Shaun de Waal conducted an e-mail interview with Robert Kirby, who has just published his first novel
Robert Kirby’s novel Songs of the Cockroach (Spearhead) was controversial even before it reached print. It was rejected by its original publisher, who feared retributive legal action; Kirby sees more sinister political implications in the decision. A war of words (preserved by Kirby on the Internet at www.cockroach.co.za) followed. The novel is a substantial work of about 400 pages, which manipulates several plot strands (an impotent National Party MP, a security police agent provocateur, a down-and-out former doctor and his posse of street children, a party official who turns into a transvestite by night, and more) toward an explosive climax.
You’ve written plays, television scripts and many a newspaper column. Now you’ve written a novel, your first. What made you want to write a novel?
I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps I had a sudden desperate need to make a larger stain.
A year or two ago you wrote in the Mail & Guardian that the reason there wasn’t a great South African novel was that South African novelists were too concerned with politics [“The wrath of fleas”, December 23 1999]. Yet now you’ve written a novel about the final implosion of the National Party (among other things). It is, at least, undeniably a political novel. How do you plead?
I don’t remember having said that, but anyway I had no pretensions of writing the Great South African Novel so the question doesn’t really apply. By dint of all the revues and the plays I’m essentially a political commentator, as is someone, I’m proud to say, like Jonathan Shapiro (“Zapiro”) and the host of brilliant cartoonists this country has produced. Anyway, it is nigh impossible to write in South Africa today without in some way touching on politics. You can do this by following the Gordimer or Fugard routes, by undertaking to do black people’s suffering for them in innumerable touching novels and plays, or you can write autobiographical novels explaining how terrible it was to be young, white and sensitive and then have to live as a horrified observer of apartheid’s wrongs, or you can sit safely on the sidelines and snipe at the hypocrisy that is inevitable in such exercises. I prefer the latter position, as unprofitable as it can be by comparison.
Given the present pathetic state of the National Party, is it even worth satirising?
I don’t believe there’s a satirical sell-by date on any institution or monster. If ever the Nats are properly dead and gone I’ll enjoy pissing on their grave by way of tribute. Anyway, the novel does not satirise the National Party as such but tries to gloat on how its remaindered and still cherished core “values” still flourish in the national white psychical undergrowth. It has something to say about some leftover Nat heavies playing at being human in current political structures like the Democratic Alliance. That’s what got it into so much trouble with the previous publishers. I would hope that what the book says about exploitative white liberals and the more than several other themes are of equal weight. Not all of them are political. There’s even a love story lurking in there. And what about ostrich fighting? Surely that’s not political.
What do you see as the place or role of satire in South African public discourse at present?
Something other than the extended drag act that is attempting to supplant it. The satirical tradition in this country is actually a lot more vital than the giggly drivel to which it has been reduced, or for that matter to the level of a Mr Bones, which is, I suppose, satirical in its intention. There’s a wealth of truly abrasive satire coming from a riotous black lobby deeply pissed off with things. This news- paper carries its fair load of satire.
In some places the novel actually repulses the reader. Is that part of its strategy?
Sometimes I do go out of my way to shock, but not always, and I certainly don’t have conscious strategies. I imagine by “repulsed” you might be thinking about some medical close-ups and an array of dead babies in the novel. Certainly I don’t really know where the babies came from. Their arrival in the thing was from some entirely unplanned mental pregnancy. I’m still a little uncertain as to their role, though in retrospect I have an idea of what cunning metaphorical ends they might serve. I look forward to seeing how the critics interpret them. It’s strange what your brain does when you aren’t looking. Sometimes you just have to let it go its own way, sit back and see what comes out, and often feel a little repulsed yourself. I don’t say to myself: “Now what needs to be satirised today and what will be the best way of doing it?” One commentator said that the depletion of sexual competence in some of the remaindered Nats in the book mirrored their loss of political clout. It was the first time I’d heard of that. I certainly didn’t intend such a parallel. I just thought it was wry that these pompous old hypocrites were being rendered impotent by a long-suffering “tea-boy” secretly adding chemicals to their coffee.