I read a lot of male writers. I know I’m a feminist, but I love them. JM Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Franzen — You have to be able to stamp yourself on a language. Manipulate it. Mould it. In Freedom Franzen describes a young girl as being ‘not so pretty as to be morally deformed by it”. I love the way they render words.
English is limited but the more you know, the more you can speak, the more you can see. Young people communicate in short bursts; when you ask them to sit down and describe the world around them they can’t. Blogging, email and text messages look, smell and feel like writing. But they’re not –— they’re something else.
I’m busy reading a fabulous biography on Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin called Team of Rivals. It’s about the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. I just snapped up the limited edition of David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavic’s TJ & Double Negative. I love the way Ivan describes such vivid little things as mapping out space on foot without the shield of a car. My children can’t do that. I’m also reading a book called How We Die by Sherwin Nuland. He’s a doctor who has worked in palliative care, but he’s also a philosopher. I’m busy dealing with my own father’s decline at the moment.
I have to try not to read too much into everything. I saw a city worker wearing a T-shirt that said ‘solid waste” and I thought that was such a strong statement.
There are four ways to make sense of the world: politics, religion, sports and art. And the first three are unreliable.
I saw 65 theatre productions last year. I’m a judge for the Fleur du Cap Awards so I have to see everything that’s on. Theatre for me is like an extreme sport. It’s right here, right now. There are no second chances. It’s a fabulous collective endeavour and the last socialist space, along with libraries and public swimming pools and some parks.
I love taking my daughters to the South African Museum and the South African National Gallery. Last year I took them to see From Pierneef to Gugulective — they saw some pretty challenging works by Guy Tillim and Steven Cohen. There was a photograph of Nelson Mandela taken by Karina Turok. They wanted to know why a good man like Madiba had been sent to jail and so I had to explain 350 years of apartheid. I gave them the condensed version: selfish white people. While we were playing in the Gardens afterwards — I love the public gardens, but I don’t like nature — one of my daughters asked me: ‘When the white people were being selfish to the black people, what did you do? Whose side were you on?”
I’m an atheist but I take my children to church. The only way my kids can reject religion is if I expose them to it.
Marianne Thamm stars in the all-female comedy show, Cracks Only, opening on January 28 at the Baxter Flipside in Cape Town.
It will continue to run on the last Friday of every month