{"id":167,"date":"2015-11-11T05:30:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-11T05:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.shortstorydayafrica.org\/?p=167"},"modified":"2015-11-11T05:30:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-11T05:30:00","slug":"i-believe-the-big-question-you-should-ask-yourself-is-not-why-you-are-angry-about-injustice-but-why-you-are-not-angry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/?p=167","title":{"rendered":"‘I believe the big question you should ask yourself is not why you are angry about injustice, but why you are not angry.’ An interview with Nadia Davids."},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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Nadia Davids’ creative voice can be found on film, in the theatre and between the pages of her novel, An Imperfect Blessing. SSDA caught up with her to find out what makes Nadia tick. <\/h3>\n

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Tiah: Your novel, An Imperfect Blessing<\/em><\/a>, is constructed with two main viewpoints along with being set both in 1986 and 1993. From a reader’s angle, the story easily slides between the characters and time frames. But for you, how difficult was it to keep repositioning yourself in order to write from different perspectives both in character and history?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nadia: <\/strong>It wasn\u2019t at all difficult to inhabit the different characters and move between them, mostly because I have a deep affection for them both; they often made me laugh even when I found them infuriating. What was much harder was swapping between time periods. The sections in 1993-with the exception of Chris Hani\u2019s assassination- were relatively light, focused on the domestic and the personal and there was something joyful in recreating the small window of exuberant optimism that engulfed the country that year. But the sections set in the 1980s were much more taxing: the military invasion of the primary school, Waleed and his friends witnessing a violent betrayal by witdoeke, the making of a child-soldier, the attack on St Athan\u2019s Street mosque. Those were terrible times. The apartheid government was at the apex of its aggressive, ruthless narcissism; very little and very few were safe. I wanted to think about the beauty and morality of the struggle against that cruelty, that darkness. The more I researched and wrote and thought about that era, the more I realised that resistance is not immune to moral failure and that it\u2019s an incredibly complex undertaking that can cast its own long shadow. I wanted to write about that complexity while still celebrating that courage and place art and love at the centre of that fight.<\/p>\n

But significantly, I didn\u2019t really think about those two periods as being discreet from one another: the sections in 1993 are wholly defined by what happens in the 1980s. That\u2019s how history functions; it\u2019s never really consigned to the past. Not in countries, not in families.<\/p>\n

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Tiah: How does race, feminism, Islam, Cape Town come together in your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nadia: <\/strong>The themes of my life are the themes of my writing. For the last twenty years or so I\u2019ve had a political and theoretical language with which to name these themes (post-colonialism, Islamophobia, Islamic Feminism, intersectionality, critical race theory etc) but I didn\u2019t have that vocabulary growing up and those things were still a source of deep concern for me. When I was writing At Her Feet<\/em><\/a>  in 2002, my sister Leila was writing up her thesis on Muslim women\u2019s narratives in Cape Town and we were having these long conversations about the local and the global, the productive, disruptive, cohesive and incohesive intersections between race, gender and class, how mediatised images of Muslim women had contracted post 9\/11, how bizarre it was that feminist liberation vocabulary had been co-opted by Bush. I was worried about how I was going to draw all these things together in the play without it becoming a didactic bore\u2026 I didn\u2019t want to loose sight-for a moment-of the political imperatives of the work, but I didn\u2019t want to pen a manifesto either. Quanita Adams (the performer) had similar concerns.  And then one day my sister offered me this quote, \u2018Culture speaks itself through the individual story\u2019-I can\u2019t remember who said it but I\u2019ve clung on to that. I believe one has to be very focused on the specifics of a small story in order to tell the currents and contours of a large one. This doesn\u2019t mean I think that if you cloak yourself in cultural \u2018authenticity\u2019 you don\u2019t have to write well. One always has to be wholly concerned with craft; it\u2019s just as critical to be invested in the aesthetics of the work as it is to be versed in a social landscape. That\u2019s what separates art from sociology.<\/p>\n

Tiah: When I went to revisit your novel for this interview the book fell open on page 347 where I had bookmarked the quote: ‘He didn’t tell Rashaad that he hoped never to stop being angry, not because he wanted to live in a state of perpetual rage, but because the anger was a way of remembering.’<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This quote hit me hard, today. As I type this, it is only two days after the violence committed at Charleston Church. It is only three days since Phillippa Yaa de Villiers posted her blog post ‘Air you can breathe’<\/em><\/a> which ends with:<\/p>\n

After Franschhoek Hugh Masekela said to me \u201cyou\u2019ve got too much anger. you need to do that tai chi, deal with it.\u201d I don\u2019t agree. Anger and outrage can energise action; if not expressed they can percolate into bitterness and decay. We have to be able to listen to each other\u2019s anger and let the anger out. It needs to be understood on its own terms and deconstructed in the terms of intellectual equality in South Africa.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

All of this led to me thinking about what motivates people to write. It is a common question, ‘Why do you write?’ One popular answer is that people do so in order to understand, to find empathy. But your quote, and Phillippa’s, made me wonder about the roll of anger in writing. Doesn’t seem to be a common topic. Yet, when I think back to my own work, anger is present and, in a manner, I have been letting it out in the form of stories.<\/p>\n

Is this true for you? Does anger feed into why you write?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nadia:<\/strong> I think Philippa\u2019s piece is one of the most thoughtful reflections I\u2019ve read around the debate so I\u2019m glad you found a way to connect the two. Anger does fuel my writing, but in the same way that love, jealousy, humour or compassion does. Most people (I hope) have a constellation of emotions and experiences coursing through them at any given time. One can\u2019t write without or outside of anger and I\u2019m not sure that anyone concerned in a serious way with social justice would want to. Anger exists. It\u2019s part of what makes us human. Anger-less characters are not believable. Neither are anger-less writers. There\u2019s strange, widely-held and limiting belief that anger is negative and best eradicated. This is plainly false. Anger can be both diagnostic and productive: it can tell you when something is wrong and it can give you the energy and commitment to right that wrong. I\u2019m interested in writing about power and politics in intimate and public spheres-I\u2019m never not going to be angry at some level.<\/p>\n

When Waleed talks about anger being a way of \u2018remembering\u2019 I think what he is saying is that he is not afraid of anger-his own or others\u2019- and that remembering is not just about dates and memories\u2026 it\u2019s about also feelings, about the emotional ecology of a particular time and place.<\/p>\n

There are different forms of anger and (at a stretch) different forms of rage in my novel; public feelings that are directed not just towards apartheid but also private feelings that erupt in intimate spaces between people because of apartheid: difficulties that flow between an interracial couple, the limitations and possibilities of interracial friendship, the very particular anger prompted by the disappointment, helplessness and hopelessness that systemic oppression can manufacture, political differences between friends and family members. I don\u2019t think there is anything more difficult than a conversation with someone you love when you have radically views on something that holds political importance\u2026There is so much at stake in those battles.<\/p>\n

But like Waleed, I believe the big question you should ask yourself is not why you are angry about injustice, but why you are not angry.<\/p>\n

Tiah: What would you like to see change in the writing world? <\/strong> <\/p>\n

Nadia: <\/strong>This is a great question and it\u2019s prompted a longer piece that I\u2019m working on. Briefly, my concerns are around how we read fiction at the nexus of race, craft and identity politics. There\u2019s an important conversation that needs to happen (globally) around race, the racial imaginary and that way in which (mostly women) writers of colour continually have their \u2018race\u2019 invoked by readers as a means of entering the text and in a way that white writers rarely experience. Interestingly, this is something done by readers across the colour line. It\u2019s so pervasive, so routine, that I can I can only think it\u2019s an unconscious, ingrained reflex. I\u2019m not completely sure why it happens but it\u2019s probably got to do with just how profoundly whiteness is universalised in the global imaginary. I need to think it through more-the piece is still at an embryonic stage.<\/p>\n

Tiah: Is there a joy in writing? If so, where do you find it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nadia:<\/strong> Writing is almost always a joyful experience for me. This doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not difficult-sometimes it\u2019s excruciatingly tough but it\u2019s always, always joyful.<\/p>\n

On Nadia’s Bedside Table<\/strong><\/p>\n

Molly Antopol: The UnAmericans<\/a><\/p>\n

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me<\/a><\/p>\n

Ali Smith: How to be both<\/a><\/p>\n

Marilynne Robinson: When I was a child<\/a><\/p>\n

Kamila Shamsie: A God in Every Stone<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Nadia Davids<\/strong> is an award-winning South Africa writer who works across a range of forms: short-stories, plays, novels and screenplays. Her 2014 debut novel An Imperfect Blessing<\/em> was long-listed for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Award and shortlisted for the UJ Prize and the Pan African Etisalat Prize for Literature.<\/p>\n

Photos by John Gutierrez<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nadia Davids’ creative voice can be found on film, in the theatre and between the pages of her novel, An Imperfect Blessing. SSDA caught up with her to find out what makes Nadia tick.  \u00a0 Tiah: Your novel, An Imperfect Blessing, is constructed with two main viewpoints along with being set both in 1986 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[47],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-writerwednesday","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shortstorydayafrica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}