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Emmanuel Sigauke interviews Petina Gappah
Munyori
Literary Journal
March / April 2009
http://www.munyori.com/petinagappah.html
Petina Gappah
is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University,
and the University
of Zimbabwe. Her short fiction and essays have been published
in eight countries. She lives with her son Kush in Geneva, where
she works as counsel in an international organisation that provides
legal aid on international trade law to developing countries. Her
story collection, An Elegy for Easterly is published by Faber in
April 2009, and by FSG in the United States in June 2009. She is
currently completing The Book of Memory, her first novel. Both books
will also be published in Finland, France, Italy, The Netherlands,
Norway and Sweden.
Congratulations for An Elegy for Easterly. What does this
big step mean to you?
Thank you very much.
It is a huge step. It means the fulfilment of a life's dream. To
be published by Faber, to be in the company of T.S. Eliot, Sylvia
Plath, Siegfried Sassoon, William Golding, Orhan Pamuk, Owen Sheers
, P.D. James, Kazuo Ishiguro and other writers I love is almost
too good to be real.
How
has your personal background contributed to your writing of Elegy.
For instance, are there traces of yourself in any of the characters
in the stories?
I think of my writing
as a compulsive form of theft. Every story I have written is based
on at least one true thing. This could be something that happened
to me, to someone in my family, to a friend, to someone in a friend's
family, or something I read. "My Aunt Juliana's Indian"
was inspired by my childhood memory of Muzorewa's UANC campaigning
in the townships of Salisbury in 1979 and 1980. "My Cousin-sister
Rambanai" tells a story that is familiar to most Zimbabweans,
the shedding of an old identity to assume a new one in the diaspora.
"The Maid from Lalapanzi" was inspired by the memory of
some of the domestic workers who assisted my mother when I was growing
up. "The Mupanadawana Dancing Champion" was inspired by
a news report in The Herald. And so on. Stories sometimes come to
me when I least expect them: I was walking at Victoria Station in
London a year ago, and playing a private game that I call "Spot
the Zimbabwean" - I have the finely-honed ability to spot a
Zimbabwean in any crowd - and I saw two people who looked Zimbabwean.
To prove this to myself, I moved closer to them, and heard one of
them say: Ufunge, kubva musi waauya haana kana kumbotengawo kana
nyama. I thought, Bingo, then I thought, Now there is a story there.
How
long have you been writing fiction?
Almost every writer says,
I have been writing since I was 3, or I began to write before I
drew my first breath, or something like that. I was not such a prodigy,
alas. I have been writing for as long as I have been aware of the
power of stories to create a firmer reality than the present. Not
that I would have put it in those terms then, I was just a kid who
liked stories and thought I'd try to write a few of my own. I wrote
my first "novel", if you can call it that, when I was
about 10. It was set on Mars and called Return to Planet Earth!
I was also ballet-obsessed at the time, and my second (and self-illustrated!)
novel plagiarised quite shamelessly the Drina books by Jean Estoril.
To amuse my brother and sister, I also wrote nonsense poetry in
imitation of Ogden Nash and Hillaire Beloc, whose poetry we loved.
These literary gems were taken for rubbish by the man who helped
in our garden, and he burned them with other trash.
My first published
story, "Marooned on a Desert Island", was published when
I was in Form Two, in the St. Dominic's school magazine, Santa Dee
Blues. My first earnings from writing came when I was in Form 4,
when I won an award of 100 dollars in the Randalls Essay Writing
Competition. I then started writing really bad poetry like this:
The beggar in the street sang out to me/I hurried on, averting the
sight/To look on such suffering must be/Avoided at all cost/And
still his raucous voice haunted me/ His raucous voice still taunted
me. It was grim. Happily, I very quickly got over that stage.
Then I went to university
where I became consumed by my law studies, by being a Marxist-Leninist,
and by falling in and out of love. I kept a journal through my university
days, but wrote no fiction. I left Zimbabwe in 1995 for postgraduate
studies, then I started working as a lawyer in Geneva in 1999. Although
I sometimes contributed the occasional opinion piece to newspapers,
I wrote very little but talked all the time about how I wanted to
be a writer. Like an unfortunately large number of writers I have
come to know, I wanted to be a writer without actually doing any
writing! I really only started writing, and, this is a crucial distinction,
finishing things, in 2006. My first short story, "Something
Nice from London" was published that year. My second story,
"At the Sound of the Last Post" did extremely well in
the SA PEN contest, and the rest followed from there.
It's
been said that your book deal with Faber and FSG is a big step in
Zimbabwean literature. Do you agree?
The book deal is one
thing, whether the books are any good is the question that will
determine whether this is a big step for Zimbabwean literature.
And that, of course, is not for me to judge. But there is this:
I have found that in publishing, it helps to have a precedent. So
the fact that both Brian Chikwava and I are being published by top
publishers may, depending on our success, make other publishers
take a closer look at other Zimbabwean writers who are coming up.
I have often told people
that you are a hardworking writer, have noticed that you are involved
in many writing projects. You have participated in international
writing contests, have won second place in the PEN/Africa Prize
judged by J.M. Coetzee. But you have also been a columnist for media
outlets like Zimbabwe Times, where your stinging criticism of poor
governance in Zimbabwean politics has intrigued readers. You are
also a satirist of the highest order, and you maintain a frequently
updated, professional blog. On top of all this, you are a busy lawyer.
How do you manage to do all this, and in what ways have you been
able to balance fiction and non-fiction works in your writing career?
Thanks for those kind
words. I believe it was Susan Sontag who advised writers to engage
with the world. Hemingway shot things, climbed mountains and wrote.
Scott Turow writes thrillers, and runs a legal practice devoted
to death penalty cases. P. D. James worked for the NHS, raised her
children as a single mother, and gave us the wonderful Dalgliesh
novels. Lady James in particular is an inspiration, because she
shows it is possible to have two lives: she had solid professional
achievements before she turned to writing. I was a lawyer before
I became a writer, I published academic papers on international
trade law before I published fiction. I see no conflict at all between
my professional life and my writing of fiction. If anything, the
one feeds the other, and I am grateful to have both. I love my job
and being a lawyer, and I love writing. But as I want to do both,
I realised right at the beginning that I needed to find a way to
fit my writing into my life. The most obvious thing seemed to be
to create a longer day, so I get up very early around 4, 4:30, then
I write, and around 7:30 I stop and the rest of my day follows.
As for the commentary on Zimbabwe, I have not found it difficult
to balance the fiction and non-fiction. Most Zimbabweans have views
on what is going on at home. All I do is to write my views down,
a thousand words at a time.
I haven't
read a review copy of Elegy for Easterly, but I am aware that some
of your stories I have read are anthologized in it, for instance,
"The Annexe Shuffle", which was originally published by
Per Contra, and a satirical piece that appeared in Prospect. In
reading these, I have been moved by your use of language, the playfulness
of your style. How much attention do you pay to language use and
style in your writing? What does this playing with language mean
to you as a writer?
Language is important
to me. I like precision, crispness; I like uncluttered sentences.
I like writing to be musical. I want to write dialogue that sounds
like people talking. Three of my favourite writers, J.M. Coetzee,
Ian McEwan and Paul Auster, in their very different ways, have this
quality, to give but three examples from their many books, The Life
and Times of Michael K, Moon Palace and On Chesil Beach are just
wonderful. Being Zimbabwean, I cannot separate the question of language
from Shona. I use a lot of Shona in my writing because I write about
Zimbabweans who speak Shona. The Shona has to feel true to me, and
has to be true to Zimbabwe. I had a crisis when I wrote the slang
term for South Africa as Ndaza instead of Ndazo, and the story was
published like that. I have since corrected it, but that kind of
thing makes me nervous. Also, I positively detest glossaries so
the Shona I write has to be clear within its context. I am particular
about the way people talk; I have a character called Ba'munin'ba'Thomas,
written as one word, because this is how we think of people in Shona,
the identity is contracted, and the person has that one identity
depending on your relationship to him. So I aim for my writing to
be musical yet crisp, and for it to feel true both in the language
and the characters.
In one
story you deal with the challenges of the Zimbabwean Diaspora. How
has living out of Zimbabwe influenced you as a writer?
Living outside Zimbabwe
has been good for my writing because it has enabled me to have the
sort of financial security that is not possible for a number of
writers in Zimbabwe. I am also lucky to live in Geneva, a cosmopolitan
city. I have friends from all over the world, which has helped me
to appreciate that we are all pretty much the same screwed-up people
wherever we come from, we are what Ian McEwan in a recent interview
called "untrustworthy, venal, sweet, lovely humans". Understanding
people, or, at least, trying to understand people, is part of what
drives me to write.
Do you
agree that this may be the time for Zimbabwean literature to shine?
Do you see it as a time for a kind of Zimbabwean literary renaissance?
Every crisis presents
an opportunity, this is a terrible thing to say but it is true.
Award-winning war correspondents emerge only in wars. I am a great
believer in bearing witness, in writing things down so that those
wiser than us can learn from our mistakes. Without Jung Chang, from
whom I learned the horrors of China's Mao through her memoir Wild
Swans, I might still have believed the Zim government's version
of the history of China. One of my favourite writers of the moment,
Yiyun Li has, through fiction, unpeeled the layers of pain beneath
the efficiency of contemporary China. The horror of Afghanistan
gave us Khaled Hosseini's searing novel, The Kite Runner. Think
of The Gulag Archipelago, and how Solzhenytsin opened up the West's
understanding of Russia. Closer to home, think of Es'kia Mphahlele,
Dennis Brutus, Athol Fugard and that whole body of writing that
came out of apartheid. So yes, for writers like Chris Mlalazi from
Bulawayo who is writing wonderful stories and plays, for Brian Chikwava,
for Raisedon Baya, another playwright, for all writers prepared
to write the truth of Zimbabwe as they see it, then this is the
time.
Which
writers influenced you?
I never know how to answer
this question, so I will tell you some, just some, not all, but
some of the writers I admire. I love the three gentlemen I mentioned
above, Coetzee, McEwan, and Auster. I also love Toni Morrison. I
love the crime fiction of P.D. James and Dorothy Sayers. I have
great admiration for Daphne du Maurier. I reread Austen and Dickens
every year. Charles Mungoshi is my favourite Zimbabwean writer.
And, as we are having this conversation in the context of Easterly,
a short story collection, I will also mention the following short
story writers: Charles Mungoshi( his Walking Still is sublime),
Chekhov, who is, of course, the master of the short story, Can Themba,
the most underappreciated writer I know, Edward P. Jones and Yiyun
Li who have written the two best short story collections I have
read in years and Ali Smith who is strange and funny and brilliant.
So what
should readers expect in An Elegy for Easterly?
I hope readers will be
amused and moved. I hope that my Zimbabwean readers will find echoes
of their own lives in my characters, and may even recognize themselves
or people they know.
This
book received a trans-Atlantic deal. Do you have plans to tour both
Europe and the United States soon? Africa? Asia? How busy are you
going to be?
This year is going to
be extremely busy. So far I am scheduled to appear at the Cuirt
festival in Galway, Ireland, at the PEN festivals in both London
and New York, the Edinburgh Book Fair in Scotland, and the Melbourne
Writers Festival in Australia. I will also go to the Franschhoek
Literary Festival in Western Cape. I will also have book launches
here at home in Geneva, in Johannesburg, and, I hope, in Harare.
You
recently went to Zimbabwe. Did the trip give you new ideas about
writing? In other words, how did the writer in you respond to what
you saw?
There is a lot to say
and write about the terrible crisis at home. I wrote a short piece
that has been published in the latest issue of the Africa Report.
I am currently writing about my tortuous experience in getting a
passport for my son, which I hope will be published by Granta. There
is plenty to write about. The only issue really is filtering it
all, because there is just so much going on.
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