{"id":2830,"date":"2019-10-16T11:50:18","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T11:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2830"},"modified":"2019-10-16T12:05:19","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T12:05:19","slug":"interview-with-petina-gappah-novelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2830","title":{"rendered":"“Fiction gets us to look at truths that politics can’t get at”: Interview with Petina Gappah"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Anya Pearson interviews Petina Gappah, Zimbabwean novelist and lawyer, whose first book <\/em>An Elegy for Easterly<\/a> was shortlisted for the 2010 Orwell book prize.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A powerful collection of human stories set against a backdrop of corruption and hypocrisy in Zimbabwe, <\/em>An Elegy for Easterly won the Guardian First Book Award and was one of the very few works of fiction that did well in the original combined Orwell prize for fiction and politics  \u2013 the only novel to win was Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s <\/em>Moses, Citizen and Me. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the tenth birthday of <\/em>An Elegy for Easterly, and a few months ahead of the UK release of her upcoming book <\/em>Out of Darkness, Shining Light, Gappah reflects on her country\u2019s socio-political transformation, the influence of Orwell on her writing, and the enduring power of fiction to reveal the truth. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hi, Petina. In\nAn Elegy for Easterly,<\/em> many of your characters are striving to escape\nthe grips of circumstance. Looking back over all the characters in the book,\nwho do you think is now the happiest, ten years later?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I think M\u2019dhara\nVitalis, the guy who danced himself to death, is probably the happiest because\nhe’s well out of it, right?! In my subsequent short story collection, Rotten\nRow<\/em>, I flesh out some of the minor characters that appear in An Elegy\nfor Easterly.<\/em> So M\u2019dhara Vitalis\u2019s biggest dance competitor appears there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When writing, how do you metabolise your lived experiences into fiction? What is the process? <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I try to give\nall my characters an aspect of myself to make them more real. Josephat\u2019s first\nwife doesn’t have the same level of education as I do. She’s not a lawyer. She\nprobably hasn’t travelled beyond Harare. But I like the bible, for instance, so\nI made her a very strong Christian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The music of Oliver Mtukudzi, the Zimbabwean musical legend who sadly died earlier this year, feels like the unofficial soundtrack in An Elegy for Easterly<\/em>. <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I’m so glad you say that, because each one of my four books is animated by a different soundtrack. An Elegy for Easterly<\/em> was very much about the Sungura sound<\/a> of the 1980s to early 2000s. It\u2019s is a type of music that’s found only in Zimbabwe. Songs go on for seven minutes, and four minutes of that is just the guitar going ‘da-na-da-na!’ There’s a lot of hardship, poverty, ‘woe is me, woe is us’. But it’s all very danceable!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mtukudzi’s\nlyrics are political, but they’re kind of subtle, emotional messages. <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

People have tried to make Oliver more of a political activist but he always resisted that. He writes about things that affect everybody, no matter what your politics are. His songs are about societal breakdown, marriage breakdown, and unhappiness<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He very different from Thomas Mapfumo<\/a>, who had to leave Zimbabwe because he sang against corruption and poor governments. Oliver wanted his songs to be a uniting force. One of the books I am hoping to write is about Mtukudzi as an undeclared poet laureate of Zimbabwe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is An\nElegy for Easterly<\/em> a political novel, or would you resist that\ncategorisation?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I can see\nthat it would be read as political, and I have no problem with that. But it\nwasn’t intended to be political. It came into a world where people were talking\nabout the politics of Zimbabwe and there hadn’t been any books that had broken\ninternationally that could have humanised those politics. I just wrote stories\nI wanted to tell about this collapsing country that I loved very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think\nthat fiction can have a special impact that is different from other kinds of\npolitical writing? <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Absolutely. I\nthink fiction gets us to look at truths that politics can’t always get at.\nPolitics is sometimes about taking sides. But one of the things that I\nchallenged myself to do is to try and take the side of people whose politics I\ndon’t agree with. In my second story collection, Rotten Row,<\/em> the very\nfirst story is from the hangman. I am opposed to the death penalty, but I\nwanted as an exercise in empathy to put myself in the shoes of somebody whose\njob it is to kill people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love Orwell’s idea of political writing as a work of art. Dorian Lynsky\u2019s The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984<\/a><\/em> <\/a>is probably the most literary biography of Orwell that’s ever been written. I believe very strongly that fiction can \u00ad\u2013 a very fancy word \u2013 illumen politics in a much more humanising way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While writing\nAn Elegy,<\/em> were you wary of being read as polemical about social\njustice issues? How did you get around that, if so?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I’m very wary\nof being seen as a polemicist, especially because just recently I’ve been\nworking for the government, made up of some of the same people I criticised! I\nwas not writing against Zimbabwe, but out of a love for it. Being a critic of\nyour government is a form of patriotism. My writing was driven by a desire to\nsee us do better, not just in politics, but also in how we treat each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u2018My cousin-sister Rambanai\u2019, Rambanai comes back from America to Harare in the early 2000s and asks: “Where are all the luxury shops? Where are all the restaurants?” You write: \u201cHer Zimbabwe was frozen in 1997, the year she left. Hers had been a country of money to burn… fast cars, and party after party\u201d. What are your thoughts on that political moment in mid-1990s Zimbabwe, looking back?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

It was an odd\ntime. On the one side, there was the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme,\nwhich was creating severe hardship. But this was Zimbabwe when it was really\nbooming \u2013 before the land invasions started \u2013 when there were tourists coming\nin from all over the world and we were not yet indebted to China. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was\nreflected in the multicultural nature of Harare. Especially if you were as\nprivileged as Rambanai was, your Zimbabwe was a country of parties and fun. It\nseemed as though you could have any type of future that you wanted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are\nstrands of Orwell-inspired writing in An Elegy for Easterly.<\/em> In \u2018At the Sound\nof the Last Post\u2019 a widow talks about the secrets in the life of her dead\nhusband, a public figure. \u201cOnly the official truth matters, only that truth\nwill be handed down through the history books… The injustices of the past\nhave been redressed to consolidate the gains of the liberation struggle\u201d. Does\ntelling the truth matter to you beyond all else?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Orwell talks about\npropaganda to great effect in 1984<\/em>. This idea of manufacturing facts to\nsuit a particular purpose was very prescient now we live in the era of fake\nnews. In Zimbabwe we even have a Ministry for Information. This idea that\ninformation can be managed and massaged is very chilling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I think manipulating\nthe truth can only go so far. Zimbabwe is now opening up to the world, yet the state\nmedia are still very much wedded to the same narrative. And it’s making them\nlook more and more ridiculous. When you say there are no soldiers out on the\nstreet, and people have footage of soldiers on their mobile phone, you know\nit’s lies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s apparent\nthat the colonial legacy is very much still there for some of your characters, for\nexample the grandmother in the Maid from Lalapanzi who still calls Harare its\ncolonial name, Salisbury. You write: \u201cIndependence was a reality that did not\nalter their memories\u201d. What were you expressing with this idea? <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

It’s a\nperennial issue that I have. Colonialism is in the past for Europe but it’s\nvery much part of Africa\u2019s present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I took a 28-day\njourney in a container ship in June to the Caribbean. It was incredible. I did\nit because I’m trying to finish my fifth book, and because I’m writing a film\nscript set on a container ship. I am probably one of the few Africans in the\nhistory of the world who have voluntarily put themselves on a ship to cross the\nAtlantic! Then we got to Guadeloupe and Martinique, and every single person\nthere is black. And that’s because all their ancestors were slaves. It really\nhits you quite viscerally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Regarding\nthe Windrush scandal], you take people as slaves from Africa to the Caribbean,\nand then when they get a chance to come to England, you start deporting them? These\npeople are in our part of the world because of our historical links. It doesn’t\nmean we have the apologise for the past, necessarily, or make reparations, but we\nneed basic empathy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think\nit\u2019s important for books like yours to offer the possibility of a way forward,\nan indication of how society can be different in some way?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Yes, I think so. But the positive change I would have wanted to create with An Elegy for Easterly<\/em> is in the reader. Just because a country is in the news for corruption and bad governance, it doesn’t mean that the people of that country necessarily lead meaningless or unhappy lives. Zimbabweans are wickedly funny. We even laugh at funerals! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Petina Gappah’s upcoming book, <\/em>Out of the Darkness, Shining Light,<\/a> is published in the UK by Simon & Schuster early next year.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anya Pearson interviews Petina Gappah, Zimbabwean novelist and lawyer, whose first book An Elegy for Easterly was shortlisted for the 2010 Orwell book prize. A powerful collection of human stories set against a backdrop of corruption and hypocrisy in Zimbabwe, An Elegy for Easterly won the Guardian First Book Award and was one of the very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":2840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1392,1408],"tags":[1416,1721],"coauthors":[1419],"class_list":["post-2830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-interviews","category-media-and-culture","tag-books","tag-zimbabwe"],"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/cropped-GappahPetina-BathshebaOkwenjecreditauthorpic-2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2830"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=2830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}