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| Book tells why Mom is tickled pink to have a little redhead They say that if you have curly hair, you want straight. If you have brown hair, you want blond. But redheads are happy just ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Petina Gappah: 'I don't see myself as an African writer' The winner of the Guardian First Book award on finding comedy in tragedy – and why she is not the voice of ZimbabweThe early press material for An Elegy for Easterly, the collection of short stories that this week won the Guardian First Book award, called Petina Gappah "the voice of Zimbabwe". She objected to her publisher, and it was rewritten. But too late: it is there on Amazon, which had received proof copies of the book, a ponderous phrase that misrepresents the way she sees herself as a writer."It's very troubling to me because writing of a place is not the same as writing for a place," she says. "If I write about Zimbabwe, it's not the same as writing for Zimbabwe or for Zimbabweans. I have to remember that as much as there are many people unhappy with Robert Mugabe's regime, there are many who are not: about 49% [of the electorate] voted for him."Gappah faces the perennial problem for writers from Africa seeking to win favour from the western media: how to avoid being pigeonholed. "I get irritated by the term 'African writer'," she says, "because it doesn't mean anything to me. Africa is so big. There are some people who are happy to be African writers. They are pan-Africanists. I'm not a pan-Africanist. I think African countries have a lot in common. But we are also very different. I'm very happy to hang out with my friends from other African countries who are writers, but I don't see myself as an African writer, because it comes with certain expectations of you."Gappah, a vivid and instantly likable 38-year-old who has taken a day off from her job as a lawyer with the Advisory Centre on WTO Law in Geneva to come to London to receive her prize, defeats any such expectations. She is her own woman, self-confident and in control of what promises to be a significant literary career. Her first novel, The Book of Memory, will be published in 2011, and her second – an inter-generational epic spanning Zimbabwean life from 1945 to 2005 – is already being planned.An Elegy for Easterly, with its 13 short stories offering portraits of people struggling to get by in economically depressed, inflation-racked Zimbabwe, is a remarkably assured debut. Gappah's tone is far from the weightiness that the phrase "voice of Zimbabwe" suggests. In some of the stories, notably "The Mupandawana Dancing Champion", it is comic, and in an interview earlier this year she said: "If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist." In reality, she occupies that ambiguous (but fertile) ground where the reader is unsure whether this is tragedy or comedy. In the face of such calamity you would, like Oscar Wilde, need a heart of stone not to laugh. "One of my favourite episodes from the last government was when they were conned by this woman, who had been educated up to third grade, into believing that she had found diesel flowing from a rock," says Gappah. "Ministers went to the rock to pay homage. It was like Brown and Mandy going to Stonehenge to pray for diesel to come out. There's something savagely funny about the situation. George Orwell said the political joke was important to any revolution: if you can laugh at the people who oppress you, they suddenly don't become so powerful."Gappah has always wanted to write and says she has been scribbling away from the age of 10, but it took her years to find a voice. She made a previous attempt on her state-of-the-nation epic, but found herself writing propaganda, real "voice of Zimbabwe" stuff. "It was awful," she says. "It didn't read like anything I wanted to read." Her eureka moment came in 2006, when she wrote "Something Nice from London", a story about a family waiting at the airport for a corpse to be flown back from the UK. "That was the first thing that I wrote from beginning to end, almost in one sitting. Where it always stopped before was that I didn't understand that writing was revision. You have to revise and revise and revise. I wrote it like I would write one of the judgments at work."She proceeded to write 22 stories in the following 18 months, was approached by an agent who saw a story published in Prospect, got a deal with Faber, and is now being published round the world. She will not, however, be giving up her high-powered legal job. "I'm going to carry on because I love my job," she explains, "but also I think it's going to afford me a measure of protection. I don't want to write because I have to; I want to write because I want to. Sometimes when writers write because they have to, the results are disastrous."She says she has no difficulty finding time to write, producing a thousand words a day, though much of it may eventually be binned. It's not quite Trollopian in its volume, but is still miraculous, not least because Gappah is a single mother with a five-year-old son called Kush, something she is reluctant to talk about for a reason I find rather sweet. "My parents would not like me to talk about it in print, but yes I am a single mother. I have a very good relationship with my son's dad, who lives in The Hague."Gappah was born in 1971 in white-run Rhodesia. She calls the system "half-hearted apartheid", but may be being generous: her family lived in a black-people-only township, and her first school was designated for black children. After liberation in 1980, however, all things became possible – her stories portray the 80s as a golden age. Her family moved to a formerly white area in what is now Harare, and she was one of the first black pupils in a primary school formerly reserved for white children. "There were six black kids out of a class of 22," she recalls. "Suddenly I found myself in a minority, which was very odd to say the least."Her father worked in a bank and was what she calls an "autodidact": he had been denied a university education but was determined Gappah and her four siblings should get one. Four of the five are now based outside Zimbabwe, a commentary on why the country is in such a mess. She studied law at the University of Zimbabwe – she wanted to be a journalist and writer, but her father insisted she become a lawyer; then, in 1995, went to Austria to do a doctorate in international trade law at Graz University, combined with a masters degree at Cambridge. She has been based in Geneva since 1998, and currently advises developing countries involved in trade disputes.Does she feel guilty to have left Zimbabwe? "You're the first person to ask me about guilt," she says, "but yes, you do feel guilty, especially when you have dinner-party conversations where people say, 'Oh, those Zimbabweans, why aren't they getting rid of their tyrant? They should just go out on to the streets.' Yeah, but where are you? In Geneva. How can you talk about people going out on to the streets? There is a measure of guilt, but at the same time being outside Zim gives me a more objective eye. We're not that special: you're like any other country that has had a similar history. Kenya's been through the same thing, Nigeria has, but it is human to only see your own crisis and your own dilemmas. Because I've been able to see it in a larger context, that's freed me to be more distanced." How does she manage to root her work in Zimbabwe without being there? "I don't live there physically, but I'm there mentally," she says simply.The Zimbabwe she writes about is a country where life goes on in the face of political oppression and economic collapse. "We so often see people in the news," she says, "yet we don't really think about what it is like to live in a place that's in the news. But it is really like anywhere else. They still have weddings in Afghanistan and Iraq." It was, she says, one of the keys she discovered in unlocking the secret of writing: "You don't focus on the big moments, you focus on the people, the tiny little moments." The voice of Zimbabwe would write about the nightmare of that country. Petina Gappah writes about the dreams and, above all, the dreamers.An Elegy for Easterly is published by Faber, £7.99.Watch a video of the Guardian first book award ceremony guardian.co.uk/books An original short story by Petina Gappah is in Review tomorrow.Guardian first book awardPetina GappahFictionPublishingAwards and prizesZimbabweStephen Mossguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Sue Arnold's audiobook choice | Audiobook review Sue Arnold's choiceClassic Romance, introduced by Alex Jennings, with Janet McTeer, Juliet Stevenson, Sam West and others (5hrs, Naxos, £16.99)Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa for not bringing this gem to your attention sooner. A little of the blame must rest with the nice young man who helped me to sort out my audio library last summer and put this between Classic FM's Top 100 All-Time Favourites and Cradle Songs from the Caucasus. It does have music, but only to introduce some of the most famous declarations of love ever made. They're all here: Shakespeare's Henry V wooing Princess Katharine in pigeon franglais; Jane Eyre still managing to sound straitlaced sitting on Mr Rochester's lap; Molly Bloom's voluptuous recollections in tranquility of an amorous tryst on Howth Head; the Owl on guitar (small) serenading his beautiful Pussycat. Alas, love being both a many-splendoured thing and merely a madness, not all these legendary lovers live happily ever after. Spare a sobering thought for Adam and Eve (yes, of course they're here, starting the whole show rolling), Guinevere and Lancelot (that other loitering knight who fell foul of La Belle Dame Sans Merci), Heathcliff and Cathy, Vronsky and Anna, Frankie and Johnny. Why is it that the potency of passion is directly commensurate with the level of restraint employed to describe it? Barbara Cartland's testosteroned Romeos and swooning, décolletée heroines had nothing on Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, buttoned up to the neck and probably wearing gloves, exchanging mutual assurances of undying devotion. "Elizabeth . . . immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change . . . as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably never felt before, and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do." Jane Austen on true love is the lick.Classic Ghost Stories, read by Richard Pasco (5hrs unabridged, CSA Word, £19.99)Once you get into listening to fragments, it's hard to go back to the 18-hour epic novel (I'm currently struggling through Little Dorrit), so I'll stick to classic shorts this week. Susan Hill's spinechiller The Woman in Black was published in 1983 but is better known as the stage version, which did for ghost stories what Look Back in Anger did for kitchen sinks. There are various audio collections of spooky stories, but this is one of the best, largely thanks to Richard Pasco. The anthology, which includes Dickens, Kipling, O Henry and Bram Stoker, is laced with memorable characters – ghastly, garrulous, menacing, mad, traumatised, terrifying – all of whom Pasco portrays with enormous gusto. But they're always kept in check by the completely matter-of-fact voice of his narrator. Haunted houses, headless apparitions, hangman's nooses doubling as bell-pulls – he takes them in his stride, and so will you until suddenly . . . No, I won't spoil a minute of your terror by giving anything away.• By the way, if you're as addicted to short stories as I and the thousands of people who contributed and listened to the BBC's National Short Story Competition on Radio 4 earlier this month, you'll be pleased to learn that the first website of downloadable audio short stories, www.spokenink.co.uk, was launched last week. They've recorded 120 so far, ranging in length from 12 minutes to two hours and costing between 99p and £2.99 per story, depending on length. The regulars are all here: Edith Wharton, Margaret Atwood, Saki – well, they have to be, but there are also some refreshing new authors and voices well worth trying. My favourites were Colm Liddy, a young Irish writer who switches seamlessly between slapstick and pathos, and Hassan Blasim from Iraq, whose dark, merciless stories about kidnapping and asylum seekers in Baghdad will give you nightmares.AudiobooksJane AustenSue Arnoldguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño Philip Hensher hails an imaginative early work from a modern Latin American masterThe cult success of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and the immense worldwide posthumous success of his final novel, 2666, have encouraged his British publishers to delve into his substantial backlist. There are lots of interesting things there, most marked by the formal eccentricity that so defined 2666.By Night in Chile is told in two paragraphs, the second only a few words long. Distant Star, the most engaging of these earlier works, is a magic realist-tinged narrative of Pinochet's regime, containing a fascist poet who writes his work in vapour trails in the sky. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a real curiosity; it has a surface simplicity, but few readers will be able to pin down a general unease about the book's purpose and meaning. It was published more or less simultaneously with Distant Star, in 1996, and its last story – or entry – contains a short version of that novel.It is structured as a sort of dictionary, with 30 or so short lives of imaginary writers. They are all related, in different ways, to often extremely rightwing causes. They pay a pilgrimage to visit Hitler or are photographed in childhood being dandled on the Führer's knee. They promote anti-semitic ideology among beat poets. They flee to South America after the war and live in enclosed Teutonic colonies. "Five feet tall [and] with a swarthy complexion" themselves, they write books with characters exclusively "tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed". They come to violent ends, either in the past or considerably in the future; their books are acclaimed within certain circles, or self-published and never noticed; they deal with each other in dense webs of literary association.In description, Nazi Literature in the Americas sounds like satire, and it has a dryness about it which could easily be taken for ironic humour. In fact, Bolaño's intentions are more sophisticated than that. Much of his personal experience was with writers passionately committed to extreme leftist causes, ceaselessly arguing about ideological purity in poetry and splitting up into smaller and smaller "groupuscules". (All this is described in The Savage Detectives.)Nazi Literature in the Americas takes what Bolaño knew very well, and sends it through the looking glass of the ideological divide. He imagines writers of extraordinary experimental verve, engaging with the most advanced literary theory. Some of them, indeed, sound a little like Bolaño in 2666, a novel as steeped in the excitements of brutal violence as any writer described here.Other of these imaginary figures are naive science-fiction writers, or the creators of adventure stories, or, in the case of Argentino Schiaffino, the poet of myth and epic for the thugs of the football terraces. In short, Bolaño's imaginary writers cover the same breadth of ground as any selection of writers. Bolaño, with his characteristic entranced fascination of tone, trembles on the verge of suggesting that some of them may have been terrible, but there is no reason to suppose others are not capable of greatness.This is a heretical thought, but the ideological basis of writing has never had much to do with its merits; a novelist is not more or less likely to be a good novelist because he approves or disapproves of Pinochet, Bill Clinton, Stalin, Mao or Mrs Thatcher. In its unexpected and committedly affectless manner, Nazi Literature in the Americas testifies to the sheer power of literature; how it can emerge in an artless or sophisticated manner with a power that we would prefer to direct.There was never any reason to think that the writers of literature were likely to be exclusively nice people. Only the most foolish reader ever considered that literature was something one would be at all likely to agree with. Bolaño's impressive novel triumphs by displaying a power of imagination and a quiddity we are not inclined to allow any of his imaginary writers. It also, magnanimously, suggests that they too might be capable of writing a poem in the sky, whatever they did when they came back down to earth.FictionPhilip Hensherguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth To accompany the Romantic poets series, Chris Moran reads one of Wordsworth's most celebrated poemsChris Moran feeds.guardian.co.uk |