Glynis O’ Hara
GILLIAN SLOVO and I are sitting in a hotel lounge discussing her new book, Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, when a couple walk in, throw themselves on a couch nearby and say: “Have you read Gillian Slovo’s new book? It’s really good.”
The woman looks over at us and recognition kicks in. She comes over with the man to introduce herself. “I just want to tell you I think it’s a brilliant achievement,” she says more than once. It turns out she is Shirley Eskapa, herself a writer, and her companion is Tony Leon, Democratic Party leader, who is equally congratulatory. Not bad as far as endorsements go, I comment. “Yes, I planted them there,” jokes Slovo as they move off.
By now, everyone knows the book deals with Slovo’s communist party/African National Congress activist parents Joe (born Yossel Mashel) and Ruth First, a woman who stuck to her own name long before post-war feminists even thought about it. You’ll also know that Joe secretly had a son called Michael Sachs.
Gillian Slovo is surprised at all the fuss the revelation caused in the South African media. Naming him, she said, had nothing to do with the possibility of grabbing headlines and pushing up the sales of the book as has been suggested, “but with the integrity of what I was writing and whether I might be hurting people unnecessarily. In fact I talked to Michael about naming him and if he had said he didn’t want it, I possibly would not have done so.”
However, despite the revealing of this “secret thing”, to evoke the book’s title, she says the work is not a family confessional, preferring to call it a family memoir. It’s not “splurges and purges of guilt, that’s not what I’ve done. I’m travelling through my past, working out what this country meant to me and how I fit into it.”
Some might say all this territory is well covered in her sister Shawn’s film, A World Apart, which concentrates on the period of First’s detention in solitary confinement in 1963.
But no, says Slovo, “that was a child’s eye-view. This is an adult understanding of a much broader period. I see them as different.”
Critics have weighed in with accusations about a “Slovo industry”, but Gillian is quite clear that she’s going back to fiction after this, her first non-fiction work. This book had a dual process – ferreting out what was really happening as well as coming to terms with her passionately committed parents, warts and all. Children of other political exiles from all over the world have written to her in recognition of shared experiences, she says.
But we have yet to see people like Thabo Mbeki and Zwelakhe Sisulu undertake similar journeys, tell their stories of struggle and exile. They and people like them must have fascinating tales to tell, but thus far the South African exile saga has been confined to white writers. It could be, suggests Gillian, that such people are simply too busy running a country now to ponder on their pasts in literary ways. We can only wait for the autobiographies of Zanu, Frelimo and Umkhonto weSizwe fighters and exiles, but somehow, one suspects it’ll be a long wait.
Before Every Secret Thing, Gillian wrote detective novels and a family saga. She says she was drawn to detective novels precisely because “they’re about the gradual uncovering of secrets”. And she enjoys constructing her own stories and seeing her characters live on the page. She wrote her first book, Morbid Symptoms, when she was unemployed. “I read a lot of detective stories and a friend and I decided we would both try our hands at it. He never finished. I was lucky enough to be published.”
After her first three such novels, she started on Ties of Blood, a family saga. “That took me three years and my partner [film-maker Andy Metcalf] provided the money, which paid off in the end and I was able to go into full-time writing.”
She’s still angry about her mother’s death by letter bomb and would like to have responsibility for that act pinned down. Spy Craig Williamson has admitted to her that he was “in the loop”, in other words, in the chain that was responsible for the act.
How does she feel about the current pressure to name informers allegedly holding high ANC positions? “It’s time for truth in this society … if there were such informers, I’d like them to tell the truth, as with my mother’s murder.”
But, as she writes in the book, finding resolution is an elusive thing. After she has interviewed Williamson and listened to the tape of their conversation, she ruminates: “Perhaps this was why Joe hadn’t bothered tracking down Ruth’s killers: because he had known what I was just discovering – that meeting with them would never provide catharsis.”
Nevertheless, that is exactly what she is looking for, she intimated in a television documentary on the same subject, Death in the Family, this week. She does say that the process of discovery has helped her come to terms with her past, but she’s discovering that truth is one thing, and reconciliation, terribly, terribly hard.