Malika Ndlovu is fast becoming very hot property on the national literary scene
Andrew Gilder
Malika Ndlovu is a journalist’s dream interviewee. She answers questions lucidly, eloquently and at length; and is so eminently quotable that one is tempted merely to submit a verbatim transcript of the conversation rather than compose an article. This is, of course, only as it should be for a young South African writer of rapidly increasing reputation, and one who is the administrator and a founding member of Cape Town-based Black Women’s Writers collective Weave.
The most significant contribution to date of Ndlovu (ne Conning) is the highly acclaimed one-woman play A Coloured Place, commissioned by the Natal Playhouse for the 1996 Women’s Festival. The work, which deals with the experience of growing up as a ”coloured” person from Durban, has seen a few incarnations becoming a two-hander along the way and has enjoyed successful runs in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town.
The three months of concerted effort it took to write the piece were not easy for Ndlovu, who had to break through her ”fear of acknowledging the ugliness surrounding the term ‘coloured”’. By confronting her personal demons through the play, Ndlovu rejected the uniform anonymity conferred on people by the word and gave expression to her passionately held belief that: ”We [coloured people] are not invisible, we are not all the same, and our histories are worthy of being recorded.”
The impulse to use autobiographical material in this way arose from the paucity of documented history on the Durban coloured ”community” although she baulks at using this last word, given its currency as the base for the increasingly pejorative: ”previously disadvantaged”. Her role models, too, were generally the ”alien” [to Durban], coloured intelligentsia of Cape Town. The process of writing the piece made her acutely aware of the ”awesome and humbling” responsibility imposed by speaking on behalf of a diverse collective of individuals. Her note for the play runs: ”I have reassessed what Coloured means for me and I hope that after you leave this space, you will be moved to do the same.”
In spite of its very definite point of departure, Ndlovu believes that the success of the piece derives from the universality of its themes. Sold-out seasons in Durban demonstrated to her how her own healing process could impact on the lives of others. The play was nominated for three FNB Vita awards in 1998, and has been published by Routledge and UCT Press in Black South African Women An Anthology of Plays.
Although admitting to an ambivalent relationship with A Coloured Place, and being very clear that she does not want to be known only as the writer of that play, the idea of having a ”place to belong” is central to Ndlovu’s life and work.
”Everyone needs a compass to navigate through the unpredictability of life, and knowing one’s origins creates a sense of belonging, even when things continually change around one,” she says. As a recent convert to Islam, she is creating just such a ”place” for herself, with husband Thulani and son Rayne.
The attraction between her and Thulani arises out of their both having flouted the conventions foisted upon them by the context of their respective births. Thulani, for example, is the only black stuntman in South Africa and is currently teaching and promoting a self-developed, martial arts-based exercise form.
Of her husband, Ndlovu says: ”It was inevitable that I would be attracted to a person who dared to define themselves by their own criteria, and risk not ‘fitting-in’ with the pack.” Their soon-to-be-expanded family Ndlovu is six months pregnant is planting its roots in the artist-friendly and traditionally bohemian suburb of Observatory in Cape Town, where they have just bought their first house.
A reputation, however, cannot be built on one piece of work. An anthology of her poetry, born in africa but, was launched internationally in Belfast earlier this year. In the foreword she indicates that poetry was her first ”place” of refuge and that, ”what began as writing ‘to myself’ was actually writing ‘from the self”’. The final section of the publication which is illustrated with the work of visual artists Berni Searle and Garth Erasmus Stage Dive, is a recording of some of her improvised, performance poetry. Improvisation is central to her artistic development and she revels in the ”terrifying exhilaration of surrendering to the creative process”, which, she maintains, has taught her how to take risks in her more conscious writing.
Enjoying the challenge of working across media, she has also created a video piece entitled Bottled Up, for the SANG/Transpositions Residency Project on Robben Island, a documentary for BBC World Service Radio called Two Halves of the Whole about her experiences as a South African in Holland, and was featured as a guest poet at the Between the Lines literary festival in Belfast this year.
In October, New Moon Ventures, the Women Theatremakers collective initiated by Ndlovu, was invited to attend the Fifth Annual Women Playwrights’ Conference 2000, in Athens.
The project that is currently taking up most of Ndlovu’s time and energy, and the one that makes her most excited, is Weave’s ink@boiling point : A selection of 21st Century Black Women’s Writing from the Tip of Africa. Weave grew out of informal gatherings held to listen to, and learn from, the literary efforts of others. Dr Desiree Lewis of Pietermaritzburg University has said of the group’s work: ”The eclecticism of the writing demonstrates how the creative impulse can shift conventional barriers and create new ways of seeing, new ways of writing and, for readers, new ways of thinking about their world.”
Ndlovu identifies two dilemmas facing black South African writers working within associations like Weave. The first turns on whether the writer has a social conscience or not. ”People operating as a collective cannot do so purely out of self-interest. There must be a point where they give back to the group,” she says.
The result of this consideration is, what Ndlovu regards as ”restricted creativity through a perceived obligation to write for the masses”. In essence, the true voice of the writer takes a back seat to the wider concerns of recording the truth of the lives of the people.
The second problem arises from the overwhelmingly white publishing industry that requires ”post-apartheid” writing of a certain ”literary” quality. Ndlovu’s response is to question whether this country is, indeed, in a post-apartheid era ”maybe post-election”, she quips and to demand to know just how one determines relative literary value anyway.
Weave hopes to shed these shackles through its first anthology. The creatively nurturing environment of the group has granted the writers a licence to write what they feel, without the sense of ”owing” anything to a wider society; and they collectively decided to tread the exhausting and frustrating path of self-publication.
In what Ndlovu calls ”live and learn” editing, the members have taken full responsibility for the entire process of production. The writing does not end with the book, however, with performances of some of the pieces being planned in order to generate publicity. The anthology comprises poetry, short stories and stream of consciousness works from writers such as Deela Khan, Shelly Barry and Joan Baker, as well as Ndlovu herself.
Weave’s members share a ”black consciousness” background, and perceive themselves as representing the missing element in a South African arena previously dominated by white males. They intend for their success to be an example to other black women writers who may not be sure of the potential of their own work.
The official South African launch of Ndlovu’s born in africa but and Weave’s anthology took place at the District Six Museum on November 24.
More information about either publication, or Weave itself, can be accessed at: [email protected], www.capsal.co.za, or www.blaconline.co.za