Shortlisted for this year’s Sanlam Literary Award, Sheila Roberts’s new novel, Purple Yams, is just out from Penguin. Stephen Gray interviewed her on her recent return to Johannesburg
Since 1975 when she made her debut with the prize-winning collection, Outside Life’s Feast, Sheila Roberts has sustained an impressive career in publishing.
Two later collections have followed, and she has three previous novels to her credit the first, He’s My Brother (1977), was banned in a notorious case for the way it portrayed foul-spoken South African men.
That year she went into voluntary exile in the United States, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. One of her recent stories was included in The Picador Book of African Stories.
Quite unexpectedly your new novel pulls your bipolar world into a triangle. It’s set, not in the US, but in Japan.
I got the chance of a visiting professorship there and being single by then I was in an ideal situation to tackle it. So I found myself a lone professional woman, for more than two years. Halfway through the loneliness came down on me, and I started to need to write about it. The first versions of Purple Yams were much more autobiographical; later I saw the possibilities in fictionalising and we’re talking about a work that’s seen eight drafts! When I had the distance, it began to come out right.
>From South Africa we’ve only ever had William Plomer and Laurens van der Post taking on Japan before, but their work seems a bit touristic now.
Yes, but once I had my protagonist being really critical I could get, I hope, more deeply into things. And also deeply into memories of her earlier life here. While in Japan she is their ”other”, so she is forced to remember situations at home in which there were various other ”others” not only black people, but those troepies in Potchefstroom, for example. I hoped in that way to force her towards a point of change.
It takes a natural disaster, in those terrifying earthquake scenes.
Well, when I was there the Kobe earthquake did take place, in which 5 000 people were killed. In Japan you are always aware of these frightening tremors in any event. I needed a dramatic moment like that to alter the situation, and although I wasn’t at Kobe itself, I researched it all via the documentation on the great San Francisco quakes. That disaster happens and by the end her relationship with the Japanese has become utterly altered.
Has your being in the US for more than 20 years had a bearing on how you see your readership?
Yes, but I didn’t want in Purple Yams to have an American heroine, because that would have put me into language problems I couldn’t handle. Anyway, I’ve never been able to rinse my mind of South Africa. My own memories keep coming back and I often return, as you know. So logically I kept to having a South African woman and her speciality being rock art just followed.
But Japan was obviously good for you, since you haven’t produced such a major work for years.
Thanks to the release of time I had there. I felt there I could at last write and write forever … Back in Wisconsin I find the workshops and so on very, very taxing.
Now Purple Yams is going to be a tough one for South African readers, perhaps. Too mature.
I suggest readers put up at first with any dislike they have for my character. Just be aware that the situation she finds herself in is not static she is on the move, towards frightening events. But also towards a broadening of her own mind and her understanding. After all, in the end she decides to stay on in Japan, however alien.