This brings us to another topic that fascinates me about writing ideas. Do you think that they exist somehow in the nanosphere? That there’s an element of clairvoyance about them? Often you discover that writers of the same era, even of different backgrounds, would publish a book almost at the same time that tackles a similar idea. Like with white South African writers recently, especially male writers, there seems to be this need to reckon with their experiences during the apartheid military conscription era. You find this, for instance, in Etienne van Heerden’s book, A library to flee. The same applies in Damon Galgut’s The promise and Mark Winkler’s Due south of Copenhagen. I am sure they also didn’t conspire to tackle that topic, yet it is there, perhaps as a need to cleanse themselves of apartheid demons. Where do writers get the ideas they write about?
SN: As writers, we do not live in a vacuum or silo, so we are all tapping into the universe, which is teeming with ideas which no one writer has a monopoly over. The distinguishing factor comes with the skill and temerity with which a writer uses these ideas to tell a compelling story. That said, we are all a product of our environment, there is no escaping it. Which is why you will often find these contentious topics of apartheid, colonialism and racism all permeating our writing.
I recently read a review by Karl Gostner, who had read Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Futhi Ntshingila’s They got to you too and my An angel’s demise. The three books are set in different locations at different times, yet Karl was able to infer a similarity in the way we dealt with the complexity of humanity, and that we “might be psychics reading the world’s soul, their words telling us of our desires, or perhaps they are clairvoyants telling us of a world that is emerging”. This statement echoes your above assertion, and I am starting to think that there is an element of clairvoyance when it comes to writing. The more I listen to writers narrating their writing experiences and talking about channelling voices and energies and characters who come to visit them, the more it makes me feel like there is a supernatural element in the process.
I recall that in my earlier drafts of An angel’s demise, Simphiwe died after giving birth, but that character wouldn’t let me rest; she was like, I need to be alive, you can’t kill me now. When I had revised her – the best decision ever – her storyline took me down to the liberation struggle. So, there is something to be said about the voices in our head as we write. I recall a conversation with Zachariah Rapola, who won a Noma Award for his debut novel, Beginnings of a dream, in 2008. He told me he was in a trance when he wrote that book. He has never been able to write a follow-up book. So, you might be on to something there with the clairvoyance streak!
Yes. I quickly googled and read the piece. It speaks of what I am saying, that writers are not just, in Shelley’s parlance, unacknowledged legislators of the world; but, in what might sound like biblical and religious language, they become prophets and priests. I am fascinated by these psychic tendencies among certain writers, as if there were an omniscient universal spirit guiding them into becoming a conscience of the world.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a South African author living in Cape Town. His debut novel The Broken River Tent won the University of Johannesburg Debut Novel Prize in 2019. He worked with the drama department of Rhodes University on two plays he wrote for the South African National Arts Festival about Maqoma and his half-brother Sandile, both of whom had been Xhosa chiefs. He has a passionate interest in South Africa’s frontier history and the wars of land dispossession. His most recent novel The Wanderers was published in 2021.
