After our lunch at The Company’s Garden Restaurant on a windswept February afternoon earlier this year, a writer I looked up to greeted me with the words: “This is the last time you will see me.” Then she got up, nonchalantly, and meandered into the greenery outside.
I was taken aback, but a part of me understood that she wasn’t being flippant at all. This was her way of not making a fuss about a farewell, which I now realise was what that moment was. I’m grateful I could say goodbye to a writer who influences the way I write to this day.
Zoë Wicomb is an incomparable South African author, praised by literary legends at home as well as abroad. Her debut collection of short fiction, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, was called “seductive, brilliant, and precious” by none other than Toni Morrison, and local Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee lauded her debut novel, David’s Story, as a step towards redefining the South African novel post apartheid.
Her storytelling also made her a wildly entertaining guest at dinner parties.
I can confidently claim this because I had the honour and tremendous pleasure of meeting her during a short fiction writing workshop through the Jakes Gerwel Foundation. She was the writer in residence for the 2024 Kommadagga residency at Paulet House in KwaNojoli.
There, she waltzed into the house of stories, and into my life, with unabashed curiosity in the world around her, as if she weren’t the most interesting person around. The other writers and I were introduced to her and tried our best at pleasantries and polite questions that were all very literary and learned. It took only days for hilarity to ensue as she regaled us with outlandish – yet completely believable – stories from her life and travels, sparred with us over writing and reading more intentionally, and routinely threatened us with the task of making a sourdough starter after dinner and wine, of course.
(Each morning at breakfast, we would lament the fact that no progress had been made towards this collective goal whatsoever.)
Paulet House somehow straddles a realm between the Eastern Cape and a Studio Ghibli film. The personnel and my fellow writers seemed to have stepped out of the pages of books in their favourite genres. In this strange, little town, everyone appeared larger than life. At first, the writer in residence during our time at the house of stories existed as just another character in this place.
To me, she only came into full focus during one-on-one sessions where we discussed and edited one of our own short stories. Up until that moment, her wit and unedited stream-of-consciousness-like conversation reminded me of Dame Maggie Smith’s iconic Dowager Countess of Grantham. When we got to work, her attention to detail and her intuitive engagement with text were equally as impressive as her penchant for jokes and “making whoopee”. Together, we pored over every line of a story I had written. With every probe and query, a new layer of meaning came to light, more questions than I had thought to ask while writing arrived, and her keen eye for style ingrained in me a courteous yet careful approach to editing – be it my own work or that of others.
She loved stories and took those of others seriously – something which opened a world of literary living for me. With complete earnestness, she climbed into the nooks and crannies of a short story I wrote about two young boys discovering their love for each other. I would blush at the obvious grammatical mistakes or sentence-level problems she would point out, but then feel my chest puffing as she remarked on the tenderness of the relationship between two characters I made up. Her mentorship reminded me that writers need to cultivate both the skill of creative writing as well as a respect for the work of fiction.
Our stay in Paulet House gave me many stories to remember her by. She framed short fiction in literary theory and told us about her grandchildren. She danced to Mama Africa after one particularly festive dinner and talked about the great wordsmiths of Ireland. She spoke of her reluctance to attend big social gatherings, but nevertheless sported a feather in her hair for our Halloween party. She would chase away cows grazing in the gardens, then come back to finish a story about how she once got into a fight at a club in San Francisco.
After leaving Paulet House, and after wrestling with a sourdough starter under duress for months, I made good on her suggestion that we meet when she was back in the country. Before our last meeting in the Company’s Garden, we found each other in Sea Point, where I presented her with a loaf of sourdough I had taken out of the oven not an hour earlier. My nature is more sentimental than many I know, but I wanted this encounter to make her realise what an impact she has had on me, as a writer and as a person who writes. The way she stopped to thank me for the gesture makes me think that she understood.
I will miss her stories, but I will miss her telling them even more.
Written by Tiaan Booyens (La Grange), who attended the 2024 Kommadagga residency with reseident writer Zoë Wicomb.
