Arja Salafranca

A doctor in apartheid’s army

2012-01-16T10:03:00.000-08:00

Battle Scarred: Hidden Costs of the Border War by Anthony Feinstein, Tafelberg

There is a world of sadness wrapped up in these walls. The psychotic patients, floundering in another dimension, are unaware of their plight. Their families see it all, though. When Mom and Dad arrive at the gates to pick up their lost son, their worry lines run deep, shoulders slump and anxiety makes their eyes dart like pinballs. The army knows there is no way back for these boys. Damaged goods must be returned.”

There are few choices for white men of conscript age in 1980s South Africa: choose to endure army training, and subsequent call-ups after that; proclaim yourself a conscientious objector and endure three years in jail; or leave, knowing you will never be able to return, or not without paying your dues to the state.

Anthony Feinstein trains as a doctor, and considers his options while taking violin lessons in Paris after winning a prestigious music prize. But the army has not forgotten him. He returns. He’s a doctor, two years should pass quickly. After basic training in which he learns that he is “lower than snake s***”, he chooses to go into plastic surgery, but the posts are full, and he’s assigned to psychiatry, the letters “PS” for psychiatry following just after PL for plastic surgeon. “The army decides I am to be a psychiatrist,” Feinstein writes, and so begins a meagre training in an army hospital, the place of sadness.

And then a different sort of hell begins. Feinstein discovers that he is to be posted to Oshakati in the then South West Africa, ordered to treat soldiers emotionally wrecked by their time in the Border War. It’s a place of unbelievable heat, and summer has yet to set in. But worse than that is the palpable sense of disillusionment and inevitability, “No one said war would be easy,” writes Feinstein. “Over and over this little homily is sung. It’s the stock response to every piece of bad news – landmine kills three, signalman hangs himself, sapper slashes throat, plane crashes, gas tank explodes.” The hot, sluggish days go on. Among the cases he treats, Feinstein encounters schizophrenia in a young soldier, and also counsels a traumatised abused wife of an army major.

Before long he finds himself in another hell in the bush, Tsandi, the baking pit of a tented camp, where he tastes fear as he’s flung into the heart of battle for the first time. The only escape: “You cannot step back from the group in Tsandi. There is simply no space for it. Only one’s thoughts are private and often they make bad company. So best to hang around the icebox and dip in for amnesia, which is what I do, following the lead of those more experienced.”

Throughout this powerful account of life in the army, Feinstein’s wry, witty and at times droll voice narrates the story in a compulsively, compelling manner.

The horrors of life in the army are laid bare, the brutality and the cruelty unfolding under his gentle pen. Musician, doctor, Jew, the combination couldn’t be worse in a regime designed to crush. Feinstein makes for a sympathetic character in his own real-life story; far from crushed, he nevertheless chooses to make his life elsewhere, beyond the borders of a SA gripped in rooi gevaar 1980s paranoia.

This memoir is a highly readable and recommended addition to the canon of stories emerging about life in apartheid’s army.

First published in The Sunday Independent, January 15 2012

Yewande Omotoso, Arja Salafranca and Others Highlight Their Favourite Travel Spots

2011-12-27T22:37:00.000-08:00

Ahead of the end of year break, IOL Travel has compiled a list of the ten best getaway spots as chosen by writers, editors and other industry professionals. Contributors to this list include Books LIVE members Yewande Omotoso, who recommends Caledon’s Cape Idlewild Country Cottage, and Arja Salafranca, whose number one travel spot is the Utopia holiday resort in the Magaliesberg...Read more here

Arja Salafranca at Love Books,Melville

2011-11-29T22:44:00.000-08:00

At the launch of Gillian Schutte's After Just Now at Love Books, Melville, Johannesburg. From left: Jill Nudelman, Arja Salafranca, Leigh Nudelman and Fiona Snyckers.

You simply do not exist unless you ‘like it’ online

2011-11-25T22:47:00.000-08:00

I left my cellphone at home. Racing out to an appointment mid-afternoon, and then I was off to a writers symposium that began at five, there was no time to retrace my steps, although I thought of doing so and knew that I’d be caught in hideous peak hour traffic and would no doubt be late. So, reluctantly, I accepted that I was going into the world naked, so to speak.

And naked I felt. As others around me clicked – taking photos, tweeting comments and images, uploading same – I sat there, feeling powerless and cut off...read more here

You can be anything you want to be

2011-11-23T23:49:00.000-08:00

You woke up this morning
to hear that Freddie Mercury had died.
The brilliant blue light of dawn
came in through a parting in the curtain
and hurt your eyes.
You couldn't get back to sleep again.

In the background Freddie Mercury sang,
'You can be anything you want to be...'
over and over again.
You lay there,
remembering he'd told the press this weekend
that he had Aids.

Broken, cut-up lines of prose to
indicate our horror.
By hiding it in the background you
can forget about it,
stop worrying whether you can catch it from
a toilet seat or a kiss.

You make coffee and brush your teeth
watching the trees grow more emphatic
in the blue morning air.

He died of pneumonia,
it's all over the radio.

Can't smear blood over doorsteps to
indicate someone's died.
It's a clean antiseptic world,
you can't find the plague in filthy streets,
or engorged rats.
Instead you can watch the living corpses on TV.
Bared eyes enormous in concentration camp faces,
teeth large as rabbits.
The picture sticks like wet dough in your throat.
You shove it down with water
and try to swallow.

In the background Freddie Mercury sings,
You can be anything you want to be,
you can be anything you want to be.

The Milky Way fairytale

2011-11-23T23:45:00.000-08:00

The constellation looked like a small cluster of cotton wool through the telescope. “Relax your eyes,” said astronomer Vincent Nettman. I didn’t know how to relax my eyes, I strained a bit more, clouds were coming, obscuring even the brightest object in the sky, the waning moon, and I joined my friends inside instead...Read more here

The Road to Publishing

2011-11-19T22:53:00.001-08:00

I swung into Wits University’s Senate House in February a few years ago. It was a hot summer’s day. Clutching books, a bag, sunglasses looped around my fingers, the university was teeming with students, noise, life, there was a palpable energy to the place. I’d been given my student number – or rather, the faculty of Humanities had simply re-activated my old number, beginning with the numeral 90 – for 1990, the year I registered as an undergrad student at Wits. It was astonishing to realise that it had been 19 years ago that I had first became a student, started studying literature and psychology; and that some of these students milling around me had only been born that year, the year I was eighteen...Read more here

At the Vodacom Journalism Awards 2011

2011-11-18T04:46:00.000-08:00

With Janet van Eeden, regional winner at the Vodacom awards, and veteran journalist Sophie Tema.

Six poems on Peony Moon

2011-11-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

Arja’s first poem was written at the age of ten – and detailed the grim effects of typhoid, a subject she knew nothing about. Things have changed since then. Her first poetry collection, A Life Stripped of Illusions, won the 1994 Sanlam Award, her second collection is The Fire in which we burn, while Isis X (Botsotso) contains a mini collection....Read more here

The Thin Line - Dividing line in human behaviour

2011-11-08T23:41:00.000-08:00

A review of The Thin Line, by Dries Blunt
This book combines excellent writing skill, an interesting choice of subject and a fine display of characters that become alive while reading.
It also carries a message of love lost and gained and how fragile relations can be.

At times I read this compilation of short stories as a number of real-life case studies which, in novel writing style, indicates the best possible portrayal of fictional reality.

There are 17 stories in which the thin line between lust and love, fulfillment and destruction and attraction are highlighted.

Salafranca shows amazing insight in the psychological motivation of behaviour.

The Thin Line is a collection with great impact, both delightful to read and valuable to have read.

(Published in The Citizen)

Review of The Edge of Things, in Wordsetc

2011-11-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

An edge is the most exhilarating point for a story to place itself. Ask any reader. We don’t need cliff-scrabbling above a literal precipice; masters (and mistresses) of the form can hollow out spaces of mystery and risk beneath the most prosaic inner or outer landscape. But what we do ask, as readers, is that the threshold matter somehow and that we are surprised and, perhaps, even changed when the story crosses it.

The Edge of Things, then, is an enticing title and a flexible one too, stretching to cover all manner of brinks. Characters cross the endlessly fascinating boundary between innocence and experience, naivety and self-knowledge, one sharing his first kiss at the company picnic, another beheading her first chicken.

What would infidelity look like? one story wonders, while another shows us what looks like cheating but turns out, in the flick of a needle, to be bridal branding instead. Worlds collide: matter-of-fact house renovations clang against soul-exchanges in one story while in another an empty house invites a range of intruders, from teenage lovers to lowering-the-tone buyers to symbolic creatures, recalling District 9, that challenge notions of inside and out.

Liesl Jobson’s “tips for super pics” apply with wit and pain to parent-child relationships, tracing shifts that the photographer protagonist catches out of the corner of her eye while her lens is trained elsewhere. Beatrice Lamwaka writes about a schoolgirl who wants to win a race on sports day. She has, after all, trained hard, fleeing rebel soldiers who abducted her. “I outran them so that’s an A+ for me. If anyone needs more practice in athletics, I’m sure it’s not me.”

Sometimes, an edge is sharp enough to draw blood. Then there’s literary edginess, fun with texts, intertextuality. Iconoclasm (“I don’t like Coetzee”) meets homage, for example, in Jeanne Hromnik’s exploration of new-South-African father figures both lecherous and pathetic. Perd Booysen amuses himself, and us too, with the device of the discovered journal, inadmissible as historical evidence because of its fictional finesse.

In David wa Maahlamela’s playful bus ride across the fiction/non-fiction frontier, we meet both Wordsetc and its editor, Phakama Mbonambi. In the optimistic view of the narrator, also called David, writers who describe lived experience “know exactly the impression they are intending to give their readers”. But this is perilous terrain for less adept scribes.

An event that bit your heart for real needs just as much construction on the page as a situation you make up from scratch. You can’t refer to that day, you must weave it, as Bernard Levinson does in “Tokai”. We have no idea whether the story draws on his life or his imagination or some alchemical meld of the two. What matters is that he shapes place, time and action so fully, so deftly that, like the narrator, we are moved by the mysterious intensity of the last scene.

The Edge of Things is in every sense a mixed bag. Alongside Levinson’s story, gems include Salafranca’s unforgettable image of a mother in an iron lung and Pravasan Pillay’s characters, dialogue and spicy small-canvas family drama.

Silke Heiss’s “Don’t Take Me for Free”, arguably Best in Show, nimbly outstrips our expectations. Like its trucker-clown narrator, Vonny, the story “was built to change”.

In Vonny’s extended appeal to her lover, “All-I-Have, Azar”, the language is as elating as the ride across ostrich and canola country in a bright-eyed van “with its massive, roaring heart and load continuing to doer ’n gone”.

The collection’s subtitle – South African short fiction – proposes that we read the stories as a kind of national sampler. (In a one-off slip, the introduction makes an unwarranted claim to be presenting writing “on our continent”.) Clearly, South African fiction has moved beyond the imperative to be earnest, political or even particularly South African. Mischief is now acceptable story territory, while Fred de Vries’s chilling tale could take place in almost any big city and Aryan Kaganof’s junkies claim that Amsterdam may as well be Durban, “there’s no fucking difference. Bars are the same everywhere. Drugs are the same everywhere.” But it is also true that, as per Hromnik, “the past is hungry”.

Several stories tackle a mix of race and privilege, either head-on or obliquely. In “Telephoning the Enemy”, for instance, Hans Pienaar crosses the “what if ?” line for an intriguing revisit of apartheid-era violence.

Solitude, as Salafranca notes in the introduction, features in many of the stories. We glimpse various anxious, closed, self-referential worlds. A man sits at a café table in the last story, telling himself consoling untruths and inking “NARCISSIST” into his crossword puzzle as he fends off contact.

What feels like a limitation, though, looking back over the collection, is neither inner landscapes nor low spirits (excellent fiction fodder) but rather a sense of stasis in some of the stories, a single note struck and held, Act 1 from curtain up to curtain down.

For these writers and for all the rest of us, Jenna Mervis’s story offers advice. Her protagonist “mentions nothing of … the fingernails of trees that have begun to tear at her corrugated roof in the night”. She looks for “a sign that … that the dangers outside have become manifest”. But by the end (and this won’t spoil it for you), she steps off the edge of the deck and plunges into the veld. Why not, writers? Instead of tamping down tension, why not let it explode? Approach the edge. Plunge. Leap.

REVIEWER: A Zimbabwean filmmaker and writer, Annie Holmes has published short stories in the US and Zimbabwe and a short memoir,Good Red, in Canada. She co-edited, with Peter Orner, Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives.

(Published in Wordsetc, Third Quarter 2011)

Arja Salafranca with Janet van Eeden at the Vodacom Journalism Awards 2011

2011-11-06T22:39:00.000-08:00

Wearing my editor’s hat – with Janet van Eeden, regional winner for her column, at the Vodacom Awards on November 4 2011.

Voila! chatroom: an interview with Arja Salafranca, by Nikki Temkin

2011-11-04T23:40:00.000-07:00

Arja Salafranca selected the short stories for The Edge of Things, a compilation of South African short stories. I chatted to her.

NIKKI: What were the criteria for selection forThe Edge of Things?
ARJA: Firstly, a story had to move and touch me, make me feel something, reflect on some aspects of life and our experiences here. Secondly, I was looking at excellence in terms of telling a story, well-crafted stories that begin with something deep inside and move readers because these were tales that just had to be told.

N: What was the inspiration for this book?
A: The book was initially meant to be an edition of the literary journal, Green Dragon. I received nearly 100 submissions and then selected the 24 stories that make up the anthology. It was too large for a journal, so I suggested that it become a special short fiction edition. I decided to do it because of my own love of the short story – as both a short story writer and as a prodigious reader of the genre.

N: Can you tell us about some of the themes of the book?
A: Some of the stories centre on solitude – and the ramifications of that, from loneliness, to a sense of fulfilment that also results from time spent alone, some centre on relationships experienced, some are about the outsider from society. Some of the stories explore the mother-daughter bond, some look at childhood experiences, some reach deep into South Africa’s past, looking at how those experiences have shaped those in the stories. Others look at identity issues in post-apartheid South Africa, and my own story deals with polio and the mother-daughter bond.

N: What do you think of South African writing currently?
A: It’s extremely vibrant and healthy – certainly in terms of the volume of fiction being produced, and we have some world-class writers, both established as well as emerging. South Africans are now so much more receptive to reading local literature – and there’s also such a range – from literary, to science fiction to crime thrillers and more.

N: Who are some of your favourite local authors?
A: I love Damon Galgut’s fierce, spare, almost uncompromising vision; David Medalie’s collection of short stories The Mistress’s Dog as well as Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Homing. I also love the poetry of Eva Bezwoda Royston (sadly she committed suicide in the 1970s). It’s personal, confessional poetry full of rich, dark and vivid imagery.

(Published in Voila!, Issue Number 8, 2011)

Bold and extraordinary

2011-10-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

The headliner for the third leg of the Out in Africa fest this year is Howl, a film about a poem, rather than a biopic, which is what I was expecting.

Howl is epic in scope, rather like the poem itself, written by Beat poet Allan Ginsberg in the 1950s.

Spilt into four parts, Howl tells the story of the obscenity trial of 1957 when, bizarrely for a modern reader and audience, the poem was tried for obscenity. Interspersed with this is a rendering of the poem by James Franco in the title role as Ginsberg, reciting the poem in a smoky jazz bar to an appreciative audience...Read more here

An unsteady flame of inner fire: a review of the film Black Butterflies

2011-10-23T02:52:00.000-07:00

There’s tragedy in any suicide; and tragedy when the person who takes their own life is a creative person is that their voice is stilled, there will be no more work from them.

There’s tragedy too in that the memory of such a life is blighted by the violent, sad fact of their premature death. Recall the works and life of Ingrid Jonker, and immediately there’s the memory of the fact that she walked into the sea at the age of 31, leaving a daughter, a life, a foam of chaos behind her, including a litter of broken relationships. She also left a body of work that has been lauded and applauded both in her lifetime and in the years since....Read more here

A terrible taste for it, like salt

2011-10-21T23:12:00.000-07:00

I’m driving to work when the beat of a favourite song comes pouring out from the airwaves. Surprisingly I struggle to place it and then the words, and the words, are familiar, so so familiar, I’ve been listening to them since my teens, since the 1980s. “At the age of thirty-seven she realised she’d never/ Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair…” The song is going to end sadly, as we know it must: “The evening sun touched gently on the eyes of Lucy Jordan/ On the roof top where she climbed when all the laughter grew too loud.”

There’s more cause for suicide than simply loud laughter, of course, but the detail is in the poetry, the lyrics, the underlying beat. We weep and sing along as we hear the song, one touched in orange colours and white cars. She’s done it, she’s finally riding the streets of Paris with the warm wind in her hair…It’s romantic, it’s beautiful, and because of all that it’s also achingly sad. The song touches, haunts, remains popular. Whichever way you read the song – and Faithfull has said she didn’t intend it as a suicide ballad – the echoes of the end are unmistakeably there. And it’s a song that has always appealed with its desperate, quiet beauty. The unbelievableness of it all. Suicide made beautiful. The words are, of course, sacrilegious.

For me, there are other hauntings, other obsessions. Plath, Sexton, Jonker…the female “suicide poets”... Read more here

Arja Salafranca reading at the Melville Poetry Festival, Johannesburg, October 15 2011

2011-10-21T23:08:00.000-07:00

Eclectic mix of local short stories, by Janet van Eeden

2011-10-13T02:10:00.000-07:00

Book of the Week: The Cream of South African Writers
The editor of this eclectic collection of short stories, Arja Salafranca, sifted through over 100 submissions before she chose stories from the cream of South African writers. There was no theme as such, but it seems as if the stories chosen examine people who are in extreme situations,emotionally or physically.

For example, Arja Salafranca’s moving story about a woman forced to live in a restrictive apparatus in “Iron Lung” is a million miles away stylistically from Aryan Kaganof’s tale of decadence and debauchery on a night out in Durban in “Same Difference.” What is similar, though, is both stories deal with someone in extremis. The narrator of Kaganof's story is the edge of the emotional abyss. The young woman watching her mother in "Iron Lung" is too. There is no easy way to contemplate a happy future when someone you love is crippled in this way.

There are many gems in this sparkling collection. The enjoyment comes not only from the juxtaposition of many different writers, but also from reading stories with such a variety of subjects.

For example, Liesl Jobson’s “You Pay for The View: Twenty Tips for Super Pics” is a series of verbal snapshots of pivotal moments of a mother trying to find a connection with her children. It is written with poignancy and deep longing. “Doubt” by Gillian Schutte is a study of how passion can seep out of a marriage once the chase is over and when feelings of irrelevance grow due to being part of a couple.

Jenna Mervis’s “The Edge of Things” explores paranormal paranoia in a tangible way and examines the valid fear women feel on a daily basis.

The eternal clash with “the other” is explored in Gail Dendy’s “The Intruders”. Perd Booysen’s “Sinners and Sinkholes” is a delightful modern-day Hermann Charles Bosmanesque tale of ghost towns and gullibility in the arid wasteland of the Karoo.

There are too many stories to mention individually, and some lend themselves to rereading many times. This is the beauty of the colection: there is something to appeal to all astes. And, fortunately, the real star of The Edge of Thingsis the genre of the short story itself.

(Published in The Witness, October 12, 2011)

The Book Review: An Essential Map by Phakama Mbonambi

2011-10-05T03:24:00.000-07:00

At the moment South Africa is experiencing a boom in book publishing. New writers are constantly minted and the stories they tell, whether in fiction or non-fiction, are as diverse as they are exciting. It all bodes well for readers as it means a greater choice of books to choose from. It also means that books compete fiercely for buyers’ attention. Which is why book reviews are regarded as essential maps to help buyers navigate aisles at bookstores.

With such vigorous book publishing taking place one would imagine that book reviews get prominent space in our media. Not so, say writers and journalists Arja Salafranca and Melinda Ferguson. Salafranca, a fiction writer, poet and editor, says: “Unfortunately book pages in some newspaper are shrinking; some papers have got rid of book reviews altogether, which is a huge pity.

"But we do still have papers (such as Mail & Guardian) as well as magazines (such as Wordsetc) and online journals (such as LitNet and SlipNet that give literary matters space and offer room for debate.”

Ferguson, a books editor at True Love magazine, agrees: “There are very few magazines and newspapers that dedicate meaningful space and respect to books, authors, book launches and so on. Perhaps it’s a reflection on what the population wants, for whom, if we look at stats, reading is not a top priority.”

Why are book reviews so important in the first place? What is their function? “Essentially, a review should serve to tell the audience whether a book is worth buying and why, without giving away too much of the plot. The nature of reviews varies. Serious literary or academic journals often run longer and more analytical reviews. By contrast, reviews in the mass media lack deeper analysis because of a shortage of space,” Salafranca says.

When reviewing books, neutrality flies out of the window. Whether in favour or against the book, opinions matter. “I like opinionated reviews, where the reviewer has a strong stance. It doesn’t matter whether I agree with him/her or not. I like these reviews because they encourage readers to see things in a new way,” Ferguson says.

On the other hand, reviewers can miss the point or can have opinions loaded with venom. Ferguson, who wrote two bestselling autobiographical books on overcoming drug addiction, Smacked and Hooked, knows this phenomenon too well. She vividly remembers the reviews Smacked got when it came out in 2006.

“Hardcore reviewers tended to get stuck in the horror [of the book]. Very few got further than the sensational aspect and reviewed it as a literary work. I was disappointed. There was even one reviewer who had some connection to my ex husband (who was in the book) and his family. She got quite personal and went on and on about how much I had hurt people and so on. She didn’t stick to the book at all. I was pretty irritated. But Smacked has sold brilliantly. I guess all the attention, whether the reviews were accurate or not, have worked for me in terms of sales.”

But, can a bad review truly harm book sales? Is the reading audience out there easily swayed by the subjective opinions of a reviewer? While acknowledging that book reviews serve as a “useful” tool to generate publicity, Salafranca believes that, ultimately, word of mouth and advertising are more potent drivers of book sales, which can help counter negative book reviews. “People may occasionally be put off by a bad review, but then again they may go into a bookshop and pick up the badly reviewed book and read it for themselves and think to themselves, ‘Hmm, I think I like the sound of this. To hell with whatever so-and-so said in the review.’ It’s important to have local books in our bookshops so that people can explore gems that may not have attracted publicity.”

It stands to reason that a vibrant book publishing environment needs quality book reviews. For Ferguson, book reviewing takes more than just going to Google, as some local reviewers are wont to do, or merely reading the back jacket of a book so as to regurgitate. She acknowledges, however, that “there are some very fine reviewers out there who do the job brilliantly”. She says: “I think Hooked is a better written and constructed book but I don’t feel enough reviewers have seen that ... But as a writer you never really feel like all people get you and you can’t force people to look at your book in the way you would like them to. As writers we land up being quite pathetically passive, panting for a drop of attention...”

Salafranca, who wrote a collection of stories The Thin Line in 2010 and recently edited The Edge of Things: South African Short Fiction, keenly follows reviews of her work. “Sometimes they focus on aspects you’d never considered. Other times you do feel they are missing the point. It’s all so subjective. We interpret anything from where we are standing, and our mood influences our responses to a particular piece. I’m generally happy that my work has attracted attention and reviews - and favourable ones. I am ready too to learn from what has been said or might be said.”

(Published in Rhodes Journalism Review, 2011)

Silence of the Bushveld

2011-10-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

It lay surrounded by grassy yellow veld, hills forming a kind of amphitheatre in the distance. At first we couldn’t see much, with the other game drive vehicles clustered around. The sun slanted down sharply, an oblique wintry yellow, and then our ranger, Gerard Ramage, turned the vehicle around. The mound of the elephant lay exposed: it had died of old age, or so the rangers here surmised, four or five days previously.

Its trunk had already been nibbled at, its insides were exposed and spilling out, a mess of liver and other organs caught the sun. The huge curve of the ribcage with its immense greyish white bones lay open, flies buzzed around the form. It was incredibly moving to see this great animal exposed, lying down dead, motionless. We are so used to seeing elephants gloriously alive, moving through the grasses and bush, kings of the jungle in their own right. To see one hacked at by predators, reduced to a lumpen piece of meat, rather than animal, was inexplicably humbling. Nearby two lions stretched into and blended into the bush. Two brothers, they had taken to guarding the elephant, it was food for them, each taking it in turns to drink from a nearby waterhole, one always guarding the metaphorical kill.

“Hold your noses,” Ramage warned us as we turned around, moving away from the elephant to make space for other game drive vehicles. Down wind now, the stench hit us like a weapon. Noses shielded, each mentally urging the vehicle on, away.

At Tlou Dam the sun was setting, the trees in sharp black silhouette against the orange sky. Rhinos drank from the water, their shadows making pictures on the surface, birds and ducks skimming against the sheen of water, creating ripples and circles. The sun setting into the quiet: utter silence but for the click of cameras as the light faded, each trying to capture something of what you can see through the viewfinder.

In winter the animals are forced to come to the waterhole at the end of the day, as there are no puddles and patches of water where rain might have fallen, as in summer, so the sightings at the dam in winter are quite spectacular.

There were other animals on the drives: herds of buffalo, more giraffes, more buck, even another elephant walking on the verge of the dirt road. At night, Ramages swept his large torch from side to side, occasionally the beam picked out the other-worldly green glassy reflection of a buck’s eyeball, a bushbaby clung to a tree.

We’d driven up from Johannesburg to Tau Game Lodge in Madikwe Game Reserve, a drive of four and a half hours. Two American medical students were visiting from where they were studying in Botswana, a French couple were touring the country. The night crackled on as we tucked into the buffet, pea soup, kudu potjie, oxtail, vegetables of carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, finished off with melktert, malva pudding, panacotta.

That night I lay back in my curved triangular bath, in my chalet, the light dim. The silence and peace of being in the bush is always a welcome, needed respite against the heady rush of routine and regular busy days. My chalet was spacious – a king-sized bed, a lounge area, a viewing deck over a trickle of river water. Relaxation continued with a leisurely start to the day: in winter, game drives begin at a very civilised hour of 8am.

The next morning, back at the mound of elephant, a jackal nervously, quickly took bites of the trunk, watching out for the somnolent lions.

In a weekend of firsts, I also agreed to a massage by Pauline Mosadi at the Tau Spa Oasis. Years before I had submitted to my first massage, an experience that left me literally chilled, under the cold glare of fluorescent lights in a room silent but for the breath of the masseuse and my own anxiety, and equally chilly in temperature, I experienced a massage that was so painful, I vowed I’d never have another. When I had a leg massage as a part of a pedicure, I again found the whole procedure painful.

Still, third time lucky. And I was. Pauline asked whether I wanted a soft or firm massage. “Soft,” I said firmly. The room was well heated, there was gentle music playing in the background and I finally understood why it is so many people regularly book massages. My head and shoulder massage left me wanting more and left me utterly relaxed, left me knowing this was an experience to take with me, and repeat elsewhere.

That afternoon, on the third game drive, the third visit to the elephant, the most moving sight of all, and one not often seen, although read about. A bull elephant approached the carcass, mourning the dead elephant. The bull sniffed around the mound, trunk curling over the body, moving around it. Grief was tangible in its stance. The sense of sadness was palpable, visceral. The great animal walked around the dead one again, smelling, sniffing, it knew what it had found and there was no way of mistaking its behaviour for anything but grief. He mock charged one of the game drive vehicles that had gone too close. Then he spotted the lions and roared, chasing them away, ears flapping, trumpeting distress and anger.

We were all silenced by the sight as the game vehicle bounced away from the dead elephant, further into the reserve along the rutted tracks. We had long-johns on to protect against the biting winter air, scarves wrapped around faces, beanies on heads as night fell. Yet there’s an austere beauty to a winter game drive. The discomfort heightens the experience; the cold changes it.

On that night’s game drive moving into dusk, we encountered a herd of breeding elephants on the road, making their way to the dam to drink. Our guide, Ramage, put the vehicle into reverse and the older elephants formed a laager around the young elephants, protecting them. He backed off, a matriarch formed a barrier between us and the young ones as we watched from the sidelines. Just metres away, she looked threateningly at us. “Just keep quiet,” we were told. I needed to hear that.

Taking the opportunity, our ranger took us back to the dam via another route so we could watch the elephants moving in single file along the bank of Tlou Dam, shapes reflected against the grey-blue water, the herd of them: matriarchs, baby elephants, teenagers of the herd jostling with and against each other. The light gradually faded away, and the noise of the cameras clicking stopped as it grew.

Another surreal orange sunset deepened into night, far off we heard the splashing of gentle swoop of trunks dipping into the water, the herd seemingly oblivious to our presence on the far side, invisible and, for now, unseen.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, October 2 2011)

Women writing for women during Women's Month

2011-09-04T23:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve read two enormously different, but equally moving books in the past weeks – both of which reflect and affirm what I wish for women this month, and in particular women writers. The first was Reclaiming the L-Word: Sappho’s Daughters Out in Africa, edited by Alleyn Diesel (Modjaji Books 2011) and the second was Julia Cameron’s autobiography, Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir (Cameron of The Artist’s Way fame).

The same week I was reading Reclaiming the L-Word I was also reviewing Out in Africa films and documentaries for the Life section of The Sunday Independent...Read more here

The Thin Line on Peony Moon

2011-08-25T14:03:00.000-07:00

The stories in The Thin Line hook the reader from the first one, and reel you in on that thin line. You will be haunted by the carefully drawn characters: by Corinna trapped in her huge teenage body, by Cleo in love with a married man after all these years, and poor skinny Mark, as he sees his lover teeter away from him. Salafranca is an accomplished, award-winning writer, this long-awaited collection is a box of jewels.

“These stories chart a new direction in South African fiction, where each line, each page – each story unfolds subtly, reaching deeper and more intimately into the tender spaces that exist in all our lives between love and doubt. Reading them kept me up late at night, wanting to know more about the characters’ lives. I was enthralled by the clarity and compassion of her insights; and moved by her obvious love for our fragile country and the fierce power of our unrelinquished hopes.” – Hamilton Wende

Wear Red, Play Dead

2011-08-23T01:03:00.000-07:00

The invite said: Wear red, play dead,
Put your head in a gilded cage.
Come as your favourite rock star.
Wear black, change your name,
Buy a dress made of safety pins.
Come as your favourite Disney character.
Come, even, as yourself.

She stared into the mirror, smoothing her face,
Angling her cheekbones in shades of naked dusk
Her hair curled out of its chignon, along her neck.
Would he be there?
Now, this time, after so long?
Would he recognise her?
Her lace-gloved hands fondled the glass stem of the wine glass.
Gently, she lifted it to her mouth.

The combination of lace, leather, thigh and bottle.
On six-inch heels she grew tall and bold.
As she stepped out of the car, her dress rode up her thighs.
Transformation was complete.

There was the taste of salt and sugar, crisps and wine.
Corks popped, gold foil curled among the trays of party food.
How have you been?
Where have you been?
Had it really been so long?
She drank, she danced, she answered questions and flirted.
The night ticked on. The new year was approaching,
And now she was spinning, flying ...

He found her there – on the soft white carpet, shoes kicked off,
Head under the table. A Mickey Mouse mask grinned next to a shoe.
Streamers draped across the table,
balloons lay plump and purple.
Where have you been?
Where, and not why.
It’s been such a long time.
I’ve missed you.
You’re so beautiful.
What was Nepal like?
Did you find yourself?

He’d found her instead in a suburban house
with an A-frame pitch.
His hand curled around her thigh,
the leather dress crinkled.
They leaned into each other,
she arched her neck against his face, the beard prickling through.
He wrapped his hand against her smooth, flat abdomen.
Again he said: I’ve missed you.
They heard the countdown in the distance
a faint sparkle of hope entered the room they stood in.
She leaned into him, whispering now as cheers filled the night air.

Published on LitNet

World of Darkness

2011-08-21T23:05:00.000-07:00

Eyes are opened to the life the blind experience at the Dialogue in the Dark exhibition, writes Arja Salafranca

My name was reduced to three crystalline syllables. I said it into the dark, introducing myself to our blind guide. I stood there, first in line, holding a mobility cane, projecting my voice into the blackness. Usually the pronunciation of my name elicits comment – its pronunciation bears no relation to the way it’s spelled, and it’s a cause of confusion and puzzlement, especially once someone has read it on paper first.

But we were without sight here, my name reduced and, for the first time in my life, simplified. It was a taste of things to come – although I had no way of knowing that as I stood in the darkness.

I was part of a party of five experiencing the Dialogue in the Dark exhibition.

I was fearful at first. I had read about similar Dialogue in the Dark initiatives online – most specifically the experience of dining in darkness, being served by blind waiters. And I had read that Dialogue in the Dark was coming to South Africa and had been looking forward to it.

It was pitch dark in the exhibition, a darkness that at first assaults and feels terrifying, close and claustrophobic. You want to open your eyes wider, hoping to let some light in. The friend I had come with became claustrophobic and said she had to leave. We waited as she was led away.

Briefly put, Dialogue in the Dark is an exhibition in which you’re led into a midnight black space, with blind guides leading you into various places – from a garden-like atmosphere, to a cityscape and finally into the aptly-named Dialogue Cafe. The purpose is to experience – fractionally, and for 45 minutes – what it is like to live in a world without sight, a world where your other senses come to the fore, forced to the surface as you negotiate your way through a dark world without sight.

As my friend was led away, and we waited for our guide to return, I wondered if I, too, was going to succumb to fear. I wasn’t comfortable, and had difficulty breathing, no matter how I tried. I was taking shallow breaths as though I were at a high on a mountain altitude and struggling to breathe.

As though perhaps sensing my anxiety, our guide Hanif Kruger, having returned, paid special attention to me. Standing close, he offered to take my hand, or to let me hold onto his arm. I clutched at this lifeline.

With tiny steps I shuffled forward, unsure where I was going, which way to turn, or how to negotiate this world. The two men in our group were already rushing forward, eager to explore this strange new experience, less fearful, more adventurous. I wished I could be as daring – but I felt as though, in a sense, I’d been reborn, and my way of negotiating new experiences is a slower, more cautious way.

We were led over a small suspension bridge within a garden-like space. The two men had already dashed across it, and I heard the one commenting they had managed it; it had swayed slightly, but they were already exploring the trees and foliage on the other side. The bridge swayed. My fears were confirmed.

In the distance, there were noises of wind and what could have been waves. I was still too anxious to take in the sounds.

Hanif came close again, a voice in the dark. I hadn’t seen him and had no way of judging his age, or his looks, and thus coming to any sort of rash judgments that we are prone to in the sighted world. I had a voice to follow, a hand, a strong arm. “You can grip both rails of the bridge if you have wide arms,” said Hanif. I found the other rail, I gripped both firmly, somehow managing to retain my mobility stick, and made my way, crouched, and slowly, across the bridge. Again I shuffled, again I felt old, as though I had aged and could do little more than hobble.

Then I heard the high-pitched tone of my friend who had left. She had been persuaded to return, and had been advised to keep her eyes shut. She found it much easier. Leading her back into the exhibition was Danielle Dimitrova, director of global development. I had met her briefly outside the exhibition space as we had prepared to enter. All proprieties cast aside by my fear, I heard her voice next to that of my friend, didn’t recognise it and rudely said, “Who are you?”

She politely explained she had met me outside – a deep, French-accented voice. I clung to her voice, to the nearness of her presence. Again, I couldn’t reconcile her voice to the slight, slim figure I had met outside – and it was too confusing to try. It was as though I were meeting her for the first time – and in a sense I was. Without benefit of sight, I found sight makes you judge a person by appearance – and there’s little judgement when you’re in the dark, clinging like a child.

Danielle took myself and my friend in hand, encouraging us to form a chain. We linked up, more than occasionally bumping into each other, digging a finger into a waist, a breast, proprietaries again cast aside.

“What’s this? asked Danielle, encouraging me to feel my way around the surrounding: from a tree, to its papery leaves, to the plastic moulded lid of a dustbin. Sometimes it was near impossible to say what I was feeling, sometimes the realisation came slowly as my other senses kicked in, memory of touch and feel somehow taking over as I couldn’t rely on my eyesight.

There was a sense of triumph as we figured out what we were touching, calling out the names of the objects excitedly, at one point I giggled to myself – this was like charades in the dark. It was apt – we were reduced to childhood in some ways – to a time when the world was new, experiences were novel, and we needed to be led around, guided, have the world explained as we explored.

Danielle led us into a city space next, again, we shuffled forward, cane ahead, encountering angles of the exhibition space, waiting patiently like children to be shown this strange new world. “What’s that?” asked Danielle as we listened to the sounds invading our senses – buses, trains, a busy transport concourse? Again we groped through memories, and again we leaned heavily on yet another sense, that of hearing, placing a heavier burden on hearing than we are used to in our sighted world.

Again, we eventually guessed correctly, calling out correctly as we crossed the noisy world of a modern city. My senses were starting to feel assaulted – noise, unfamiliar noises, the movement of bodies around me, and always the lifeline of Danielle’s strong, clear voice leading us forward, clutching it like a rope, a lifeline.

We were in a market next, feeling fruits and vegetables in a bowl. Sense of smell was the next sense to be put to work – I couldn’t distinguish an apple from the other fruits without putting it to my nose and sniffing the aroma.

I marvelled at the strangeness of touching and smelling in order to work out what was in the bowl.

A pineapple was easy to guess at – its prickly-like leaves and outer shell easy enough. There were clothes hanging by a market stall, different fabrics falling between my fingers, a mannequin with a pregnant belly.

All the while there was Danielle’s strong warm presence leading us through, encouraging us to explore, to feel, to guess. I was struck by how this experience had revealed us all in psychological ways: both my friend and I are anxious types and explored through the veil of our fear.

When another friend went days later she found herself confronting and resolving her own demons, while my mother on her visit raced ahead, true to her daredevil sense of spirit.

We were now growing more confident. The fear had left me; my friend was even starting to make her way in this world of the darkness, had acquired a confidence, as though discovering a sense she hadn’t known before.

She moved quicker now, more sure of her steps, I was no longer shuffling as slowly as I had before, but was nowhere near as confident as she.

Our encounter with the dark ended with drinks and chips in the Dialogue Bar. I moved toward the counter and placed my order with two servers there. More voices in the dark. I gave them a R100 note, they knew exactly what I given them, and knew exactly what change to give me and how much. I took the clutch of notes and coins, I had no idea what I had been handed. I was too busy holding onto my mobility cane, my straw, my can of cold drink and packet of chips.

Noises were louder in the silence, crisp packers ripped through the darkness, opening a straw and inserting it into the can took longer than necessary. Tastes were intensified in the dark, senses now concentrated on flavour, seeking it out, making it work harder again than it ever has to.

As we sat Hanif passed us a “pimply” book – a book of Braille. We passed our fingers along the unfamiliar small dots on the surface of the paper.

I couldn’t imagine having to read through my fingers. Hanif spoke as we ate, telling us that he had been blind from birth, his optical nerves hadn’t been attached to his eyes.

He was married, his wife also blind. We tried to make sense of world without colour as he spoke, “To me a tree is a pole with more poles and leaves at the end of it.” I tried to imagine knowing a tree purely through feel and smell, and failed miserably. I imagine a tree and immediately I see the visual image before me.

“There are only a few things I wish I could see,” he shared, “a sunset, or a baby’s smile or the look of happiness on someone’s face.”

We greeted this with a poignant silence, each lost in contemplation.

And then, a chink of light, a faint glimmering of white, and Hanif led the way out. I was sorry to be leaving the darkness, and yet I breathed a sigh of relief as we were led out, the faint white giving way to the lit corridor and into the light.

Back into the world I knew, but why, paradoxically, was there also this sense of loss?

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The Dialogue in the Dark is curated by the South African National Council for the Blind and the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Newtown and is now open to the public .Initiated by Andreas Heinecke in 1988, Dialogue in the Dark is a product of Dialogue Social Enterprise (DSE), an organisation whose key mission is to create innovative learning opportunities that improve the quality of human interactions. The underlying principle of the exhibition is drawn from the work of German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, “Principles of Dialogue”, which states that “The only way to learn is through encounter”. The Dialogue in the Dark exhibition has travelled worldwide raising awareness about human diversity while empowering people with disabilities. It has been presented in more than 30 countries and over 160 sites throughout Europe, Asia and America. Six and a half million visitors have experienced Dialogue in the Dark worldwide, and over

6 000 blind people have been provided with employment.

For further info: http://dialogueinthedarksa.blogspot.com/ and http://www.dialogue-in-the-dark.com

To follow the exploits of Hanif’s guide dog, Orli, visit Facebook and make friends with Orli Kruger

First published in The Sunday Independent August 21 2011

Out in Africa film festival

2011-08-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

Gay movie festival highlights gays’ struggles, writes Arja Salafranca

Getting Out, one of the documentaries being shown at the Out In Africa festival, is a probing, hard-hitting documentary which looks at the raw face of homophobia in Africa. Ranging in space from Uganda to London, to Cape Town, filmmakers Alexandra Chapman, Chris Dolan and Daniel Neumann follow the lives of a number of Africans who have been forced to flee their countries simply because they are gay. With anti-gay laws being promulgated in Uganda, and practised in Malawi and Zimbabwe, gay people in Africa sometimes find themselves being raped in an effort to “correct” their perceived deviance, arrested, ostracised by their own communities, and forced to flee for their lives.

The documentary follows the stories of Ugandan gays Florence, Val and John, as well as Zimbabwean Tatenda, a transgender seeking asylum in South Africa and sexual reassignment surgery. The stories are harrowing.

Tatenda finds herself forced to leave her home in Zimbabwe, with her mother being aware her daughter must leave and powerless to help. In South Africa, Tatenda is penniless and homeless for a large part. Some of the more shocking scenes include the long queues of refugees at Home Affairs – over 500 people queue all night, only a handful are dealt with in the morning. Some refugees queue for over a year before they are attended to – and think death by returning home might be the only solution.

Stories of the corrective rape are horrifying – as well as the insidious treatment by British authorities of the refugees, with some officials advising the gay refugees to return home and “live discreetly” in order to escape the wrath of their communities and government. Such statements are outrageous.

There are some happy conclusions, and work by tireless lawyers in order to secure citizenship for these gay refugees, but the suffering undergone is equally shocking to hear.

In 80 Days (80 Egunean) two septuagenarians meet after a lifetime apart and a marriage in between, to find that sometimes society’s expectations force you into a mould you may not have inhabited if you had been born in a different time. We’re in the Basque region of Spain and encounter Axun (played by Itziar Aizpuru) and Maite (Mariasun Pagoaga). Maite, feisty, youthful in spirit, and on the verge of retiring, is visiting her sick brother, while Axun is, paradoxically, visiting her daughter’s ex-husband who has been wounded in a car crash. The daughter lives in California.

Liberated, determined to enjoy life to the full, Maite lives alone in her flat, surrounded by memories. She’s made peace with her trajectory of her life – and yet, life isn’t over yet, an attitude she exudes through her playful demeanour. Axun lives a quiet, uneventful life with her husband of many years. The quiet boredom and conventionality of her life is tellingly captured in a few choice scenes – from attending church with women friends she has known for many years, to silent evenings at home, cooking for her husband, her telephone calls to her daughter a lifeline out of the quiet desperation of her everyday existence.

When Axun and Maite recognise each other as childhood friends, a touching, strong re-connection follows. Maite soon takes Axun out for the day to an island, memories are rekindled, a childhood attraction comes to the fore – but it’s more than Axun can take. Uncomfortable feelings have been stirred up, and Axun remains ill at ease with the notion of lesbianism. Still, the burgeoning relationship continues – and when Maite reaches out when Axun comes to supper, the resulting scenes are inevitable.

This extraordinary film by Spanish writers and directors Jon Garano and Jose Mari Goenaga moves slowly and quietly towards its conclusion, and is brave in its telling. We don’t often see older people on screen, playing out games of sexual desire, but the writers rip the lid off this taboo. A beautiful, meditative piece about the choices we make, and the choices foistered on us by our own acquiescence to society’s demands.

Meanwhile, a very different story of lesbian experience is encountered in the local documentary, Waited For, directed by Nerina Penzhorn.

Waited For takes a look at lesbian couples who have chosen to adopt children, interviews and scenes of family life are interspersed with the wait for a baby by trans-race couple Kelly and Leigh-Ann. We watch as they are interviewed by social workers, visited in their home, and drive with them as they shop for their eagerly-awaited child. It’s an agonising experience: waiting for the phone to ring, waiting to hear if they will become parents. As gay women they are at the bottom of the adoption hierarchy.

Other issues come to the fore in the home of New Zealander Pip and South African Lee as they debate the benefits of leaving this country to bring up their children in a place where one daughter has already experience racism from a white New Zealand child. Single mother Paula talks openly about being a recovering addict and lavishes love on her adopted son. An engaging positive portrait of gay adoption emerges in Waited For.

We Were Here travels back to the 1980s and is an absorbing, eye-opening look at the impact of Aids on gays and lesbians in San Francisco’s gay district, The Castro.

Interviews with those who were there are interwoven with archive footage. In the 1970s The Castro was the place to be for America’s gay community, a safe haven of acceptance as gay rights took off, and gays took their place in the sun. But by the end of that decade and the early years of the 80s, menace arrived in the form of a strange “gay disease” in which sufferers wasted away, deformed by Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions.

Five Castro residents who were there tell their stories – stories of watching loved ones fall ill and die, all helpless in the face of this plague. Eileen Glutzer, a lesbian nurse who helped to administer many of the Aids trial drugs, is the only woman to be interviewed. Others are HIV-positive artist Daniel Goldstein, who lost two lovers to Aids, and speaks movingly of these losses, gay flower seller Guy Clark, Paul Boneberg and Ed Wolf. Ordinary men and women who lived through an extraordinary time.

With the advent of antiretroviral medication and the public surge of support for Aids sufferers which is more prevalent today, it’s hard to recall a time when Aids sufferers were treated like lepers through sheer ignorance. There was literally no hope, just palliative care as one by one friends and lovers died, the plague decimating a significant proportion of San Francisco’s gay community.

*This is the second season of Out in Africa, showing in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Other documentaries being shown include Lauren Beukes’s Glitter Boys and Ganglands, a peek behind the drag curtain. Other feature films included are Children of God, directed by Kareem j Mortimer, set in the heart of the Christian Bahamas, while Man at Bath (Homme au bain) is described as no-holds barred French film by Christophe Honore. See www.oia.co.za for the full line-up.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, August 14 2011)

Poetry: South African women writing their bodies - Gillian Schutte

2011-08-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

There has been a proliferation of poetry coming out of South Africa over the past few years – and much of this poetry has been scribed by women writing their bodies. From the wants and needs of their vaginas to the conflicting emotions that a period may bring on, to the inner stirrings of desire and lust – women are writing it all down and lots of it is getting published.

Says award-winning poet Arja Salafranca: “I think some of this has been due to the really sterling efforts of Colleen Higgs at Modjaji Books – she’s putting out a record number of poetry volumes by women writers – more so than any other publisher. This creates awareness and interest in the form.” ...Read more here

An apple in Munich

2011-08-12T23:50:00.000-07:00

I think a red apple won’t be good enough.
A red apple plucked from a bowl on a luxury
river cruise liner, carried in my bag for two days.
An apple cratered on board in Passau,
placed in the industrial deep freeze and displayed
five days later in a white china bowl somewhere in rural

Hungary.

And then plucked by me, craving fresh fruit
after days of rich six-course meals.

But it languishes in the bowl in my cabin.
Until, packed, looking around, I grab it,
stuff it in my travel bag.
You never know when you’ll get hungry at airports,
said an elderly woman on board.
We fly from Budapest to Munich.
Catch a train to the city centre.
It’s a cool spring, but the city streets, flanked by
history and beggars, are still full of strolling Germans.

It won’t be good enough, will he take it?
I ask the Scotsman with me. Surely he’d prefer money?
But the Scotsman takes it, gives it to the beggar
huddled in a doorway and without hesitation
the beggar, not even looking up, bites hungrily
into the fruit, devouring it quickly, desperately,
without words of debate.

Published on LitNet

Short story form challenges and inspires writers: a report by Leila Bloch on the Cape Town launch of The Edge of Things

2011-08-12T00:16:00.000-07:00

For an anthology of short stories, The Edge of Things includes both depth and scope, with several writers who seem (to varying degrees) unafraid of entering new literary territory. Published by Dye Hard Press, selected and edited by Arja Salafranca, these 24 stories are a special fiction edition of the literary journal Green Dragon.

At the launch, facilitated by Salafranca, a predominantly female group of writers clustered around a podium and steered the familiar how-and-why, question-and-answer session towards more spontaneous conversation. During the evening writers explained how they found inspiration while also skilfully adapting their writing to the short story format...Read more here

Joburg pix, not taken

2011-08-04T00:49:00.000-07:00

A man, having his head shaved,
highlighted by the dusk of early evening.
All around him, gathering darkness, except his head,
this small stall, lit by phosphorescence,
haloed by a weird greenish purple light.
A flash of colour.
I drive on.

Another man, lurching across the road.
Perhaps forty, mouth already gummy,
long brown hair scraggly,
head shakes, words spill out,
but they mean nothing.
I let him pass, a smile of gratitude,
before he reverts back.

A woman, whose breasts are wide and flat,
fat bulges under her cheap beige knit.
She strolls, slatternly, slowly,
I must wait, gunning my engine.

The man who puts his hand through my window.
Takes hold of my keys: Give me money now.
No, I say, surprised. No, again. I won’t give you my keys.
Eyes darting, afraid, he runs away.
No, I carry on, although no one can hear me.
Money in the boot, not much.
I don’t carry much these days.
Money, along with camera,
tucked away in the boot,
where they can hurt nobody.

Published on LitNet

Report on the Cape Town launch of The Edge of Things

2011-08-03T23:49:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday night saw the Cape Town launch of The Edge of Things, an anthology of South African short fiction selected by me and published by Dye Hard Press. This followed a month after the Jozi launch at Love Books in Melville.

Hosted by The Book Lounge, the launch was a chance for me to meet some of the Cape Town writers with whom I’d previously only had email dealings, as well as a chance to catch up with writing friends...Read more here

Review of A Book of Blues by Courttia Newland

2011-07-29T07:57:00.000-07:00

This eclectic, diverse, and interesting collection ranges across countries – from the exotic African island of Lamu, off the coast of Kenya, to the heat of Miami, to the coldness of the underground to the gritty, roughly-hewn streets of London. In tone and style too, this collection offers a range: Beach Boy, which opens the book is an intensely lyrical piece; while in All Woman the narrator talks in a Caribbean patois-accent, and other stories zing with humour and sassiness.

I have to start with the achingly beautiful and memorable Beach Boy, a story of such poetry, it lingers on long after the first reading, and a story I wished would carry on..Read more here

Kate Turkington and Arja Salafranca at Tau Game Reserve, North West

2011-07-29T00:22:00.000-07:00

Exploring sounds of father-son relationship

2011-07-25T23:07:00.000-07:00

Now showing at the Old Mutual Theatre on the Square from July 13-30, My First Sony is a one-man show with Israeli Roy Horowitz, in the title role of 11-year-old Yotam.

The title refers to Yotam’s obsession with recording every sound uttered by those in his life – providing an audio diary, and a way of making sense of his world. He needs it, with an irresponsible, womanising father who continually berates the insecure Yotam about his weight problem, criticism serving as mask, and further eroding Yotam’s fragile sense of self.

Horowitz presented the phenomenal play The Time Keepers last year at the same theatre, and brings a similar energy to this one-man show.

In a question-and-answer session after the show, he revealed that he has been playing the role of Yotam, off and on, for the past 15 years. He became intrigued by the novel by Benny Barbashe when he was fresh out of acting school, met the Israeli writer and persuaded him that he was the right man to adapt the book into a play.

The result is a poignant, moving piece of theatre with a rather shocking ending, a beguiling exploration of a father-son relationship filtered through a young boy’s eyes. Highly recommended.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, July 24, 2011)

Elephant mourning its mate at Tau Game Reserve, North West

2011-07-24T00:54:00.000-07:00

Photos: Arja Salafranca

Podcast of Interview on Radio Today about The Edge of Things

2011-07-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

Arja Salafranca was interviewed by Sue Grant-Marshall about the anthology of South African short fiction, The Edge of Things, on the Reading Matters programme for Radio Today on July 14th.

You can listen to the podcast of the interview here.

Kate Turkington reviews The Edge of Things

2011-07-20T23:43:00.000-07:00

Short stories, as any writer knows, are possibly the most difficult literary form. In the space of a few pages, the storyteller must condense the thoughts, feelings and actions of his or her characters and then come to a conclusion.

The Edge of Things (Dye Hard Press) edited by Arja Salafranca, herself an award-winning poet and short storyteller, gives us the best of contemporary South African writers. There are many themes with many twists.

The title story The Edge of Things by Jenna Mervis marries stark everyday South African reality to a wondrous fantasy. Arja’s own story The Iron Lung reminds us that imprisonment is not only physical but emotional and spiritual. The Company Christmas Party by Hamilton Wende is about that tender first love, and Mr Essop by Pravasan Pillay tells the story of a charming old Indian pensioner who rents a cottage on a friend’s property with unforeseen circumstances. The stories are dazzlingly diverse: funny, sad, thought-provoking and relevant. Keep them by your bed or in your bag for those school lift waits.

Published on http://www.joburg.co.za/ here

Loneliness a recurring theme in this collection: a review of The Edge of Things, by Gwen Podbrey

2011-07-14T01:06:00.000-07:00

The short story has come back into its own over the past few years, possibly because time-strapped readers find them easier to manage than a lengthy novel.

This collection includes contributions from a remarkably diverse range of writers, including Gail Dendy, Jenna Mervis, Gillian Schutte and Jayne Bauling.

If there is one central theme to the book, it is alienation (or, to use real name, loneliness). The stories capture encounters and experiences which tilt us over into the cracks between the crevices of contemporary life: those dark, uncharted spaces where needs are failed by niceties, and pain and perdition walk hand in hand.

Pick of the crop – by a long way – is Bernard Levinson’s superb “Tokai”, which recounts his delivery of an Afrikaans couple, the Bezuidenhout’s, baby in the dead of night. But the birth is complicated and the womb goes into violent contractions, forcing him to manually secure it and staunch its gushing of blood.

For hours he sits, his hand in the uterus of his semi-comatose patient, feeling this incubator of life convulse, enfold his fingers and relay to him its arcana.

“There was a slight shift of tempo. I listened with the fingers of my fist. Unmistakably, I heard the womb flutter and shift itself minutely over my fist... It stretched and gripped. Stretched again and squeezed my fist firmly. I inched my hand out. A secret dialogue between my hand and the womb. My blunt fist - mute and solid. The womb excited, chattering and intimately pressing and caressing my hand.”

Witnessing the drama of this birth - like the primordial one and, indeed, all births - Kleinman Bezuidenhout is engulfed in agony as acute as his wife’s. The next morning, Levinson - preparing to leave - sees him engaged in a ritual which matches, in every detail, the intensity and power of the previous night’s crisis.

The story is an unforgettable glimpse into the soul of the healer, whose patients’ trust in him can crucify as often as it coronates, and whose brief role in their lives - as an outsider, observing and intervening, but never sharing - carries a unique loneliness.

Later, in Liesl Jobson’s “You Pay for the View: Twenty Tips for Super Pics”, we enter the alienation of a compulsive photographer unable to fully engage with her life, and attempting instead to capture its essence through her lens “because the camera never lies”.

Yet it does, for it lacks the vocabulary to capture the truth of locations and individuals, how they imbed themselves in the DNA of the soul and remain there forever, a testimony to life and loss. These are not within the province of pixel and resolution, but of another documenting medium altogether.

The third exceptional story in the collection, Pravasan Pillay’s “Mr Essop”, recounts the arrival of a seemingly kindly, placid lodger at his parents’ home. The author, still a child, notes the growing friendship between the boarder (Mr Essop) and his father - both lonely men - and their mutual pleasure at discovering the values they have in common. But when Essop suddenly shows a brutal side to his nature, shock is added to disappointment.

Aryan Kaganof’s “Same Difference” explores yet another kind of alienation: that of drug users, whose subculture and exclusion from mainstream society force them to band together, unwillingly recognising in each other kindred tortured spirits and putting on a show of bravado to conceal their desperation.

In this ugly, treacherous world, the only allegiances which matter, last as long as it takes to shoot up a crystal meth hit.

“The upstairs toilets are for blowjobs and the schnarf sessions. The outside toilets are for quick shags and schnarf sessions … Tretchikoff girls clustered on the walls and in the mirror. Looking down serenely on the useless lives of all the pastel customers. Useless, all of it. Useless.”

As the narrator ends yet another all-night session with his gang of users in the fetid, filthy basement of a nightclub, and the sun announces the break of yet another unwelcome day, he reflects: “I’m frightened. I’m lonely. Sometimes I feel close to death. But at least I scored tonight… There is no reason to stay alive. But I refuse to bribe the reaper to come and take me.”

Hans Pienaar’s contribution, Telephoning the Enemy”, makes a brave, but failed, effort to explore the alienation of white, apartheid-bound South Africans on the verge of political change. As bombs hidden in sidewalk garbage cans claim one civilian victim after another during the early 1980s, racist beliefs are heightened and the gap between terrorist and victim appears unbreachable.

Not all the stories have the gravitas or compositional skill to sustain the reader’s interest. Angelina N Sithebe’s cumbersome, melodramatic and poorly structured “Sepia”, for example, features characters who are utterly implausible, while Rosemund Handler’s “Clueless” exhumes a stale, clichéd story line: white, lonely madam coming on to a man across the colour bar, followed by a delicious explosion of eroticism and new awareness of each other as human beings. Hardly groundbreaking stuff.

Still, with 22 out of 24 stories offering piercing insights and showcasing a range of exciting writing talent, the collection is one of the best to emerge in recent years. Salafranca’s eloquent and moving foreword whet one’s appetite for the feast to come and the contributors’ profiles at the back of the book give perspective to the voices on the pages, which demand - and deserve - an audience.

(Published in SA Jewish Report, July 8, 2001)

Short but rich South African view - a review of The Edge of Things by Jane Rosenthal

2011-07-12T00:56:00.000-07:00

Two collections of short stories illustrate why the genre continues to garner accolades for the country

The Edge of Things: South African short fiction, selected by Arja Salafranca, Dye Hard Press

African Pens 2011, Jacana

Though they may have been somewhat neglected in recent years, there is a long tradition of short stories in South African fiction. Some of the most famous writers are Pauline Smith, Can Themba and Dan Jacobson; more recently Ivan Vladislavic, David Medalie and Zoe Wicomb spring to mind. Practitioners of this form were hard at work last year if one judges by the two collections reviewed here. As with literary awards for fiction, it's a matter of some chance as to what appears in any given year and 2010 seems to have been particularly good.

Arja Salafranca originally intended The Edge of Things to be a special short-fiction edition of the journal Green Dragon, but as she had so many submissions, it became a full-length book. This interesting and wide-ranging selection reflects the richness of the South African experience. It begins with several pieces that delineate the complexities of personal relationships, including mothers and daughters, dysfunctional marriages and the interior lives of women - all situations in which the protagonists seem to be sailing close to the edge of things.

The title piece, The Edge of Things by Jenna Mervis, is a particularly fine story about a woman and her dog, alone in a remote place, which is beset by fear and fantasy.

Other strong but even darker pieces include Tokai by Bernard Levinson, a brooding, sexualised and masculien take on birth; Telephoning the Enemy by Hans Pienaar recounts the effects of a bomb on a conservative Pretoria community; and in Solitude Dan Wylie an isolated coffee-drinker who enjoys crossword puzzles observes the lives of others from the periphery. Margie Orford's The Gift is an erotic and original meditation on freedom and commitment. Its contrast to these, Hamilton Wende's The Company Christmas Party evokes adolescents careening uncertainly but cheerfully into adulthood.

Pravasan Pillay's Mr Essop is a precise cameo of language and life in Chatsworth, in which the protagonist at first appears to be the perfect tenant.

Although there are a few less felicitious inclusions, the standard is remarably sustained. Most memorable would probably be Silke Heiss's Don't Take Me for Free, narrated by Vonny, a woman whose hold on her job as a furniture-van driver, and on her sometimes man, Azar, is extremely tenuous. This unusual story asserts the humanity of the homeless, poor and underemployed. For Vonny and Azar the stabilising symbol of their lives is a carved piece of cedar wood. This item,made by Azar, is as abitrary as fate but is seen as a spine and a road that helps to hold them. Poetic and deep, Vonny's strange existence imprints itself on the reader's mind.

The 500 stories originally submitted for African Pens 2011 were read and shortlisted to 21 by variuous volunteers (PEN readers and an editorial board) before being judged by JM Coetzee. Although Coetzee considers the standard of this year's entries to be "generally higher", he said that "the kind of short story writer we are all hoping that an award of this magnitude will attract - the newcomer with naked talent, a feel for language and a fresh vision of the world - stubbornly fails to arrive".

I thought this a little stringent - there is plenty of "naked talent" and "feel for language" - and even considerable "fresh vision". Stories that particularly show "fresh vision" would include Claremont Park (Bobby Jordan), Pinch (Martin Hatchuel) and Evolution (Jayne Bauling).

Jordan's story takes one deep into the experience of people on the fringes of Cape Town society in a lyrically light and accepting way not seen by this reader before. Pinch could be a sidebar to Deneys Reitz's great classic about the South African Anglo-Boer War, Commando, with an entirely unexpected flare, both tender and brutal. In Evolution Bauling takes the reader to a place where our existence as the dominant primate species is challenged, perhaps deservedly so. In these three we have fresh visions of the present, past and future.

The winning story, The Story, by James Whyle, is a gem. Set in Pringle Bay, it has more than one narrative layered into its cleanly written pages and concerns a man, his driver's licence, a cop, a baboon and several "whatifs". In second place is Heatwave by Beth Hunt, in which a woman, surrounded by love and good fortune, examines her conscience when a lover dies.

Of the 21 stories I considered 15 to be very good - and the rest to be almost as good. Names that are already known to readers include Liesl Jobson, with her intense, perceptive style, and Sarah Lotz, whose The Pigeon Fancier is funny as well as sad.

Both these collections of short fiction are not to be missed and contain stories that will join the ranks of the established tradition.

(Published in Mail & Guardian, July 8 2011)

Invite to the Cape Town launch of The Edge of Things, at The Book Lounge, July 28th

2011-07-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

JHB launch of The Edge of Things at Love Books, Melville

2011-07-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

From left: Sandy Goulding, Marion Sher, Kay Robinson

From left: Jayne Bauling, Love Books owner Kate Rogan, Gillian Schutte

From left centre: Hans Pienaar, Hamilton Wende; at top centre: Fred de Vries, Arja Salafranca and

Jayne Bauling

Peter Sullivan and Jo-Anne Richards

Kate Rogan

From left: Hans Pienaar, Hamilton Wende; top: Fred de Vries

From left: Arja Salafranca, Jayne Bauling, Gail Dendy, Gillian Schutte, Bernard Levinson

Jayne Bauling

Hans Pienaar

Hamilton Wende

Gillian Schutte

Gail Dendy

Fred de Vries

Arja Salafranca

Arja Salafranca and Gail Dendy

Arja Salafranca

Showcase for SA short fiction by Maureen Isaacson

2011-07-11T02:25:00.000-07:00

Published ahead of the South African Short Story Day is The Edge of Things: South African short fiction, selected by Arja Salafranca, the editor of Sunday Life.

It is a special edition of the literary journal Green Dragon, which Salafranca, says has been published annually since the early 2000s. Salafranca said she suggested that this particular edition, dedicated to the short story, serves “to highlight the importance of this genre, increasingly coming into its own in this country”.

The result is 24 pieces, “some of which qualify as short stories, others more like prose poems and descriptions of emotional experiences”, according to the Cape Times.

The book includes the stories of a range of writers, some well known, including Margie Orford, Liesl Jobson, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Rosemund Handler, Hamilton Wende, Aryan Kaganof, Hans Pienaar and Salafranca herself, as well as those new to their craft, including Beatrice Lamwaka.

Salafranca’s debut short story collection The Thin Line was published by Modjaji Books last year. She has published two collections of poetry, A life Stripped of Illusions and The Fire in Which We Burn. Her poetry is also collected in Isis X (Botsotso).

Salafranca received the 2010 Dalro Award for poetry and has twice received the Sanlam Award, for fiction and poetry.

The Edge of Things, published by Dye Hard Press, costs R185.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, June 26, 2011)

At the Sunday Times literary awards 2011

2011-07-02T00:43:00.000-07:00

Invite to the Cape Town launch of The Edge of Things, at The Book Lounge, July 28th

2011-06-23T00:27:00.000-07:00

Extracts from The Edge of Things on Peony Moon

2011-06-23T00:21:00.000-07:00

The Edge of Things (Dye Hard Press, 2011) consists of 24 South African short stories selected by Arja Salafranca.

The contributors are Jayne Bauling, Arja Salafranca, Liesl Jobson, Gillian Schutte, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Jenna Mervis, Jennifer Lean, Fred de Vries, Margie Orford, Aryan Kaganof, Bernard Levinson, Hamilton Wende, Pravasan Pillay, Beatrice Lamwaka, Hans Pienaar, Rosemund Handler, Tiah Beautement, Angelina N Sithebe, Jeanne Hromnik, David wa Maahlamela, Perd Booysen, Gail Dendy, Silke Heiss and Dan Wylie...Read more here

Arja Salafranca, editor of The Edge of Things, answers a few questions about life, the universe and short stories

2011-06-16T00:51:00.000-07:00

The Edge of Things is an eclectic collection of short stories traversing a vast distance emotionally and intellectually.

For example, Arja Salafranca’s moving story about a woman forced to live in a restrictive apparatus in “Iron Lung” is a million miles away stylistically from Aryan Kaganof’s tale of decadence and debauchery on a night out in Durban in “Same Difference.”

As with all anthologies, some stories will resonate with each reader more than others...Read more here

Jeanne Hromnik's review of The Edge of Things

2011-06-16T00:46:00.000-07:00

There are 24 pieces here, some of which qualify as short stories, others more like prose poems and descriptions of emotional experiences. Relationships are central, aloneness integral and fictional reality

flexible.

The collection displays a variety of writing styles. It includes pieces by some of South Africa’s well-known writers, but also some gems from lesser knowns, including Beatrice Lamwaka’s prize-worthy Trophy and Dan Wylie’s tour-de-force, Solitude.

Interesting reading for those who are curious about the advance of short fiction in the local publishing market and, for all, comfort food for the soul. Jeanne Hromnik

(Published in Cape Times, June 10, 2011)

Does the truth really set us free?

2011-06-09T04:15:00.000-07:00

The Lies We Shared by Sarah Penny

(Penguin, R200)

The Lies We Shared, set in England and Africa, is Sarah Penny’s second novel, and richly redolent and evocative of the landscapes of of these polar opposites.

This novel is rooted in the African earth and the heart of the story comes from the narrator’s love of the land.

We meet Rebecca Falconer on a cold wintry morning in London as she wakes in a cheerless bedsit. Her 70-year-old mother has just died, and she journeys to her parents’ home in Dorset for the funeral. The other central people in her life are her father, Dickie, her brother, Howard, and his pregnant wife.

They are refugees from Zimbabwe – just a year previously her parents were thrown off their farm courtesy of President Robert Mugabe’s land invasion policies. Mother, father and daughter fled to England, where Howard had already settled and made a home.

Rebecca feels rootless in London, where she experiences debilitating panic attacks.

With time off over the December break, Rebecca decides to travel
to Kenya, where her mother, Elizabeth, was born, grew up and married her first husband.

Only after her husband was murdered did her mother migrate south to Zimbabwe.

Rebecca’s knowledge of her mother’s past is sketchy. On a whim she decides to visit the farmhouse, Ol Lokop, where her mother spent her early life and a few of the years of that first marriage.

It’s been nearly 50 years since her mother lived at Ol Lokop, where her first husband was murdered by a Kenyan servant, a man more friend than servant, who had known his victim for over a decade.

The farm is now owned by a young couple, who have rondavels for rent, and Rebecca settles in, seeking something – clues to her mother’s life, a hope of belonging, infused with a deep, burning ache for Africa and grief over the loss of the family farm in Zimbabwe .

The narrative moves between present and past. Rebecca, born in 1969, grew up during the War of Independence, a time of uncer-tainty, bomb-proof vehicles, a time when fear was as ever-present and as real as the smell of smoke.

Children learned to know and handle guns and witnessed death first hand: “When I was a little kid, during the war, I used to be scared a lot of the time… I never thought it would be nicer not to be scared because I’d never lived in a
country at peace.”

The unhappy experience of having lived through a war comes through powerfully, the past recalled in such lavishly detailed passages.

It had been assumed that the farm would eventually pass to Rebecca, and her love for it, Zimbabwe and the land remains evident throughout the novel.

Meanwhile, Rebecca ponders the past her mother never spoke about, and through the young couple who now run the farm she meets the elderly Grant Windermere, frail and close to death, a man who knew her mother and her first husband. At this point the novel becomes thriller-like in intensity.

In this outstanding novel, we journey with Rebecca as she moves closer to an understanding of what occurred – a truth, or a set of lies she never suspected existed.

Past and present intertwine as Rebecca lives vividly in both, edging towards the precipice of understanding.

The Lies We Shared is rich in other details too – this is also a story about the farm invasions and their devastating impact on the lives of the farmers and their families who had to flee the country.

But this is primarily a story about a fractured relationship between mother and daughter, of Rebecca’s closely-observed psychological journey toward some kind of resolution.

Rebecca’s immersion in the land and lives of some of the Kenyans she encounters adds to the rich seam of strands that make up this story.

Ultimately, this is about the lies we choose to tell, and sometimes to keep, in order that we may go on living, whatever the cost, and whatever the damage done.

Published in The Star, June 9 2011

Invite to the Johannesburg launch of The Edge of Things

2011-06-08T00:31:00.000-07:00

Franschoek Literary Festival

2011-05-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

I was a participant at this year's Franschoek Literary Festival on 13-15 May. I discussed 'Lekker English' with linguist Raend Mesthrie and chatted about my fiction alongside authors Doreen Baingana and Marguerite Abouet at a panel discussion chaired by Edyth Bulbring.

Landmarks rekindle memories of the way we were

2011-05-23T11:52:00.000-07:00

SITTING in the Bioscope in Joburg’s CBD took me back. Beigebrown leatherette chairs, hard neon lighting, and an industrial grittiness to the small cinema.

Even the name took me back: the Bioscope. It was what some called the movies way back when – I don’t think I’ve heard the term since the 1980s, perhaps. This was when mall cinemaplexes started ruling the roost and independent movie houses – aha, another word I haven’t heard in ages – started shutting one by one.

But what did it take me back to? I couldn’t say exactly. French film actress Simone Signoret famously called her autobiography Nostalgia Isn’t What it Used to be, but sometimes there’s another word for it, a word that English doesn’t have. No, it wasn’t nostalgia, but a vague sort of memory perhaps, a memory you can’t always put your finger on, something that shimmers out there, until you can grab it, date it.

Places do that to you – bring you back to the past in ways you had never considered. That’s one of the beauties of having lived in one city most of your life, or most of your life. The past fuses, and little things bring it all back.

I went to a new friend for lunch one day, driving back to Highlands North and on past Balfour Park and my old high school, Northview. Turning from Louis Botha Avenue I passed the corner where Bimbo’s used to be. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, the current fast food establishment – I think it’s a fish joint – disappeared, much as Bimbo’s disappeared from that spot years ago.

Memories I hadn’t thought of for years came back – being 14-years old, ordering Bimbo’s burgers after school or on Saturday nights. They came with a pink sauce: a combination of tomato sauce and mayonnaise, and very deliciously lapped up then. Afternoons of sitting at the table at Bimbo’s, watching Madonna on the television set, discussing such matters as the right age to lose your virginity.

I hadn’t thought about pink sauce for years, in fact, I was half tempted to try it again, but perhaps some things are better left to a teenager’s memory.

Similarly, visiting Norwood, again now off the beaten track for me, is another jolt into and out of the past. When I was growing up, living in a home just off Grant Avenue, there were two restaurants on the strip: La Lampara, since relocated to KwaZulu-Natal and the Drug Store. The Drug Store was an institution, it lasted long into my mid-twenties: a place of fries, burgers, milkshakes and memories, not least of which was trying to stretch our rands between a group of us. Nobody shares a burger better than teenagers and university students.

But by then other restaurants were beginning to mushroom along Grant Avenue, and the Drug Store was no longer unique. Still, I drive past the place where the Drug Store used to be – a secondhand-furniture, clothes and odds and sods sorts of place – and I’m looking twice. The Drug Store stands there still – so ingrained in my memories and experiences.

Kensington, Bedfordview and Edenvale provide another sense of déjà vu for me. I lived in Troyeville then – on the same street that David Webster died, and around the corner from the famed Gandhi home. I was a reporter for the community paper – and knew the area, like, well the back of my hand. Driving down that broad sweep of Langermann Drive is like driving into another decade, a time when the golf course still existed and hadn’t yet become a site for yet another shopping mall.

In yet another restaurant on yet another corner, three of us chums, all only children, debated our psychologies, wondering how growing up without siblings had affected us.

Days later it came to me – why the Bioscope seemed so strangely, vaguely familiar. Two years ago in the US a friend took me to see a movie in an art deco cinema in Oakland. The foyer was grand, impressive with sweeping architectural curves, but the cinema itself was strangely bare. Hard seats, black scuffed floors, like the back of a school hall. Again, there was something familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Days after going to the Bioscope the memory returns. At the age of seven my mother took me to see the movie Odds and Evens. The film has made no impact on me, beyond the fact that we had to write about what we had done that weekend.

I pondered how to spell the name of the movie, thought I had it right, but also thought it best to ask my Grade 2 teacher. It imprinted the memory onto me – a movie house where smoking had just been banned in cinemas, a fact my mother, as a smoker, remarked on, and cartoons and news took up a sizeable time before interval and the main show.

I had forgotten all these details, but they came rushing back, piling up on each other, layering, unlocked by the fact of having sat in another old cinema, the past unlocking like a jigsaw.

Published in The Sunday Independent, May 8 2011

Review of An Intimate War by Donvé Lee

2011-05-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

THE intimate war – that closed battleground between a couple, fought within the confines of coupledom but, at times, no less bloody and messy and horrific than that fought between thousands in so many public war zones.

And, even harder to understand, both for those within the intimacy of that personal zone and those standing by watching the wrestling of two people, is being unable to comprehend or to help.

This novel charts the unsteady, murky territory of the relationship between an unnamed man and a woman. They come together, move apart, and come together again, drawn time and again by the passion that unites them, despite the destructive forces that run through their relationship.

As reader, you know what you’re in for from the moment you read the opening line: “The first time we divorced we did it on a serviette,” a divorce that leads once more, to undressing and “our limbs entangled with the limbs of the tree, my feet rooted in the ground my arm stretched out to the sky”. We’re in the tangled, twisted territory of attraction here, and so the narration continues.

The prose is poetry, almost dreamy, the story is told almost entirely in the present-tense, with Lee using the second person point of view to tell the story, the narrator addressing the text to the you of the man she seemingly cannot separate from. This can be a difficult device to sustain – although Lee manages it with a skill that means you read effortlessly, and it carries you along so that you don’t notice the unorthodox narration. The lack of quotation marks around speech adds to the dreamy, surreal quality of this story, and yet the tale is anything but dreamy.

Lee’s style is to use run-on, made up compound words, punctuation sometimes discarded in an effort to let the text flow on, again a style that evokes the half-wavy, half-seen dream world.

Instead what follows is heartbreaking, all too real, and not dream-like at all. It’s the poignant story of a man and woman who will find their love stretched and broken by the man’s inability to trust the woman. His turbulent, volatile emotions destroy their world, even though the woman tries to hold on, her love somehow intact, strong, always trying to mend his shattered soul.

It’s not hard to see why she carries on trying, the eroticism of the man’s love is forcefully expressed. Despite his own wounds this is a man who “is handing me back to myself. “Through the promise in your eyes. Beneath the balm of your voice. Under the miracle of your tongue.” He buys her a full-length mirror, encourages her to explore and love her body, despite its plumpness that she so despises, or has despised. And in tender love scenes that most intimate act assumes its beauty and power through Lee’s poetic touch.

And yet, within the love, poison: “A carapace has begun to grow over my soft centre. Your offerings of flowers have lost their innocence. They are bittersweet pills you feed me in an attempt to erase the latest bruises on my heart. It’s not your flowers I want, it’s your trust.”

Instead the narrator finds herself defending her decision to wear lipstick when she goes out, with the man accusing her of trying to attract other men, and the violent cycle has begun: “My daughter watches and she learns about the things women do to please their men.”

And still, the push and pull continues, coming together, driven apart, desire and love morph into despair and the therapist’s eyes assume the woman’s pain, and still the rollercoaster of it all continues, an intimate love closed to the understanding of outsiders.

Why do we love the people we do, and how can we untangle ourselves from destructive passions? There are no answers, simply the continuing tide of love through it all.

Published in The Star, April 7 2011

The Edge of Things at the Franschoek Literary Festival

2011-05-16T23:58:00.000-07:00

The Edge of Things, published by Dye Hard Press, together with The Thin Line by Arja Salafranca, published by Modjaji Books, for sale at the Exclusive Books stand.

Photo: Arja Salafranca

The Edge of Things, published by Dye Hard Press, together with The Thin Line by Arja Salafranca, published by Modjaji Books, and Glass Jars Among Trees, edited by Alan Finlay and Arja Salafranca, published by Jacana.
Photo: Arja Salafranca

The Edge of Things: South African short fiction selected by Arja Salafranca

2011-05-16T23:54:00.000-07:00

ISBN: 978-0-620-49506-6

The Edge of Things consists of 24 South African short stories selected by Arja Salafranca, and is published by Dye Hard Press.

The authors are Jayne Bauling, Arja Salafranca, Liesl Jobson, Gillian Schutte, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Jenna Mervis, Jennifer Lean, Fred de Vries, Margie Orford, Aryan Kaganof, Bernard Levinson, Hamilton Wende, Pravasan Pillay, Beatrice Lamwaka, Hans Pienaar, Rosemund Handler, Tiah Beautement, Angelina N Sithebe, Jeanne Hromnik, David wa Maahlamela, Perd Booysen, Gail Dendy, Silke Heiss and Dan Wylie.

280 pages.

Will soon be available from bookstores countrywide, estimated retail price R185.

Life on the edge of love and lucidity: a review of The Mistress's Dog by David Medalie

2011-04-25T02:44:00.000-07:00

Small, one of the 12 short stories that comprise this volume, David Medalie’s second collection of short fiction, opens with a description of the insomniac Stella.

“At night, when the ticking of the clock reaches into every corner of the darkened room, Stella lies motionless, but awake. These are the hours she dreads… Stella has always had to make to do with small.”

What follows is a description of what most would term a “small” life. Now living in a small bedsit in a retirement home – her small life having precluded her affording a larger cottage – she soon befriends Gwen, who can and does afford a large cottage and soon Stella is manipulated into a friendship with this newcomer...Read more here

Pillowtalk:Author Arja Salafranca

2011-04-19T23:38:00.000-07:00

What are you reading?

I'm in the middle of two books of short stories, The Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo and Dead Girls, by Nancy Lee...Read more here

What made you fall in love with books - and how did it happen?

2011-04-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

I owe my love of reading to my mother. One of the few pictures of her as a pregnant woman in Spain shows her reading, clutching a book, and so a lifelong love of books was born in me. Finding books in English while living in Spain in the ‘70s and then Israel, wasn’t easy for her – we’re talking pre-internet, pre-Amazon, pre-Kindle – but she managed....Read more here

Review of The Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo

2011-04-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

The Best American series, for those unfamiliar with it, consists of a range of stories published in US and Canadian journals from the previous year. About a hundred of these are then read and selected by the guest editor, and, in this year’s case, Richard Russo did the choosing, selecting a final list of 20 stories, now collected in this volume.

I found the stories in this volume exceptionally compelling and readable – with many being of the über-lengthy variety, running to many pages, with the writers taking time to tell the tales, really letting each story breathe and glow...Read more here

Review of Kerry Hammerton's These Are The Lies i Told You

2011-04-10T01:41:00.000-07:00

This debut collection of poetry by Kerry Hammerton is a bumper one, numbering just under 60 poems – an impressive number, and more than the average length of a poetry collection.

I like that, though. I like the fact that I felt I could truly enter into Hammerton’s world through the sheer volume of work here.

It’s a particular world, told in a particular voice – a sharp, fun, sassy voice...Read more here

Good news on the short fiction front

2011-04-08T02:22:00.000-07:00

Good news on the short fiction front: Arja Salafranca has put together 24 South African short stories which will be published by Dye Hard Press under the title The Edge of Things, a special short fiction issue of the the literary journal Green Dragon...

Read more from BookSA here

Alternative Anthology Keeps Turning Heads

2011-04-07T01:27:00.000-07:00

The depth and breadth of contemporary South African writing in English makes it tough to contain – and makes creative approaches to local anthologies quite welcome. Indeed, quite necessary.

Glass Jars Among Trees is a collection of current South African writing – an alternative anthology of South African prose and poetry that is fresh, compelling and different.

The editors, Arja Salafranca and Alan Finlay, have selected works from published and unpublished writers that reflect a wide variety of writing styles and formats.

Stories in the form of mock movie reviews and film scripts, diary entries, song lyrics, poetry, short fiction, essays, comedy – even opera – make this a comprehensive showcase of South Africa’s new generation of writers.

Kay Benno’s highly inventive “Men with Dead Mothers” tells its rather unusual story through film reviews, while Finuala Dowling’s “Stand-Up Comic” delivers a wry, slightly sad story of a woman’s experiences through the speech of a comedian. “Lioness”, Alan Kolski Horwitz’s slowly unfolding story reveals the trials of a second marriage, and the convoluted triangles couples negotiate as families merge and stepfamilies are formed.

On the nonfiction front, Gary Cummiskey’s essay, “Who was Sinclair Beiles?” probes the life and art of Beiles, South Africa’s sole Beat poet.

The diary entries are numerous and engaging, proving quite concisely that diary writing isn’t a lost art that only the Victorians practised in their flourishing penmanship. Ursula Cox and Carol Leff explore what it means to be women at the close of the 20th century, while Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob lives through the war in Bosnia in 1993 in “Once a Thing is Known – War Diary of a South African Peacekeeper in Bosnia”, bringing to life just what it feels like to be caught up in a war.

Kobus Moolman, on the other hand, is writing in a time of peace, a time of artistic solitude in “Boom St Journal” and Karoo Notebook, bringing to his notebook a series of vignettes, snapshots and thoughts on writing.

Glass Jar Among Trees Homepage

Glass Jars Among Trees by Alan Finlay and Arja Salafranca
EAN: 9781919931234
Buy Glass Jars Among Trees via Bookfinder

(Published on BookSA)

The Edge of Things: South African short fiction selected by Arja Salafranca

2011-03-21T06:37:00.000-07:00

Coming from Dye Hard Press this April:
The Edge of Things

Rhino Post Safaris: Walking in the Bush

2011-03-21T06:19:00.001-07:00

We’re in single file, moving through the bush. It’s still early morning, but the sun’s up and blazing already.

Sweat cakes the back of our necks. Hats are vital, keeping the sun off our faces. It seems like we walk through the crackling sounds of the early morning air, feet stamping through the tinder-dry bush, rain desperately needed here.

Up since before dawn, there’s silent anticipation. We’re hoping to see one of the big five in the bush: elephant, lion, rhino hopefully – after all, the trails are named Rhino Walking Safaris. Read more here

Reading the poem What Matters at Jozi Wordjam

2011-02-27T02:22:00.000-08:00

Diary extracts (2008)

2011-01-19T04:13:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, April 9 2008

Aboard MV Mozart, Danube River

Gliding through Europe on the MV Mozart, on the Danube, on another press trip. Making our way toward Budapest, the Danube greeny-grey rather than its fabled blue. I sampled Munich in two days, saw Dachau, boarded the boat, peeked into the village of Durnstein, tasted Vienna in the form of a Sacher torte. And now, gliding toward Budapest, formerly a place name on a map, now a place I’m going to be able to name, say I saw.

I’m a million miles from home, making my way through a gentle, peaceful Europe where it’s safe to walk around at night, where you catch trains and buses to go home, and they run on time. Trying to explain home to the people who share my table at night in the dining room is like trying to explain Mars to earthlings. “So do you catch the train into town?” asked Roger, the English investment banker. And how could I begin to explain Johannesburg with its chaotic roads, the minibuses going where they like, the buses that are infrequent, if they come at all? The minibuses that are not state controlled, are often not road worthy with Coke bottles attached to steering wheels to hold brake fluid and screw drivers sometimes serving as steering wheels? Every time I open my mouth I feel like I’m telling tales, exaggerating or complaining. At dinner I drink bitter lemon (called dry lemon at home) and say how much I enjoy it, and say that I haven’t been able to get it for a while as we ran out of gas to make it. Or so I assume. Because we seem to be told regularly that we’ve run out of gas when you can’t find a brand of cold drink, or even sparkling mineral water.

Similarly I can’t explain the joke the SAA pilot made as we flew out of OR Tambo and the lights were, as usual, put off before we lifted into the air: “Load shedding is about to begin,” said the pilot, and those South Africans on board caught the joke and laughed wryly. How do you explain load shedding?

And so South Africa follows me here. People are interested in what’s going on. A Swedish woman on the Dachau tour asked me if it was dangerous to go out into the “woods” or “forest”. Knowing she meant the veld or the bush, I think, I said not really, as lodges are often protected by fences, and you can take guided walks with rangers, and they often carry guns. I did speak of the dangers of crime, however, and that tourists become victims as they aren’t aware of the dangers. A tourist went running along the beach at night and was raped. You can perhaps do this in Europe, go running on a beach at night, but you can’t do this in South Africa. So I said no, the animals weren’t dangerous as such, if you keep to designated areas, stay in a game drive vehicle. It was the people – although, along with that, there is a tremendous amount of friendliness and goodwill.

But of course your country does follow you. I walked the streets of Munich at night and it was fine and safe. Of course if anyone came too close, just trying to pass, I tensed automatically. And yes, thefts happen anywhere, but you can still do this in Europe. Stroll with your bag, an ordinary, not very amazing thing to do. And yet, it’s not something I’d ever do at home. In Johannesburg we drive from mall to mall. The level of fear, of threat to your body all the time, is unimaginable to Europeans.

And so the comparisons follow me through Europe. You expect the safety, the neat, quiet orderliness of Germany, of Europe, but still you can’t quite believe it. It feels comfortable to catch a cab from Munich airport one morning and then to suddenly realise how quiet, neat and orderly the streets are. When someone hoots you turn to look around around, because it’s all so unusual, it disrupts the serenity. It actually feels odd. And you wonder why someone has dared to put their hand on the hooter. And yet, it’s only leaving Munich that you suddenly realise there are no beggars and no hawkers at every robot. Again, how unusual.

There are beggars of course. Not everywhere. One at the main train station, a Gypsy-looking woman, face creased into pleading. A man on a street corner. Another sitting on a pavement in Vienna, a young man with long, brown hair, head bowed to the ground, yet with his hands outstretched, waiting. But they are seemingly, oddities, few enough not to be noticed. A mime artist dressed as Mozart, hands outstretched as you point your camera at him. Another form of begging, you could say, and he’d probably argue with you.

Munich. Beggars and casinos and strip clubs. Kebab shops on just about every corner. And the internet shop was run by Turks. I emailed South Africa listening to Turkish music, while pecking my way through a German keyboard. The z is where the y is, and I never did find the apostrophe. The Chinese ran cheap shops where I bought a 10 euro canvas bag. And sex saloons: a winking figure of a plastic woman, red lights flashing from an interior, Abba blaring out into the street. So many of them and the casinos too, seemingly open all the time. And on Sunday, as in apartheid South Africa, the shops are closed. You can only window shop. Only the kebab shops, restaurants, internet cafes are open.

One night I saw a young woman eating in an Asian restaurant, all by herself. Forking her food in a dimly-lit place, quite self-contained. Perhaps I glanced at her for a second only, and her partner or friend was simply in the toilet. And then again, perhaps not.

Budapest. The waters of the Danube are finally beginning to look blue if you look towards the distance. We’re docked in the heart of yet another old, grand European city, surrounded by famous buildings, history, a sense of proud grandeur. It’s a film set setting; you can’t help but be impressed.

Friday April 18 2008

Back home. Each journey throws up another nuance, reveals something different to you, or about you. Each journey highlights a particular place in your life, and each journey is ultimately about you, not the country you’re visiting or the city you’re wondering through. Seen at another time your experience is altered. I loved Spain when I visited three years ago, yet couldn’t wait to leave it when I visited last June, and this time I fell in love with Europe all over again.

Sunday May 25 2008

Glancing at a newspaper article this week: 20 percent of South Africans in the 18-44 age bracket are considering emigrating – that’s the prime of the working population.

Meanwhile xenophobic attacks have plagued the country for the past two weeks. They started in Gauteng, attacks on foreigners living in South Africa, spreading from the townships to Cleveland and Hillbrow last weekend, and then KwaZulu Natal and the Cape. The newspapers are full of images: Mozambicans, Malawians, Congolese and Zimbabweans fleeing the townships, blood pouring from their wounds. Fleeing to churches and police stations where makeshift tent cities are springing up. These people have lost everything: homes, shacks, possessions. Appeals for food, soap, underwear. The Mozambican government has been sending buses to transport them home. Looting of shops and homes. On TV I watched as police fired rubber bullets, roughing up looters who pillaged for food. Two men carting a looted fridge down the road in a mad hurry, doors opening as they hurried, plastic ice trays spilling out. You couldn’t help wondering who the fridge belonged to: a foreigner chased out of his or her home, a foreign-owned shop looted?

Images of the attacks have been flashed around the world. It feels like the 1980s again: the townships on fire, mobs marching, police firing. Town on Tuesday was eerily quiet; the Indian-owned shops near The Star’s building were shut. They did open again on Wednesday.

It took Mbeki days to make a statement about the attacks. And he still hasn’t visited Alexandra township where it all started. It took Morgan Tsvangerai to visit Alex.

The attacks were sparked by fears that immigrants are taking all the jobs away from local workers because foreigners are said to work for less money. Food prices are spiralling. Life is getting harder and unemployment is still (unofficially) at 40 percent. The government has wavered between condemning the attacks, saying they are not xenophobic in nature but are the work of criminals instead. And yet it’s foreigners being targeted, hounded, raced out of their homes. And the most chilling of all: two men necklaced in scenes even more reminiscent of the 80s. And more chilling: a woman laughing as the man burned with the tyre around his neck.

Sunday June 22 2008

Today is Michael’s birthday. Obviously this has been weighing on my mind. The other night I wrote two poems about him, “I’ll always miss dreaming my dreams with you” and “You’re only ten weeks old”. And then today I wrote a short story called, “Finally, a meeting”. About all the times I have imagined bumping into him: from sitting in Trafalgar Square, imagining him being there, say on holiday from Canada; to other times when I have met men who look like him, a training course recently, or a guide at Ichobezi Lodge, to other times I have fantasised about seeing him. This story takes it further, and imagines a meeting sometime in the future, when me as narrator, is in Canada and the new older Michael bumps into her. But she is now happily married. It’s too late now, to do what she’s always wanted to do. I hope it’s good. I enjoyed writing it – a “found” story in the sense that I hadn’t been planning or pondering such a piece.

Funny, or not so funny how he still continues to haunt and dominate me. I realise that at the time of the break up I think I decided I never wanted to be so hurt again. And so, to prevent being hurt, I never did open myself up as I did then, nor fall as heavily for the other men I have known since him. So I did what I set out to do then. It’s only by opening up that you get to experience the roller-coaster of love. It was like a death recovering from that breakup, I’m afraid I won’t survive another. And yet, people do survive.

Friday August 22 2008

I entered the POWA (People Opposing Woman Abuse) writing award. The story had to be about healing from abuse, the journey to healing. I edited 'Octopus Fingers' down to 2 500 words. Cutting the story nearly in half means really paring it down to its essentials. Does it work? It ends differently, and I took out the bit about the woman (based on my mother) never healing from the spousal abuse and I renamed it 'Crumbs'. A few months ago I took another look at it and decided it didn’t work and I must take it out of my MS collection of short stories. Rereading it today, really rereading it by having to prune it, I liked it, revised my decision. But it’s hard to be objective about your own work, to really judge it. And rereading it I thought that the theme of the story is how Hazel (my mother in disguise), doesn’t heal from the abuse, the experience. That’s the whole point of it. A sad point – that some people don’t recover but remain mired in the effects of the abuse, or a bad relationship. *

Sunday August 31 2008

Thinking back to the words used in my childhood, how usage changes not just within a person’s life, but within a few decades. As a child “cookies” were what the Americans called fairy cakes and are now referred to as cupcakes. Now I haven’t heard the word cookies used in years. When did cupcakes supplant cookies? And the word still exists – it’s what the Americans call what we refer to as biscuits.

And then there’s another foodstuff: pasta. At some point we stopped saying “Would you like spaghetti or macaroni?” and asked instead, “Would you like some pasta?”Only then do you choose whether you’ll be eating fettuccine or linguine or penne or whatever. Why the change? Again, who knows.

As a child I heard my mother referring to “rouge”. By the time I was using the stuff in my twenties, in the early 1990s, I referred to “blusher”. My mother still refers to ships and countries as “she”. I do a double take when she says something like, “America is a bully, she should stay out of the war.” She? I know what she means but in my generation’s use, I’d say something like, “The boat, it’s called the MV Mozart.” A boat, for me, is an it. A country even more so. English lost all its gender cases, but for these instances, and yet they have survived in my mother’s lexicon. But not in mine. How odd. Our language stretches and bounces back like elastic. Living, breathing, dynamic.

But what were to happen if English were a dying, vanishing language? Instead of flourishing, let’s pretend there are only a handful of elderly speakers left. When they die, the rich heritage of our literature, movies, music, idioms, dies with them. It’s an unutterably lonely feeling. To think if losing the language you’ve known since birth, loved and lived in. To think that your language dies with you: its unique sounds, its hard masculine character, its flexibility. And yes, it’s unimaginable to think this of English when it’s such an alive language, with life being breathed into it every day by its millions and billions of speakers. It pulses. And yet, this language death is happening to so many marginal languages, from Aboriginal languages, to Native American, to others that are clinging, Provencal, or look at Cornish, now clawing its way back with a few determined students learning it. For English speakers it’s unimaginable not being surrounded by our language. But contemplate it, imagine it. It feels lonely; it feels like you’re the last person left on planet earth. (And there are aliens out there.)

Monday September 22 2008

Dance of friendship. The uncertainty of it. I never can take anyone for granted; friendships like balls, sparkly balls dangling from a Christmas tree. I could say or do the wrong thing. The lack of intimacy. Yes, I do talk about what matters – work issues, writing, but I don’t go further now. Say how jittery I feel about the future, not sharing deep personal stuff. So many friends don’t know about my childhood or my teen years and how that scars and cuts me up still. I feel like it’s an essential part of me, of who I am, the way I am. Seeing personal stuff as being dirty. Yet, friends do tell each other these things.

Wednesday October 1 2008

October, birthday month. “At the age of thirty-seven,” sings Marianne Faithfull in “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”, my favourite song, “she realised she’d never ride in a sports car in Paris with the warm wind in her hair.” I’m still hoping that’s to come. Paris, warm wind, love.

Thursday October 2 2008

I love the short story. It’s definitely my genre, whether I go on to write novels, or novellas, or anything else, I’ll always have to write short stories, be satisfied by writing them, and reading others’. Alice Munro made her name writing stories. It’s what I want to do. That and personal essays, personal travel writing, some journalism. And have the space to tackle larger projects too, when I want to.

Sunday October 12 2008

Out last night with Jenny to see Coupe, a quietly brilliant play, created by Sylvaine Strike and Sue Pam Grant and the members of the Fortune Cookie Company. Set in a coupe, a second-class train compartment, three people share the compartment, a Frenchwoman, speaking only French, a twittery nervous English-speaking South African and an Afrikaner. Each speaks only in their own language to each other, and yet they manage to communicate. A revolving coupe is the stage set as they travel overnight. A play filled with layers, levels, meaning. Nuances. The head of a gazelle affixed to the wall of the coupe becomes mirror, repository of deep dreams and desires. As night goes on and each sleep another kind of communication takes place, More unnamed desires emerge. Each caught up in their own impossibilities. A rich work that lives on, no wonder it’s won so many awards and has garnered such a reputation.

At Jenny’s you feel the passage of years, not a weight, it doesn’t feel oppressive. The photographs in frames, on the fridge, in her bedroom, her family, brothers and sisters, her daughter as a baby, a toddler, a teen, grown up, Jenny and her husband through the years. Jenny seated at a typewriter in the 1980s. The settled feeling, you feel, you know that they have created lives, histories together, a warm, satisfied feeling, a contentment is present.

Saturday, November 22 2008

Went away with Venise to Umkwali Reserve to track cheetah. As always with Venise we find ourselves discussing personal things. We spoke a bit about Michael – this haunted, unresolved relationship in my life – and at one point she commented that everything I brought about him seemed negative. That observation felt uncomfortable and I laughed it off by saying but oh he looked so good and sexy in his leather jacket with his broad, handsome shoulders. I knew what I was doing – not wanting to see that comment or dwell on the negative, that there was a lot wrong with that relationship, when I often romanticise it. And I didn’t want Venise feeling like she had to analyse me. That’s her job as a therapist, I don’t want her to think she has to bring it to our friendship, be my therapist.

But her words reverberated and I have been thinking about it, and how right she was with that observation, and it closed something, that comment. How is it that no-one else has ever said it, seen the negative of that relationship through all my talking about it? Did the therapist I saw ten years ago, ever comment like this? Have friends ever said the same? Perhaps I haven’t been ready to hear that before, if it has been said. But suddenly, somehow, I was ready to hear it, and admit that yes there was a lot wrong with it and that it wasn’t right. A door clanged quietly: I stopped obsessing about Michael, and wondering what he might be doing now. Somehow that comment made me let him go, wherever he is, whatever he is doing, married, divorced, with kids or without. It no longer mattered to me to know. I put him in the past. A door shut and with it shutting, I saw other possibilities. It was the most liberating feeling. Could it be that I am finally over Michael? It feels like it.

* 'Crumbs' was published by POWA in 2009.

These extracts were published in In Our Own Words: A generation defining itself, 2008

Flash fiction

2011-01-18T11:55:00.000-08:00

100 Papers: A collection of prose poems and flash fiction by Liesl Jobson
Botsotso Publishing, 2008

“A pale pink slug emerges from between Josie’s teeth onto the dental floss that is wrapped so tightly around her thumbs that they bulge like purple grapes. ... When she pulls the floss between them, it snags... When she gets it right, the floss slides down without bumping her gums, the slugs are a pale creamy colour.”

So opens one of prose poems in “The Air of Words” in Liesl Jobson’s debut collection, comprised mainly of flash fiction and some prose poems. This piece is short, yet powerful, its images stay with you, from pale slugs of teeth detritus that turn pink with the blood coming from gums, to the larger issue of why Josie, the central figure in this drama of the flossing teeth, cannot eat and cannot say certain things.

And such is the power of many of the prose poems in 100 Papers. Another memorable one being the delightfully named “Sun-Dried Tomatoes” in which “droopy carrots” on a clothesline, along with “tomatoes and peppers flapping in the breeze” recall in a few, quick sentences what it means to have a mother who plants “father’s socks and shirts in the vegetable patch”. A witty poem that goes deep with its vegetable metaphors.

Another equally clever and moving prose poem is “Under my SAPS heart” where a kindly captain at Diepkloof’s Alien Investigations Unit recovers the narrator’s heart from a defunct fountain. “So pale, so under-developed it could only be a white girl’s heart”. In a few witty paragraphs we learn that the captain washes the heart of detritus before replacing the item: “The State will not be held responsible for such silliness in future.”

On the other extreme is “Button” in which marital abuse is highlighted in a few, deft strokes, in three paragraphs to be precise. Short, but memorable.

Meanwhile “Clutter” delights with its descriptions of items left in a large ceramic jar near the kitchen sink. Each item is representative of some person in the narrator’s life: a gift from an ex-husband, children’s milk teeth, a student “taught badly”. But the listing of all these items has a purpose in itself, as absolution may be obtained in the end. This is one of the most powerful prose poems in the collection, talking as it does of the universal problem of clutter that litters our lives and psyches, growing even as we try to move beyond the mounds of it.

With origins that stretch back in time to the days of Aesop’s Fables and Ovid, practitioners of the flash fiction form have included writers such as Anton Chekhov, O Henry, Ray Bradbury, Amy Hempel and Grace Paley. Yet, it’s only since the early 1990s that flash fiction has become so popular. Some say the growth of the internet has helped to spread its popularity: readers online are looking for a “quick fix”, not a lengthy, meandering story. Whatever the reasons, flash fiction has taken off in a big way. WW Norton in the US published the volume Flash Fiction in June 1992, and Tom Hazuka, one of the editors, says “initial response was overwhelmingly positive”. To date it has sold 22 000 copies and is in its fifth printing.

To my knowledge this is the first collection of flash fiction by a South African author. Anne Schuster was a pioneer in that she published Woman Flashing in 2005, a collection of flash fiction by women writers, but 100 Papers marks not only Jobson’s debut, but the debut of a collection flash fiction by a single author. What exactly is flash fiction? Experts – and readers and writers differ. At the launch of her collection in Johannesburg this past July, Jobson said that flash fiction was a highly poetic genre and described it as a “tricky beast”. Some publications call for flash fiction and set a word limit of 1 500. Most flash fiction pieces are from anything from less than 400 words for micro fiction, to up to 1 000 words long. Even the name itself is not fixed: it’s called anything from micro fiction, to flash fiction, postcard fiction, sudden fiction and so on. Says Camille Renshaw: “Readers discover something brief and intimate in a very short space of time. Meanwhile Randall Brown says “Great flash pieces have that ‘centerlight pop’.”

Jobson’s flash fiction world is largely a domestic one, with a few recurring themes, the divorced mother, whose children live with their father, infidelity and its effects, love and its rewards, and the milieu of families, which are not always cosy.

“Pickle” is one such story that takes a look at a divorced mother whose ex-husband has custody of the children. Seeing them only on alternate weekends, the mother tries, “she is trying to get it right. She really is, but it’s a big job looking after her children... There’s a lot of catching up to do for the other twelve days, the lost time. That’s the hard part.” This mother has a secret; she likes to finish cartons of ice-cream, leaving the healthy vegetables bought for herself and the kids to go mouldy. “The mother is tired, permanently blah. She hasn’t slept in weeks, maybe years.” This is a sensitively-wrought portrait of a mother, doing her best, trying to be a mother for two days out of every fortnight, sending jolly text messages to convey her love on the days she doesn’t see her children. An excellent piece.

“My Mother’s Diary” is a touching look at the narrator’s mother, writing as a young girl in 1970, interwoven with the daughter’s memories of girlhood from that time. It’s not as easy time for the ten year old with enormous breasts, called ‘Tits Tessa’ by the pre-pubescent male classmates, and meanwhile the police come regularly looking for her mother’s lover Koos, not white, in an apartheid South Africa. Jail, and then years later, Tessa releases her mother’s memory and ashes to the wind in poignant prose.

In “Duet” the unnamed narrator finds herself in a psychiatric ward after a man puts a gun to her head. “...I heard a click. Not the click of a trigger. I never heard that... The gunman’s finger played with the safety catch of his glock: flick-flick-flicking, like playing with a ballpoint.” What follows is a description of life in a mental ward where “a linen basket on castors” talks, there’s blood everywhere as a fellow patient tries to carve a heart on the narrator’s arm. This gripping story takes you right within the madness and confines of such a ward.

But there are lighter moment as well in this collection, as well as a bit of erotica. “Christmas Eve Picnic, Pretoria” offers a small moment in the life of two women lovers. It’s an imagining of the picnic to come, words are charged with sexual meaning and a delicious playfulness. “You place a round of Brie, pale as your breast, beside a salad of herbs...hanepoot grapes, fat as your nipple.” The real present comes after the picnic of course, and after love-making.

Or there’s “The Virtue of the Potted Fern”. The opening line, as always, sets the scene for what’s to come: “It’s not easy to organise a bookshelf that’s been moved from the guest room to your bedroom because your South African relatives are coming to stay.” You must be ruthless as you keep the I-Ching away from the Children of Heaven, and don’t put the Healing Back Pain next to The Story of O. Working in the dark, “Like the rules for entertaining foreign in-laws, they do not exist.” Instead perhaps put a potted fern by the bed, surely a quieter option.

Returning to Randall Brown’s assertion that good flash fiction has that “centerlight pop”, do Jobson’s pieces have that pop? I believe that many do. For my money, some work better than others, and I felt some resonated more than others, but each reader will have their favourite.

Research sources:
www.english.ucdavis.edu/spark/issue3/thflash.htm (for Tom Hazuka’s comments)
www.pifmagazine.com/SID/313 (for Camille Renshaw’s comments)
www.smokelong.com/features/012605.asp (for Randall Brown’s comments)

First published in New Contrast, 2008

Bridget Jones in scrubs

2011-01-18T05:19:00.000-08:00

Karma Suture by Rosamund Kendal
Jacana R130

It's the end of another long, tiring day for GP Sue Carey. She's wearing green surgery pants, as she had yet more body fluid spilled over her during the course of the day, and she hasn't eaten anything more nourishing than a giant slice of cheesecake.

She's just 28 years old, still single after a broken engagement, ginger-haired rather than auburn, sleek and more zaftig than svelte. She works 24-hour shifts at a time to pay off her huge medical bills, dashes from one hospital to another, and in between tries to relax, socialise, be a good friend to one who is slowly becoming addicted to drugs and anorexia, and meet men so she can have another relationship to endure, so she doesn't end up alone with only a cat for company. Oh yes, to add to all this, she joins a philosophy class.

If this already sounds too much like chick lit, it's anything but. A simple pr?cis may read like some kind of doctor/local Bridget Jones number, but Karma Suture presents something deeper and more profound. On one level this is a fairly light story: the trials and tribulations of an exhausted, overwrought young doctor still struggling to find her feet in the world, if not the hospital. But it also presents an astonishing portrait of what really goes on in government hospitals and the doctors who work in them.

Author Rosamund Kendal is herself a medical doctor who practises in KwaZulu Natal, dividing her time between medicine and creative writing. So clearly she knows what she is talking about.
Sue Carey is a likeable, fun character, and you get to laugh and love and empathise with her, but the secondary plotline - that of life in a hospital for the medical personnel - provides a compelling read that is gripping.

No amount of newspaper reports can as accurately describe the minutiae and day-to-day realities of life in our hospitals, from bed shortages and negotiations with other departments to clear the said beds; to treatments that don't happen, or happen too late; to diabetic patients guiltily wiping away pie crumbs after downing Cokes and nodding yes to doctor when she suggests other foods, but all in vain, as some patients will go back to what is easiest.

There are weekend stabbings, gang members and family members battling it out with broken bits of bottles, only to somehow become the best of buddies the next day. There are young girls who decide to take overdoses at four in the morning. It's no wonder the doctor on duty is short-tempered and irritable. And then the scourge of Aids: anyone who doubts its insidious presence need only to walk the wards of Bellville (where Sue mainly works), or any other large hospital.

People are dying, and they are dying of Aids, over and over. And yet each receives a different "cause of death", pneumonia for instance, as patient confidentiality prevents writing the truth.
Revolving around Sue the doctor are the accoutrements of her personal life. Her flatmate Leah, soon to snuggle up to married life; model Gina, skinny, getting high on drugs to stay that way; and Carol from the philosophy class, who becomes more than a friend.

Sue copes with the tensions of being a doctor by having more than the occasional one-night stands. Then she does get involved with a dishy young doctor and the path is not smooth (when is it ever?), but by now you're cheering her on.

This book also reads a bit like one in a series - you wouldn't mind hearing more; by the end you are really in sympathy with this slightly kooky, but loveable doctor. How did she get to where she is? You'd like to know more about her years of training or studying, and of course, what happens next?

Perhaps author Kendal will tell us in due course.

First published in The Star Tonight May 15 2008

Desert and desire become one

2011-01-18T05:15:00.000-08:00

The Impostor by Damon Galgut
Penguin R163

This is a quiet, powerful story, a novel trimmed of excess, where every word means what it should. A handful of characters dominate the terrain of The Impostor, set in a small, sleepy Karoo town. This is a pared-down novel, running at just over 200 pages and yet huge in impact. It draws you in from the moment you begin, and keeps you mesmerised. Quietly. There is no gore; there are, seemingly, no cliffhangers.

And yet, peer beneath the surface and Galgut exposes the gore inherent in all our lives. This is a novel steeped in the realities of life in South Africa today, with its edge of corruption, its contradictions and its searing beauty against complex realities. "The guards and the thieves were the same people - there's South Africa in a nutshell," says a character halfway through the story.

It opens on the day that Adam Napier drives into a sleepy Karoo town. He's going to take up residence in the abandoned home that his wealthier brother Gavin bought some years ago. On the way there he is stopped by a traffic cop for running a stop street and is outraged when he's asked to pay a bribe to ensure the fine goes away. But Adam won't pay, he's just lost his job and his home, one of the reasons he's moving into this abandoned house. The scene sets the tone, revealing Adam as an upright and somewhat indignant man. It's only one of the traits that will set him apart in a country and a place where it's sometimes just so much easier to pay a bribe.
Adam, who once published a book of poems as a young man, is determined to begin writing poetry again after 20 years of silence and working in a faceless corporation. Forced out by affirmative action, injury is added because he didn't see it coming, that the young black junior was being groomed to replace him.

Choosing to spend the first night in the house, even before the electricity and water have been turned on, Adam experiences the first of many strange nights, with only his thoughts for company and a yearning to again write the poetry that just won't come.

His neighbour is a silent man in blue overalls and with steely grey hair, a man nearing old age. The first sighting is accompanied by a look that does not lead to an introduction, but the quiet shutting of doors.

Adam's life carries on, quiet days followed by quiet nights, with only his own thoughts and regrets for company. Then one day he bumps into Canning at a local shop. Canning, left money by the father he hated, inherited a game farm, Gondwana, just outside town. Adam will spend the first of many weekends there, drinking toxic blue cocktails and admiring Canning's black wife, Baby. Canning reveres Adam from their boarding school days, although Adam can barely remember him. But Adam returns again and again, drawn by desire for Baby.

Events move slowly, inevitably to a climax. Things are not what they seem at Gondwana, and changes are afoot. Canning will benefit from this new South Africa ? and not just by acquiring a desirable black wife.

Part of the beauty and power of this novel lies in Galgut's finely-tuned use of language. The Karoo comes alive under his pen, a stark harsh Karoo baking in the sun, full of spiky plants and hard, tough earth. Dialogue is carefully pared down and measured. There are no superfluous pages of conversation, and Galgut has an ear for South African idiom and expression.

As Adam tries to makes sense of the changes that will befall the game farm and all their lives, he is taken on a helicopter ride with Canning. "It comes to him that time is the great distorting lens.
Up close, human life is a catalogue of pain and power, but when enough time has gone past, everything ceases to matter. Nothing that people do to each
other will carry any moral charge eventually. History is just like the ground down there: something neutral and observable, a pattern, a shape."

With The Impostor Damon Galgut once more firmly establishes himself as a writer of immense and strange power. A writer who can carry the mettle of greatness without a wobble.

First published in The Star, Tonight May 22 2008

A lengthy pursuit of redemption

2011-01-18T05:11:00.000-08:00

My Brother's Book by Jo-Anne Richards
Picador Africa R158

This book contains the most original line of a novel I have ever read: "I was born on page 23 of my brother's book. On page 52, before the whole world, I betrayed him. There was so much in between though. So many days plumped by doves roasted on fires, and fruit straight off the tree ... How could you have crushed all that into fewer than thirty pages?"

So begins a well researched novel that moves between the 1960s and 2004. It's told largely through the viewpoint of Lily, sister to the brother of the title, Tom. Their complex relationship is laid bare in a betrayal that will alter their lives and ruin the ties between them. Tom has now written a book, hence the title, and Lily takes issue with the way he has recalled the past.
The story not only weaves between the present of 2004, but also leaps around in time in the scenes set in their childhood in the 1960s. Lily and her Tom are being raised by their father, referred to as "Pop", in the American tradition, which didn't make sense for me. The mother disappeared years before, a constant absence in their lives. Pop ekes out a living with Tom and Lily following him as he moves them between towns such as Fort Beaufort, Cathcart and Bedford. Lily and Tom grow up haphazardly ? Pop is loving and kind, a maverick kind of soul, but a beacon of security and stability he isn't.

The siblings are forced to make new friends over and over again. Sometimes shunned by the white kids, they fall in with coloured kids, but this is apartheid South Africa, and at the first sign of acceptance by the white kids, allegiances, understandably, shift. Time shifts often, and sometimes Lily, the main narrator, is referring to life in another small town, in the past, so to speak, and I found these passages jolting me right out of the story.

Richards is adept at exploring the long-ago world of childhood, reaching right into the heart of childhood that is a novelist's gift. Speaking about the moon landing, Lily recalls that "The astronauts said the moon made them feel like people who are all excited to go on holiday, but find when they get there that it looked a hell of a lot better in the pictures. The moon was just grey, they said. Kind of like plaster of Paris." Meanwhile, "Captain Borman had a beautiful view of Earth. He was floating in front of the camera for the Americans. But we could still hear his voice on the A Programme, even if we didn't have TV in South Africa."

Richards is equally adept at describing the landscapes, evoking the beauty of the eastern Cape with sentences such as: "The morning lay motionless across the village. Everything held its breath as though, by its stillness, it could hang on to some vestige of early freshness."
Richards' dialogue is also spot on, she has an ear for the SA patois and idiom, sprinkling her sentences with South Africanisms as "Afrikaner-vrot-Bananas", or "safe like a kuif" and that old word for the movies, bioscope, lives again. But the Afrikanerisms get a bit much: English speakers don't pepper their language with that many words from the other taal.

This not quite idyllic childhood is nevertheless recalled with warmth and nostalgia by the adult Lily. Understandably, of course, a time when she could still look up to the adored Tom and have that love returned. Contrast that with the scenes set in 2004 in which Tom's book appears, and the cracks in their relationship, hammered solidly in by Lily's betrayal, are obvious and ugly. Lily would dearly like to repair the damage and the pain this rupture has caused.

The present slowly comes into focus: letters are exchanged between Lily and Miranda, an old lover of Tom's. It's some time before we discover who Lily is writing to, until finally the signature is revealed, but I found this device annoyingly twee.

Eventually the story unravels, but it takes too long to get there. Richards' strengths are also the weaknesses of the novel; while the dialogue is authentic and delightful, there's simply too much of it. Her research is thorough, and this shows in the many authentic details in which life in a small town is detailed, but again, there's too much of it, and less detail would've allowed a fine story to flow more effortlessly.

First published in The Star, Tonight supplement June 26 2008

Foreign affair with China

2011-01-18T05:05:00.000-08:00

Drinking From The Dragon's Well by Alex Smith
Umuzi R155

South African travel writing comes of age in this delightful, witty travel memoir by Alex Smith. Her highly successful novel, Algeria's Way, was published last year and this makes a wonderful follow-up, as it were.

In 2006, Smith spent a year teaching English in China, in the city of Wuhan, a grey, dusty city distinguished by nothing more than the fact that for yonks Smith couldn't find a map of the place, for love or money ? and forget about finding a map in English, as you would if you were in China's happening cities such as Beijing.

Leaving her part-time job as a social editor at the now defunct magazine Style, Smith heads to China. She's had a meeting with a publisher (Umuzi), who gave her green tea and enthusiasm and so begins the long process of waiting to see if her "skinny Spanish novel" will be accepted. Skinny Spanish novel becomes Algeria's Way in time, but there's a lot of agony before Smith hears anything more from the publisher who gave her green tea.

For 32-year-old Smith, tea is more exciting and more addictive than sex. She's accepted this job teaching English even though teaching isn't really her passion. It will give her time to write, and she's not looking for foreign romances or anything so misty-eyed. She just wants an answer from her publisher and maybe stories from China that can be wound into a longer piece on that great, enervating yet mysterious country.

What she finds is that she earns more than local teachers, despite the fact that she is inexperienced and not really into imparting the rules and grammar of the language to others. She is given a huge apartment with three rooms, brown curtains, concrete floors and a Western toilet hastily fitted into her bathroom. She also has big fat maggots growing on a pipe in the bathroom, but these can be tackled as soon as the bathroom's stopped flooding. Nothing a plumber with crooked teeth and no English can't fix, though.

Smith writes postcards to her beloved granny Constance, back in Cape Town, tick-ticking away on her old manual green typewriter. Not much of a writer herself - the plots have always eluded her - still Constance churns out her minor stories. Smith's missives to her gran are touching, witty, bright points of reference in this book.

Her job is to get her unlucky and difficult class 4.4.12 to speak English. Two hours are devoted to this task every week and Smith does her creative best to get these shy, unwilling students to talk after their days spent working. After telling them all about Nelson Mandela one night, she asks them to speak on "What makes a person a real hero? What are your heroes?"

Smith learns as much from her students as they from her, and the book is sprinkled with their answers and the delightful way they have of twisting the English language. "My mother," says one student, talking about those she admires, "she is optimistic to the world, and struggles with illness bravely. Zhou Enlai, first prime minister of PRC (People's Republic of China) because he is intelligent, generous, magnanimous, tolerant, humorous and handsome as well."

Talking about travel and adventure to her students, asking them where their favourite journeys were to, yields yet more entry into their frames of reference: "Beijing is my favoured journey. I like to live in the sky."
"One day when I honeymoon. Then live in a city with middle-class scale."
"My journey of life I'd like to live somewhere over the rainbow."

Meanwhile, Smith waits for news of her skinny Spanish novel and sends out a rough draft of yet another Spanish novel, this time about pigeons, to overseas publishers. Life is an exercise in waiting and hoping, meanwhile gradually making friends with both other English teachers as well as some of her Chinese students and colleagues.

The writing is funny and witty, and yet there's a lot of pathos in this book, too. It's hard to categorise it as strictly travel or strictly memoir, instead it's a wonderful combination of both. Smith takes South African travel writing to new heights.

China does come alive in Smith's hands - but it's a Smith version of China. It's a China where you bake in the summer and freeze in the winter, where you surf the Internet, because you can't sleep, and the 'Net is a friend of sorts, a China where you're suddenly illiterate, because you can't read a street sign, and adjusting to the disorientation that brings. It's a China where you start to make sense of Chinese characters through diligent struggle, knowing that it's only when you get to 5 000 characters that you'll even begin to read the newspaper.

It's the endearing story of one woman's voyage through a year in a foreign country; it's charming, funny and sad in places. It's bright and funny, and you're sorry to close the book.

Published in The Star, Tonight August 14 2008

Old films hold a lost world

2011-01-18T04:57:00.000-08:00

You can't watch the Yiddish Film Festival without reflecting on what was to come and what was lost

Watching Molly Picon in the 1923 Yiddish silent film East and West and then in 1938's Mamele is like watching a history of film. Both are part of the Yiddish Film Festival on in Cape Town. In 'East and West' cameras don't move, actors do. So there are times when the action takes place just a little too far off centre. Subtitles projected on to a black screen break up the action. It all feels delightfully quaint.

When one character is thinking of another, his or her image appears surrealistically superimposed. Actors and their characters are introduced when they first appear and the subtitles are flashed on to the screen for far longer than they are in today's foreign films. Also leaps in the plot are unbelievable by today's standards. In the end you just can't step away from being a watcher. But that's also part of the charm.

East and West is the earliest surviving film of Picon. Born in the United States in 1898, she was taken to Europe by her husband Jacob Kalich to improve her Yiddish. This she would use in the Yiddish talking movies of the 1930s and 1940s.

In East and West, she plays Molly, the flighty young daughter of Mr Brown (formerly Brownstein), who left his native Eastern Europe to make it big in America. Molly and her father journey back to the old land for a family wedding. Old and new, east and west, rub up against each other.

Molly doesn't wear a scarf or have missing teeth like others back home. She wears pretty dresses and gets up to all sorts of mischief, such as making the wedding singers dance to jazz and devouring a whole chicken on Yom Kippur instead of fasting and praying. One of the most delightful scenes comes at the dinner table when the extended family sits down for noodle soup, described as "a luxury which is music to the ears". Molly is coquettish and pulls faces, particularly at Jacob, a young Talmudic scholar who has joined the household. Through her flighty actions she finds herself married to him, and that's the beginning of some unhappiness.
When East and West was released, it was as popular as Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, and outplayed it for months.

Mamele ('Mommy' in English) is like leaping forward decades. Not only are we into the era of talkies, but film-making had also progressed enormously. The camera tracks the characters and you hear the Yiddish language, a rich, earthy combination of Hebrew and German.

Picon is the mamele, Havche, taking care of her brood of siblings and a father. Their mother died a few years before and Havche promised to take care of the family. It's Poland in the 1930s. Girls work in factories, money is tight and the extended family lives in a flat so close to their neighbours that their arguments can be overheard.

There's a poignancy in watching this movie - you know that within a few years this would end. The war and its attendant horrors lie ahead.

Mamele is a look at a lost world and poses the question: why should a young girl sacrifice her life for a promise, and for a clearly ungrateful family? A sub-plot veers off into gangsterism, and we see gangsters in suits, smoking cigarettes, doing deals.

Picon breaks into song, singing of Havche's unhappiness, and, yes, once more there are plot elements that stretch the modern imagination.

Why put on a Yiddish film festival after all these years, and what's its appeal? Sharon Riva, the director of the National Centre for Jewish Film at Brandeis University, has overseen many successful festivals in places such as New York, Sydney, Helsinki and Sao Paulo. She says that the audiences are mixed, with many older but also some young people seeking a glimpse of a lost world.

"We just premiered a new [film] restoration in Jerusalem, with the youngest [audience member] two months old; [there was also] a Hassidic Jew in full dress and many people in their 20s and 30s seeking knowledge of the richness of a culture that was destroyed before its time. These films capture the diverse world of Yiddish theatre, music, comedy and life, and the richness of the culture."

Veronica Belling, a researcher at the Jewish Studies Library at the University of Cape Town, agrees: "Yiddish film is an offspring of the Yiddish theatre, and it inherits its themes and its flamboyant acting styles. "The films explore two distinct worlds - the old world of the shtetl of the eastern European Jews, just as they are poised to leave for the new world, for America, to create new lives away from religious persecution. This is where their drama and their poignancy lie. We see this most movingly in the movie Tevya that opens the festival."

Tevya (US, 1939) is based on Sholem Aleichem's play about Khave, a dairyman's daughter, who falls in love with the son a Ukrainian peasant.

Eight films are being screened, including American Matchmaker, with Leo Fuchs, described as the "Yiddish Fred Astaire". In this 1940 musical comedy, Fuchs plays Nat Silver, a debonair American whose eighth engagement goes awry.

Great Cantors of the Golden Age is a recent compilation that combines highlights from Yiddish film-maker Joseph Seiden's 1931 film, The Voice of Israel, and cantors from the 1910s to the 1940s. Greenfields (US, 1937) is Peretz Hirshbein's classic play adapted by Edgar Ulmer and is one of the most critically acclaimed of the Yiddish talkies.

The restoration of these films is complicated, Riva says. "We search the world for extant prints and negatives and then piece the films back together, scene by scene - usually working with nitrate prints from which we make a new safety negative, then create a new translation in English, produce a separate 35mm subtitle track and then generate new 35mm prints from which we make DVDs. The process can take a year and costs between $60 00 [R470 000] and $100 000 each."

Belling adds: "These films are a must for film boffs, as well as for people who just want to be entertained ? they have gained appeal simply because of their historical context."

The festival is at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town until Thursday, when it opens at Johannesburg's Hyde Park Nu Metro theatre and runs until August 28. For more information on Yiddish films go to http://www.jewishfilm/. org

Published in Sunday Life, The Sunday Independent, August 17 2008

Debut effort heralds greater things to come

2011-01-18T04:53:00.000-08:00

Whiplash by Tracey Farren
Modjaji Books R150

The cover of this debut novel leads you in. If covers sell books and attract readers, then designer Natascha Griessel has done her job. The simple, yet effective, predominantly blue-hued cover with the elongated shadow of a woman on the road sets the scene.

This ground-breaking novel centres on a year in the life of a white prostitute in Cape Town. It's set in Muizenberg, when the suburb was still sleazy. Tess, 26 years old and addicted to painkillers, turns tricks to make a living. Fifty bucks will generally do it. Getting into strangers' cars, or lying beside freeways, she takes her life in her hands every time she accepts a new client. She has no pimp and works only by day. Yet the ever-present danger of her line of work is presented again and again: one woman is fatally slit from throat to stomach, another takes a beating.

The topic of Whiplash is unusual, uncomfortable and daring. Prostitutes are so far out of sight in our polite society. We don't think about them or accord the anonymous women on the side of the road names or lives. Yet in Whiplash, Farren has done the seemingly impossible: she has created, in the fun and spunky Tess, a likeable character. In part this is due to the humour that runs through the narrative.

These may be desperate times, and Tess is down on her luck, an addict, a prostitute, living from one day to the next, but she is no desperado, no wanna-be suicide.

There is, always, a sense that this is just for now. As she lies in her bath, she dreams of a life that could be: "I'll live with a big man. Maybe a body builder ? I'll have sculptures put up at my heated pool? I'll float round on a big, puffy lilo. When he gets home from work he'll kiss me on the forehead."

Farren, an ex-journalist, gleaned a lot of her information from talking to prostitutes and her astute observation shows in the details of this book. The language is earthy and real, fast-paced and breathless, yet underscored with wit: "The sun is flippin' desperate, thinks it's gonna die young or something. It stings my cheeks, makes wet patches under my arms." Or this: "The flat's still full of the shock of the blast. The air's still scared. ? I gobble two Adcodol, lock the last two back in my boot. God, I want more."

This almost light-hearted tone informs the novel, which tends to liven the mood of what could have been a depressing read.

Tess lives in False Bay Holiday, with the missing word, Flats, nailed onto a fence at a tyre repair shop. That's the kind of place it is. And peopled by Madeleine, sewing to make a living, and mourning her missing husband. Tess has friends like Annie, soon to follow her boyfriend to Joburg, or Princess with a broken face. In-between there are the clients such as a cop who gets freebies in exchange for his silence, or the man in a marriage made tight by the fact that he and his wife can't have children, a man whom she soon is befriending.

This is a book begun as an address to her mother back in Durban, a mother whose influence has shaped Tess, and also shapes the story, as absent as she may be. There's also the ghost of her stepfather Graham, still alive, but you can barely call him that, felled by a stroke, impassive, silent in his wheelchair. The past weaves into the present, and as the story progresses, we learn why Tess remains haunted by these two people who shaped her, and why she drifted into the life of a prostitute.

But something's got to break and this comes in the form of a broken condom. Before long, Tess realises that her sudden craving for fish points to a larger problem.

What happens after becomes a turning point for Tess, and the story pivots on this decision. It remains a roller-coaster of a journey and as readers we are led through by Farren's confident, jazzy prose.

Some of the novel could have been cut in order to get to the heart of the story. However, this is an assured book and marks the debut of a startling new voice on the South African literary scene.

Published in The Star Tonight September 4 2008

You're married, it happens

2011-01-18T04:43:00.000-08:00

Strange things happen when you go on leave. You come back married, with a brand new name and absolutely no idea who your new husband might be.

Going online, your bank cheerfully welcomes you with a "Welcome Arja!", but your name is now Mrs A Coetzee.

The customer care woman at the other end of the line is not only mystified, but also doesn't seem to care. You tell her there's no Coetzee in your family, never has been and you've never been a Coetzee - how could this happen?

She doesn't know, suggests you get in your car and drive to your nearest branch to sort it out.
The cheery poppie at the counter assures you it's nothing to worry about, it happens all the time when a bank updates its software and records and, not to worry, her colleague is going to sort it out. You still have the same amount of money in your account, don't you?

Yes, alack and alas, you do. The new name didn't bring a rosy glow to your bank balance, and the last thing you want to do while you're supposed to be away from the hurly burly of life is to encounter it at your nearest bank.

Back at work, a colleague asks if you've checked your status at home affairs. What if you have been married off secretly somewhere offshore? You turn ice cold for a minute. It's nightmare territory - proving you're not married is like proving sky is blue.

Holding your breath, you check - no, home affairs hasn't married you off; it's only the bank that is determined to see you with the knot tied.

Friends don't understand why you are not livid with rage, why you haven't demanded to see the bank manager... Truth is, you're tired. When you're not fighting name changes, you're fighting a cellphone company over their 3G service that doesn't work, or holding on to the phone while a bored oke at DStv is telling you to pull out the red plug and replace it with a yellow.

No, it's your Jewish mother who comes to the rescue. When she tries to deposit a cheque for you and the bank won't accept it because it isn't in the name of Coetzee, she goes into action. Thank God for Jewish mothers who don't take no for an answer.

Days later the poppie from the bank phones to say that your name has been changed but now they can no longer investigate the matter because it would be too difficult because you are no longer Mrs Coetzee.

You stare down the phone. You can just imagine the face on the other end and barely manage to splutter out that you don't care how difficult it is, you still want the matter investigated.

As you put down the phone, a messenger brings you a little black box. Inside, with a press release inviting you to a bridal expo, a fake diamond ring in a black velvet box winks up at you, and nestled further down is a little plastic statue of a man and woman in wedding regalia, the kind that you plop on to a cake.

Finally, you howl.

Published in The Sunday Independent, October 19 2008

Life once the fairytale's over

2011-01-18T04:33:00.000-08:00

Marriage Vows by Gail Schimmel Kwela Books R165

It's Jordi Gordan's 55th birthday. Happily married to Hal since her early 20s, she rises on this birthday, and looks in the mirror. "I pull the skin on my face tight by placing my hands on my cheeks and pulling back, toying with the idea of a face-lift ? I let my face fall back and poke at my crow's feet - the wrinkles gather at my eyes like old ladies gossiping on a corner."

While Hal cooks her traditional birthday breakfast, she receives an SMS from Nico, the man who has skirted the boundaries of her life for more than 30 years, while she has remained happily married to the man now cooking her food. "This brief mourning is all that Nico is allowed of my birthday, and for a moment, seated on the toilet, I belong to Nico."

So begins a novel, in deceptively simple language, that explores what it means to love two men, yet to stay true to your own belief in the sanctity of marriage and the vows so quickly repeated.

The language is light, unadorned of excess or flowery adjectives. Jordi could be talking out loud as the narrative progresses. As such it might be easy to dismiss this book, yet this is a book that raises issues around infidelity, the nature of love, and whether to remain true to your feelings or your beliefs.

This is not a simple tale, although it is simply told. Marriage Vows, Gail Schimmel's debut novel, is as nuanced and layered as, well, yes a 10-tier wedding cake.

The novel moves between past and present, alternating between Jordi's 55th birthday and the memories of her life with Hal, and their two children, now grown, and the meeting with Nico. In London on a business trip, her husband and children back in Johannesburg, she meets the man who will haunt her.

Jordi kept me reading right till the end; she is a strong, yet heart-breaking character. Schimmel has painted her portrait in vivid strokes.

A successful businesswoman, Jordi has married her career with her family. On the night of her birthday she is hosting a business dinner party for her husband, instead of spending it with her family and friends. A first clue to Jordi's nature - somewhat selfless - is that she is sacrificing this night for Hal without much complaint.

We learn of a cherished sister, Belinda, who died of cancer, in love with a married man, and taking the secret of his identity to the grave with her. Infidelity and temptation lurk, cosy bedfellows.

The story is peopled by the other sister, Denise, cold and distant, and her mother makes an early appearance, talking mostly high school French as dementia takes hold.

There's Jordi's best friend, Sally, whose multiple marriages and the six children she had produced serve as foil to Jordi's own quiet, but loving and only marriage. "Sex on a stick," Sally says referring to her latest husband, Neil, 10 years her junior, but "recently I have started thinking that Sally's enthusiasm about Neil is sliding. Occasionally she lets slip a snide comment about pretty faces not being all they're cracked up to be."

The past and the present continue to intertwine. As Jordi shops, has lunch with Sally and prepares for the evening, a portrait of her marriage emerges. Throughout the years there's Nico, who Jordi met at the age of 30, but it's a relationship both push away for various reasons. Jordi's belief in her vows, Nico's need to stay close to a dying wife.

Timing, so important in relationships, jars and disconnects the two. When Nico remarries, Jordi feels pierced, yet when he offers to leave his second wife for her, again alignment is out of sync. Yet, the realisation has its effects: "The knowledge that Nico would leave his wife for me was bad. It seeped like poison through my thoughts, and its bitter fingers plucked at my day. Every time something went wrong, the thought would be there: I don't have to take this; I have an alternative."

As the novel builds to its climax, there's a breathless, almost thriller-like impulse in the reader to get to the end, to find out what happens. I was left just about shocked by the ending. Schimmel has revealed no clues. What remains is a sense of how memory distorts, and of how one can be so wrapped up in strong beliefs of the way a marriage should be that the truth of a relationship remains clouded.

Schimmel's strong craftsmanship moves this story along seamlessly weaving between the times. This is an important debut by a local writer of real power, and I look forward to reading her next novel.

Published in The Star Tonight November 20 2008

Deftly summons human frailties of New Yorkers

2011-01-18T04:23:00.000-08:00

The Last Bachelor by Jay McInerney
Bloomsbury R279,95

This is the latest collection of short stories by Jay McInerney, who shot to prominence in 1984 with the publication of Bright Lights, Big City. The collection, largely peopled by those who call New York or its neighbouring environs home, is clearly set in a post 9/11 world.

While one story, 'I Love you, Honey', directly deals with the events of that day, there are oblique references to the day that changed America forever, and scarred that country and New Yorkers.

But this is not a collection about that tragic day, or its aftermath. It's a book peopled by ordinary people doing all the things that people do: bruise and punish each other with their infidelities, set out to marry rich men and have Thanksgiving parties where the muck of the past is raked through with regularity.

Although it's set mainly in New York, several of the characters have roots in the South, and the languid, humid South is contrasted with the more frenetic, neurotic mores of the north.

There are some lighter, fun pieces too, and McInerney shows a witty hand in 'Summary Judgement' in which a social climber who has "passed the first blush of youth", sets out to capture a rich man after the death of her husband leaves her in debt. The story is cattily delicious: there are hints of impropriety in Alysha de Sante's past, there are underhand dealings as she sets out to snag a businessman, and we watch as she reels him in, and cheer when she makes a fatal error.

Infidelity and its effects are dealt with in three of the stories, the aforementioned 'I Love you, Honey', 'Invisible Fences' and 'Putting Daisy Down'. In each of these tightly constructed tales, the married couples punish each other in ways that are scarcely imaginable. A woman has abortions to punish the wandering eye of her husband in the ironically titled, 'I Love you, Honey'; in 'Putting Daisy Down', a title that gives away the ending, a woman demands her husband put his 10-year-old cat to sleep, but pays the price as the story closes, and again we cheer.

Meanwhile, in 'Invisible Fences' Susan must pay the price for her infidelity as she and her husband start picking up men in bars to take home at night.

Observes her husband Dean: "When you're playing outside the regular borders, it's important to have rules and boundaries." But playing outside of the rules doesn't always lead to happiness: "I made her tell me everything. I was tortured by visions of her treachery, by my own roiling filthy imagination ? until we both realised that the actual circumstances would never be enough to match the visions in my head."

In 'The Madonna of Turkey Season' we are introduced to a family who have lost their mother and wife to cancer. The scene is played with yearly frequency: the father becoming maudlin, the brothers pushing against each other in ways that cannot be forgiven. At the heart of the story is the unhappiness the family feels over one of the brothers, Brian, who has written a play, subsequently made into a film, which explores the death of their mother and introduces a note of infidelity in the relationship of the parents.

It's hard to make doubt disappear once the seed has been planted, and hard to forgive the brother for planting the seed. Hard too, not to believe that Brian may have been privy to a deathbed confession none of the others were witness to. And it's hard to see the failings of a mother who has died too young: "We always believed in you Mother, more than anything, but we never for a moment thought you were human."

In 'Penelope on the Pond' a woman waits in a remote pond for her lover, a senator campaigning for the president, and yet to announce a forthcoming divorce. Out of sight of the tabloids, it's ultimately not the blogger journalist who will drive a knife into their relationship, but the smooth-talking wannabe president himself.

In the quietly thoughtful 'The Last Bachelor' Ginny encounters her long lost lover, AG, in the weekend before his first marriage at the ripe age of 40. The story passes back in time, detailing the dalliances of AG, who feels it's time to finally settle down.

When he visits Ginny the night before his nuptials, bringing lines of coke, old secrets are revealed, old loves given an audience. This is a tender, wise story, somewhat sad in execution. And sometimes, seems to be the message of the story, it really is too late to do the right thing.

Published in The Star, Tonight, February 26 2009

Fiction with the sting of fact

2011-01-18T04:02:00.000-08:00

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro (Random House/Struik R300)

Alice Munro is one of our contemporary masters of the short story, who has made her literary reputation through her crafting of short fiction, that often-neglected and under-valued genre. This year, she was awarded the third Man Booker International Prize for her overall contribution to international fiction, an accolade which firmly cements her reputation.

In Too Much Happiness, her latest collection, Munro once again mostly focuses on the lives of her fellow Canadians, barring the novella-length piece which closes the book. Hers is a gaze that is tender and compassionate, a gaze that bathes her stories in a sensitivity that is acutely felt.
This is not a writer who judges her characters, nor does she mete out punitive actions.

There is suffering, then again, there is always suffering when casting an eye over the human condition, but we feel that Munro's characters are well taken care of, gently led from beginning to end.

And yet, there is darkness in Munro's stories. Her simple story-telling hides the truth of the sorrow that is out there, presenting portraits that are seemingly simple, innocuous tales.
I've long been a fan of Munro, and have read all her collections. But, strangely, there's a darkness in these stories that I haven't noticed in her previous volumes, and which makes reading Too Much Happiness an interesting experience.

However, there is also a truth that we all recognise once we reach the final line of so many of these stories.

The opening story, 'Dimensions', highlights the recent tragic events in the life of Doree, a young woman who has to take three buses to reach the prison where her husband is held. She is working as a chamber maid, has changed her appearance by bleaching her hair and losing weight and is seeing a counsellor.

She is in the throes of change, a change brought on by tragedy, which is only slowly, and horrifying revealed as the story unfolds. A moment in time helps the healing, and although time will continue to heal, we feel, life is rarely that cut and dried.

In 'Fiction' Munro cleverly contrasts the world of fiction with that of reality. The story is told in two parts, sometime at the cusp of the 1980s and today.

What is remembered, and noticed, differs according to whom is doing the remembering. In this story Joyce divorces her husband when he has an affair.

Years later, at a party she gives with her second husband, she meets a young woman, a writer who has just published her first book.

When Joyce reads it, she gasps at what the woman, a child from her own past, has written. But the young writer does not recognise Joyce, barely acknowledges her.

Meanwhile, Wenlock Edge, set in a long-ago 1950s of university students sharing digs, is a strangely unsettling narrative.

The unnamed narrator is paying her studies by working in the university canteen and living cheaply.

When she is forced to share with the quiet, yet compelling Nina, she is introduced to a world that is far from pin set suits and propriety.

Yet, the story unfolds gradually: we are made aware of the hold that people have on each other, and the loyalty that binds them.

People are strange, no more strange than Mr Purvis, who prefers that women read poetry to him in the nude. A compelling, utterly memorable piece.

Both 'Free Radicals' and 'Face' present shocking, yet totally believable portraits of ordinary people living ordinary lives yet hiding secrets and afflictions which subtly twist the dynamics of their interactions.

In 'Free Radicals' Nita has just, unexpectedly, lost her husband. Yet, when an intruder bursts into her home, we learn her secret; the reasons are compellingly believable, and we even cheer her on. In 'Face' the damage inflicted on one born with a livid birthmark is re-lived, a damage that waxes and wanes and yet determines a person's life.

The damage that other people do is again the subject of another story, 'Child's Play', a story of children who engage in action that is anything but childish, and yet is also firmly anchored in that world of seeming innocence.

The novella-length 'Too Much Happiness' is a strangely compelling tale, although the focus this time is on Sophia Kovalevsky, a Russian mathematician and novelist in 1891, a time when mathematicians had to be male, and females in this decidedly masculine environment suffered for having been born so.

The fiction examines aspects of her life, her love affair with a man who was reluctant to commit to her, and a final, perilous journey to Stockholm. It's a bitter sweet story, a story which opens new avenues of interest in a woman whose name now lends itself to a crater on the moon.

Published December 21 2009 in Pretoria News

A strong narrative set in rural SA

2011-01-18T03:53:00.000-08:00

The Angina Monologues by Rosamund Kendal (Jacana, R145)

Rosamund Kendal's second novel, The Angina Monologues deals, as did her debut, with the trials and tribulations of being a modern doctor in today's South Africa. Like the first, Karma Suture, it also has a deliciously witty title.

The Angina Monologues centres on three young women interns who are completing compulsory medical community service in rural KwaZulu-Natal, at Prince Xoliswe hospital, in a one-horse town. Each is vastly different, and we follow their lives and struggles with life in a decaying hospital, decay which is made worse by the corruption practised by those in charge. We are introduced to each in separate chapters.

There's Rachael, spoilt and rich. We meet her as she wanders disconsolately around her spartan doctor's quarters, trying to figure out how to make water emerge from the taps. You pump it yourself, of course, or pay the dagga-smoking gardener to do it for you. Shock number one. Yet Rachael is determined to make a go of her community service and to stick it out. Not an easy task when she is beset by her parents at every turn, her neurotic Jewish mother in particular, imploring her to pack up, return to Cape Town and board the first plane to London where she can find a job as a doctor, and a husband too, hopefully.

In contrast to the wild and funny Rachael is the conservative, quiet young wife Seema. Passionately dedicated to her vocation as a doctor, and a brilliant medic, she harbours a painful secret. Her husband Satesh is both insanely jealous of her abilities, and abusive in his jealousy and his lack of love for her. But for Seema to abandon her marriage would mean incurring her family's wrath and alienation. She struggles poignantly with these dilemmas throughout the story.

Then there's Nomsa: feisty, ambitious, and equally passionate about her calling. And yet she too is caught between two worlds - an education in Cape Town away from her family in Aliwal North means that she feels alienated from her home and her rural, illiterate mother. But her mother is sick and Nomsa must return home and face the family she loves with a fierce sense of pride, yet returning means awakening a mass of contradictions within her.

Nomsa's portrait is finely drawn - I found her the most compelling of the three. The tensions that threaten to tear her apart are sensitively revealed.

It is only fairly late in the narrative that the three meet up, becoming more friendly with each other, and I couldn't help wishing that this had happened earlier on in the story. Part of the joy of each woman's life is in the connections they have made with each other, and this forms part of the enjoyment of the reading.

A very apt and large part of the story is Kendal's explanation of conditions at a rural hospital, which are shocking, to say the least. The stories of the various patients are also woven into the novel, and some of the stories are heartbreaking, especially in cases where private, expensive medical care could have saved lives.

Kendal, a medical doctor herself, knows what she is talking about, and her fiction exposes the truths and deceptions in an entertaining, yet ultimately shocking way.

Kudos to her for doing it so cleverly and for uncovering the facts that need to be exposed.

At the end of the year the threads of these young women's lives coalesce in a number of decisions made, and realisations achieved. This is a delightful, witty, entertaining read - serious truths are explored, and lives are deftly and intelligently explored in this strong narrative.

Published in The Star Tonight September 23 2010 and Pretoria News September 27 2010

Memories of the way we were . . .

2011-01-18T03:31:00.000-08:00

Author interview and review: Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room, Penguin 2010

A man goes on a journey in these three inter-linked novellas set across time. The man's name is Damon. He observes, meets another, grows older, is touched and changed by the experiences. He watches the world, the world in turn watches him. Yet, who is Damon? On first being introduced to the narrator and also participant of these three pieces, there's a jolt. Damon the author, the centre point of the stories? The author isn't going to say.

What Damon Galgut is doing in this book amounts to play. Between the layers of seriousness, there's an artful play at work. Galgut is asking questions, challenging our preconceived notions of fiction. It's a book which keeps you, as reader, perennially on your toes, and yet supremely interested, too, in the events that are unfolding within these sparsely, almost dryly written pages.

This is a story of memory, according to Galgut, but this is also an examination of the nature of travel - and how we change and evolve as we leave what's familiar for the unfamiliar, even if, like Damon, we are not natural travellers. "The truth is that he is not a traveller by nature, it is a state that has been forced on him by circumstance. He spends most of his time on the move in a state of acute anxiety? he's constantly afraid of dying."

Galgut summons up the story of a journey: "A large part of travelling consists purely in waiting, with all the attendant ennui and depression. Memories come back of other places he has written in, departure halls of airports, bus-stations, lonely kerbsides in the heat and in all of them there is an identical strain of melancholy summed up in a few transitory details. A paper bag blowing in the wind. The mark of a dirty shoe on a tile?"

What follows is a short description of plot, because plot is not central to this series of novellas.
In the first novella, The Follower, Damon meets a man, Reiner, while travelling in Greece. When Reiner visits him in South Africa the two undertake a disastrous journey to the isolated mountain kingdom of Lesotho. It's made disastrous by Damon's passivity, and a sense of threat emanating from Reiner.

In the second novella, The Lover, the same passivity follows Damon as he travels through Africa years after his journey through Greece. While in Zimbabwe he meets a group of European travellers, and keeps meeting up with them, despite trying to go his own way. One of the travellers, Jerome, exerts a strange pull and Damon will travel to Switzerland, but the end is concluded, again, by Damon's nature.

However, in The Guardian, Damon is propelled into action in turn by the wild actions of his friend Anna. They have travelled to India together, in some sort of hope that the wildly unstable Anna will be calmed and soothed by being away. It reads like a high-action thriller as Damon's passivity is thrown off. This was a deeply compelling piece, made unbearably poignant by what happens to Anna and Damon.

The writing is tight and spare; landscape forms a backbone to all three stories, suggested rather than painted in primary colours. The real surprise is when Galgut chooses to invert the traditional method of telling a story, first person morphs into third and back again. At first, you're jolted by the device, then it becomes part of the telling, and is a surprisingly effective device and not at all disruptive to the reading. Here's an example: "What is he looking for, he himself doesn't know. At this remove, his thoughts are lost to me now, and yet I can explain him better than my present self, he is buried under my skin."

Intrigued by this device, I ask Galgut what he means by it. He writes in an e-interview from Italy: "The real subject of this book is memory. In the writing, I have tried to capture something of the quality of the way memory works. That's the reason for the switch - in memory one is sometimes an 'I', back in the moment being recalled; then at other times a 'he' or 'she', a stranger observed from outside. And sometimes also a 'you', somebody one can address over the intervening time. It sounds cumbersome, but I hope it reads effortlessly, because it's something we all do unconsciously in our heads the whole time. Of course, memory is another sort of story we tell ourselves, which is why the book is written as fiction."

We're on to the territory between fact and fiction here. I'm going to ask the inevitable question of the line between autobiography and fiction in a writer's work.

I recall the lines in the second novella, The Lover, when Damon is recalling the Swiss Jerome: "?Because in every story of obsession there is only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life."

Galgut answers: "All writers are drawing on their own lives to some extent, though, of course, some experiences sit closer to home than others, as I hope this book makes clear. I think the borders between fiction and non-fiction, imagination and 'truth', are extremely porous. Sometimes there's no distinction at all."

The line dissolves: in the second novella, Galgut writes that, "a journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made? things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory."

And memory remains - through all its twists and turns, what is remembered one way one day is remembered a completely different way in another light, or in another emotion. Galgut's In a Strange Room offers a remarkable encounter with memory and meaning of travel and the games we unwittingly play as we attempt to make sense of the knotted strands of our journeys, both external and deep into our own selves.In a Strange Room was shortlisted for the 2010 MAN Booker Prize.

The winner, announced on Tuesday, was London author Howard Jacobson, for his novel The Finkler Question.

Published October 14 2010 The Star Tonight and in Pretoria News

China memoir pulses with charm and pathos

2011-01-18T03:09:00.000-08:00

Cracking China: A memoir of our first three years in China by Rod Mackenzie
Knowledge Thirst Media, R195

There's no surer way of knowing you've arrived in a foreign country and culture than to be greeted with the words that it's 11am, so it's time for lunch. Lunch? Yes lunch. It's just the beginning of the many differences that will confront and assault the sense of normality of Rod Mackenzie and his wife, known affectionately as the Chook.

They've arrived in China to teach English. All the way from South Africa to rain-soaked England, where a so-called career as a used car salesman doesn't pan out as expected. Next stop Shaoxing, China.

With his shaved head and larger-than-average girth, Mackenzie stands out like a sore thumb and is soon compared with pictures of Buddha. No matter. His infectious, bubbling personality soon wins over his high school students, who start to learn, not by rote, as has been the norm, but by laughter, fun and games.

First lesson for Mackenzie, memorising the names of his pupils, who have all given each other English names, which are rather prosaic and reveal the vast gaps that open up between languages.

There's Fish, Star, Ice Sucker - who got the name because "ice is nice to lick in summer" - and a female student who calls herself Boy, simply because she likes boys; then there's Sunshine, Answer, WC, Pig-pig and Twin A and B.

Mackenzie's writing is shot through with humour and there are many laugh-out-loud scenes. One day a TV crew arrives to shoot footage of the English teacher at work. Walking up to Fish, Mackenzie asks in front of the cameras, "How are you today, Fish?"

Mackenzie writes: "Fish was so mesmerised by the TV crew that he lost the precious bit of English he knew. His jaw wavered uncertainly. His friends translated my question for him, a phatic question he would have learned in his first English lessons at school four years ago... Bill, my next victim, fared far worse... he took one look at us, mouth agape, and ran away."

There are other vexations brought on by living in a foreign culture. When Mackenzie and his wife use what they think is a vase to put flowers in, the guffawing reactions of their Chinese friends enlighten them. They've been using Chinese versions of chamber pots.

And then there's the night they cook for their friends and wonder why they are eyeing the food with visible fear. "What was wrong with baked potatoes and a simple omelette? It was the same as a bowl of fish heads being repugnant to me while everyone else held the decapitated delicacies between their chopsticks and sucked and chewed on them until even the forlorn, round fish eyes disappeared into their mouths."

But there's pathos between the humour, and when Mackenzie and his wife pass cages of dogs, they try not to think what their final destination might be.

And through it all, Mackenzie, also an accomplished published poet, captures the strangeness of life in China through verse.

Cracking China pulses with charm and with Mackenzie's obvious love for the country that eventually cracks open for him. Read it for a foreigner's glimpse of a land that captivates, frustrates and delights, and, as always, fascinates.

Published in Pretoria News, July 5 2010 and The Star Tonight July 1 2010

What's Missing, what's found

2011-01-18T02:59:00.000-08:00

Missing by Beverly Rycroft
(Modjaji Books, R145)

I picked up Beverly Rycroft's debut collection of poetry, Missing, while waiting for a flight home. Airports are never a good time to read - announcements shatter your concentration repeatedly.
But, from the first poem, I was drawn in and found myself devouring these poems hungrily. Rycroft takes the intimate nature of her life and shapes the experience into deeply-crafted works.

Much of the poetry in this collection is concerned with her struggle with breast cancer, a seemingly grim topic, but don't let that put you off. Her poems are heartfelt and you don't have to be a woman, or to have suffered breast cancer, to have these poems talk to you.

The subject in Friday: Diagnosis is cancer, and the words are transformed into sharp, shocking weapons: The telephone, once a domestic creature/has turned into a raptor/? The Doctor's voice spinning from it/ steamed warm/and sticky as fresh entrails:/malignancy/ chemotherapy.

And yet there is humour, too, in Rycroft's examination of the disease. Here, in David's Visit David tells her that: in his Aunt's day/breast prosthetics were bolstered/with bird seed./After a sweaty game of tennis/one afternoon/she found/her bosom had begun to sprout.

The equally intimate nature of love, marriage, togetherness, and the delights of having and watching children grow up, is another topic explored compellingly in these poems.

These themes coalesce in the poem, If this bed could talk, in which the narrator speaks of a bed which has hosted love "lying together", a youngest child who has colonised the bed, a mother-in-law urging a husband to eat, a daughter singing, and a woman waiting.

Meanwhile, in What I learned from you the poet writes of a marriage in which she learns that: a brown Gomma-Gomma bedroom suite/isn't the worst way to start a marriage. But what she learns is also bittersweet, that in the end: if we really had to/you and I might/just/manage without each other. And then, gratitude for life: "laughter/good friends/my love/ this poem is the heart of an achingly simple poem: Bequest.

Rycroft's poetry is very accessible, vital and necessary: a fine debut.

Published The Star Tonight, October 7 2010

Tenderly distilling time's essence

2011-01-18T02:47:00.000-08:00

Homing: Short Stories Henrietta Rose-Innes (Umuzi: R170) Henrietta Rose-Innes's debut collection of short fiction spans stories written from the mid- 1990s to the present day, and is a welcome addition to her work. She has also written two novels, with a third forthcoming next year. There are several moving and memorable stories, distilled essences of a particular time in the characters' lives, highlighting a pivotal point upon which a realisation is made and a life turns, for better or worse. Many of the stories take place in Rose-Innes's home town, Cape Town, or in locales near the city, and the city becomes a subtle background to the themes explored. Rose-Innes's work is highly visual and when I recall the first story in this powerful collection, 'Homing', I immediately think in terms of the pictures painted by this writer. Homing is a strange, haunting story about retired couple, Nona and Ray, who happen to live a few doors away from a face-brick retirement home, a home both suppose they will eventually move into. But then the home closes and in its place "reared the pink backside of a new hotel". The building wreaks all sorts of changes, including altering the play of light during the day, inverting the normal order of things. Then Nona decides to spend a night in the hotel, telling Ray she is going away. She secretly strolls down the road to stay in this new monstrosity, from where she will be able to view their humble home from the vantage point of this new swish place. Enter a flock of homing pigeons who surreally surround Nona in her hotel room. Home is indeed altered when you look at it from afar. All sorts of faults become evident and you yourself are changed by the experience. 'The Leopard Trap' is another strangely disaffecting story which revolves around Daniela who's "taken to leaving town when things got bad", escaping from the violent, unexplainable rages of her husband Thom. While away, staying at a bed and breakfast near Sutherland, she chances on a leopard trap and her fear is visceral, animal-like: "Her cheek touched stone. And all at once it grasped her: the horror of the trapped creature, of the trap, this box precisely measured out for her own length and breadth?" The fear dissolves and she stares coolly at the trap within the landscape. Daniela returns to her husband, as she must, as she always does, in this story in which a trap to "take a living cat and turn it into bones and pelt" becomes a startling metaphor for a marriage trapped within itself. 'Burning Buildings' is another story which examines the bounds of a relationship, this time between Hein and Anna. Hein is into matchstick building, constructing elaborate buildings and castles, which are then burnt outdoors, the couple watching the towers of destruction, bound by their mutual fascination, Hein's streak of destruction uniting them and yet also tearing a rift through their lives. This is a story in which the props do not trap the lovers, but instead, ultimately set them free. 'Tremble' takes place within the confines of a singles weekend. Erin is only on this cheesy, getting-to-know-you jaunt because her friend Alice persuades her to accompany her. The place is luxurious, safe, framed by mountainside vineyards, "and everyone was white, middle class, of an age. That was, she supposed, what she had requested. She'd known these people all her life". The past collides with the present as Erin finds herself reaching across the age gap that separates her from a teenage boy. This is a story about a certain age - that gap between youth and before the onset of middle age, when time may be running out, and people are burdened with "excess weight, the first strands of grey" and "caution and worldliness". And yet, time to try again: a story that probes the spaces between wanting and not having. There is again an element of the surreal, which nevertheless edges back into reality, in 'Bad Places'. Three young people have attended a party dressed as mermaids. Elly wakes up on the beach, her friends asleep, the blue pigment having seeped into the sand, cobalt skin bleeding into beige. Leaving her friends sleeping, she encounters a "bergie" in his makeshift beach hut - and the few moments of that encounter will shape and alter her forever. The final story in the collection is the tour de force and the Caine Prize-winning 'Poison'. In this excellent apocalyptic story, Lynn finds herself fleeing Cape Town after a mysterious disaster has resulted in the city becoming contaminated, with residents fleeing in panic as fast and as far as they can. Lynn lands up at a near-deserted petrol station and finds herself stranded in this empty world which is "poison violet and puce". Sometimes there really is nothing left to do but to abandon yourself to the violent, apocalyptic worlds you find yourself stranded in. A mere telling of the events doesn't do justice to a story that is haunting in its simplicity and continues to resonate. It's a story of extraordinary power: a description that fits much of Rose-Innes's short fiction in this excellent volume. Published in The Star Tonight, October 28 2010

Honest awakening

2011-01-18T02:41:00.000-08:00

The Au Pair: A True Story
by Michele Macfarlane

(Jacana, R139.95)

Michele Macfarlane is a married mother of three living in Cape Town as this book opens. Happily partnered with Peter, a chiropodist, they lead a seemingly idyllic life. However, her eyesight is failing due to the onset of retinitis pigmentosa.

Macfarlane hires an au pair to help her care for the children and drive them around as she can no longer do so. Within a few pages Macfarlane is both celebrating her 37th birthday in her parents' luxury penthouse and suffering - and I use the word advisedly - the effects of her crush on her au pair, a woman of 23, Marizette.

Suffering, because Macfarlane believes herself to be straight: she is married, settled, her life following the ordinary, well-travelled paths of heterosexuality. There are niggling questions, of course. She was abused as a child, and can never quite rid herself of that "yucky" feeling she experiences when she's intimate with her husband, and there was that incident as a university student with the girlfriend of her brother, Ian? but these are just niggles. Or are they?

Macfarlane is surrounded by well-meaning close friends and members of her extended family, and sometimes supported as she tries to talk herself out of a crush on this much younger woman, who is in a relationship with a partner in any case.

Most of the book's chapters open with long e-mails written by Macfarlane to her close friend Sara, who lives in England with her own husband and family and is, ironically, also questioning her own sexuality and finding herself attracted to women.

The e-mails then set the scene for the actions that unfold in the main narrative.

The writing style is deceptively light, easy to read, set in the present tense, yet the story that unfolds is anything but light, nor is it easy. The events will impact on all those involved in the lives of these two women - family, friends, and of course Macfarlane's three children.

The book unflinchingly tells the story of the emotional rollercoaster of discovering that you're gay, and needing to leave a marriage to be true to yourself, and yet how living your own truth can be devastating to those around you, most especially Macfarlane's husband, Peter, who is initially broken and embittered through the process.

And yet, as Macfarlane makes clear, her gay orientation is not a choice, and not something that can be switched off, denied or ignored.

In one of her e-mails to Sara she discusses her attraction and the reasons for it: "The point is that nothing will stop me feeling the way I do about Marizette. I'm crazy about her.

"Of course I've asked myself over and over again how it's possible at such a relatively late stage in my life to discover I'm a lesbian.

"And I don't have an answer to that. There were many tell-tale signs? and again, I think: how could I not have known?"

And yet the toll taken on her family and her own sense of self-hood makes the guilt acute: "Sara, I feel like such a bad person. I've always liked myself and now I don't any more. I can't believe I'm hurting my children. All I ever wanted was for them to have a happy childhood."

Macfarlane is brave in many ways - for agonising over her choices, and ultimately choosing what will make her happy, a decision that embraces her new-found sexuality, a sexuality that has been denied or, suppressed, one that has left her unable to find satisfaction with men.

Brave, too, is Macfarlane's choosing to reveal so many intimate details of the lesbian sex between her and Marizette - descriptions which are quite graphic at times, and refreshingly so.

There's also a sense of fun here, and the scene in which the two buy a strap-on is infused with humour. Macfarlane is also unsparing in her depiction of the emotional difficulties each experience and the role of therapy in helping to diffuse some of these problems.

The Au Pair is a gripping, compellingly told story, and Macfarlane and her family are also brave enough to have the details of their lives thrown open within its pages.

Ultimately, too, there's a happy ending that you welcome as a reader, but what this book also makes clear is that even happily-ever-after requires some emotional work and rare understanding.

This is a necessary and welcome addition to the local landscape of memoir writing.

Published in The Star Tonight December 9 2010

Short stories long on intrigue

2011-01-18T02:37:00.000-08:00

Stories: All-New Tales
edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
(Headline Review, R185)

Short stories: we may lump them together in one big homogenous thing. Sure, there are differences, but basically a story is a story, not so? Yet, there are as many types of stories as there are say, novels, from literary to thriller, romance to adventure.

I admit that I like my stories rather literary: within my own strictly defined limits, characters emerge from page, grow, become aware, and carry this awareness of something defining them off the page.

However, the stories in this anthology stretched me somewhat. Horror rubs shoulders with fantasy, new vampires sprout a special tooth to suck blood or develop a fetish for chickens, and the past develops new underwater dimensions.

There are a few "literary" stories within this volume - in which ordinary people love, laugh and die and there isn't a vampire or strange being in sight - but the majority of these tales plumb depths which I don't normally reach in my own reading of the genre.

Enjoy might be too facile a word to describe my experience of these stories. At times I was horrified and disgusted, I was intrigued, I was admiring.

I kept on reading, for the most part, because, as the editors Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio write in their introduction, "what we wanted to read were stories that made us care, stories that forced us to turn the page. And yes, we wanted good writing."

The stories in this collection are polished, crafted, well-edited gems, they keep you turning the page, and the images created in your mind live on long after the reading.

Roddy Doyle's gruesome Blood is a case in point turns on a husband's sudden taste for the red stuff, to the point where he takes to murdering his neighbour's chickens while trying to hide this lust from his spouse. The surprise of the story is revealed right at the end? and it's a surprise to the husband himself.

Blood lust is the focus of Walter Mosley's Juvenal Nyx, a meandering story of how a perfectly ordinary man, a member of a Black Students Union, is turned into a man who lives by night and alone, surviving on the blood of others. This long tale also shows what happens when he attempts to live again in the world, emerging from the darkness of his solitary vampireness.

Joyce Carol Oates, a master of the genre, contributes Fossil-Figures, a strange tale of two twin brothers. One is strong and healthy, a popular A-grader who will go into politics with his winning smile and winning ways; his brother is sickly, weak, a victim of his brother's avaricious greed in the womb, or so the narrative suggests. The twins grow up, their lives dissect, diverge, then ultimately come together. A quietly powerful story, yet there's gothic horror wrapped up in the package.

Violence and murder form the spine of a number of exceptional stories.

There's Neil Gaiman's The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, a story set some time ago in which two men set out in search of treasure, and yet mistrust will dog them and splinter through.

Lawrence Block's Catch and Release is equally chilling in its presentation of a serial killer, while Jeffrey Deaver's excellent The Therapist is a horrifying yet gripping tale of man in the vice of mental illness.

I loved the fantastical Goblin Lake by Michael Swanwick, in which a man journeys to the bottom of a lake, to emerge with truths and realisations about the nature of paths taken, and not taken.

Meanwhile the narrator in Kat Howard's A Life in Fictions suffers from the fact that her lover keeps writing her into his stories, and thus influencing the course of her own reality. A mind-bending story, and delicious in the telling.

Equally fun was Diana Wynne Jones's Samantha's Diary set in the year 2?, in which the young narrator Samantha writes wittily about a secret admirer who keeps sending her live birds, from swans to pigeons and a partridge or two.

Finally, I also thoroughly enjoyed Michael Moorcock's simply titled Stories in which the lives of a group of friends, from their 20s on to life in their 60s is told in simple language, language that swoops and falls from event to event.

A real delight.

Published The Star Tonight December 9 2010

Winter afternoons

2011-01-15T10:02:00.000-08:00

Winter afternoons the pink wall is
cold grey, the sun oblique, hiding,
you can feel the chill in the
shadows of the paint.
Even the leaves look cold.

Published in New Contrast, Summer 2010

New Year's Day 2011 at Utopia South Africa

2011-01-15T09:47:00.000-08:00

First day of the new year 2011 in the magical Utopia

Forthcoming publication from Dye Hard Press: The Edge of Things

2011-01-15T09:30:00.000-08:00

The Edge of Things is a special issue of Green Dragon, to be published by Dye Hard Press, and consists of 24 short stories selected by Arja Salafranca. The authors are Jayne Bauling, Arja Salafranca, Liesl Jobson, Gillian Schutte, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Jenna Mervis, Jennifer Lean, Fred de Vries, Margie Orford, Aryan Kaganof, Bernard Levinson, Hamilton Wende, Pravasan Pillay, Beatrice Lakwana, Hans Pienaar, Rosemund Handler, Tiah Beautement, Angelina N Sithebe, Jeanne Hromnik, David wa Maahlamela, Perd Booysen, Gail Dendy, Silke Heiss and Dan Wylie.

Publication is scheduled for March 2011.
More details to follow.

Review of The Thin Line - Joan Hambidge in Die Burger

2010-12-23T04:27:00.000-08:00

The Thin Line is ’n versameling kortverhale wat ’n mens eenvoudig nie kan neersit nie.
Arja Salafranca ondersoek die subtiele verbintenisse tussen mense, soos vroue wat saam koffiedrink, maar mekaar sonder woorde kritiseer, of, met giftige uitinge aanval; eksgeliefdes wat saamreis en in ’n vreemde landskap ontdek die verhouding werk nie meer nie, en sal nooit weer werk nie; ’n “verhouding” tussen twee mense wat liefdeloos is en tog uitloop op ’n desperate seksuele verkenning; ’n vrou wat haar manlike geliefde se eks-meisie seksueel begeer, najaag en ’n slot wat uitloop op ellende; ’n ondersoek na vetsug met ’n jong meisie wat haarself letterlik doodeet as die subteks . . Read more here

Short story short-listed for the Thomas Pringle Award

2010-12-06T23:51:00.000-08:00

My short story ' Strangers', published in New Contrast literaty journal in 2009, has been short-listed for the Thomas Pringle Award by the South African English Academy. Read more here

BookEx, Sandton Comvention Centre, Johannesburg, November 2010: Discussion panel on short fiction

2010-12-03T00:43:00.000-08:00

Arja Salafranca and Lauren Beukes

David Chislett and Arja Salafranca

David Chislett, Arja Salafranca and Lauren Beukes

From left: David Chislett, Arja Salafranca, Lauren Beukes, David Medalie and Louis Greenberg.

BookEx, Sandton Comvention Centre, Johannesburg, November 2010: Short fiction discussion panel

2010-12-03T00:37:00.001-08:00

From left: Arja Salafranca, David Chislett, Lauren Beukes, Louis Greenberg and David Medalie.

Photo: Helen Holyoake.

Nature proves you can step in the same river twice

2010-11-22T22:48:00.000-08:00

There's the old saying that you cannot step in the same river twice. It’s credited to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived from 540 BC to 480 BC and the full quote is: “You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

Meaning, of course, among many other explanations, that you can’t try and retrieve or recover the past – the current has flowed on, there is another sense at play, you are a different person, you cannot grab at the intangible, at what has been and is over.

I thought so, too. Recreated experiences fall flat and yet, I think, after several experiences this year, that you can succeed in nabbing back a bit of the past, and making sense of what has been.

The experience will be different, you look on with older eyes, perhaps less naive, and you must make peace with that. For you can step in the same river twice, and sometimes the experience is ultimately satisfying. I attended a 20-year school reunion earlier this year – and found that while we had all moved on, a different sort of connection was achieved and ultimately cemented.

A few weeks ago, I returned to Utopia. I first went there at the age of eight with a large crowd of adults and children. Set within the mountains of the Magaliesberg, there are more than 100 self-catering, rustic A-frame chalets dotted around the wild nature reserve.

A river runs through it, you can hike the nearby mountains, swim in the pool, play tennis near the clubhouse. The name Utopia is aptly chosen – it’s an idyll. And never more so than for an eight-year-old child running wild, swimming the river that’s flanked by dusty pink and golden rocks.

I’ve never forgotten my time there, through all the years and subsequent travels to other places and other continents, although I did not consciously plan to return.

But a few years ago I was asked to write a short story for an anthology, and the place came back in my imagination. It had been too long – the story didn’t gel, memory really had dimmed the tarnish and the details – but the seed had been born.

I had to go back. Instead I went overseas a handful of times, travelled around the country, and always the memory of Utopia remained, I even Googled it a few times.

But the idea had taken root and one day I was explaining this place called Utopia to a friend, telling her all about it. She interjected – she knew the place well and had been going since a decade before. She had bought one of the units with her husband.

A hushed silence followed this statement. A plan was born.

Weeks later, we made our way to Utopia for a weekend. As soon as we drove through he gates and I looked at those strange, almost eerie looking -frame homes, most constructed of stone mined from the area, and topped with charcoal wigs of hatch, I remembered. Entering her unit, the place simple in its usticity, views of mountain, bush, trees, I remembered.

We scrambled down to the river to swim after lunch, and there was the same road, undulating slabs of rocks, the deeply flowing river, the natural cool of water, darkly inviting. I remembered. I had stepped back in time in some strange way.

I had managed to step in the same river twice.

Yes, it was 30 years later, but memory had sustained me, vague and shimmery as it was. I really had stepped back into the same river twice, and found the same source, the same strength. There are times when you experience nature in ways that you can’t quite describe. Going to Death Valley in the US produced a similar feeling in me: a sense of awe, a sense of homecoming, a stillness, and also a deep longing to return to that place of parched landscape and salt flats.

Similarly, sitting on the rocks at Utopia, taking photographs of the clouds moving across the water, the green reeds shimmering hazily in reflection, I’d stepped back, and yet also forward.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, November 21, 2010)

Elephant back at Camp Jabulani

2010-11-22T22:17:00.001-08:00

We’re walking across a plain at night. I’m in a group consisting of 16 elephants and just as many people, visitors as well as elephant handlers. It has just grown dark and we’re ambling at an elephant’s pace through the veld at Kapama Game Reserve, which edges the Kruger National Park.

We’ve just passed a lion sitting majestically in the plain, watching as this procession of grown elephants, baby elephants and humans winds through the bush.

Flashlights illuminate the way, flicking constantly from side to side. Above us the Milky Way comes into view, obscured by the bright, nearly full moon.

There’s a canopy of stars above, almost like a blanket covering us. We move on, beyond the lion, the ground sloping gently upward. Ahead we see a herd of wildebeest, moving through the veld, ignoring us. On elephant-back we’re part of the veld, part of the world of the animals, part of something ancient, timeless and even nameless.

As we move through the night, on the way to the elephants’ stalls, I feel I’m lost in time, as if I’ve gone back thousands of years, before cars and technology, noise and light, rush and movement.

Back to the way humans used to move across the earth, on the backs of animals, on elephant, horses, mules, donkeys, following the slow rhythmic movement of the animals, going as fast as hooves would allow. There’s no rushing the process.

We will arrive when we arrive. It’s a slow procession across the land, walking and silence, almost a meditation. I’m reminded of Robyn Davidson’s excellent travel book Desert Plains, published in the mid-1990s, in which she travelled with the Rabari, a tribe of Indian nomads, riding camels as she had in her bestselling Tracks. Using an ancient form of transport – a slow form that guides and shapes your days in a way that is no longer available to us in everyday life.

Tonight I’m riding the female elephant Tokwe, named, like some of the elephants at Camp Jabulani, after rivers in Zimbabwe. She moves slowly, slower than the bull Mupfuri that I rode last night on a sunset ride.

As we move, I get a sense that she’s tired, somehow. Her baby, the male Limpopo, stays close by, occasionally breaking away to tear at branches to chomp along the way.

In fact, the noise of the elephants, tusks outstretched, reaching out to tear a tasty morsel of tree or branch, along with the quiet clumping along the path and the occasional murmuring of the other elephant riders, are the only sounds that accompany us as we move through the plain.

Arriving at the elephants’ stalls, we dismount, one by one. By riding elephants tonight, we have gone back centuries, we’ve reconnected with something we hadn’t been aware of previously.

We’re each of us moved in different ways. We exclaim excitedly as we dismount, “awesome, amazing, unbelievable” – the quotidian adjectives don’t do the experience justice, but they are all we have.

Once the elephants have been led into their stalls, Ian Crichton, the elephant master, takes us through and explains the differences in their personalities.

Fishun sports a big scar. He was treated by vets using the ramp that we use to mount the elephants. As such he’s developed a phobia about going near the mounts, and cannot be ridden.

“So, he’s just a freeloader, doing his own thing,” jokes Crichton affectionately.

We’re led to Tokwe, the elephant I rode tonight, which, Crichton says, is a type of mother aunt to the other baby elephants, which often cluster around her during the day.

Most heartbreaking is the plight of Kumbura, an orphaned elephant, which has no mother, and when she needs protection, none of the other elephants shelter her as she doesn’t “belong” to them. Instead she takes refuge under the powerful presence of Jabulani, after whom the camp is named. We cluck sympathetically.

Other elephants don’t like being touched and as Crichton leads us outside, I’m struck by the differences in personalities and temperaments between the 17.

Then there’s Joe, absent Joe, who took off one day, deciding that he didn’t want to live in the stalls, and left to join a wild herd. The camp owners have respected his decision.

Camp Jabulani is all about the elephants, and respecting their needs and wishes, explains Crichton. The camp itself, a luxury lodge, is named after one of the elephants, Jabulani, and the herd at the camp were saved from death.

Jabulani was the first to be rescued, in 1997. As a four-month-old, Jabulani arrived at the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre. Dehydrated, he’d been abandoned by his herd and been found stuck in the mud of a silt dam. It took a year for him to recover.

In 2002 the Roode family, who have been involved in conservation since the 1970s, heard about the plight of 12 elephants in Zimbabwe. The owners of the farm in that country were having their land expropriated and the elephants faced death. The Roodes set off for Zimbabwe, returning with the elephants, and amazingly Jabulani was immediately accepted by this new herd.

Camp Jabulani was created with the aim of supporting these elephants and offering the opportunity of interacting with them as well as riding them.

Says Adine Roode, managing director at Camp Jabulani: “Should I have had a choice and if it was easy to release domesticated elephants into the wild, it would have been an option to release these elephants, but unfortunately it was not possible. We were able to save the animals from a gruesome death and at this stage we provide safaris to sustain the operation by giving guests an experience.”

On the safety of the rides, she says: “The time of the day doesn’t really have an effect on the safety aspect for the elephant-back safaris. I’m more of the opinion that the experience of the handlers is of paramount importance.”

The handlers came with the elephants from Zimbabwe and have 30-plus years of experience. Each elephant has its own personality and the handlers have to interpret their moods.

“Elephants have a lot of similarities to humans and their emotions must be respected and understood by us. The amount of time the handlers spend with the elephants is vital as this creates a bond and trust between the two,” says Roode.

“Our senior grooms are on th e ground overseeing proceedings and have a wonderful relationship with the elephants. We would not be able to continue such an operation without these handlers.”

We leave the elephants in their stalls for the night, heading back to the lodge for supper. Although it has been a full day, we remain energised, the remarkable stories of the elephants, of their distinct differences, their rescue and the creation of a camp remain with us as we sit down for dinner.

This will be our last interaction with the elephants before we go home the following morning.

An equally remarkable sunset elephant-back ride had been our introduction to the rides, starting in the golden light of late afternoon the previous day.

We also pay a visit to the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre where Jabulani had first been brought as a dehydrated baby. The centre, in Hoedspruit, rehabilitates and cares for injured and orphaned animals and is dedicated to the survival of rare and endangered species, especially the cheetah.

On arrival we watch a DVD which explains the work of the centre.

At the curio shop I buy a paw print cr eated by a playful cub. A drive around the centre introduces us to wild dogs yipping excitedly for their food, allows us to stroke an ambassador cheetah and park expectantly in front of the “vulture restaurant”, where a rotting smell of old meat and bones comes from the pit. This is a concrete rectangle filled with old as well as new bones, a veritable orgy of death.

The vultures gather, the student volunteers drive up and tip kilos of meat in and the vultures roar in, a spectacular, swirling mass of feathers in browns, greys, beiges, a whirlpool of birds feasting.

On the last morning before going back to Joburg – a five-hour drive – we opt for a quick, lateish game drive.

Our last, spectacular sighting is of a leopard perched high in a tree, camouflaged by the golden yellow colours of the leaves. It is a rare, elusive, a prize sighting.

Next to our game-drive vehicle, a large lion lies sleeping in the sun. Our ranger surmises that the lion would have chased the far smaller leopard up the tree as both big cats compete for food, resources and, ultimately, territory. It may be a long wait before the leopard can come down.

The sun climbs high in the sky, it gets hotter, and we take off in a roar of petrol, noise, urgency and haste.

We drive off but the ending to this story hasn’t yet been told, it’s still somewhere out there in the future, unknown.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, November 21)

At the launch of Ingrid Andersen's Peace Work and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers' The Everyday Wife at Love Books, Melville

2010-11-18T23:29:00.000-08:00

Eyes wide open: Gay in Jerusalem

2010-11-18T22:39:00.000-08:00

Sset within the cloistered community of an Orthodox Jewish world in Jerusalem, Eyes Wide Open is a quietly tragic film about the devastating effect of homosexuality on the lives of its two Jewish protagonists.

Aaron Fleishman (Zohar Shtrauss) takes over the family kosher butchery after his father dies. A married father of four, he’s a sombre, silent man who spends his mostly solitary days in the grim-looking shop. It’s a grimy place, washed over in cold fluorescent light which throws an unforgiving glow over all.

Life changes irrevocably when a young Yeshiva student, Ezri (Ran Danker), enters the butchery and becomes his assistant. The two are immediately drawn towards each other – and the concept and its consequences is a frightening one, especially for Aaron, who is married and a pillar of his community.

Ezri, it could be said, is just passing through. There will be consequences for him too, but they are lesser, he can move on.

Love plays itself out in this cold, harsh-looking shop, taking place in a room above with its sagging bed and peeling ceiling, or in the depths of the vast fridge below. With dead meat hanging from hooks in the ceiling, you can just about smell the decay of the carcasses and it’s not hard to make the leap to the metaphor filmmaker Haim Tabakman implies in this film.

There’s stagnation and death, and seemingly no solution, or proper outlet, for the love the two men feel for each other.

In an interview, Tabakman has commented that “religious people do not consider homosexuality a sin, it just does not exist. So how can you deal with it if somewhere it is written that it does not exist? To them, it’s just an evil urge. Being homosexual is like a disease that you can easily get rid of. It cannot be part of a human being’s essence.”

Eyes Wide Open takes us into the very heart of the Orthodox community, a world of conformity and compromise. From the butchery, to the small narrow streets of old Jerusalem, to the stifling confines of a flat that is too small to contain the family and this momentous series of events.

We watch as Aaron and his wife Rivka (Tinkerbel) eat a plain supper together, the children in bed, the silence lying in shafts between them. It’s clear that Rivka knows only too well what’s taking place between the two men.

When Aaron and Ezri go off to a small dam, finally away from prying eyes, swimming together, there’s a sense of a breath of fresh air, of freedom, albeit fettered and brief. While the butchery is an unforgiving cold place, the dam is bathed in a stark, azure beauty.

Secrets will out in this small, tightly-knit world, and the community is outraged. Things cannot continue as they are. Aaron and his lover Ezri will be forced to choose.

Watching the choices being made is harrowing – the film keeps you on a knife’s edge and is a gripping piece of narration. This is a bold, compelling film which casts a hard, judgmental light on the world of orthodox Jews, and its truths make for unsettling viewing.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, Novemver 14 2010)

Writing in pictures brings daily life into crisp focus - Tanya Farber

2010-11-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

Local award-winning writer Arja Salafranca has been brewing a collection of short stories over the years, and recently it came together in its collected form as The Thin Line. Luckily for the reader, not an ounce of pretentiousness got thrown into the pot along the way, and the result is a subtle yet gently haunting literary experience.

Salafranca's style in this collection is best described as cinematic. Each story plays out like a camera lingering on minutiae which, brought together, tell the reader a great deal about the characters and situations which form the subject matter.

"The earliest story was written when I was 18," she says, "and though I have written and published a number of short stories since then, there has been a lot of culling and pruning of my material."

The most striking - and refreshing - aspect of this collection is that it bears no trace of the albatross that many South African writers find tethered to their neck: the burden of our past, the issue of "representation", and the pitfalls of stereotyping and political correctness.

Salafranca casts all that aside in favour of an unashamed microcosmos of experiences. There is no attempt to be "definitively" South African.

"As a short story writer, I don't have a responsibility to show how awful society is or can be," she says. "But if someone changes how they think for having read it, then that is simply the beauty of writing."

She says local writers should never tell themselves that they need to send out a message. The mission, instead, is to move someone.

"If politics or a comment on society or the law comes into my stories, it is by the way," she explains.

And that is precisely why the collection makes for such thought-provoking reading: one is able to delve into the subtle detail of atmosphere, character and feeling without being bashed over the head with didactics.

Even in a story such as "A Car is a Weapon", Salafranca deals with the issue of fake drivers' licences, but at the heart of the story is the characters and the moral dilemmas that are thrown up, and Salafranca avoids lacing the text with her own opinion on the issue.

In terms of the process of her writing, she is often inspired by a photograph or an image in her mind. From there, the story develops a life of its own.

"When I start writing a story, I have an image in my mind. I usually know how it's going to end, but not how I'm going to get there."

Judging from the nature of each story, it appears that that image in her mind is usually the main character in clear focus, with a blurred background which slowly comes into sharp focus itself as the plot moves forward.

"The characters come through the story but it's not a conscious thing," she says.

In A Man Sits in a Johannesburg Park, for example, the story opens with a cinematic description of a man and his dog: "A man sits in a Johannesburg park on a late summer's afternoon. He releases the lead attached to his spaniel's collar and she bounds off to sniff trees and play near the river, perhaps the dog will even go for a swim again."

From here, the story gently rolls open to reveal a dilemma about emigration, and as this happens, the image of the man on the park bench acquires more meaning.This story, as well as the others, depict what Salafranca describes as the way in which we experience other people in our daily lives.

"You arrive in someone's daily life as you meet them for coffee, for example," she says, "and then after an hour or two you are apart and encountering someone else. You don't first come across their background information. You meet them during a slice of your life and it is a slice of their life too."

In terms of the publishing process, she says it is challenging for an unknown writer to get a collection of short stories published as there is "an assumption that you should get your novel out first".

But, she says, when booksellers say that short stories do not sell, the downfall is in the marketing.

"We have to throw short stories at the public the way we threw South African literature at the public a short while back. We were shown how great it was to read about ourselves."

She says she has heard it takes most people approximately three weeks to finish a book.

"Why not spend those three weeks with a short story book?" she asks, adding that in our busy lives, there is the advantage of dipping in and out of different stories.

If you agree with that philosophy, or are tempted to do so, The Thin Line is an essential read.

Published in The Star and Pretoria News, October 28 2010.

At Hoedspruit with cheetah

2010-10-23T03:01:00.000-07:00

Venise Germanos and Arja Salafranca, September 2010, Hoedspruit