Novelists From South Africa

"I like it and it is a great way to pass the time. Initially, I just thought I could write; now I know I can. . Interview question- Why do you write?"

"Personally? To be recognized. On a larger scale: less dumbing down in readers."

"I put my head in my hands and try to get quiet, quieter and quieter, and the thin membrane, the invisible connective tissue around the part of my brain that holds my memory, that allows me to stay focused on the present, begins to slide through - emotion makes it happen easily - and through the thready openings memory begins to come through, healing memory, slowly, in great detail, slowly, there is no rush, it must be firmly built up. From this comes self-healing."

"And as if you were transported on an escalator from one floor to the other, and could not get off, so time unyieldingly transports you away from your husband's death. But the loss of a son or daughter, it pours out the sadness, also on you, no matter how long ago, it's still there, always there."

"At the start of a new fiction project, there is always a piece written quickly, assuredly, with little hesitation, and with the euphoric feeling that comes with knowing one has found somewhere to begin"

"Since I am a slow writer and a compulsive editor, I try not to stop too often"

"I write furiously, admonishing myself when I seem about to fall into the old habit of editing sentences as they appear. I want to discover what it is I am going to be writing about, who is in the story and what they are doing there."

"And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of the familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else traveling is like free-fall, or flight."

"Innovation and change: it was one of her key phrases, a mantra she liked to repeat. But it was empty. Ruth Ngema would go to great lengths to avoid any innovation or change, because who knew what might follow on?""

"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work…"

"The moment the metal box speaks her name, she knows it’s happened. She’s been in a tense, headachy mood all day, almost like she had a warning in a dream but can’t remember what it is. Some sign or image, just under the surface. Trouble down below. Fire underground."

"He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly."

"When they were not working they had children without being able to secure a man they could really call a husband."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work… Black man cleans the streets but mustn’t walk freely on the pavement; Black man must build houses for the white man but cannot live in them; Black man cooks the white man’s food but eats what is left over."

"We’d never really known father before. And now living close to him and seeing him at close quarters, I realised that his face was unlikeable."

"The first time I saw him I thought, he won't last."

"All the images and impressions and countries and continents he'd vised had been erased. What you don't remember never happened."

"You’ll come back and be able to look after yourself and the two you’re leaving behind."

"So for a while I had two lives: one that was empty and adrift, in the hospital by day and another that was illicit and intense, by the side of the road at night. The one had nothing to do with the other."

"They park in the driveway under the awning, with its beautiful green and purple and orange stripes. Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre."

"[Ockie] imagines himself one of his Voortrekker ancestors, rolling slowly into the interior in an ox-wagon. Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways. Ockie the brave pioneer, floating over the plain. A brown-and-yellow countryside passes outside, dry except for where a river cuts through it, under a huge Highveld sky."

"It was once said that religion explains in terms of agents what science explains in terms of processes."

"The function of the brain and the nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and otherwise irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive."

"Bulane was dressed in faded old khakis, somewhat soiled and torn and sprinkled with mud, and although this was the height of summer on the highveld and the sun would soon be scorchingly hot, he was swathed in a thick army coat that looked frayed and moth-eaten, like something which might have been bequeathed to an importunate servant by a jokey employer."

"Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?"

"...as I was to later find out, the skin was neither soft nor the hair so smooth as I had first imagined."

"Why believe the word of the girl against mine,... Except for the whiteness of her skin, a color that has caused more trouble and unhappiness in the world than the color of any other skin, what particular claim to virtue can this girl be supposed to have?"

"Oh Mr Bulane, what a sight to greet the plains of Tabanyane!"

"In a few days I am to die. Strange, the idea neither shocks nor frightens me…"

"No, I'll die of a vaster, deeper, more cruel conspiracy by the ruler of my country who have made a certain knowledge between persons of different races not only impossible to achieve but positively dangerous even to attempt to acquire. They have made contact between the races a cause for profoundest alarm among white citizens."

"The day you come across my uncle Sekala no-one will need to point him out to you! Try to imagine a monster six-foot-ten, with a face like a train locomotive or the front of Mount Taba Situ, and you have the exact image of my uncle. Children have been known to cry when he has but looked at them; an attempt at a smile from him is likely to send children running for shelter behind their mother's skirts. When he makes a joke he smiles so hard that his eyes seem to close up and vanish, bringing to perfection his exceptional ugliness!"

"For my grandmother, Esther Makatini, who washed white people's clothes so that I could learn to write."

"We were lovers in everything but in name."

"Why don’t they do something so we can handle this once and for all! They’re wearing me down!"

"And we do not want passes. They have enslaved our men—and we do not want to carry them."

"My chubby little brother! Perhaps he’s having a little ‘crisis of conscience’!’ perhaps, because of their culture."

"Apartheid? We had defeated apartheid. We had finally perfected a method of making love even without making contact, utilizing empty space like two telepathic media exchanging telegraphic messages through sexual airways."

"Bohm’s solution was simple and logical. We have been wrongly interpreting the nature of matter and the universe itself. The message never travelled across space and time at all because both these constructs are an illusion brought about by the brain. In fact the two particles were really one particle all the time and as such they both ‘knew’ what was happening to each of them."

"...people should remain in their own countries and try to sort out the problems of those respective countries, rather than fleeing them; South Africa had too many problems of its own."

"And while we’re so busy blaming [the Makwerekwere] for all our sins, hadn’t we better also admit that quite a large percentage of our home relatives who get killed in Hillbrow are in fact killed by other relatives who bring their home grudges with them to Jo’burg. That’s what makes Hillbrow so corrupt…"

"From the day whe arrived at her husband's home, no one called her by her name."

"I do not not own life, you often said when you tried to laugh your difficulties away."

"....the whites are the conquerors and all is theirs. A man's one hope is among the whites.... The thing for the Buys-volk to do is to get back to the whites."

"You have watched God and Devil, gods and Ancestors, wondering whether *they* owned it, this thing called life. As far as you could see no one seemed to own it, judging by the way they too cast their eyes in the directions of our Hillbrow, Alexandra, and Tiragalong, clicking their tongues in deep sadness or grim amusement as people devoured one another. You were right there with them, still on your way to finding out whether any of them owned life."

"The women are experts at waiting - for husbands, for rain, for unborn children."

"And yet the less civilised white peasant of Europe is to this extent the coloured man's superior: the blood in him is stronger for advancement."

"We are all God's children.....Perhaps, we brown people are His stepchildren."

"Given the opportunity, the descendant of serfs may be a Tchekov. But the child of colour, unless his colour is attenuated to the verge of vanishing point, does not seem to have in him the ability to rise. It is as if the offspring of the originally mixed unions had, through generations, and through circumscription of life and interbreeding, achieved a definite, inferior, and static race: a race not given to wildness (its mothers were savages, but they were slaves); a race with something old and civilised about it (its fathers were Europeans); a race made up of weak materials and without the capacity for spiritual or intellectual growth."

"An ostrich took a mate for life. It was their nature. Why try and mess up nature? Was the new prosperity not enough for them? …Where would it end?"