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The lesser spotted blog

looking into the mirror of the rapists

1/29/2013

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Picture1 Billion Rising event in Khayelitsha. Thanks to Andrea Dondolo Rising @ FalseBay College, Khayelistha.
What a feast the media has had lately. Pistorius and the beautiful, doomed Reeva Steenkamp. Young Anene Booysen, gang raped, mutilated and murdered. So many words thrown out into the chatter clouds. So much indignation. So much condemnation.
     So little change.
     Once you start listing brutality, it is hard to stop. If you laid all the abused women end to end, would they reach the moon? Mars? Venus? What about some names: Malala Yousufzai, the fifteen year old Pakistani girl who was shot for wanting girls to go to school; Jyoti Singh, the Indian woman who was gang raped on a bus and so brutally assaulted that 90% of her intestines were removed; Kozaphi Elizabeth Kubeka, 92 years old, raped and strangled by her 38 year old grandson…the list never ends. If you laid out the names end to end would they weave a rope long enough to bandage the wounds? To tie up the rapists? To shroud the dead?
     After Anene Booysen was raped and disembowelled, our politicians fell over themselves to decry the offence. They called for the perpetrators to rot in jail, to feel the full might of the law. The same politicians whose corruption and greed perpetuates the cycles of poverty in which abuse festers, who shelter the teachers who impregnate students, and the councillors accused of sexual harassment. A few weeks after Anene’s murder, a 49 year old woman laid charges against a police officer who allegedly raped her in the “trauma-room” of the Herbertsdale Police Station, one of many accusations of police rape. No politician has bothered to comment on this. Ten years ago, Baby Tshepang was raped in Louisville, a crime born of poverty that rocked the nation. Her rapist was jailed, but nothing has changed in the town.
     Of course I was sickened by what happened to Anene Booysen, and tempted to join the public lynch mob that wanted to hang her rapists high. But there is that uncomfortable truth, that nagging feeling that Anene was paying a price for a system that benefits me and all others born into privilege; that the rapists, along with Anene and millions like them, have been rotting in jail since they were born: the jail of poverty, alcoholism, and social deprivation; Anene was forced to leave school in Grade Seven; her rapists no doubt had similarly grim prospects. They all suffered the daily assault of a bleak, impoverished life with no chance of escaping it. Most children growing up in abusive situations see the world as divided into only the abusers or the abused – their only prospect of improving their situation is make sure they are the former.
    Few would deny that people are brutalised by poverty and deprivation. What is seldom acknowledged, though, is how much we are brutalised by wealth and power. Society decries the rapists, but condones the brutality of governments and warmongers who conscript youth and turn them into raping and killing machines then send them to war for the sake of profit and power; The brutality of a pornographic industry that dehumanises both they watchers and the watched; the brutality of a world that throws half its food away every day while millions go to bed hungry; the brutality of an entertainment industry that fosters our thirst for violence with no regard for what this might do to the minds of children; the brutality of the oil and energy barons who will sacrifice the peace and security of the world to ensure that our dependency on oil is never diminished…
     Lynching Anene’s rapists will do nothing to stop this . And it seems to me that the practice of isolating and condemning instances of barbarity often serves to obscure the barbarity that underpins the fabric of our society. It fosters the illusion that our social political, religious and economic systems are fundamentally decent.  But until these systems are truly governed by the principles of kindness, morality, dignity, equality of opportunity and freedom of expression, we should not be surprised when the barbarians feast on the weak. It happens all the time, in opulent boardrooms where rainforests are condemned, in courts where justice is for sale, in Asian sweatshops where children sew sports shoes for American athletes, in dark alleys where young girls die in agony.
     But the dark forces who prowl these precincts are not the only movers in the world. The One Billion Rising campaign is one of many impulses towards a more enlightened society. Every human right, every instance of social justice in this world has been won through struggle by the underdogs, or those who defend them. Not one has been handed out willingly by the oppressors. It is up to all of us to make sure that the underdogs never stop barking; to make sure that in pursuing the scapegoats we never forget who the real perpetrators of brutality are. The brutality meted out to Anene Booysen, Jyoti Singh and the millions of forgotten victims is a mirror of our ugly, cracked society. Let us never be afraid to look at its truth, and do what must be done to change it.

Below is a poem I wrote some time ago to express the despair I sometimes feel as a mother of daughters – my own and everyone else’s:

 The women’s Lament
Oh we women
Who dwell among thorns
Our brains a tangled skein of fears
That we knit, unravel, and knit again

Our clicking needles strive in vain
To weave a coverlet for our children
To shield their tender limbs
From the chill winds of fate

How we lament
The porousness of our membranes
The  permeability of our defences
The hollowness of our vessels
That are so easily stuffed with hate


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How to unwrite a novel

1/24/2013

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PictureNo wonder the only thing in your in-tray is the cat…
‘What the hell have you been doing’ my publicist Kennedy demanded. ‘NO blog posts for over three months! How do you think you’ll keep your fans?’
     ‘Fans? What fans? The only fan I have is the lacy one my dad gave me with I love Madrid on it. No, wait, I lost that at the last Spanish themed party I went to.’
     ‘Well, no wonder the only thing in your in-tray is the cat. I think I’ll have to find a less lesser spotted author to publicise.
     ‘I’ve been busy,’ I whined
     ‘Doing what?’
     ‘Unwriting my third novel.’
     ‘Oh, please,’ he snapped. ‘You’re supposed to write novels, not unwrite them. Even you should know that.’
     So I wrote the following, to explain myself. Kennedy remains unconvinced….

How to unwrite a novel

When I was young, I assumed my life was a novel. Like that man in ‘Stranger than fiction’, I could always hear some authorial voice narrating my story, commenting with admiration or disgust on my exploits, finding meaty metaphors for my state of mind, rewriting unsatisfactory dialogues. Over time I became annoyed with the Author of Me for being such a poor planner – the plot was meandering, with tedious passages about going to the dentist or learning for geography tests. The characters were improbable, and the main protagonist had markedly few moments of heroic distinction.
     As I grew older my rational mind told me that I couldn’t be a character in someone’s novel, (although  part of me still wonders). But this long-standing delusion made me realise that I’d be forced to write a novel. If only to show that hopeless Author of Me a thing or two about how to do the job properly.
     So I sat down after lunch one day and dashed off a novel, more or less, and when I’d finished I said smugly to the Author of Me, ‘There, that wasn’t so difficult’. This novel found a publisher promptly, garnered a few favourable reviews, and was a modest success although the proceeds would keep me alive for a few months only if I didn’t mind living in a bus shelter and eating dog food.
PictureThe second novel is an altogether different animal
    First novels often fall quite spontaneously out of their authors, which is why they are seldom published, although there have been some notable first novel wunderkinds. When I failed to win the Booker prize with mine I consoled myself with examples of people whose first book is such a success that they never manage to pull off another one, and sat down to write Novel #2.A Second Novel is an altogether different animal. The pressure surrounding a second novel is enough to drive any creative thought right out of your brain.
     It began  with the intention to write an ‘ecological thriller’.  But I soon  realised that the force that would  drive the novel was something far less tangible: something about grief, forgiveness, and regret, and the healing power of landscapes, and the odd tapestries that these forces weave in human relationships.

PictureThe idea was elusive
This idea was  elusive but  insistent. And the long and often painful process of tracking it down taught me an important lesson: the idea that breathes life into a novel is not necessarily the most brilliant, or fashionable, or commercially viable, but it is the most tenacious. It may be a story, or a gesture of a passing stranger, or something that catches your eye on a train or an odd thought that occurs to you when watching the bathwater run out of the plug hole. Or, if you are Franz Kafka, when watching a cockroach squirming on its back.
     It doesn’t really matter what idea starts the story, what matters is it’s tenacity. Like an oyster producing a pearl, some bit of grit has to get under your skin and bug you until you turn it into something lustrous and nuanced with no ragged edges. (At least, you hope that with luck and hard work, your effort creates a pearl and not a lump of  organic grunge).
     Novel #3 has benefitted hugely from this lesson. But I didn’t know it when I wrote The Unseen Leopard. I failed to pin down the idea, and thus lost sight of it.  I did masses of research around genetic engineering, and  wanted to cram it all into the book. The setting clamoured for attention instead of hovering subtly in the background. Minor characters seduced me into rambling engagements with their dramas. Back stories demanded to be heralded as main events.

PictureAs I wandered hopelessly through its tangled thickets I heard the Author of Me snickering in the dark.
    I was like the sorcerer’s apprentice. I had wielded the wand of authorship with little sense of responsibility, and  had no idea of how to rein it in. My story  self-seeded into an impenetrable forest which engulfed the Idea, and as I wandered hopelessly through its tangled thickets I heard the Author of Me snickering somewhere in the dark.
     My publishers were kind but firm.
   ‘Cut.’ They said, when I staggered into their office with a 700 page manuscript.
     I picked myself up, dusted down my bruised ego, came to terms with the fact that not every growth I had sprouted was a precious flower to be preserved at all costs, chopped out a few hundred thousand words and one or two family sagas and took it back.
     ‘Cut,’ they said again. But where? I wailed. And this was the problem. The  editors were in dispute. Some loved this character, others hated her. Some thought one aspect of the story was the most compelling, others thought that was a side-show and something else should be shoved to the fore.
     Finally, as I lay awake one night  deranged by contradictory advice, the light broke through. The story I had to focus on was the one that I felt most compelled to tell, and the voice I needed to narrate it had to offer the prism that offered me the most compelling view of that story.
     It did not matter that this editor liked it and that one didn’t. What mattered was my own passion for it – not because I know better than everyone else, but because if I lacked the conviction and passion, the story would be dead before I’d written a word.
     And so, I went into the forest to unearth the story I wanted to tell, and to identify the characters I wanted to tell it. The story was pretty much the original idea; but the one narrator was a surprise. In my early versions, I tell Melissa’s story through a diary. The breakthrough came when I realised that her story needed to be narrated through her self-confessed killer, James.
     What a lot of unwriting I had to do! And rewriting. And unwriting again. This was when I discovered how important unwriting is to a novel – both in the sense of knowing what to delete, and of knowing what not to write in the first place. And this means recognising the soul of your story early in the process, and keeping it always within your sights.

PictureHonour your stories in whatever humble form they arrive
So the best advice I can offer aspiring authors is to recognise the stories that are given to you, and to honour them in whatever humble form they arrive. If a goblin comes knocking at your door demanding to have his story told, don’t try to dress him up as a vampire just because vampires are all the rage these days. It won’t work – you’ll just end up with some sad wannabe vampire that’s lost all his authentic goblinness.
     Writing a novel is a very long, very lonely endeavour. Your only friend in this process may be that goblin who wants his story told, so you had better learn to love him, warts and all. He needs to be so real that you converse with him constantly in you head, and expect to bump into him in the street. If he isn’t, you can be sure that your readers will toss him aside after page one with no compunction whatsoever. At the same time, however lonely you are and however much you love your goblin, don’t let him invite his extended family, unless they are critical part of his story. And if they do come, don’t let them steal his thunder – the more you write, the more you’ll have to unwrite.

Honour your stories in whatever humble form they arrive     I sometimes get annoyed with the stories that blow my way because they lack murders or mayhem or flashy contemporary chic. But I have learnt to treat them with tremendous respect. And yes, I’m also a lot less cocky nowadays with the Author of Me. Because that Author, poor thing, does not have luxury of the delete key, and has to faithfully record every numbing detail of my life – no wonder he/she/it/ has come up with such a clumsy effort…Now, if only we could unwrite some of that novel!


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