’s white iberals and Madiba” I suggest also “Happy Birthday Saint Mandela; Long-live White Privilege!” In Mphutlane wa Bofelo’s Bluesology & Bofelosophy, pp. 147 -149). Maybe it’s because his so-called “dream” fits so well into their picture of a dream. A dream in which their privileges are left untouched. Where the “previously advantaged” have remained “still advantaged” and the “previously disadvantaged” keep being… “still disadvantaged”. Why I don’t hear you and your liberal folks, Mr Brink, calling out so often Sobukwe’s dream for example, or Hani’s dream, or Biko’s dream? They also have been betrayed, haven’ t they? The point is (and we both know it, Mr Brink) that, historically speaking, Mandela (in part), but especially his curious successor, have been the architects of a country which has charmingly put into practice the principle so well expressed by fellow writer Tomasi di Lampedusa in his masterpiece The Leopard: “If you want everything to stay as it is, everything must change”. Speaking in an out-of-fashion lexicon: at superstructure level important changes have taken place in post-apartheid Mzansi. Nonetheless, at a structural level the ANC-led so called “revolution” has been a leopardesque one so far..

If the concept is not clear yet Mr Brink, please read what Aryan Kaganof has to say about this in his clarifying poem Previously dissed (with particular attention to the last stanza):

Brothers and Sisters
You still getting dissed
That didn’t stop
Except for window dressing
And a few name changes
Not even that
Piet Retief is still
Piet Retief
And this poem is in English
Not exactly a language
You could call native

And what about the elections?
You can stand in a queue
All day every five years
But the land is still theirs

[…]

Previously dissed
My point
That you might have missed
Is that amandla lost the plot
When democracy got the vote
Instead of nonkululeko
Nowadays it’s all the Yiddish white folks
Going “Viva Nelson Mandela”
With their fists in the air

After almost fifteen years of “model democracy” this, Mr Brink, seems to me, very unfortunately, the heritage of “Mandela’s dream”. But most probably I am misled. And, as it seems you’re able to interpret better than me and anybody else Madiba’s sleeping thoughts, please keep enlightening us in the future.

In the next, epic, crime scene, Mr Brink’s j’accuse against the new power élite continues, in an apotheosis of rancour against grotesque “members of parliament” vandalizing the road in a “rogue car”, as well as the usual suspect Nqakula, who is here freely linked to them for being “a worthy follower” of these bully MPs’ “footsteps”. “Among the new power-élite in South Africa” Mr Brink explains “[Mr Nqakula]’s attitude appears to be gaining ground, in direct proportion to the escalating violence of the country.

NOTE 9: Curious criminological theory which associates crime and escalating violence to the “attitude”, the good or bad manners, of the ruling class of a country. After Lombroso’s, this is definitely the most interesting theory to appear in the criminological academic scenario. According to a vast literature, crime is mainly generated and fuelled by social and economic inequalities. In a country like ANC’s South Africa, where redistribution of wealth is virtually inexistent, and the gap between rich and poor gets larger and larger, crime will continue to expand. That’s the real reason, not Mr Nqakula’s and the MP’s rudeness. Otherwise, according to your theory, it would be sufficient to elect Don Juan de Marcos as the next President (though, given the latest vicissitudes inside the ANC, it looks like it won’t be so), and crime will vanish from the streets like morning dew on a summer day…

Tuning down a bit, but still on a dramatic mood, Mr Brink explains once more how much he feels in danger in the South Africa of the Nqakulas (“[i]n the present state of the country, I may meet that death sooner rather than later”) But tougher than leather, and stronger than any Nqakula, he is determined to follow daughter Sonja’s wise advice (“as Sonja said the morning after her ordeal, ‘I refuse to become a victim.’ ”)

NOTE 10: Something to agree with you, Mr Brink. Although this entire article smells of victimization from its very beginnings…

In the following lines Mr Brink explains how he “refuses to become a victim” because he will not allow his country to be left in people like Nqakula’s hands. He will stand face-to-face against the true problems of the country: (“The problem is that while such incidents [with all the emotional and mental scars they leave behind them for months, for years] characterise the present evolution of South Africa, the real suffering of our new democracy is not addressed”)

NOTE 11: Your daughter’s very unfortunate incident is as serious as cancer, no doubt about it, Mr Brink. But, haven’t you gone a little bit too far? The “real suffering” of Mzansi’s sluggish democracy is certainly not the loss of a few sumptuary goods…

Closed the brief but sentimental parenthesis on the emotional downsides caused on daughter’s mind by the robbery, Mr Brink goes back to his favourite leisure game, the MP hunt:

“The swaggering Jacob Zuma […] takes a shower after unprotected sex to counter the danger of AIDS; Charles Nqakula washes his hands of rape and murder. Nqakula pretends that the only ‘squealers’ are previously advantaged whites who cannot adapt to democratic change. For him it is easy to deny the plight of innumerable victims, black and brown and white, who live in townships and informal settlements, and whose clamouring for help over the years also fall on deaf ears”.

NOTE 12: As a prophet of liberal culture, Mr Brink here speaks in the name of others. And becomes the spokesperson not only of the “innumerable white victims”, but also of poor, “plighting” township residents. But, in embarking such noble cause, Mr Brink gets downright slack. He speaks about “innumerable victims, black and brown and white, who live in townships, informal settlements and squatter camps”. What’s that??? I live in a township and the only white faces I see around belong to obese tourists on bus tours, casual guests, or random Telkom technicians playing a toccata e fuga… This only in the townships. Since there is scarcity of formal electricity, telephones, and no tar roads to drive through, no traces of white faces in the squatter camps you mention, without even knowing what you’re talking about. And, by the way: what is this “black and brown” distinction? Are you drawing distinctions between black people Mr Brink? Is this yours updated, liberal version of the “pencil test”?

I learned from illustrious genetists and anthropologists, but above all from my everyday life experiences, that there is only one race, the human race. But if, in this sclerotic, globalized, post-modern, postcolonial, post-everything world, we still have to categorize people, then I think that a black person is a black person, regardless to the tonalities of their skin. Looking forward to further explanations, Mr Brink.

“What is lost is not only a generation of the murdered and the maimed and the deprived, but the opportunity to set up our democracy as the example to the world it was once claimed to be”.

NOTE 13: I think South Africa lost the chance to build an “example” democracy when the democrats you extensively talk about in your article decided to set into practice the neoliberal agenda imposed by today’s neocolonial powers (i.e. the IMF, the World Bank and other “democratic” institutions). And building that Garden of Eden for foreign corporations which is today’s Mzansi. Hence, turning their back on the people who had elected them.

‘At least,’ Sonja wryly said after the event, ‘we should be grateful that we are still alive’. In a curious way that remark was what angered me most. What kind of a country is this in which life is not a normal given, a norm, a status guaranteed (by our admirable constitution among other things), but something exceptional and remarkable, a privilege so extraordinary that it deserves special consideration and gratitude?

NOTE 14: Out of the blue Mr Brink gets “angered” because he finally finds out that people of this country wake up and are “glad to be alive”. He eventually opens his eyes to the fact that “life [in South Africa] is not a normal given, a norm, a status guaranteed, […] but something exceptional and remarkable, a privilege so extraordinary”. It sounds like if it weren’t for daughter Sonja’s unfortunate experience, Mr Brink would have never discovered such terrible truth! Yet, it would have been sufficient to live a couple of months in a township to be aware of it! In this mysterious place you prove not to know at all, people around you keep passing away because of hunger, hiv/aids, crime, etc. Life for them deserves “special consideration and gratitude” because it’s an everyday achievement, not something one can take for granted.

And then, turning poker-player again, Mr Brink plays the “constitution card”… another ace up his sleeve. C’mon, Mr Brink, you’re not a naïve, undergraduate student. I am sure you are fully conscious of the fact that, if not put effectively into practice, even the most socially advanced constitution is dead letter, don’t you? You don’t agree with me? Well, re-read Soviet Union’s 1936 Constitution and think about how “admirable” it could have been for Russian citizens living under comrade Big Moustache Joseph. To my experience, I come from a country which, like South Africa, has produced one of the most progressive constitutional charts ever written. And so what? Millions of my fellow-citizens (especially the younger generation and migrants) are struggling to pay their rent, their purchasing power keeps falling resulting in the inability for average families meeting the rising cost of living. A progressive Constitution does not protect anybody from being vulnerable and insecure. In other words: from being poor.

“[t]his ‘insignificant’ episode – Mr Brink bitterly whispers in the following lines – “marked as it was by the minister’s apocalyptic arrogance, has become a watershed in my own thinking about the New South Africa”.

NOTE 15: At least, some ground in common: the “insignificance” of the episode, given South Africa’s innumerable other, much more urgent, problems.

The story continues. From Mr Brink’ accounts of his speeches around the globe we find out he “feels [him]self left in the lurch” because people like Nqakula, “have now begun to define the image of the ANC”. Due to this aesthetic reason (and not to other reasons like, for instance, ANC’s neoliberal policies and “frustrated reforms” , the most striking one being that of the land) Mr Brink’s optimism has evaporated (“[I]n recent years, whenever on my travels I have been asked about the many ills that beset the New South Africa […] I have taken pains to insist what a dramatic change there has been in the country, and that there is good reason to be essentially, if cautiously, optimistic. I can no longer do that. It would be a betrayal of the most important values I believe in, and which were once, in a dream, exemplified by the ANC”).

So desperate is Mr Brink about the future of the country that he envisages the ultimate national catastrophe at the horizon (“One wonders for how long FIFA can continue to contemplate sending its soccer teams in 2010 to a World Cup presented in a country that has lost the ability to guarantee the safety of players, officials and spectators, turning what should be a world-class spectacle into a potential massacre which could make the Munich Olympics of a few decades ago look like a picnic outing”).

NOTE 16: Again, the game of associating current South African issues to historical facts does not produce convincing narrative results. Because of Mr Nqakula and some tsotsis the World Cup is to become “a potential massacre which could make the Munich Olympics look like a picnic outing?” Please, let’s not be ridiculous…

Fast forgotten Mr Brink’s drama queen predictions, I can’t prevent myself, once more, to think about the real nightmares troubling Mr Brink’s nights:

“If these distressing rumours about the 2010 World Cup being held in a country other than SA will come true, no dinner at the French embassy with Thierry Henry and Michel Platini! Oh my God! Oh my God, Oh my God!!!…”

In the final part of the story, while humbly recalling his own contribution in the struggle (“[d]uring the years of darkness under apartheid […] I saw it as part of my mission as a writer to explain what dared not be spoken openly by the silenced, to speak what was forbidden - in order to ensure that the truth could be brought into the open”), Mr Brink blatantly undermines Mr Nqakula’s (“[He] can, of course, not care less [about… ]. He has paid his price in the Struggle, hasn’t he?”). And, as in the aforementioned case of Biko’s murder, he plays the trick of crime-to-crime comparison. Going, once again, in utter confusion. According to Mr Brink in fact, Mr Nqakula’s personal experience under Kruger (“When others were tortured and killed, he, too, suffered. He was hit by a banning order, remember: persecuted, on a piece of paper, by the man who was left cold by the death of a fellow human being”) is comparable to that of “the people (mostly white) who ‘winge’ about the level of violence in South Africa” (“just as Nqakula himself is now left cold by the suffering and death of innumerable fellow South Africans, whose only desire was to enjoy the blessings of a generous land in a model democracy”).

For my sadness, the story slowly and tiredly came to an end, not without one final blitzkrieg against the political class: (“Like his colleague, the Minister of Health, Manto Tsabalala-Msimang, who babbles incoherently about curing AIDS with wild garlic and herbal concoctions, the Honourable Minister of Safety and Security is concerned only with assuring the prosperity of a small group of associates and confidants built on the suffering and deprivation of a huge majority”.)

NOTE 17: What you’re talking about here, Mr Brink (“assuring the prosperity of a small group of associates and confidants built on the suffering and deprivation of a huge majority”) has nothing to do with the bad behaviour of the ruling class of this country. It is called capitalism. That undisputable, unquestionable economic system which allows those like Mr Nqakula, as well as the radical chic, to keep prospering and enjoying life at its best. Are you perhaps, in the moving final lines of your story, questioning the accountability of capitalist societies?

No, he’s not. As these closing considerations seemed to make my faith on Mr Brink’s objectivity resurge, the umpteenth sudden twist on the plot brings me back to square one. The ending of the story is, inevitably, another disappointment (“We can still salvage those human and African values that have shaped the New South Africa – not the values that brought forth monsters like Nqakula or Zuma or Tsabalala-Msimang, but those that have produced a Mandela or a Tutu. But there is not much more time to lose”).

NOTE: 18: What are these vague “human and African values that have shaped the new South Africa”? Those thanks to which “62 000 white families still own 80% of the land, […] good education is still unattainable for poor families and […] economic power still resides in white hands”? Those due to which “democracy in South Africa had turned into a democracy ‘for those who have’ ” ?

Even in these conclusive, populist remarks, capitalism is not questioned.
It’s really time to drop the newspaper in the dust bin.

NOTE 19 (CONCLUSION): While I certainly agree with the sentiments expressed by Brink, when they are viewed against the brutality of criminals and the arrogance of politicians, his statements become hollow and hypocritical.

When he urgently takes his pen and pad to denounce the sad story of a tranquil bunch of diners being assaulted by an unruly gang of thugs, he should make an equal amount of noise about the crimes (the “petty” street crimes, but also the “grand”, economic crimes) committed against those who are really left behind: the poorest and often voiceless people who are busy in the everyday struggle for survival.

On the contrary, Mr Brink has proved to be ready to jump from the chair only when what is in danger is his daughter’s life (or, more probably, her jewellery). Let ‘s be clear: crime is a curse for all societies, at any latitude. Whenever, wherever. I am scared of hijacks and robberies too, and I too believe thugs are a serious menace to the peaceful living of our communities. With regards to this, Mr Brink, you must not feel alone. We are on the same boat. But then again, as you seem to be so concerned about it, but above all thoroughly determined to DO something about it, I want to read articles of yours for each and every crime that is committed in South Africa. I want a pamphlet of yours – at least as passionate as this, memorable, one – each and every time a child is raped or a mother dies of aids in the township, or a worker is buried alive in a mine. I repeat, Mr Brink: each and every time. If you believe this is a commitment too demanding fine. I understand. But if so, then don’t write at all about “Mandela’s (?) betrayed (?) legacies (?)”. Please. You know, whatever these legacies are, they are betrayed so many times, on a daily base, in this funny “model democracy” of Mzansi, Mr Brink, that if by any chance you tried to embark on the noble task of writing about them ALL, you would find yourself stuck 24-7 in front of your brand new laptop. And in that case, bye bye Friday’s tea at the yacht club and bye bye wine-and-cheese at the French embassy. As I stated earlier: a nightmare I surely do not want you to go through.

It is your right, or rather your duty, as a citizen, honest taxpayer and writer to vindicate for you and your family the right to live a Gatsby-style life in peace. But don’t get angry if your storytelling sounds to the street person as the maimed “whines” of a petty liberal. I feel it also my duty as a fellow citizen of yours to ask you, Mr Brink, not to speak in the name of the ones you do not represent (and surely don’t know). I have tried to talk frankly, Mr Brink. You know, I and the everyday people of this country are probably quite… insensitive about what happens – good or bad – in your leafy, “peaceful suburbs”. Don’t get me wrong, Mr Brink. I am not saying I am not trying. In fact I try and try to be moved by the terrible tragedies of the bejewelled ones but, for as hard as I try, I simply find it hard to empathize with them. You know, Mr Brink, poor people have tragedies of their own to deal with. It is not a matter of hierarchies. I wouldn’t like to see other people cry. I wouldn’t want to see anybody cry from an offence. My eyes, like yours, are full of tears. But I have so many reasons to cry that my eyes get emptied very quickly. And when it’s time to shed a tear for the unfortunate bejewelled ones, my tears-tank is empty and dry. I am sorry…

Your Glad to be alive, Mr Brink, is not a South African story. To put it simple, it is just the story of a few rich, privileged guys, living in a country where most people around them have to struggle to get by. And the privileged ones are the same, everywhere. When their Rolex is stolen or their Hermès bag snatched, when their private companies are nationalized or their land confiscated, they start weeping “This is outrageous! It’s the end of democracy! Tyranny! Dictatorship! Help! Help!”

If you used your story as an occasion to express your anger against the hooligans and the corrupted politicians who, in different ways, terrorize this country, then I am on your side. Well done, Mr Brink. I’ll sing in choir with you “Down with corrupted politicians! Down with the hooligans!” But if you wrote this story to catch the solidarity of the (poor) majority of South Africans, I think that you chose the wrong set and the wrong characters to develop your plot. Regardless of the fact that you agree or not with my semi-serious comments, Mr Brink, you will at least agree with me that this is quite a pedestrian mistake for a renowned novelist like you. Isn’t it?

Yours unbegrudgingly,

raphael d’abdon
January 2008

This text is copyleft. Anyone is free to circulate these parts of the document provided they are complete and in their current form with attribution and no payment is asked. It is prohibited to reproduce this document or any part of it for commercial gain without prior permission of the author.

“Before I could read, I loved books and liked to collect piles of them …”

Finuala DowlingBorn in Cape Town in 1962, Finuala Dowling was the seventh of eight children of radio broadcasters Eve van der Byl and Paddy Dowling. She has lectured at Unisa and worked as a freelance educational materials developer, writer and lecturer. Her short stories have been broadcast on radio and have appeared in several anthologies, winning runner-up prizes in the Cosmopolitan and Commonwealth Broadcasting Association competitions. She won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for her first volume of poetry, I Flying, and was co-winner of the Sanlam Award for poetry in 2003 for her collection entitled Doo-wah Girl of the Universe. In 2005 her first novel, What Poets Need, was published by Penguin. Finuala lives in Kalk Bay with her family.

What Poets Need
Author: Finuala Dowling
Publisher: The Penguin Group (SA) (Pty) Ltd
ISBN: 014302468X
Publishing Date: 2005
Format: Softcover
Price: R80 on kalahari.net (Buy this book now!)

Michelle McGrane: Finuala … it’s a beautiful, unusual name. Where does it come from?

Finuala Dowling: My name is Irish. It means “white shoulder” and has something to do with a myth involving a swan. Though my father wasn’t born in Ireland, he identified strongly with the spirit of his ancestral home.

Kalk Bay seems the perfect location for a writer to live - the sea view, pavement cafés, enchanting curiosity shops, and winding streets. How long have you lived in Kalk Bay?

I’ve called Kalk Bay home for 34 years, even though for eight of those I was actually living in Pretoria or Riebeeck-Kasteel. I’m not sure I could write anywhere else in the world.

Do you enjoy walking on the beach? Do you find poems come to you while you’re walking along the sand?

I walk or swim every day and I find that something about these simple, rhythmic exercises tends to release the mind and enable it to make unexpected, unforced connections. When I was going through a particularly productive period, whole poems would come to me as I walked - image, rhyme, lineation, everything - I’d say them over and over in my head, trying to keep track of the editing changes I was making in the unreliable ink of thin air, anxious to get home and write them down, but reluctant to interrupt the process. Yet I never go to the beach thinking, “Now a poem will come.”

What were you like as a child and what was it like growing up in a large family?

My mother says of me, “She never spoke to us.” I was the seventh child of two very strong, clever, articulate personalities, so there always seemed to be plenty of noise, conversation, playing, theatrics, excitement and laughter going on. In the midst of all this hubbub, I would frequently withdraw. At first into the garden, where I played with an imaginary friend and her (also imaginary) family. Later, I’d spend hours in my room drawing or making things or writing satirical newsletters. In our teenage years and early twenties, we siblings shared friends and had almost a kind of salon society with people just dropping in for tea on Sundays and staying for drinks and watered-down soup to which my mother added every leftover in the fridge. I sometimes think my writing comes from a feeling of having had something to say, but no opportunity to say it - partly because everyone else was talking so much, but partly because of a degree of habitual introversion.

Were you always clear about what you wanted? What did you believe about your future?

Before I could read, I loved books and liked to collect piles of them around me, sometimes pretending to read or teach from them. When I could read, I read everything. All the books my mother brought home to review, all my brother’s university set works, library books, the back of the cereal box, newspapers, graffiti, joke books, books from fetes, old books gathering dust. We also had a strong culture of the spoken word at home: my mother reading aloud to us every night in her beautiful, Guildhall-trained voice; listening to comedy records or poets’ voices; evenings where friends and family told or acted out hilarious anecdotes. But there were other possibilities, apart from writing. I remember in Standard 3 our teacher going around the group and asking every girl what she’d like to be. There were, of course, some who wanted to be air hostesses and hairdressers, but I said I wanted to be an archaeologist. I think I changed my mind because I was worried that digging in Egypt would be very hot. Then I had two very influential art teachers who made me think I might take up painting as a career. I still sometimes miss that feeling that comes over you when you have a brush or 2B pencil in hand. In matric, I was studying a special literature course in addition to English - we did everything from Beowulf onwards. When the literature teacher asked me what I’d go on to study, I said I was hoping to get into Michaelis Art school. She said, “That will be a great loss to literature.” Those words, plus the fact that we couldn’t have afforded expensive art materials, set me on my course. I thought I’d train to be a writer by studying great books … ag shame.

Who have been the most influential people in your life?

People who’ve helped me to see who I am and what I can do. Family, teachers and lecturers, friends, publishers. Apart from my family, the people who’ve had the greatest impact on me were (and continue to be) colleagues at Unisa. I worked with a group of women there under Margaret Orr, and they never doubted for a moment that I’d be a published author one day; they helped me to firm up that vision of myself. Years later I sent my first poems to another Unisa colleague, Leon de Kock, who edits the journal scrutiny2. Not only did he publish 11 poems of mine (”Send me everything you’ve written,” he said, after reading the three or four I’d humbly submitted), but he showed my poems to Gus Ferguson. Gus invited me to read at a few events, helped me to understand that I was a poet, and of course, he published I Flying.

At what age did you start writing poetry?

I’d love to say I was a child prodigy, but I only began in my very late thirties. I’d always imagined myself being a novelist.

Which poets have inspired and influenced you?

When I was young I was largely dependent on the “syllabus” for the poetry I encountered, though my mother was working as a drama teacher at the time and introduced me to some much more fun stuff. I remember one poem in particular that began “A year ago last Thursday, I was strolling in the zoo/ When I met a man who thought he knew the lot/ He was laying down the law about the habits of baboons/ And the number of quills a porcupine has got”, and I thought, “So poems can be natural, funny, quirky!” But generally, though I read many different kinds of novels beyond the prescribed Lord of the Flies, choosing freely from the library, the poetry I read was limited by the list set out by the Department of Education, and that list was in turn limited by the available anthologies. Luckily in South Africa we had Robin Malan and his anthology Inscapes. But the real problem was that I seldom came across a whole volume of poems by just one poet - apart, of course, from Longfellow, Wordsworth and Tennyson in frighteningly large, dusty tomes at home. At university they were obsessed with teaching us the Metaphysical poets and the Romantics. We never got to hold in our hands and cherish that wonderful thing: the slim volume of verse by a living poet. Although I think syllabus poetry is often great poetry, poetry that one comes back to, it did not speak directly to me as an eighteen-year-old. I responded to Ogden Nash, William Carlos Williams, Stevie Smith, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, WH Auden, ee cummings, Thomas Hardy. Today I think Billy Collins is marvellous, also Sharon Olds, Paula Meehan and Eavan Boland, Douglas Dunn, Roger McGough, Wendy Cope, Denise Levertov, Maya Angelou, Grace Nichols, Antjie Krog. In the struggle days, my favourite poet was Mzwakhe Mbuli. I want to teach courses which involve students buying real poetry books, not anthologies.

You were awarded the Ingrid Jonker prize for your first volume of poetry, I Flying. Where did you get the inspiration for the collection’s title?

The title comes from the poem of the same name. In this poem a group of us are walking down to Kommetjie beach on a bitterly cold, blustery and stormy winter’s evening, with my nephew Gabriel in the pram. The wind is almost gale force, and I’m feeling sick with an old sadness that the weather is doing nothing to improve. The little girls are happy, though - they’re pushing Gabriel’s pram really fast, so fast that he stretches out his arms and cries “I flying.”

Are there people you feel comfortable sharing your work with when it’s in draft form, people you can use as sounding boards?

Probably not quite in the way you mean. These days we exist in a workshop culture - everything is a collaboration. I don’t feel happy with that at all. I’m enough of a critic of my own work. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need people. Sometimes when I’m writing or speaking in a normal way - just saying something aloud or conveying a thought or anecdote by email - my interlocutor or correspondent will say, “That’s a poem!” More often I show people my poems once they’ve been published. But there are two notable exceptions. The one is public readings - I find these very useful places to test drafts. Not that I’d welcome members of the audience coming up and making editing suggestions, but just being able to listen to my own poem as I read it, and to see its effect, that helps me judge. Some poems that I thought were marvellous have sunk and been relegated in this way. Others have completely come into their own because of a lively audience response. There is one person in particular I sometimes send drafts to, more as an act of intimacy than as a request for feedback.

Is a poem an almost immediate creation for you, or do you put poems away in a drawer and return to rework them months later?

Poems are quite immediate with me; I find it hard to return to the exact mood of the first writing later, so I tend to work straight through on a poem until it’s complete, rather than shelving it.

When you’re putting together a collection, how do you decide which poems go into the book and which to exclude? Do you find it difficult to put personal feelings about some poems to one side?

By answering this question I must reveal a shocking fact about myself: very few - fewer than ten or fifteen poems - have been left out of any collection of mine. In fact, I Flying consists of every single poem I’d written up till that point barring two which I just knew were bad. I find the ordering more difficult - which poems to place side by side and which ones need to give each other a wide berth. There are poems that I secretly like but which seldom come up in discussions as readers’ favourites. I don’t think that matters.

Tell me a little about Fay Weldon’s Fiction.

This is the book that came out of my doctorate. I chose Fay Weldon because I found her novels (from Down Among the Women to The Life and Loves of a She-Devil) funny, experimental and punchily feminist. The problem was that Weldon’s fiction started to change almost the moment I started to write about her. I found her later novels flip rather than witty, and trendy rather than current. I loved her self-conscious style (she addresses the reader directly) and produced a novel that bristled with Weldonian tricks, which I now find quite irritating. I’m pleased to say it was rejected and I hope it never sees the light of day. Still, the whole experience of writing a thesis taught me discipline, and the publisher who rejected my novel attempt wrote to say I should please send her anything else I might write. That was Alison Lowry, and ten years later I sent her What Poets Need.

And your comedy, Bungee Writing Finals, won the Audience Vote at the PANSA Reading of New Writing Festival in 2002 and went on to a full production. How do other genres of writing affect your poetry? Is it difficult to keep your hand in so many different forms, or do they feed off one another?

I’m not sure that I have it in me to be a dramatist - I’m too much of an introvert and that’s not good for stagework. Bungee Writing Finals was based on my experiences as a creative writing teacher, so even though it’s a play, it’s still very textual. It’s a theme I’d like to come back to some time. I’d also like the play to get a proper run one day. Dramatic elements work very well in poems, as do prose moments. I think I like the interplay of different genres. What Poets Need was a conscious attempt to break those artificial boundaries, to make a novel-addicted public take another look at poetry.

Do you type your work straight on to your computer or do you use pen and paper until you’re happy with your draft? Do you have different processes for getting down poetry and prose?

I work straight onto the computer except for desperate moments in the middle of the night or on holiday. I treat prose as a job - I report for duty and work to deadline and word limit. Once I’m in that disciplined environment, all kinds of wonderful creative ideas can and do flow, but I have actually forced myself to be there in the first place. Poetry is different. I come here to write a poem because the poem itself, or the thought that is about to become a poem, has completely seduced me.

You’re a mother too! How do you juggle the demands of motherhood and a busy writing career? Is there a certain time of the day or night when you work your best … do you find yourself creeping to your desk in the small hours of morning when the house is asleep?

I can’t work at night - I rarely if ever have written after 9.30 at night. I get up at 5 or 5.30 a m to write. My daughter does struggle sometimes with this unavailability, though I make it clear that she may interrupt me at any time. It’s not something I’ve resolved, or that I feel on top of, this motherhood-writing-teaching thing. But Beaty’s started to write very passionate poems herself, so I’m pleased.

Penguin South Africa has published your strongly original and skilfully crafted novel, What Poets Need, this year. Are you happy with the reviews and public response you’ve received for the book so far?

I’m delighted. The response has been beyond my wildest hopes. I’ve had all kinds of unsolicited fan mail and phone calls. It’s wonderful, but also frightening.

I love that you managed to integrate poetry so seamlessly into the novel …

I do think of poems as being continuous with life. In my family, a quote from a poem or a pause to listen to a poem will happen in the middle of ordinary discourse.

You begin What Poets Need with lines written by Alice Walker from How Poems Are Made/A Discredited View:

I know how poems are made.

There is a place the loss must go.
There is a place the gain must go.
The leftover love.

Do you believe poetry can be therapy for a broken heart, a place for “the leftover love”?

I should say first of all that I don’t advise poetry as a dumping ground for raw emotion. What I think happens, and I think Walker expresses this, is that you sit down to write in a mood of utter despondency and hopelessness. You are beyond coping. You are going under. Then, as you write the poem, something is released inside you - a set of unconscious images or unexpected connections. The poem takes on the loss, but produces a gain - because of an insight, an ironic twist, a sleight of mind, a twist of wry humour, the very proficiency of language itself in the face of the abject spirit. And these gains are actually your own inner resources, only you didn’t know about them before, or you’d discounted them. Well, they’re not quite yours: they belong to the poem.

Margaret Atwood once wrote “… it’s a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography …” Is this one of the reasons you decided to use a male protagonist, John Carson, in What Poets Need, as opposed to a woman who may be identified with you?

Pretty much everyone has identified me with John Carson, so if it was my intention to disguise myself I’ve failed miserably. There were a number of reasons affecting my decision to write as a male. First, I wanted to give myself a feeling of absolute licence, of allowing my character to say/do/eat/think anything he liked without my worrying, “Would a woman say this?” The idea of a younger woman being lovelorn for an older, married man: that was so clichéd to me, it didn’t appeal at all. On another level, something that interested me a lot at the time of writing was my perception that there are men out there who are never represented in books or the media - straight men who cook, feel sensitive, do housework, look after children, respond emotionally/artistically to the world. Adverts, for example, often play on a particularly irritating binary opposition between the “he-man” that’s into sport, sex, tv, etc and the “nerd” who is unappealing to women, klutzy, a loser. I wanted to depict a man who would show up the artificiality of traditional gender distinctions and stereotypes. Finally, it was just such an empowering thing to write as a man, such a liberation for me. John is NOT me in all kinds of ways. He’s not nervous about walking on the mountain alone; he expresses thoughts that I keep hidden; takes time out for coffee breaks; he’s more outgoing; less driven … I liked being him. He got to me. Right at the end of the last set of revisions for Penguin, when I’d been inside his head for 72 hours non-stop, I opened my wardrobe one morning and thought, “What the hell are all these dresses doing here?”

You raise the issue of eating disorders through John Carson’s niece, Sal, a gorgeous, intelligent nine-year-old who becomes unhappy with her weight and refuses to eat. Are you concerned with the prevalence of eating disorders and society’s preoccupation with a largely unrealistic ideal in terms of female shape and attractiveness?

The normalisation of anorexia/ bulimia concerns me deeply. By “normalisation” I mean that our society accepts and silently, implicitly, encourages the idea of perpetually hungry women. The media depict underweight women, those without breasts, hips, tummies or thighs, as beauties deserving of praise and reward. The alternative is always represented as morbid obesity. But somewhere in the middle, under erasure for the most part, is the now abnormal-normal, slightly rounded, woman. Every now and then the media allow us to reflect on the special, radiant beauty of the normal size 12-14 woman - Nigella Lawson, Marilyn Monroe, Kate Winslett. But then it comes back with its mouth spitting full of vitriol about “piling on the pounds”. Renee Zellweger is described as “piling on the pounds” in order to play the role of Bridget Jones, who is to my mind a slender to normal-shaped woman. To eat normally, to have a normal weight is seen as a moral failing. Interestingly, round, plump or normal-sized women have gone underground, have become the secretly desired, the quiet lust of men pushed towards boniness rather than bonniness. Statistics show that while men marry thin women (leaves more for them to eat? Looks like a more pliable option?) their lovers/mistresses tend to be plumper.

In the novel, John communicates with Theresa, the married woman he loves, by email. Do you correspond with people mainly via email? Has writing letters become a thing of the past and do you miss it?

I confess I don’t miss letters very much, though I still love getting them. I love the immediacy of email, the secrecy, the possibilities for record-keeping. Emails for me double up as diary entries. I also hate, hate, hate the telephone, so I’m trying to train everybody to communicate with me this way.

In your experience, do you think people generally have preconceived ideas about poets, about their emotional make-up, the sort of lives they lead?

The only really funny idea I find people entertain about me personally is the notion that I go around seeing absolutely everything as an opportunity for poetry. “I suppose you’ll write about this,” they say, or “I’m going to find myself in a poem.” I would say that there is still some residual mystique attached to the label “poet”. I notice that Gus Ferguson always refers to himself as “a pharmacist”, which is true of course, but also an oblique, ironic reference to that mystique thing, a side-stepping of it.

What has writing a novel taught you?

That when you are writing most personally about yourself, you are actually writing most universally.

Tell me about a few of your favourite books and why they are important to you.

I have a special affinity for the confiding tone of first-person narration, the “I” of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. That kind of intimacy you feel when the narrator trusts you so deeply: it is like friendship. My favourite books are also all in some way concerned with the creative process; they are metafiction: Possession by AS Byatt, Pale Fire by Nabakov, Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood, Colm Tóibín’s The Master, Unless by Carol Shields, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I’m not a big fan of elaborate plots: I love interiority. I love books about reading too: Dai Sijie’s Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress; Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, Tobias Wolff’s Old School. Like all sane people, I regularly reread the entire works of Jane Austen.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? What does feminism mean to you?

Yes, though I reject the negative stereotype associated with the word. A feminist is someone who believes that women should have equal rights - this is the dictionary definition, and by that definition, most South Africans are feminists.

Do you think age is a factor in becoming more confident, more accepting of oneself? As you get older, have you found yourself mellowing to a certain extent? Do you ever find yourself worrying about ageing?

As I’ve aged, I’ve definitely improved. I was way too sharp, almost acerbic, in my wit as a young woman, and intolerant of non-intellectuals. Now I feel much fonder of the world in general, and actually delight in the kind of people I used to scorn. I have less ambition now, yet I get more done and some quite astonishingly wonderful opportunities have come my way. I worry about the far side of ageing, the way it seems to me that we have been given so many more years to live (if 80 is the average life span of a woman, many of us must be living to 100), but without guarantee of physical comfort, financial security or mental agility.

Finuala, what are you passionate about? What moves you, what inspires you, what brings you joy?

I’m not a very passionate person on the outside - I think I appear quite reserved. I’m nervous about hugging and kissing: I always seem to bash noses when pressed to someone’s cheek. But I do feel strongly on the inside. I love to laugh, I love sudden shared insights among friends or moments of delicious absurdity. I love letters or visits from friends, winter walks in the Karoo or just on the mountain; in summer swimming in big bashing waves. Calm, pearly evenings when the whole family gathers for champagne in the garden. Family shows and theatricals - spontaneous or rehearsed, especially if they involve our children. Sharing a wonderful poem or novel I’ve just discovered. The way it feels when a poem arrives. Planning parties or skinnering with my sisters. Finding unusual beautiful romantic clothing in velvet or chiffon. Being alone but not lonely. An early night with a hot-water bottle.

this interview first appeared on litnet

ZIYA US SALAM

His more salt-than-pepper hair does not quite go with his persona. He writes briskly; once he wrote 20,000 words over a weekend! He talks fast too; cheerfully as well, making it almost impossible for him to sound ponderous. He sprinkles his sentences with a liberal dose of humour. And refrains from saying the obvious. He may not exactly be in love with “Slumdog Millionaire”, Danny Boyle’s film based on his debut book Q&A, but is diplomatic enough not to criticise the film in public. He is not your everyday writer. He is, in fact, an everyday bureaucrat, who “moonlights as an author”.

Welcome to the world of Vikas Swarup who until the other day was yet another diplomat with pretensions of wielding a pen. “We might as well open an IFS School of Writing,” he jokes hours before the premier of “Slumdog Millionaire” on the sidelines of the recently-concluded Jaipur Literature Festival. A little away from the crowd, he decides to pick up Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes and transforms himself into a stillness so unexpected of a man who exudes life and energy.

What does he have to say about the movie? “A visual delight. ‘Slumdog…’ is an evocative title more suited to the film,” he says, then stops. A shade strange, considering when he speaks there are few commas and hardly any full stops.

Candid talk

Prod him a bit more and Vikas takes recourse in the sayings of Sanker Mukherji, the famous Bengali writer whose books were adapted for the big screen by the legendary Satyajit Ray. “Sanker once said, a book turned into a film is like a daughter given away in marriage. And the film is like a son-in-law. A wise man never says a bad thing about his son-in-law!”

Vikas may not have his tongue firmly in his cheek, but he is willing to be candid. “When I saw the film I was not shocked. I was never invited to the sets and I learnt a writer is not an integral part of production. I got no invitations for the Golden Globes either. When they were happening in Los Angeles I was in Pretoria. But post-awards, I did some 35 interviews in two days in London! I did not know the Golden Globes were that huge!”

He is indeed frank without sounding scathing! How is that possible? “I don’t have to write every day. I am not the kind of writer who would say if he cannot write he cannot breathe. I am happy even without writing. Often writers make you reach for the dictionary. I would rather have them reach for the hanky. I am your ultimate role model as a writer. I have no formal training in writing, did not study literature. I write the first draft of my first book and it becomes a hit! If I can, so can you. For me putting together the first book was nothing but a challenge: if I too can be published! In the end it turned out to be sickeningly easy. I don’t even know about the genre of Q&A.”

The actual writing

He makes it sound so simple, in fact beguilingly simple to write a book that has been translated into 36 languages! “The Dutch and Swedish translations came ahead of the English. I wrote the book in 2003, it was published in 2005 and the film scouts asked me in 2004,” he says, ready to walk down memory lane one more time. “It was quite some time back when I started. I wrote the first draft over two months in London. My wife and kids had preceded me to India. I was alone. I had solitude. I wrote four and a half chapters and sent to 10 agents. None of them responded. One day I was surfing the Net and came across Peter Buchman who offered to help. He asked for two chapters on mail. He replied within 24 hours. I was thrilled. Writers don’t get response that promptly from any agent or publisher! He liked what I wrote. I consulted Patrick French too who advised me not to sign for the book if the agent asked for money. Peter came and all went off well. Then I wrote like a maniac as I was about to be posted as a political counsellor to Pakistan where there is no concept of beginning or ending the day! Once I wrote 20,000 words over a weekend to meet my deadline.”

Reactions

T`hat is fine, but was not the Government a shade perturbed by the contents; the focus on India’s underbelly? “There is nothing diplomatic about the book,” he says diplomatically. Asked to elaborate, he says, “I did not present India Shining. Indian reality is too vast, too complex. The book only offers a slice of Indian life. I have never lived in Dharavi but I have been to the slums. More than research I needed empathy as a writer. The Government gives you that artistic freedom to write. I did not face any interference in my writing. In fact the only time there was pressure on me to edit part of the book was when I got a call from the American publishers who wanted to edit some dark portions. I said go ahead but if you do that, 40 per cent of the book would be gone and you won’t have much left!”

Well, not much was edited. And the readers loved what was offered to them. “When I finished the book I realised I had a good thing going but did not expect such a response,” he sums up in a matter-of-fact manner.

What was the inspiration along the way? “I had many seniors in IFS. Navtej Sarna and others. I asked myself, ‘Do I have a novel in me?’ I read a lot and was inspired by James Headlley. I devoured everything by him. I loved Kafka too. But thrillers fascinated me with their rare consistency that inspired me in narration. It is something similar to what I found in Hanif’s Exploding Mangoes. It is like an intellectual concert.”

And how did the film come about? “Well the screenplay writer assured me that the soul would not be tampered. I understood then and there the body will be mangled!”

What’s next?

Through with the first book — and knowing him one does not expect Vikas to write a chic-lit — but did he not toy with the idea of a sequel to Q& A; now being reissued as Slumdog Millionaire? “It is the hardest thing to do. I thought of writing a second book but did not want to repeat myself. I have this ability to surprise the readers. So I opted for Six Suspects.”

Is not he again capitalising on a slush-pile of real life? Just as he did with his first book. The book has parallel stories one can draw similarity of many real life instances. For example the Jessica Lal murder case, the BMW fiasco, the Salman Khan black buck case. All that Vikas offers by way of explanation is, “The book is an anatomy of murder. I wanted a narrative from many forms. My book is not about the Jessica Lal case. It is the story of a playboy son of a Chief Minister! In fact, my books in general are more about India because the more affluent a country gets, the more banal become its stories.”

So, he has again tried to defy banal. But has not slipped in the stereotypes of talking of India’s poverty in front of a global readership? “I know about the accusations levelled again ‘Slumdog…’ and some against Q&A too. I have heard of Amitabh Bachchan’s comments too. But believe me there is no personal rancour. We both hail from Allahabad. My grandpa was his father’s lawyer! As a writer, I am not attracted to the gory or the bizarre. I like to write simply. There is no point in creating a false persona.”

this interview was first published here

Exiled from South Africa in 1975 after his poems were banned, Christopher Hope has riled the authorities from afar. His latest novel is a savage appraisal of his native country after apartheid

* Interview by Maya Jaggi

The Corbières hills span the horizon behind Christopher Hope’s medieval cottage in Languedoc, and beyond are the shadowy peaks of the Pyrenees. “Over there’s Spain,” he gestures with satisfaction from a little terraced garden. “I’m only one-and-a-half hours from Barcelona.” Brought up in apartheid South Africa, and now an itinerant writer and journalist, Hope keeps a sharp eye on his escape routes even when ensconced in idyllic wine country in the south of France.

He left South Africa in 1975 on a one-way exit permit, after his barbed poetry riled the authorities, and spent 15 years in London, then spells in Moscow under perestroika, and Belgrade during the “tribal wars” in ex-Yugoslavia. Six months of every year are still spent travelling through Africa. Now aged 62, he has written nine novels, including the Booker-shortlisted Serenity House (1992), as well as poetry and short fiction, children’s books, reportage and the memoir White Boy Running (1988). Much of his fiction returns to South Africa, through dark satire or grim farce.

Hope’s thoughts may have turned to escape when Signs of the Heart (1999), his barely disguised portrait of the village in which he has lived since the mid-1990s, was translated into French. Though he named it “Kissac”, claiming the location and characters were fictitious composites, he drew heavily on real stories for a book subtitled “Love and Death in Languedoc”. Readers from far and wide instantly recognised it as Caunes-Minervois, near Carcassone. The local hotelier, Hope notes with irony, signed copies, but “the village is still divided between those who consider it ‘cruel and unjust’, in the words of the local doctor,” and those who were merely “furious because they weren’t in it. I’m not sorry I did it, but you never get a free ride”.

Those words may have contained a premonition about his latest novel, My Mother’s Lovers, published last month by Atlantic Books (£14.99), and this month in South Africa. The story of a Johannesburg pilot, Kathleen Healey, and her son Alexander, the novel is Hope’s most savagely sardonic appraisal to date of the “new South Africa”. Yet as Kathleen hunts, shoots and boxes her way freely across the continent, occasionally flying freedom fighters to safety, the novel first probes the ambiguous role of the “white man” in Africa, questioning whether “pale Africans” can ever be more than transient “ghosts”.

“People from Europe, as well as Asia, made their way to Africa and sought an empty space they could fashion in their own image; they named, classified, codified it,” says Hope. “My forebears and others were infused with an extraordinary sense of power and privilege, and it turned them into clowns or killers.” Africans were “romanticised, like the Masai, or made into the invisible ones, who served then vanished.” Now, he says, the Masai and others are saying, “‘You came, you took, and now we’d like our land back.’ That feeling is immensely strong. It may be unjust, but it puts the question of European continuation in Africa under great scepticism.” It is a problem “very close to my heart: tolerated minorities who may never belong. My feelings are contradictory. As a writer, it’s for me to observe and not be sentimental; it’s not for the white farmers to insist they belong.”

He adds, “The way white people, with their territoriality and testosterone, have connected with Africa is: if you can’t kick, shoot, ride or eat it, what good is it? It’s a pugilistic, violent form of attachment that I don’t particularly like, and people who live in Africa have been at the point of it. That leads to extreme scepticism; when I hear the word ‘Africa’, I want to know who’s using it.”

Through Alexander’s relationship with his neglectful mother, the novel reflects Hope’s own ambivalence, his “passion for Africa born of love, but that’s also deeply suspect when professed by a white African”. His character shares her name with Hope’s own mother, Kathleen. “My mother’s generation felt they belonged, and that they owned whatever they could see,” he says. Yet his character is a colossus who “detests and overwhelms nationalistic and sexual boundaries and racial divisions. One wants to take the piss out of people who insist on walls, borders, and pomposities, the fatuities of power that Africa throws up. The sense I have is of the largeness of those I meet - the amplitude, openness, generosity - and the smallness of those who govern and often ruin them.”

South Africa after 1994 is pilloried for inadequate policies on HIV-Aids and hostility to migrants, its proliferation of walled fortress suburbs and political “newspeak”. “In Soweto people attend two to three funerals a day, with DJs and marquees, and many who run the country are in deep denial,” says Hope. “The people who suffer most from Aids, as from everyday violence, tend to be black.”

He has been strongly criticised for sniping from afar, and seeming to hint that the new South Africa - whose authorities banned a poem of his in 2000 that had been banned under apartheid - was as bad as the old. Donald Woods, writer and former editor of the Daily Dispatch in the Eastern Cape, objected that “many of us … went through worse punishments under the old apartheid regime than merely having our words banned”, while others pointed to the robustness of debate in the new democracy. “People always say, ‘how can you have a sense unless you live here?’ says Hope, “but I go back and listen.” As for suggesting an equivalence between new and old, “I wouldn’t,” he says. “Things have changed emphatically for the better, but I see old patterns repeating. South Africa is as racially obsessed but in different ways. The forms of white nationalism we grew up with are mirrored in the new black nationalisms. Everyone who found apartheid not just cruel but militantly stupid thought we couldn’t reproduce that.”

Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944. His father, a pilot in the South African Air Force, was killed before the war ended. His mother went to live with her father Daniel, an Irish Catholic who ran a hotel bar in a small Transvaal town and was later mayor. They moved to a Johannesburg suburb, to what Hope sees as the twin catastrophes of the 1948 elections that ushered in grand apartheid and his mother’s remarriage. He says: “My mother married all the things I loathed, politically and personally, in South Africa; my stepfather and I were enemies.”

Hope’s first novel, A Separate Development (1977), was a satirical comedy about a boyhood under apartheid - promptly banned in South Africa. But, after his mother’s death in 1997, he returned to his childhood in a more strongly autobiographical novel, Heaven Forbid (2002). Six-year-old Martin loves his male nanny, the Zulu Georgie, about as much as he loathes his mother’s suitor Gordon, a paragon of the male sports of kicking balls and servants, who is aghast at the Irish family’s easy way with “natives”. Hope says, “My grandfather’s family had a largeness, a lack of fear, that made it seem like a golden time lost. My mother never discussed it, but memory is the weapon. You can take notes.”

When he was eight, they moved to Pretoria, into an “Irish ghetto - a small island of Catholics surrounded by carnivorous Calvinists”. He spoke English and Afrikaans, but knew that, for the Boers, second only to the “black danger” was the “Roman danger”. Yet he shared the privileges of skin colour. It was only at the University of the Witwatersrand “that the race divisions began to hit me. As a child you knew, but understanding wasn’t much encouraged, along with reflection or reading.”

Books were an escape and an arsenal. “I read everything - Richmal Crompton, Biggles, Huckleberry Finn. I enjoyed the oddness of my obsession. My mother used to say, ‘promise me you’ll make them last; don’t gobble them’.” Among his influences are Swift’s A Modest Proposal (”anger well managed”) and Mafeking Road by the South African humourist Herman Charles Bosman (”he understood how ridiculous and hypocritical we are”). Elvis was “forbidden: this was negro music. It made him even more interesting.”

Hope worked as an editor for an Afrikaans publisher, and as an advertising copy writer, and started a little magazine, Bolt, whose contributors included the poet Mongane Serote, later an MP. “Poetry was the major means of protest,” says Hope. “It was the way to annoy the hell out of the authorities and say something about the townships. The cameraderie and defiance were mind-tinglingly exciting.” But they met with repression, and, for many, exile.

He has two sons in their 30s: Jasper, a manager in London, and Daniel, a violinist with the Beaux Arts Trio who lives in Amsterdam. Hope’s ex-wife Eleanor was manager to Yehudi Menuhin, a “musical grandfather to my kids”. He now lives with his partner of some six years, Ingrid, a South African photographer turned interior designer. To write, he closets himself in a converted garage in the village, with a tiny skylight. But the couple also have a nearby retreat up La Montagne Noir, a simple stone shepherd’s cottage lit by paraffin lamps, with majestic views of forested slopes.

Hope once wondered if all the places he travelled to were “not more than mirrors for the place I come from”. His study of tyranny, Brothers Under the Skin (2003), drew parallels - unconvincing for several reviewers - between Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of apartheid, and Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe.

“I go back again and again, to try to find out where I come from,” Hope says. “I’ve spent my entire life looking for something like home. I was homesick before I left, because my country never existed. It was a piece of political chicanery, a fiction of the imagination of those who governed us, a rare form of insanity that one lived. Everything large or generous or open or loving was forbidden or illegal. Everything I’ve written has been an answer to that.”

Yet he writes “not to change the world but to undermine it”. However harsh the comedy, he says, “I prefer the liberation and release of laughter to the boring repetition of tragedy and melodrama. The buckets of tears over [Alan Paton’s novel] Cry, the Beloved Country never amounted to anything. What people most disliked was having their fatuities exposed; being found ridiculous. One should celebrate irreverence, and pay no respect to power.”

this interview was first published by the guardian.co.uk

Capetonian Tracy Gilpin has become one of the first South African authors to be published by the new international imprint, Black Star Crime.

Tracy studied journalism, is the author of a non-fiction book, and has written more than 30 short stories. An ardent member of Greenpeace and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Tracy is a passionate activist at heart.

Here she chats to us about her debut novel, Double Cross.

You were a journalist before you became a full-time writer. At what point did you decide to become a writer?
Becoming a writer was never a conscious decision. I made up stories about absolutely everything long before I learned to write. I don’t believe anyone becomes a writer.

Writers are people who are wired in a certain way. I never have to brainstorm for ideas. It’s simply a case of developing into plots the ideas that occur to me because I see stories all around me, in everything.

Was the urge to write a novel always there?
I remember sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table at the age of about six or seven, telling my nanny and sister some long convoluted tale I made up as I went along. Novels were a natural progression.

Dunai Marks, the main character in Double Cross, is an ardent activist who finds her boss and mentor murdered in her office. Did your own activism play a part in developing this character?
Yes. Crime is mostly motivated by a desire for money or personal gain. The idea of ideology as a motive for crime is fascinating.

It’s far more interesting to write about a character who is prepared to commit a crime for what they believe is a ‘good cause’ than a person, devoid of conscience, who kills for let’s say, a cellphone. As heinous as both crimes are, the former is far more complex than the latter.

In a crime-ridden country, peaceful resolution is rare to find and violence seems to beget violence. What are your thoughts on the moral dilemmas around this?
South Africa would have no democracy today if groups had not engaged in a violent anti-apartheid armed struggle. I believe pacifism versus armed conflict needs to be thoughtfully debated far more than it is at present. There are no easy answers; it is one of the greatest dilemmas facing humanity.

Pacifism is the ideal, the best way forward for the enlightened evolution of our species, but there are too many examples – Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone – where decisive military action would have saved many lives. Instead UN Peacekeepers stood by helplessly while hundreds of thousands of civilians were massacred. Peace must first be attained before it can be kept and sometimes the only way to do this is through military intervention.

I do not agree with one country invading another but one possible solution is for the UN Security Council to expand its mandate from one of only peacekeeping to one of peace-enforcing where absolutely necessary.

You make a number of references to Pippi Longstocking? Who is she and what does she mean to you?
The series of Pippi Longstocking books, written by Astrid Lindgren, was a publishing phenomena in the 1970s and 80s that caused controversy around the world. The stories were about the adventures of a 9-year-old orphan who was unconventional to say the least.

Pippi was an eccentric feminist and storyteller who threw out societal convention and managed to be incredibly funny while doing it. She influenced the way I view my gender and the world around me.

Can you tell us about the writing process behind Double Cross? What made you choose to write a crime-fiction novel?
I wrote Double Cross while working fulltime so it was a little disjointed at times and took a bit longer than the second book. I wanted to write crime fiction for the same reason I think actors like to play the baddies – because you get to plum the depths of the human character. And of course as a South African I was surrounded by strange and beautiful settings, rich and unusual characters and far too much real-life crime.

Will we see the return of Dunai Marks in future book projects?
Absolutely. Double Take, the second in the Dunai Marks series, revolves around a refugee whose children go missing four months after arriving in South Africa.

It is only Dunai Marks who is prepared to step into the xenophobic mess that exists in our country, to help her find her children. It is due for release in March next year and I am busy with the third in the series.

this interview first appeared on women24.com