3 South African Women Authors to Read and Know.
South Africa boasts a literary talent that stretches across generations, cultures and class divides. Our cultural diversity, our painful but beautiful complex history, our continual questioning of self-identity and relationships necessitated by social and political forces, and our collective work to heal and integrate have created the perfect conditions for storytelling talent to emerge.
Three South African Women Writers to Read & Know.
We are a nation of wounded healers and, at the helm, exist a litany of women and femme writers and storytellers determined to find ways to communicate their experience. Our literary publishing and marketing infrastructure is limited compared to what writers in more economically developed nations have access to. Yet, despite the odds stacked against them, these writers continue their work, knowing that writing is about so much more than the creation of a published book. It is also about reclaiming the story and narrative disintegrated by the Story imposed on us by history.
The result of this strange combination of forces is that it is not so easy to discover and access the work of many of our most talented writers. But if you are willing to put in some extra effort to find them, you’ll discover gems of books and stories, cross-cultural innovations with language, and treasure coves of insight into the nature of being human — made all the more special because you have found what few have been brave enough to begin searching for.
Inside this blog - I’ve begun the process for you, in celebration of Women’s Day, by seeking out 3 women authors working across 3 different literary forms: poetry, short story and long-form fiction.
What unites and connects these authors is not that they are women but rather, their devotion to sitting with the questions and using language and story in a way that does not simplify or reduce truth and complexity but rather dives straight into the nuance, details, paradox and uncertainty. By doing so, they are able to see themselves more clearly in a way that allows us — the readers — to also see ourselves more clearly.
Author: Sindiswa Busuku-Mathesa
Form: Poetry Anthology
Title: Loud and Yellow Laughter
Publisher: Botsotso, 2016
Link to Purchase Book: Clarke’s Bookstore, Cape Town
Excerpt:
“A Fragment from Mother;
for the girl child, b. 1990[… I GAVE YOU TO HIM because he could give you all the things I couldn’t. He could teach you things I’ve never heard of. He could teach you how to listen and enjoy his jazz music. He could teach you about history and all his wars. How to eat gracefully with a knife and fork. He could teach you to speak English. Not my kind of English, his English. I knew that if you had that kind of clean, clear English, you would do better than me. Good English opens doors. People take you seriously when you speak, the way you speak, they listen to you, to the clarity of your English, they are impressed by it and pay attention to it. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you. I don’t think I could have given it to you. That’s why I gave you to him…]”
Author: Jo-Anne Bekker
Form: Short Story Collection
Title: Awake, Asleep, Awake
Publisher: Modjaji Books, 2019
Link to Purchase Book: Bridge Books, Johannesburg
Excerpt:
“Amnesia, pg 61: She loses the words she writes down. They travel from head to hand and fall from her fingers. She is a gardener sweeping up the words that mouths release, raking up the sentences of lawyers and academics. She collects a pile of words and sentences then chooses just a few to display. Once they have been planted in print they leave her. Decades later she finds her reports on a civil conflict, reads them as if for the first time…”
Author: C.A. Davids
Form: Longform Fiction
Title: The Blacks of Cape Town
Publisher: Modjaji Books, 2013
Link to Purchase Book: Abe Books, Online Wholesaler
Excerpt:
“Chapter 14, pg 89-90, There was an unseasonal downpour during a Cape Town summer. That is how the story began. Still, the garden must have worn its loveliness in the overlapping bougainvilleas, Frangipani trees dropping white and yellow blossoms, and an orchard of fruit trees. It was late November, school had closed for the year and the girls in the family had decided to host readings of their favourite books in the garden, inviting their neighbors to join them. Many of those who were invited arrived, not so much for the readings, as Zara could surmise so many years later, but because it was the only house on the street where fruit could be picked from the trees and where pots of tea made their way around the crowd while home-baked cakes were offered by the lovely Black sisters. ‘We were cultured…’ Rose insisted, about those days. ‘The rest of the country was struggling, defying government regulations and you lot were reading in the garden, gazing north…’ Amy demurred sulkily. ‘And I suppose you think the whole country was always suffering. Even the oppressed laughed! And we brought brightness to those spinsters lives. And, your Aunty Jean married an Adams boy - that was how they met…’”
One of the devastating impacts of Apartheid is that it dehumanized the other and reduced every complex, individual person to a set of characteristics that could be classified, grouped and organized into trajectories that dictated their potential for self-actualisation. Agency, will and self-determination were completely removed from the equation within this system.
The other devastating impact, too, of a young, traumatized democracy, with so much pressure and visibility created by international campaigns and Mandela’s near-religious idolification, is that while the world looked on to see if we could be the first nation to navigate such a major social and political transition without bloodshed, it simultaneously assigned us a story that we, ourselves, were not yet ready to verify. Since this story was also sellable at scale, it continued gathering force and momentum. And, it continues to this day:
This is black. This is white. This is hero. This is villain. This is perpetrator, this is oppressed. This is what success looks like. And here, this is what failure looks like.
What about the middle? The glorious messy middle?
We are not just a nation of black and white people. Within categorized power structures of organising bodies exist large, mystical, expansive, interdependent internal worlds. People with dreams, hopes, ideals, desires and disappointments. Each containing a glorious vastness of experience, interpretation, insight, tension, paradox, mixed heritage and mixed bags of affordances and disaffordances.
The authors that I am celebrating today — I am not celebrating because they are women, or because the holiday demands it. I am celebrating them because they are so much more than “gender.” They are writers who have shown up to the work, day after day, arriving at their desks and grappling with the wounds of the unseen. Finding the courage to source joy, devotion, pleasure. To sit with complexity. To tell the stories that resist easy answers.
This is the work of care.
And in doing the work of caring for the complexity of their own experience, they create space for us to care for the complexity of ours.
That, too, is what stories can do.
The Invitation
We are a community of wandering writers across the world with roots in Cape Town.
We are readers and writers. Thinkers, feelers and explorers. We come together every Tuesday midday (SA), ONLINE to explore a new literary concept, device or challenge, complete a writing exercise, and encounter a new book, film or piece of sonic or visual art.
If this sounds like your kind of conversation, come join us. Link to join: Creative Writing in Cape Town Community Chat
