Creative Non-Fiction: A Conversation

Duncan Brown and Antjie Krog

DB: Creative non-fiction has become in a sense ‘the genre’ of South African writing (recently

your own work, that of Jacob Dlamini, Sihle Khumalo, Max Du Preez, Rian Malan, Kevin

Bloom, Denis Beckett, Shaun Johnson, Adam Ashforth, John Carlin, Jonny Steinberg, Stephen

Otter, Njabulo Ndebele, Jeff Opland, Julia Martin; historically, Sol Plaatje, Can Themba, Nat

Nakasa, Todd Matshikiza, Alan Paton, H. I. E. Dhlomo, and many more): writing which makes

its meanings at the unstable fault line of the literary and journalistic, the imaginative and the

reportorial.

AK: I suspect it has something to do with our history of ‘apartness’. That we are continually

busy translating ourselves, our landscapes, our communities, our experiences of other

communities to one another. We can perhaps not begin to value each others’ fantasies or fictions,

if we don’t understand the realities that gave rise to them. I am therefore much more delighted to

have read Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia than I would have been had he fictionalized it. (On the

other hand, what is Ivan Vladislavic’s fictional Portrait with Keys other than non-fiction about a

part of Johannesburg? You see, this is an impossible topic!). But I believe non-fiction writing is

also about unearthing a hidden or unacknowledged or unnoticed life. I read somewhere that you

only begin to write when you come across something in your life that you find nobody has

written or has written about how you see it. So there are such obvious and huge gaps in South

African society that every second person must feel she has to fill a vacuum. I also believe that

every single creative person in the country is reacting to the more than two thousand

overwhelmingly black TRC testimonies that have been fed into the air in recent years – either by

contradicting, confirming, nuancing, undermining, finding another style of being a

black/white/male/female voice, or even ignoring them. If all of this has settled, fiction could

perhaps return to its proper place in our society.

DB: What would fiction’s ‘proper place’ be, if that isn’t too simplistic a question? (J. M. Coetzee

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commented at some point that he was sick of being asked the ‘tired question’ about the ‘role’ of

South African literature.)

AK: For me fiction would imagine our togetherness, would take risks from what we know into

what we have never imagined e.g. whites without any power at all, or everybody being coloured,

for it is crucial to start creating an ‘imagined community’ in our South African narrative. But I

have always suspected that one needs financial stability and a confident grip on one’s

surroundings in order to begin to imagine. Why, for example, did so little writing come out of the

Boer concentration camps? The best Anglo-Boer war poetry and fiction came mainly from men

who were either not in the war or with the commandos. To use an image: it’s like trying to catch

a fish. But you cannot begin to use the fishing rod if you don’t know and understand the

embankment on which you have to plant yourself. Without the fish we will die of hunger, but

you will not get there if you don’t sort out the embankment and the water - this is what non-

fiction does. The role of fiction is to lift above the water for one incredible moment: a living fish.

DB: The inside jacket cover of the third volume in the Country of My Skull trilogy, Begging to be

Black describes it as a work of ‘literary non-fiction’. The other term which has some currency at

present is ‘creative non-fiction’, and, historically, there is the analogous genre of the ‘new

journalism’, (and the other term ‘faction’, which has very unfortunate connotations in our

country!). What is your take on this?

AK: I am actually quite deurmekaar whenever I’m asked this question. Recently I put it to a

Dutch book buyer (he buys for bookshops from publishers) and his answer was: apart from

biography and memoirs, we have only two main rubrics – non-fiction and literary non-fiction. By

the latter we simply mean that it is better written than non-fiction, more skill, more craft, more

literary devices and better language.

Interviewers have called Country of my Skull anything from ‘faction’ to a ‘novel’, and I

have never interfered with that because frankly I don’t know anymore where the lines run. The

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moment one uses something as ‘unreal’ as language to describe a live-three-dimensional

complex moment, one is already falsifying, fictionalizing by deciding which angle, which words

to use and what detail to leave out. So in one way I would say nothing that has been written had

not already been heavily tampered with; even the simplest journalism is inadequate in giving a

single fact in its complete fullness – the moment there is language, reality is already affected.

On the other hand, working for SABC radio confirmed the important differences between

literary non-fiction and journalism. One of my first stories was about how squatters were

surviving the Southeaster wind. My story started as follows: “‘Nail! Nail the screw!’ Mrs

Mohapi shouted to her son as he was battling to secure the roof of her shack in Joe Slovo

squatter camp.” I was ordered to change the first line into fact. But all of it was fact, I said. No,

general fact I was told: “Over the weekend squatters battled the stormy Southeaster wind. When

SABC visited Joe Slovo squatter camp families were … etc.” The facts should be confirmed by

three sources and conveyed in a general tone with standard jargon.

For literary non-fiction I depend on three devices: a literary form to tell the non-fiction; a

more imaginative language; and the pronoun ‘I’. Firstly, by literary form I mean a basic story-

telling technique: a beginning, a build up to a climax and a conclusion. Why? Because that has

always been the best way to tell a story, even a true story. Secondly, as a poet I instinctively tend

to trust the capacity of language to capture the in-capture-able at the very moment it stretches

into the poetic. This kind of language is particularly helpful when one is analyzing a real-life

situation and finds oneself not able to really capture what makes this scene so remarkable.

Interestingly enough, Elaine Scarry in her Dreaming by the Book (2001) identified five formal

practices that writers use to execute the mimetic aspect of writing: “radiant ignition” (injecting

light into the image that is being described); “rarity” (focusing on the rareness or uniqueness of

what is being described); “dyadic addition or subtraction” (focusing on a static image or panning

out); “stretching, folding and tilting” (manipulating the images by distorting particular facets);

and lastly, “floral supposition” (using descriptions of flowers to make the moment more real for

the reader than were she to experience it herself).

Thirdly, I use the pronoun ‘I’ which immediately creates space allowing for an individual

take on facts, a deeper reading and interpretation of the non-fictional ‘reality’. The ‘I’ also allows

me personal access to fact. I cannot speak on behalf of Afrikaners, but I can speak as an

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Afrikaner. At the same time, the ‘I’ is also immediately ‘multi-voiced’ – its meaning determined

by the countless previous contexts of the word ‘I’ as it has appeared in my poetry, my

journalism, and even all the other writers using the pronoun ‘I’. As Bakhtin suggests, every

word, expression, utterance, or narrative bears the traces of all subjects, possible and real, who

have ever used or will use this word, expression, utterance or narrative. The ‘I’ also at times

assists the reader who can piggyback into the text – safe in the knowledge that the ‘I’ would

never abandon them.

I guess the final deurmekaar-scratching of everything for me was of course J. M. Coetzee

who since Boyhood seems to make the point from the other side: how easy is it to detect the

precise point that a novel slips from fiction into the autobiographical? Didn’t he say that all

fiction is autobiographical and all autobiography is fiction? Would it therefore not be more

ethical to admit: I have given up on reality?

DB: Tom Wolfe says of the New Journalism:

The result is a form that is not merely like a novel. It consumes devices that happen to

have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose.

And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious,

so built-in, one almost forgets what a power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows

all this actually happened. The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The

writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and

James Joyce dreamed of and never achieved. (1996: 49)

Does this resonate with you? I’m thinking of the fact that you have specifically avoided the

option of simply calling your work fiction, a generic definition which would manoeuvre you out

of a series of ethical and legal complexities. What are the benefits of refusing the simple option

of calling your work fiction or novels?

AK: What I find an interesting question is why Tom Wolfe uses the phrase: “it enjoys an

advantage”. Why does he think it is an advantage? In the past people preferred to read fiction

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because it “lied the truth” much better than any non-fiction did. I would never say that

Dostoyevsky or Zola or Patrick White or James or Joyce did not get readers absolutely involved!

People prefer films to documentaries because the unimagineables of the documentary will be

filled by the filmmaker’s imagination. It is a question: why in South Africa are the sales of non-

fiction apparently outstripping those of fiction? And why don’t I prefer Coetzee’s Boyhood to

say, Age of Iron, because the first seems closer to a biographical truth? So I would suggest that at

the back of Tom Wolfe’s question is a knowledge that fiction in a way currently has been/is

failing in the ways Mark Freeman and Jens Brockmeier formulate: the new types of conflicts,

dilemmas, predicaments of the post modern world can no longer be

emplotted within the traditional genres of tragedy, Bildungsroman, adventure story,

triumphalist narrative and so on. As we move into the heart of the post modern condition,

the challenge of achieving some measure of narrative integrity, far from being obviated,

may in fact become intensified. Moreover the very attempt to move away from the self

may in fact lead toward it. How, in the face of such multiplicitous array of possible

selves, is one to find direction about how best to live? And how, in the face of so

voluminous a library of possible narratives, is one to determine how best to tell one’s

story? At times the ‘path inward’ (as in autobiographical writing) may appear to be the

only one to take. (Freeman and Brockmeier 2001: 92)

But to have called Country of My Skull a novel would have brought about even bigger

problems. Using so many TRC submissions, press briefings, interviews and testimonies, and then

projecting the text as fiction, and therefore my own imagination, would have been profoundly

dishonest. I also have to say that my respect for the capacity of the imagination of writers (or my

own) took a severe blow during the TRC process. Sometimes I would write down what I

remembered of a particularly haunting testimony, and when I checked it against the real

testimony, mine was always, always weaker. Add to this the fact that no writer had ever captured

or equaled that immense power and rhythm of the translated TRC testimonies in their work OR

imagined the breadth and depth of depravity that was revealed at the perpetrator hearings. Even

those fictional accounts that appeared after the TRC are floue lugspieëlings of how the

testimonies really were. Finally: the ‘fictionalization’ that the ‘I’ admits to, is often nothing more

than an effort to protect those who became part of the narrative outside the TRC ambit of public

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commissioners and testifiers.

DB: As you know, I am working on Adam Ashforth’s narrative engagement with the subject of

witchcraft in Soweto, especially in the book Madumo: A Man Bewitched. Despite his extensive

use of fictional techniques (in particular narration, dialogue and shifting focalisation), Ashforth

seems insistent that Madumo should not be considered a novel. In refusing the genre of the

novel, Ashforth seems to be claiming what Tom Wolfe describes as the “in-built advantage” of

that analogous form, the New Journalism: the assumption, on the part of the reader, that “all this

actually happened”, something akin to the ‘autobiographical contract’. As readers we may

question Ashforth’s narrative portrayal of the man he calls ‘Madumo’ and his suffering, or we

may even dispute the significance of his story or the relationship between Ashforth and

Madumo, but we cannot – in terms of the conventions of the genre – deny the existence of the

man or the fact of his suffering: we are forced into having to engage with Madumo and his

bewitchment, without the option of dismissing him as a problematic fictional construct, as – for

example – hostile readers might do with David Lurie or Petrus in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.1 In a

serious engagement with the question of how to narrate Madumo’s story of spiritual possession,

Ashforth seems to find in the shifting, ambiguous and yet also demarcated space of creative non-

fiction new possibilities for narration and identification.

AK: This is a most amazing observation, Duncan! That one uses non-fiction in order to remove

the escape clause for the reader. So maybe it has brought us closer to some kind of distinction of

the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Let me try and concretize it into imagery of the

“Bybelse spieel in die raaisel soort”. I would say: the fiction writer is saying: I am making a

mirror, and if you stand here, it will assist you with your beingness in the world; the non-fiction

writer is saying: I found this mirror, if one stands here there is this reflection in the mirror – what

does it mean? So you can choose different mirror-makers and different places for different

reflections, the reader of fiction can dismiss both mirror and reflection as being too manipulated,

far fetched, etc. The reader of non-fiction cannot dismiss the non-fiction writer pointing to a

particular reflection as being a fabrication. It is up to the non-fiction writer to convince the reader

of how much is real reflection and how much is also nothing but manipulation. The non-fiction

writer can choose a kind of mirror, small, oval, cracked etc, but she can never make a mirror.

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Perhaps there is an even better image: the fiction writer takes the photograph, what and

how she wants and then develops it. The non-fiction writer uses a found photograph.

DB: Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines is a text which is formally close to Ashforth’s and also

approaches the question of writing belief. Chatwin’s solution, after extensive negotiation with his

publisher, was to call his narrative a ‘novel of ideas’.

AK I think The Songlines is a wonderful example of a writer grasping an essence and then

manipulating many things to say that thing that he wants to say. Apparently a lot of it is not

correct, and yet he brought a completely new sensibility into the Western world that was not

there before. I would rather have The Songlines, than to be without it; on the other hand I would

rather have had a correcter version which would probably have been even more challenging if

less riveting.

DB: Many of the examples of creative non-fiction which I mentioned at the outset – as well as

Ashforth’s and Chatwin’s work – seem to find in the contradictions, fluidities and possibilities of

the genre ways of engaging with social and cultural difference, and renegotiating or remaking

identities. Your collaborative work with Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele in the book There

was This Goat is a prime example.

AK: I couldn’t have imagined the testimony of Mrs Konile. But say I decided to make a novel

out of it and started to make up all the conversations and thoughts about it. It could still have

been an interesting book, but nothing more than a thumbsuck without three real people coming

from three different sensibilities allowing the book to explore nooks and cellars that we didn’t

even know existed. I found for example how often white people expressed their surprise at some

of the observations of my black colleagues, but on the radio station where we discussed the book,

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quite a few black readers phoned in and were astonished about my angle. Which brings me back

to the estranged worlds that we are coming from in this country.

But I’m still intrigued by this question you raise about ‘writing belief’. Can you say

something more about that?

DB: It’s a tough question, but I think one which we have to engage with seriously if we want to

make any sense of the society in which we live. One of the reasons why I find There was this

Goat so significant a text is because you, Kopano Ratele and Nosisi Mpolweni venture into the

risky territory of trying to think and write into and about beliefs, assumptions, imaginings,

realities, which may be very different from your own, but which you credit, respect, are changed

by, are humbled before, may also be provoked by.

But before I try to answer your question in more academic terms, let me offer you an

anecdote, which summed up for me the need to think seriously about writing belief. Sometime in

the mid-nineties, when I was working at the University of Natal, Durban, I attended a research

seminar in the History Department, in which the paper, like just about all of those in the series,

was quite clear that historical materialism was the explanatory paradigm, and that the religious or

spiritual – if considered at all – were explained as (misguided) responses to social, economic and

historical conditions. At the end of the seminar I had to hurry across campus to give an English 1

lecture in probably the biggest venue on campus, Shepstone 1, which holds in the region of 500

people. But I couldn’t get in, because there was a prayer meeting going on, and the venue was

filled to bursting. So in stark, experiential terms I was faced with the question: how to reconcile

the dismissiveness of the twelve (mostly white) academics towards faith, with the apparently

sincerely-held beliefs of the 500-plus (mostly black) Christians in the lecture theatre? I found it a

salutary and humbling experience; and I was disconcerted by an apparent arrogance in much of

the academy generally towards religious or spiritual faith (as well as the racial and class aspects

– mostly white, middle-class academics versus mostly black, mostly support staff). Coupled with

that was my own return to Christian faith a little later in my life, and hence my own struggles to

think through the complexities of writing belief in academic contexts.

1 I am grateful to Antjie Krog and Claire Scott for discussing these ideas with me.

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But to take up the question slightly more theoretically. Let me consider three different

possibilities, and see how far these take us. Firstly, and for me the most interesting scenario is

how to write belief which you do not share. Obviously anthropology, ethnography and religious

studies have approached this question quite intensively over many years, but I’m thinking of how

you write belief in a nuanced, empathetic way, while retaining some sort of critical perspective.

We are in the situation here, I think, of wanting to credit belief, even if we don’t necessarily

endorse it. And if we really want to understand a country in which both the census figures and

our own lived experience tell us that the overwhelming majority of people believe in some form

of supernatural power, then we’d better take the question seriously. For me, where this touches

on the conversation we are having about creative non-fiction is that the imaginative shifts,

narrative destabilizations, varying focalisations, metaphorical intensities and so on which the

genre can employ, alongside more conventional discursive or reportorial prose, allow an

approach to belief that can write from both inside and outside; can allow for the complexities and

contradictions which such an endeavour necessarily involves. I’ve mentioned Adam Ashforth’s

work as to me exemplary in this regard. Harry G. West is another fine example. In his book

Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique, he says:

Like many scholars of sorcery, I place myself in my narrative, producing what James

Clifford – drawing on Bakhtin – has referred to as “dialogical ethnography” (Clifford

1988: 41-44). However, whereas other scholars of sorcery have made the story of their

apprenticeship the central thread of their narrative – often in the form of accounts of

personal journey from incomprehension to understanding – I have rejected this narrative

trope. My reasons for doing so derive from the awkward tension I discovered to exist

between my experience of studying uwavi in the field and the understanding of uwavi I

developed over the years both in the field and ‘back home’. In the field the study of

uwavi was sometimes profoundly disorienting. Knowledge gained one day was lost the

next as I gathered contradictory evidence or became aware of disparate perspectives.

(2005: 9)

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A little further on, he says:

In the construction of an ethnographic account, one can scarcely avoid making some

sense of the topic at hand. Indeed, as one can scarcely live in a world without seeking to

understand it, I have, like the Muedans with whom I conversed, sought to see the

unseeable, to know the unknown, to make sense of the senseless. It is quite another thing,

however, to suggest that this sense revealed itself, as such, over the course of the journey

of my fieldwork. My struggle to make sense of uwavi was continually transformed in

various contexts outside the field – in the library, in the seminar room, and in front of the

computer screen. This book conveys my understanding of uwavi at the time of its writing.

Although it comprises accounts of events and conversations that occurred in the conduct

of field research, the chronology of these encounters has yielded in my narrative to

another order of presentation, for each of its constituent episodes has come to coexist

with the others in my memory, each one interrogating others across boundaries of space

and time, each one shedding light or imparting confusion upon the others. The narrative

not only follows Muedan history but also threads through the logics of uwavi as I

eventually came to conceive of them, all the while ferrying back and forth between

simplicity and complexity, clarity and ambiguity, certainty and doubt. (2005: 9-10)

His book is an academic monograph, but I think his methodology may resonate with your use of

creative non-fiction in many ways, including the sense of ‘cutting and pasting the upper layer, in

order to get the second layer told’, and also of writing into the narrative your own developing

understanding or confusion. The other author whom I admire in his attempts to write faith is

Terry Eagleton. I’ve talked elsewhere about how he uses various fictional techniques in his

critical writing on Christianity, in particular shifting focalisation and free-indirect discourse, to

produce accounts of Christian belief which are entirely credible to Christian believers, but which

do not move him out of his own materialist paradigm (Brown 2009: 17-20).

Secondly, one needs to think about writing belief from within that belief, not as an

evangelist, but as a scholar. I am supervising a doctoral student, Nkosinathi Sithole, who

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produced a very good Masters thesis on ‘near-death narratives’ in the Church of the Nazarites,

and is currently writing about the performance of hymns and sacred dance in the church, one of

the assumptions of which is that audience for such performances is partly those who have

departed this life for heaven. I had a hard time getting his doctoral proposal through the Higher

Degrees Committee, because the objection was raised that there was a methodological problem

in his being a member of the church and also writing about it. His counter-argument was that all

of the studies of the church – including my own work – had been done by people from outside

the church, which had led to certain inaccuracies in the analysis. Now many areas of academia

have developed methodologies for self-reflexiveness in writing one’s own position into one’s

analysis, especially if one is either an insider or outsider to the society under discussion, and

Nkosinathi Sithole did indeed engage with this. And he has used some very interesting

techniques, including at one point an extraordinary autobiographical account of is own adult

circumcision, to negotiate the complexities of his writing position. But there seems to be a larger

assumption that needs to be questioned. One cannot ‘prove’ that political, historical and

economic forces are the fundamental and sole determinants in human history: historical

materialists believe them to be, and adduce evidence for this, in the way that Christians, Muslims

or Buddhists adduce evidence for their beliefs and epistemologies. But I’ve yet to hear that it

would be methodologically problematic for a materialist or liberal humanist to write from or

about his/her own paradigms (and I’ve encountered some pretty evangelical materialists in my

time!).

Which brings us to the third, and maybe least helpful aspect of writing belief. What

writing isn’t about writing belief? Saying that may be as pointless as the philosophical debate

about whether anything exists outside of human perception of it, but perhaps the question is

especially salient in relation to creative non-fiction, and in particular your own writing: the

Country of My Skull trilogy seems so usefully and insistently to stage the complex processes of

sense making and identity (yes, faith and belief are written through all three books) that make us

so wonderfully, contradictorily and infuriatingly human. In particular, in South Africa it seems

the genre of creative non-fiction has often involved rethinking whiteness, something which is an

explicit focus of yours in the Country of My Skull trilogy.

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AK: Harry G. West’s description sounds like the problem we had in writing about/out of

something like ubuntu in There was this Goat. I have picked it up as the basis of some of the

TRC testimonies but could not manage to forge any kind of tool to ‘prove’ that it was there. In

Mrs Konile’s testimony it felt completely absent. By moving away from accredited sources to

the personal experiences and from academic writing to a conversation, my two colleagues

managed with astonishing ease to pinpoint and to describe it. Yet, in the absence of footnotes, we

had to work endlessly on the text to find convincing and unsentimental language to express this.

Our ways of working also determined the form of the book. I did feel squashed between a way in

which human epistemology was supposed to base and support itself on something, if not

obsoletely materialistic, then profoundly Western, and the successful attempts of my colleagues

to move beyond the enclosing theoretical lines. It reminded me of how the Afrikaans poet

Eugene Marais visited Bleek and Lloyd while they were doing research on the /Xam, and how he

was told by one of the /Xam that he could speak bird or lion. In other words, not imitating, but

conversing. I think my primal obsession is to insist that one can only imagine bird, be bird, if one

is living with and like, and one becomes bird as the Bushmen did or the Kaluli so beautifully

described by Steven Feld in his book Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in

Kaluli Expression. As Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than

are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.166-7), and the old paradigms are holding one back.

But to return to ‘rethinking whiteness’. Ron Kraybill (1995) gives a few to-be-repeated

stages or steps as part of a reconciliation process. The first step is to turn away from one another.

The second is to redefine oneself and/or one’s group. I think that since 1990 a hell of a lot of

turning away and redefining had taken place. Are Afrikaners only apartheid monsters? Are

blacks only victims? How black is coloured? Are all whites the same? Etc. The third stage is to

undertake a small act of trust. This is action which makes oneself vulnerable because one’s

survival depends on the other. Millions of South Africans are involved daily in small acts of

trust. It is these moments where the edges meet that provide for me the most interesting material

for non-fiction. In terms of the imagination I sometimes get the impression that soapies are the

only places where such redefining and acts of trust are being imagined. They pretend we all live

‘normally’ together. A lot of scheming, passion, caring and destroying takes place, but race is

seldom the cause or the space of risk. The risk is to have all races living without racial friction.

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DB: What has always seemed to me your most ambitious and definitive statement about your use

of the genre of creative non-fiction is contained in Country of My Skull:

“Hey Antjie, but this is not quite what happened at the workshop” says Patrick.

“Yes, I know, it’s a new story that I constructed from all the other information I picked

up over the months about people’s reactions and psychologists’ advice. I’m not reporting

or keeping minutes. I’m telling. If I have to say every time that so-and-so said this, and

then at another time so-and-so said that, it gets boring. I cut and paste the upper layer, in

order to get the second layer told, which is actually the story I want to tell. I change some

people’s names when I think they might be annoyed or might not understand the

distortions.”

“But then you’re not busy with the truth!”

“I am busy with the truth … my truth. Of course, it’s quilted together from hundreds of

stories that we’ve experienced or heard about in the past two years. Seen from my

perspective, shaped by my state of mind at the time and now also by the audience I’m

telling the story to. In every story there is hearsay, there is a grouping together of things

that didn’t necessarily happen together, there are assumptions, there are exaggerations to

bring home the enormities of situations, there is downplaying to confirm innocence. And

all of this together makes up the country’s truth. So also the lies. And the stories that date

from earlier times.” (1998: 170-171)

Could you comment on this?

AK: To return to the photographer and photo image. I can let you sit, give you tea, enlarge the

photograph, give you a PowerPoint display, but what I cannot or rather should not change is the

photo – the way it is. Because that is what I am trying to tell, the second layer, the unchangeable

that I have chosen to understand and talk about.

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DB: I want to push you a little on this. I understand the ethical aspect, and also the personal

nature of the narration (it is the “country of my skull”, and you have already talked about the

importance of the ‘I’ in the narration). Can you say something more about getting the “second

layer told, which is actually the story I want to tell”, which you describe as “unchangeable”. Are

we talking here about the affective story, the penetrating imaginative or metaphorical insight, the

emotional ‘truth’ – the kind of thing which readers traditionally go to novels for, rather than to

journalism or social history?

AK: It is like when you write a poem. There are the words, sounds and images, and one is

shifting, moving, hauling new ones in, in order to make them conform to that other thing which

the poem is about. It is hard to describe. It is both layer and context.

One makes decisions about what to incorporate and how, based on something, some

notion of how the poem or book should sound. So I don’t sit and think, you know I have this

European bird in Begging to be Black, let me find an African bird. I was actually on one level not

aware of the different kinds of birds in Begging to be Black, and yet something in me was busy

with the composition or connecting patterns and was pulling those birds in. Maybe it is a

question of being responsive or empathetic to the things which connect within the context that I

am creating.

So the reason why one chooses to describe A and not B, mentions C and not D, is

because one is busy picking out the pattern that one has discovered. But what does this do with

the integrity of what is really happening? By leaving out D am I not distorting what is happening

in order to make reality fit the particular pattern that I want to expose? What is the validity of my

pattern then?

This brings me to ‘voice’. One often says how this or that young writer is still trying to

‘find her voice’. What does that mean? And what is at stake when one’s found voice becomes

public? When only writing Afrikaans poetry (during the apartheid years) I was often asked: who

do you write for? I found that easy to answer: for nobody. I have/hear/sense something inside me

that wants to be said and my only loyalty/energy lies towards making this happen as clearly as

possible. But looking back I can see that I was ignoring the voice I was forming during those

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years. The voice that turned what was picked up by the creative self into words/sounds. Here I

am today because of this particular voice. How does it get and keep its integrity? And maybe

that is what is bothering me most about some of today’s fiction: I find so many gaps, so much

papered over non-knowledge, so few attempts to complexify the very question of living here and

now, that the writers whose voices I trust I can count on my one hand.

Let me give an example of the kind of choices relating to integrity. In Change of Tongue

I describe the disastrous interview I had with Mandela at Qunu. Not long after that encounter I

was invited with my whole family to have dinner with Mandela at his Cape Town house. So I,

my husband and children then had dinner with a charming Mandela who told my children in

detail what a brave and remarkable person I was. It was one of those immensely special moments

of one’s life. So when I write the book, the dinner could be the rectification of the awful way

Mandela treated me at the interview. But to write about the dinner was not only very difficult,

but for me it affected the integrity of my ‘voice’. I thought long and hard about what to do. To

cut the piece would affect Mandela’s stature: because he wanted to ‘make up’ for the treatment.

Now why won’t I give him that? Do I sacrifice him so that I can keep my integrity? One can say,

yes that is what I did. But I think I did something much more interesting than the usual Mandela

story: I substituted the dinner with a frank discussion I had with somebody about him in which

the exploration of him as a leader went much deeper than the other story allowed. (I wrote about

the dinner in another forum).

DB: At a recent conference, a prominent South African literary and cultural studies scholar

commented that she had over the past few years found South African fiction unsatisfying, and

that she was more engaged with writing in other genres, whether they be journalism, creative

non-fiction or social history. I was reminded of this by the dialogue which occurs near the end of

Begging to Be Black:

“No, I can’t, I don’t want to write novels.”

“Why not? With novels you can explore the inner psyche of characters; you can

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imagine, for example, being black. So what is it about non-fiction that you don’t want to

give up?”

“The strangeness. Whatever novelistic elements I may use in my non-fiction

work, the strangeness is not invented. The strangeness is real, and the fact that I cannot

ever really enter the psyche of somebody else, somebody black. The terror and loneliness

of that inability is what I don’t want to give up on.”

“But how will you live together in your country (or mine) if you don’t begin to

imagine one another?”

“I want to suggest that at this stage imagination for me is overrated.” (267-8)

There’s a lot going on in that passage, and – despite the sense of the failures of imagination – the

imagination is very much present. Your whole narrative is shot through with imaginative

projections and associations, but they constantly negotiate with or mediate ‘the real’.

AK: But it is a particular real. I am not writing research as in an academic article, presenting the

proven/argued. I am exploring the seams, the edges. I had some wonderful discussions with

Johan Degenaar, just before he retired, and remember he once stopped and said: no wait, let me

rephrase, I see you work entirely in images. So if I describe Kroonstad in Change of Tongue, I

am not busy with Kroonstad, I am trying to say something else using Kroonstad. Although

Kroonstad immediately becomes a metaphor, I need you to understand that Kroonstad is a real

place, so that you can explore with me this ‘realness’ I am trying to communicate through

Kroonstad. And what is this realness? They are falling apart and people are suffering and scared

and surviving in many very complex ways. Kroonstad becomes contextualized patterns. In itself

it displays all the notions of a once-proud white town in the flux of changes – I make my choices

of what to describe based on patterns that shows up what Gregory Bateson (1979) called first

order connections; I describe it in such a way (choosing to mention A but not B) to expose the

pattern of the town in comparison with that of the country to make second order connections and

so forth. Why don’t I imagine a town and country? I think (because I have never even attempted

to write fiction) to imagine a town is to make it whole, to imagine it whole-ly and from this

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wholeness decide what to describe/tell. What I am saying through non-fiction is that I have

problems, I cannot see this town in its entirety, but look, here are some patterns and they are

saying: it is complex, wholeness is (im)possible, but here are patterns.

DB: I’m reminded of Tom Wolfe’s (no doubt hyperbolic) comment about the New Journalism in

this regard. He points to the tension between the new journalists’ view that novelists in America

in the 1960s were abandoning the complexities of their society for increasingly rarified

imaginative flights, and yet their own anxiety that – despite this – their work as journalists was

nevertheless inferior, because it was ‘journalism’ and not ‘literature’, little imagining the impact

their writing would have:

And yet in the early 1960s a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had

begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the feature statusphere. It was in the nature of a

discovery. This discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say,

was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would … read like a novel. Like

a novel, if you get the picture. This was the sincerest form of homage to The Novel and to

those greats, the novelists, of course. Not even journalists who pioneered in this direction

doubted for a moment that the novelist was the reigning literary artist, now and forever.

All they were asking for was the privilege of dressing up like him … until the day when

they themselves would work up their nerve and go into the shack and try it for real …

They were dreamers, all right, but one thing they never dreamed of. They never dreamed

of the approaching irony. They never guessed for a minute that the work they would do

over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature’s main

event. (1996: 21-2)

AK: I find again that I differ from Wolfe. I respect a good novelist like Coetzee more than any

non-fiction I have read about the country. Disgrace has ripped open more debates and

conversations about South Africa and colour than any newspaper article or non-fiction book ever

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did. So a good novel is immensely powerful. Maybe something is to be said about the quality of

novels he is talking about. So personally I am not interested in how we imagine one another,

because we don’t know one another well enough, but in how we are, really, how have we

survived, how have we loved and betrayed? I have read some fiction about known characters or

towns and could sometimes just cry about how some writers simply do not manage to capture the

contradicting layers of what was available.

DB: There are key moments in the Country of My Skull trilogy where you engage self-

reflexively, and flag for the reader, fiction-making as part of your narrative strategy. It’s

something that is somewhat unusual in the genre of creative non-fiction, because – while it opens

imaginative space, and points to a different notion of ‘truth-telling – it simultaneously denies

what we discussed earlier, what Wolfe identifies as the ‘in-built advantage’ of such writing: that

the reader knows “all of this actually happened”.

AK: If you read carefully you will see that these flags always refer to technique or strategy and

never to the inherent content. Most of these fictionalisations are to protect people while at the

same time signaling that telling a story about the truth is a complicated business.

DB: What limits do you set yourself in this regard? What duty do you have to the integrity of

voice and identity, to the ‘authorship’ of ideas? For example, you mentioned to me in

conversation that the idea of “knowing someone’s heartbeat” was something that had been

spoken to you outside of the narrative context of Lesotho, in which it finally appears in Begging

to Be Black.

AK: This is virtually impossible, but let me try. A woman invited me for lunch to discuss

possible ways of working together with her NGO. Partly explaining why she had to cancel the

previous meeting, she briefly told me that she was away because her grandmother died. And then

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she told me the story about the heartbeat in a kind of effort to explain why she feels a bit

emotional. Thereafter we had about an hour-and-a-half conversation about the possibilities of

working together. Now of all the many things said and told that afternoon to each other, why

would this piece stick in my mind? I remember nothing else of what was said that afternoon, and

none of our plans materialized anyway. So why would these sentences be preserved in my

mind’s eye so clearly that I can still see her hand resting for a moment on her chest where her

heart is as she was saying it? It is also because of these sentences that I can remember the café in

Observatory where we sat, she with her back to the wall. Her other hand was on the table around

her wineglass.

Is this already the moment that the arbitrariness of choice and representation of reality

start? Or is it that the memory has retained everything and will pull something out the moment

that a connective pattern is found? I have noticed through the years as a poet that I also have

what I have come to call a creative IQ – something that subconsciously and unconsciously

selects and holds things like images, stories, words, feelings, somewhere. While I would forget

major things, or be unable to remember a single thing of an important event, I would be able to

remember something completely insignificant for years and years. These things are kept until I

am working on something – then suddenly like a fish hook, it is as if the thing I am working on is

dredging up this cluster of gathered at random and now suddenly related things.

Now I am on this page. I am in Lesotho after a conversation with Bonnini which had

opened up a lot of thinking around being interconnected in my mind. The story of the heartbeat

comes up. It’s essence of interconnectedness fits what I am busy saying, but it has nothing to do

with Lesotho or Bonnini. The woman who told me cannot form any part of the story (she does

not fit into the larger pattern of Lesotho, Kroonstad and Berlin), nor the unimportant lunch. To

make it real non-fiction I need to phone her and say: I want to use this, these are the words as I

remember them, is it okay for you if I use them like this. Several things can happen: she can say

no, you may not use them, as I am also writing a book about my life (which I suspect is the

case); or she can say: yes, and everything is solved; or she can say: no this is not quite what I

said and give me a broader or weaker description. But because I have asked her, I now have to

use it without any change AND ascribe it to her real name AND make her a character in the book

to validate the inclusion. Now if that is to happen, then she will obviously want to read the book

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first and okay what is being said by her. So for me the cost to reality becomes too high for these

few sentences which in the end lose nothing of their validity without her being attached to them

and in contrast may lose the coherent power they currently have through meddling.

And here comes the second and bigger arbitrariness: how do I use this? For me the

essence, the vertebrae that is to form the spinal pattern, in other words what may NOT be

changed, is the notion that such an intimacy can develop between the grandmother and her

granddaughter that a kind of calibration of heartbeats, a through-bodily-awareness of one

another, was possible. And it was important that it was a story told by a black woman. The rest

can be negotiated by the fictional elements I am using to tell the story – the cut and paste so that

the connecting second layer or pattern of what I want to tell can stay intact. So initially I wanted

the horse rider person, Clement, to tell it as we go on our way to the waterfall. But does it not

interfere with the integrity of the piece? Do I know enough about interconnectedness to know

that a black man could have had the same experience? I believe that I don’t know enough to

make that choice. So it must stay a woman. There are horse women in Lesotho but I had had no

contact with them. Then I thought, no let me say that I was remembering this story as I was

sitting on the horse. So I WAS on a horse, I HEARD the story of the heartbeat, but the two

didn’t happen simultaneously as on the page. What was important to me was not the time breach,

but that the essence of why that story was gathered, preserved and re-presented by me kept its

integrity. But I could have mis-heard her, or my memory could have preserved only part of what

it wanted to hear – that is true. But that is why the ‘I’ is brought in, to warn the reader, things are

as this ‘I’ remembers and tell them. More importantly, by combining the strong visuality of the

horse riding incident with the philosophy of being interconnected I used exactly the strategies

that Scarry is talking about – making moments real by using “radiant ignition”, “rarity”, “dyadic

addition or subtraction” and “stretching, folding and tilting”.

Let me give you a more problematic example. I wrote a poem when I was 16 years-old

and moved to a new and smarter class in high school where the kids were who took Latin and

whose fathers did professional jobs in town. I felt utterly insecure, ugly and poor, but John, who

in the end married me, was extremely kind towards me. So I wrote a sentimental poem about this

unworthy girl, with the pimples and the nylon jersey thanking the boy for being kind towards

her. Many years afterwards I read that the South African writer, Mark Behr, said that when he

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read the poem at school he was floored: that was how he said he wanted to write; he wanted to

have the guts to tell about pimples and a cheap jersey. Now you have to know, I hardly had any

pimples at school and because my father was a wool farmer, it would have been over his dead

body that any of us would wear nylon. Among all the images in the poem Behr picked those two

‘lies’ as the strongest and gutsiest parts. My creative instinct told me that to describe me as I

WAS would not make the reaching out of the boy such a splendid thing, but if I had pimples and

synthetic clothes, it would.

But let me try to engage with narrative integrity from a theoretical point of view.

According to Mark Freeman and Jens Brockmeier, narrative integrity comes about through an

open and de-centered, multiple self whose many possible voices nevertheless remain highly

individuated and self-defined, whose narrated life embodies the adamant refusal of binding and

substantialised character ideals. They describe narrative integrity not only as “harmony of

proportion or beauty of form as principles of narrative composition”, but also as “the coherence

and depth of one’s ethical commitments. Narrative integrity encompasses both aesthetics and

ethics” (in Brockmeier and Carbaugh 2001: 76).

This truly does not help me much, although I always have as many ‘I’ voices present in

my work as possible with enough space in which the ‘I’s can differ and confess to contradictions.

But I found something else: according to H. Porter Abbott in The Cambridge Introduction to

Narrative, one uses an implied author “to assume wholeness in the sense that one assumes that a

single creative sensibility lies behind the narrative. That sensibility has selected and shaped its

events, the order in which they are narrated, the entities involved, the language, the sequence of

shots. When reading this way, we read intentionally” says Abbott “– it is in keeping with a

sensibility that intended these effects. Some would say that this is the only valid way of reading a

narrative. This is the way we usually behave when we interpret: that is we assume that a

narrative like a sentence comes from someone bent on communicating” (2002: 95).

I would say that I stick my neck out: I say: I have a pattern that I am “bent on

communicating”, I present myself as a single creative sensibility that has selected and shaped the

narrative presented to you. You will read it not as coming from an omnipotent oracle, but as a

very personal sensibility of a particular reality presented by me. But unlike the fiction writer, you

can hold me to the truth, you can judge me right through the story on the ways I respect the

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integrity of that truth. On the other hand, maybe it is at the same time safer. People have rejected

Coetzee because they have conflated the author with Prof. Lurie, but the non-fiction writer can

say, this is not me, don’t blame me, this is a real character.

DB: The notion of ‘creative non-fiction’ has a long history. As Marc Weingarten argues, its roots

stretch far beyond the 1960s New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion or Hunter S.

Thompson, or the non-fiction novel of Truman Capote, conservatively to at least Jonathan

Swift’s eighteenth-century political satire, Charles Dickens’s “Street Sketches” for the Morning

Chronicle (1836) under the pseudonym Boz, the writing of Joseph Pulitzer in the nineteenth

century, and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1902) (2005: 10-14). Are there any authors

who have engaged you, or seemed to open up the possibilities of the form?

AK: In a strange way it is precisely the fiction writers that open possibilities of non-fiction. The

origin of the form of Begging to be Black is on the one hand because of the dramatist, novelist

and good friend Tom Lanoye who said to me: rewrite the murder story as fiction. Go into the

heads of the killers – it would be fascinating to read. At the same time there is Foe of Coetzee

and Petrus in Disgrace. Both these novels admit current impossibilities to imagine oneself into

black, and for me through the testimony of Mrs Konile to imagine myself black AND poor. I

have never heard that language, and simply can’t imagine it. So in a way it is the questioning in

fiction (Coetzee), the flaws in fiction, and the way black writers like Ndebele are presenting

narratives that have inspired me.

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