The Comment Factory

Gillian Slovo

It has been said that we can’t write about others without writing about ourselves; that all good characters somehow have written into them those parts of the author that might otherwise go unexplored. In this way, as Henry Miller writes, fiction offers the author emancipatory possibilities as “the purely personal element is resolved into the universal.” In the same way, Gillian Slovo’s novel Red Dust, which deals with the pain of post-apartheid South Africa, was born, she once said, “out of my grave-side realization that if the country would not leave me alone, then I would have to face it.” In reading her work (twelve works of fiction, a play and memoir to date), it therefore becomes necessary to run any attempt at understanding it alongside her own personal story.

Born in 1952 in South Africa to anti-apartheid activists Ruth First and Joe Slovo, she grew up in an atmosphere of uncertainty and secrecy, a witness to the inexplicable phone calls, clandestine meetings and sudden trips abroad which defined her parents’ lives. When her mother was murdered by a letter bomb in Maputo in 1982, she waited over a decade before the identity of her killer was confirmed during the trials held by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 1995, shortly after he had been made Minister for Housing for the ANC under Nelson Mandela, her father died of cancer. In the wake of his death, at the age of forty-three, Slovo learnt of his involvement in several armed struggles, an on-going affair, and the existence of a half-brother.

It is no surprise then when she tells me that “one of the main things I concentrate on in writing fiction is the struggle to find truth – of my story, my characters, the things I choose to say.” Indeed, both truth and secrecy feature heavily in her writing. Like Nabakov’s butterflies, they are returned to almost compulsively, her characters relentlessly investigating, questioning, uncovering, discovering. Much of her early work employs the crime genre as a means of facilitating this exploration. “The detective form I used is all about uncovering secrets and truths, but even the novels that followed had a thread of the uncovering of secrets running through them,” she says.

These threads do not run through abstract plot lines but, rather, are embedded in ones that are deeply personal. Her 1993 novel Façade, is about a daughter born to famous parents investigating the truth about her mother’s death and her father’s involvement in international aid. Red Dust, published in 2000, tells of several characters’ confrontation with their past as they search for answers at the hearings of the Truth Commission. In reading these books in tandem with her memoir, Every Secret Thing, it is hard not to feel a sense of unfinished business lingering in this process. In fact, much of her early writing seems to contain an implicit expression of pain at things left unsolved — and a harnessing of fiction as a means to explore this through transferring the anxiety onto her characters, whose troubles and problems are also frequently left unsolved. Is writing a cathartic process for her, I wonder; does it have therapeutic value? “Writing makes me think in more detail about the subject of my writing,” she says, “and in that way can change the way I see things — which could, perhaps, be seen as having therapeutic value.” However, she resists my suggestion of catharsis, she says, because “that seems to assume the aim is to find an end that changes and explains all. I think good writing doesn’t look for tied up ends. And I care deeply about the words I’m layering down and spend so much time concentrating on them that catharsis goes out the window.”

As a daughter of two notorious political figures, another – perhaps inevitable — focus of Slovo’s writing is that of private lives becoming entangled in a public world. Her novels deal with characters caught up in events over which they have little or no control, and their ensuing struggle to make some meaning from them – a kind of intimate political commentary. Such complexities seem to make up multiple shades of grey in comparison to the stark tones of her parents’ rhetoric. But is there a space for fiction within the political sphere? Can it affect social change? “It can in the sense of teaching us to think more deeply about what it means to be human as well as looking at the way others live and strive for their humanity,” she says. “Political change is also about understanding the ‘other’ and this, often, is what fiction explores.” In another sense, however, she feels that the potential of the novel is compromised by making its intentions purely persuasive: “I would veer away from ever aiming to write a book that makes people think in one particular way – that, to me, is less like fiction and more like propaganda.”

The emergence of Tribunal theatre – of which Slovo’s play Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom remains a defining part – provided a means to negotiate this path between fiction and propaganda, and find a place where art and politics could comfortably sit together. “Whilst Guantanamo contains many of the themes that I had previously used in my novels – the themes of powerlessness, the impact of the past, the meaning of justice. The words in the play were the words of our interviwees rather than mine. My job was to structure the narrative rather than write the dialogue — it was a challenge but also a really interesting thing to do — to describe a journey I had made by using other peoples’ words.” It pays tribute to her ability to negotiate these two realms that, along with other plays such as Half the Picture, Guantanamo has been credited with helping to accessibly re-politicize theatre. “I think Guantanmo came out at a perfectly timed moment,” she tells me, “when people wanted to know more about what was going on in more detail, and with more feeling, than they could get in the papers. In that way I think it had impact. And also in the way that it was put on in many US cities, including New York, Washington DC, Chicago and San Francisco and also, in readings by many, many community groups which meant the issue was more in the forefront of peoples’ minds.”

From detective novel to memoir to political theater, Slovo’s latest piece of writing, Black Orchids, is best described as a literary novel: slower, more grownup somehow than her earlier work, and more concerned with the interior world of her characters than the events beyond them. “Generally, I think the major change in my writing is to be, over the years, less concerned with plot, and more concerned with character,” she says. “Good writing is what increasingly engages me. So I am less interested in rushing to the last page, than in just enjoying the journey.”