escribe yourself in a sentence
I tried to describe myself in one sentence once, and ended up writing a memoir.
Describe your book in a sentence
I have tried to speak for those who have seen the unspeakable and make their lives visible for those of us who take the luxury of peace for granted.
Describe your ideal reader.
Open-minded and prepared to turn the world upside down and shake loose their prejudices and ideas constantly ‒ someone who is not afraid to look beyond raw words to the cracked places in our psyches. Someone who is careful to make sure that their judgements ‒ if they find that they must judge – are not biases.
What was the originating idea for the book?
The book grew out of a magazine article in which I was trying to tell the story of soldiers (in this case ex-RLI soldiers from the Rhodesian war) who had been sent off to war as heroes to fight for the “right” cause (with God on their side) and who came back to find that the war was not only unwinnable, but also unpopular (not only with many at home, but also overseas). How do those men (and some women) live in the world knowing that they given up an enormous part of their lives (and in some cases their sanity) for lies? How do you go from being a hero to a pariah?
As the article evolved, though, I found that I was more interested in describing my own relationship with one particular soldier. I wanted to show how charismatic, capable and powerful he was and yet at the same time how difficult and broken and I wanted to show how difficult it was to be appropriately distanced from him (as a journalist and a human being.
When we journeyed together, and as I got further and further out of my depth, I found myself behaving less and less like the woman I knew and recognized and more like someone I’d read about. I realized then that most of us judge the actions of others from the comfort of an armchair ‒ but do we really know how we would behave when pressed? I was determined to be as horribly honest about my own short-comings as I was about the way the soldiers behaved in the war in an effort to explore how it is difficult to predict how we will behave even under slight pressure, let alone the ultimate pressure of war. Most of us might be surprised by the answer ‒ I know I was.
Describe the process of writing and publishing the book (research, editing, etc). How long did it take?
I suppose the story that became the book evolved over a couple of years. I wanted to write it very quickly after the trip to Mozambique before I was tempted to change my mind about being as brutally honest as I could be about myself as well as about the people I met on my journey. The writing came first as a magazine article and only then as a book ‒ so it’s hard to say how long it all really took.
I suppose once I had my notes and research (everything I could find on and around the subject of the Rhodesian war of liberation) I managed to get the whole thing down in six breathless, very painful weeks. The editing is a sort of fog after that ‒ but I imagine about six months of back and forth about language (strong, in places!) and structure.
Name some writers who have inspired you, and (briefly) tell us why or how
My own work is inspired by the world’s inconvenient, perverse connoisseurs of inhospitality. James Galvin, in The Meadow, has a tender, cowboy directness that feels very familiar to me. In his comfortably mad and almost impossibly poetic memoir, Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje presents us with his family and neglects to apologize for them. He is also a great wordsmith and I admire his poetic turn of phrase. One of the most important scribes of the dislocation and tragic pride of the migrants left awash in the chaos of twentieth century colonialism and post-colonialism is VS Naipaul whom I admire for this characteristic.
Cruelty is inevitable when there is a battle for resources, and VS Naipaul understands both this and the desperation with which his characters cling to their sense of humanity in A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, A Bend in the River and Miguel Street. It is a peculiar gift to write tragedy and the expectation of death so that it feels organic instead of self-important or maudlin. No-one manages this with more finesse than John Berger in To the Wedding.
And then the urgent literature of my own home continent have all been a huge source of inspiration: JM Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K; Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between; Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing; Chinua Achebe’s quartet including Things Fall Apart; Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy; Bessie Head’s A Question of Power. I read as much as I can as it comes out of Africa ‒ but I do find myself going back to those old favorites and asking with a mixture of envy and bewilderment, how did they do it? So I suppose the rawness and the honestly of some of that earlier work appeals to me.
What are you reading at the moment?
The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich (should be required reading); The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut, and Running Toward Us, edited by Isabel Balseiro (I’ve just been in South Africa, so broke the handles off my hand baggage with the books I found there. Keep writing and telling your stories — there is such a refreshing lack of flab in the books of your country!)
Do you write by hand, or use a typewriter or computer?
A computer.
What is the purpose of memoir?
I think I realized that memoirs were an important addition to literature (only if they were honest, of course) in order that our lives were completely chronicled in a poetic and readable way (history can be so dry and often only reflects the story or the party line of the majority, which is not where so many of us live). I can’t speak for the other 6 billion people on the planet, or to their experience, but I can offer a shard and a glimpse of the entire picture, by telling my little story that takes place on a tiny fraction of the earth’s surface in a cosmic blink of the eye.
When we’re all dead ‒ which happens so fast, in the big picture ‒ our stories might be all that’s left of us. There are plenty of people who tell me, “But your experience is nothing like what I found in Zimbabwe or Rhodesia or my family” and to them I say, “Good. Then write your story and make our history that much more complete.” It is the brave who write memoirs with unflinching honesty and the cowards who complain that their stories have not yet been told.