Writers who have inspired me

My writing no doubt reflects a gathering of influences, many of which I am probably not even aware. Influences can be very deeply buried. So this is a short and highly selective account.

As I mentioned in my Introduction, after I left South Africa I immersed myself in literature from the African continent. Some of those works had a profound impact on me as a reader. Even though I only began writing many years later, something of their effect must have remained. There were the autobiographical accounts of childhood by Mphahlele (Down Second Avenue) and Peter Abrahams (Tell Freedom) that hit me in the gut as a white South African who had grown up so oblivious of the every day brutality experienced by black South African children. Once imagined, through print, how could I ever forget the terrible injustice of the uncle beating the little boy Lee at the behest of the white farmer in Tell Freedom? Because the child hadn’t said ‘Baas’. Abrahams wrote so simply, directly, vividly. The dialogue brought his people into my room, into my head. I marvel at the apparent simplicity of such dramatic storytelling that can engage young and old. I unconsciously aimed for that kind of simplicity in Journey to Jo’burg. I know that to write with that kind of directness and sharpness is more difficult than it appears.

The South African writer and Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer has spoken and written about ‘witness literature’ as ‘a genre of circumstance or time and place’ (‘Testament of the Word’, London: The Guardian Review, 15.06.02). She records how, even as a child, she tried to find the meaning in what she saw by transforming it into stories based on everyday incidents of ordinary life. Her writing style is often complex and layered: the opposite of what I admire in Tell Freedom. Yet she too is a writer whose work I respect enormously. What connects her to Abrahams and a host of African writers is her commitment to witness the ordinary incidents that reveal individual characters and their umbilical connection to the fabric of the society. This is what rivetted me in the work of writers like Achebe, Ngugi and the playwright Fugard. ‘Details make a world’, says Gordimer. She is right. As a writer, I have to learn constantly to observe and to know which details are key.

Finally, in this partial account, I owe words to the great American short story writer Flannery O’Connor who advises us that character should control action and action should reveal character. What a great yardstick for editing!

Read more... Publications