Novelists

"He imagined that crossing the threshold he had left the earth or been raised to another atmosphere with its own perfume and light…and here too there was the same reverence which shook his soul when he entered the mosque of the Lady Zaynab in Cairo. The same serenity, the same darkness in corners, the same thin light hovering like souls in the air: God’s house is God’s house in every place and age."

"He couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He still hadn’t forgotten the days of the revolution, the revolution of 1919. During those days he had seen a sight he would never forget, a British soldier standing alone surrounded by revolutionaries who surrounded him and one of them struck him with a rod of metal on his head, and he fell with blood over his face…and then the British soldiers appeared armed with their machine guns and the revolutionaries scattered."

"Are there women everywhere in France teaching children hatred of the Germans? And who knows probably all the women of Germany teach their children hatred of the French…whatever the reason, what right to they have to bring their children up on hatred? But he too was brought up on hatred, hatred of the British."

"Christianity as it bean in the East is love and the moral example, the soul of Islam is faith and order, but the new Christianity today in the West is Marxism, while the Islam of the West is fascism, and it too has the look of faith and order, faith not in God but in a leader, and order not for social balance through humility and charity, but an order enforced by terrorism…these are the religions which the West was able to come up with when it decided to join the East in making religions for the world."

"When Sa’ad Zaghloul, the leader of the Egyptian revolution, just freed by the colonial authorities, he travelled to Paris in March 1919 to attend the paris peace conference and to push for egypt independence he was totally ignored by the Allies. The French newspapers did not even write a word about his presence in France. In order to elaborate this sticky point in official Egyptian-French relations, al-Hakim presents another Egyptian student in Paris and makes him narrate something more sympathetic about the French people as symbolized by a known writer…"

"Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors."

"I have at least the whole of my life to answer a question: Who am I? And who is the other? A gust of wind at dawn? A motionless landscape? A trembling leaf? A coil of white smoke above a mountain? I write all these words and I hear the wind, not outside, but inside my head. A strong wind, it rattles the shutters through which I enter the dream"

"Our steps invent the path as we proceed; behind us they leave no trace, only the void. So we shall always look ahead and trust our feet. They will take us as far as our minds will go…"

"But bad manners or vulgar gestures can sometimes have a touch of poetry about them, just enough not to arouse one's indignation."

"The secret was there, in those pages, woven out of syllables and images."

"The father had no luck. He was convinced that some distant, heavy curse weighed on his life: out of seven births, he had had seven daughters. The house was occupied by ten women—the seven daughters, the mother, Aunt Aysha, and Malika, the old servant woman. The curse was spread over time. The father thought that one daughter would have been enough. Seven was too many; tragic, even."

"I saw some words slowly rise and hit the damp ceiling. There they melted in contact with the stone and fell back on my face as drops of water. It amused me. The ceiling was like a writing table."

"....the work of the spirit and the work of the field."

"the eternal mystery of death as well as paradise...."

"science has revealed truth, which has ultimately liberated humanity from its absurd fears"

"What man did not want a piece of viable land that belonged to him"

"For me, the Quality of Mercy is about what to do with particularly violent histories—when you inherit them"

"What do we do with this inherited state? An eye for an eye or forgiveness?” —and what does that forgiveness (or mercy) even look like"

"The idea of forward movement as progress has become something that I find very problematic. And I think it’s because I bought into it for a very long time in my own life, in my own thinking. That as long as things are forward moving, this is progressive. So I liked the idea of having these people thinking that they were coming here or coming together as a form of progressing, right? The very narrative of progress is so built into the whole colonial narrative that it can’t make sense of itself without that. But I actually liked the idea of realising, maybe, that that forward movement is not necessarily leading anyway. This is something that I think the protagonist of the novel realises by examining her father’s life closely, because he is someone who’s constantly on the move but also very lost and directionless. There are moments in our own histories, both collectively and personally, where, you know, it looked like we were doing this, but actually, we were not moving forward. Maybe, you know, we were stuck or we were moving back, but we were not doing that forward progression"

"I think when we think of the city it’s where people go to work. But in a country that has such little employment, why is the city so busy? Well, it’s because people are employing themselves. So it’s a whole other way of relating to that space"

"For me, Bulawayo is a city of people coming together to build the city. So it’s a very cosmopolitan space. Because we received the city for a very long time as a white people’s place, there’s a way people feel disconnected from it. But your great grandfathers were the ones building the various buildings that you’re looking at. They were the labour. And there’s pride to be had in that. So maybe when you’re there, have that connection to it. Realise that this is actually something that was actively created by people who then also actively created you. I think that connection is missing sometimes because we were not allowed to have that sense of ownership as black people, or people who are not white, of the city. Indian and Coloured people had to live in a very particular place in the city, for example. That segregation led to a very interesting connection to the city, but this is our city, and we should have that sense of communal pride"

"That’s what I love about looking at the history we’ve created, it is messy, it is chaotic. With all the attempts to make it otherwise actually what made the past the past was that it was just people not following the rules that had been put in place. I mean, if the rules had been followed, there wouldn’t have been women in the city, there would not have been the creation of the Coloured races, as it came to be known, there would not have been the creation of a middle class, there’s a lot of things that just were not supposed to happen. It’s people saying, oh, I see you’ve created this law, but I’m still going to do what I want. And I think when we look only at the laws that were in place, we miss the people’s reaction to that. This is why governments and power are afraid of people, because people are very contradictory and very difficult to confine and very difficult to define and they can do anything. I think the reason why, in this part of the world, apartheid and segregation became so violent is because people were told to stay within their boxes and they didn’t necessarily want to"

"But really, we can talk about the violence of apartheid, but what actually made the history was the messiness, was the chaos. Was people. That’s what creates the reality. Not necessarily following the rules, but most definitely breaking them"

"One of the things that makes me particularly unhappy with the way Zimbabwe has dealt with its race issue is that it has invisibilized—we still call them Coloured people—Coloured people. They’re silenced, they don’t have any political agency. And I think people would rather pretend that they don’t exist, because they don’t want to have to face the history of how they came to exist. In many ways I see parallels with the United States, and a lot of that violence, for me, stems from knowing that when someone has your last name and is black, and you’re white, you might share an ancestor. And the reason why you have that last name is something violent. So you’re going to continue that violence to make sure that that kind of relation is erased. But it’s there, and I think we now need to start facing those uncomfortable sides of our histories"

"I came across a lot of Sethekelis when I was reading archival sources. And I think a lot of us women who exist in the country don’t know that such women existed. Or if we know that they existed, we receive them with a very negative narrative that says, oh, they were loose women or they were prostitutes. That power that they had is totally taken away from them. And I think that is, well, more than problematic, and it’s something we need to revisit. We need to be very critical about how certain women were portrayed and continue to be thought about. Because again, we know that powerful women and women who are challenging anything are always considered very threatening, so history doesn’t want to remember them at all"

"we have to be confrontational about the past. We have to learn from it, but also challenge some of what we’ve received as knowledge and truth. I’m not comfortable with just letting the past be the past, because I think there’s so much to learn from it. The adage is that if you don’t learn from it, you’re just going to repeat it, and I think unfortunately we’re living through a period where we’re repeating it, we’re repeating a lot of things. For instance, I think if a lot of women who work at the market in Zimbabwe right now understood that they were continuing a tradition of defiance that started at the very beginning of the colonial era, they would have a very different sense of what they were doing"

"In some ways, living in Bulawayo I’m always aware of what could have been. So I’m always writing both what is and what could have been, or what was and what could have been. Because the potential for something better has always been there. We just never realised it. And I don’t know that we ever will, because we’ve never created the idea of a nation, so maybe we just never will. But I think it’s something to think about. When we read, there’s so much possibility, and then the reality of things is always a bit of a disappointment. But I think if we can imagine it, then we can achieve it. We seem to be able to do that with horrible things, so we should be able to do that with things that are good too"

"I think it is possible to reimagine or imagine something better for ourselves. I think it’s important. And it’s possible to use the past to do that. For me, the tragic thing is that history has always been owned by those in power. So what we receive as history—and this happens everywhere in the world—is already a narrative that is very curated. And I think our true empowerment comes from engaging with that history on our own terms ourselves, and taking what we want from it. And I think that’s a journey that, like you were saying, is just not built into our education systems, for obvious reasons. But it is something that I think if we did, could help people heal, in many different ways, traumas that some of them are not even aware that they have had, you know, historically or even up to today. And part of this bigger project is to show that this moment is very much like this other moment, is very much like this other moment. If we focus too myopically on a particular moment in our history, we lose sight of the fact that these things repeat. So maybe it’s not to question the person in power but to question the type of power itself, or to question the very systems that we have put in place. There’s a way in which we reduce things to people to make it easier, but a person is a person, a system is a whole other thing. And we ourselves are so imbricated in systems that we don’t know how to disentangle them. But we have to start trying to do some of that work"

"I wanted to use my imagination to say, yeah, it was horrible, but look what could also have been possible, right? And that doesn’t mean we can’t achieve it now. I think that’s where most of the hope in my novels comes from. I mean, there’s no denying that what happened in this part of the world was just terrible and horrible and horrific. It doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. It doesn’t mean we always have to relate to each other that way. And I know this sounds idealistic and too optimistic, but I think if we do even a little bit of this work, we will be much better. And leave a better legacy for those who come after. Because there’s no untangling what has already happened, it’s already happened. So what we need to do is figure out how to move on with it"

"I think I’m always finding moments to do that. But also there’s this notion that in this particular moment in history, women just knew how to do this, they were so domesticated and they just followed recipes and cakes came out and they were all fluffy and wonderful. I don’t think that was every woman. I had the very anti-domestication thing going on in the novel because I think that’s also a way of narrowing our own narratives about ourselves, you know, you’re mothers and wives and this is why you were happy and this is how we know you. But what if you were not good at being a mother or wife, what does that mean"

"There is a duality to South Africa, as in all of life itself, that is evident, and as stark as the inequality among its citizens"

"Then I close my eyes, and I imagine a world where I sabi and you sabi that we are okay, as we are"

"Perhaps all South Africans need to embrace the mirror of yesteryear, and fear it not, for it holds the answers to the questions that we seek today. Questions that, if left unanswered, will still be asked by generations yet to come.”"

"In the stillness the voice inside is louder, much louder, and cannot be ignored"

"Our stories are important and need to be told"

"If there is a pure space inside of us that can access the eternal source, and give rise to great acts of kindness, create masterpiece artworks, inspire life changing technology, and drive a man to risk his life to save a woman and her baby in a flood, where then does that space exist inside us that gives rise to great acts of horror and pain?"