View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Online Kunapipi Volume 24 Issue 1 Article 6 2002 Interview with Achmat Dangor Elaine Young Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Young, Elaine, Interview with Achmat Dangor, Kunapipi, 24(1), 2002. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol24/iss1/6 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Interview with Achmat Dangor Abstract South African writer Achmat Dangor was born in 1948, as the Nationalist government — the architects of Apartheid — came to power. In 1973 he was banned for five years for his involvement in the radical black cultural group Black Thoughts, which he had helped to establish. Although forbidden to attend public gatherings and publish any of his writing during that time, Dangor wrote in secret and, in the 1980s, helped found the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), a group of mainly black writers dedicated to the freedom struggle. From 1986 to 1991 he was executive director of the rural development agency Kagiso Trust, and in 1992 taught South African literature and creative writing at the City University of New York. He was subsequently appointed Director of the Independent Development Trust and, in 1999, was made Chief Executive Officer of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. Alongside his work in the development field he continued ot write, and has published seven works of fiction and poetry to date. These include two collections of poetry, Bulldozer (1989) and Private Voices (1993), a short story collection (Waiting for Leila, 1982), a play (Majiet, 1986), and three novels, The Z Town Trilogy (1990), Kafka’s Curse (1997) and Bitter Fruit (2001). He has won many literary prizes, including the 1998 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for Kafka’s Curse, a novel which is in its second edition and has been translated into seven languages. In July 2001 he relocated to New York where he is currently working on his next novel. In March this year he returned to South Africa to participate in the Time of the Writer Festival in Durban. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol24/iss1/6 52 ELAINE YOUNG Interview with Achmat Dangor South African writer Achmat Dangor was born in 1948, as the Nationalist government — the architects of Apartheid — came to power. In 1973 he was banned for five years for his involvement in the radical black cultural group Black Thoughts, which he had helped to establish. Although forbidden to attend public gatherings and publish any of his writing during that time, Dangor wrote in secret and, in the 1980s, helped found the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), a group of mainly black writers dedicated to the freedom struggle. From 1986 to 1991 he was executive director of the rural development agency Kagiso Trust, and in 1992 taught South African literature and creative writing at the City University of New York. He was subsequently appointed Director of the Independent Development Trust and, in 1999, was made Chief Executive Officer of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. Alongside his work in the development field he continued to write, and has published seven works of fiction and poetry to date. These include two collections of poetry, Bulldozer (1989) and Private Voices (1993), a short story collection (Waiting for Leila, 1982), a play (Majiet, 1986), and three novels, The Z Town Trilogy (1990), Kafka’s Curse (1997) and Bitter Fruit (2001). He has won many literary prizes, including the 1998 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for Kafka’s Curse, a novel which is in its second edition and has been translated into seven languages. In July 2001 he relocated to New York where he is currently working on his next novel. In March this year he returned to South Africa to participate in the Time of the Writer Festival in Durban. EY How has living in New York affected your writing about South Africa so far? And how do you think it might influence the way you write about South Africa in future? AD The most immediate influence is physical. New York is an immense, noisy, rowdy but wonderful place and I am so distracted by the novelty. I do Interview with Achmat Dangor 53 consultancy work with HIV/AIDS two days a week and I am able to write three days a week. But there are many distractions, so many cultural distractions — things that I never had time to do, like going to museums and art exhibitions, and going to listen to people read poetry. The other distraction is that New York is such an enormously noisy place. We live in an apartment just off Park Avenue and 34th which is like a major crossroad across Manhattan. You hear cars and noise all the time. So I’ve decided not to pursue the sequel to Bitter Fruit for the moment. Instead I am writing a novel about a South African in New York. It’s based on an idea that I’ve had for a long time — almost like something from Death in Venice, coupled with Garcia Marquez’s Death in the Time of Cholera, about a character living in South Africa who was once in the Underground. During that time he had a relationship with his MK1 commander, who warned him ahead of time to get out of the country when they planted the bomb at Magoo’s Bar in Durban. He loses touch with her and she disappears into the system. Years later he gets an obsession to find her when he sees a picture of a woman who turns out to be the South African Consul-General’s wife and he recognises her. So he moves to New York to find her, which he does, but the consequences are tragic. It’s loosely based on Robert McBride’s2 story but it’s essentially a story of a man with an obsession. Men are like that: they have obsessions which they don’t want to let go of. In a way he is forced to come to terms with what he is and the things that he did, the things that he evaded and the things that he didn’t do. Instead of setting the story in Cape Town as I had wanted to originally, with a different context and a different occupation for the woman that he is obsessed with, I set it in New York. It gave me the opportunity to get out of my system some of the stories that have been there for a long time: the untold stories of people who have been in exile, in the Underground. All you tend to hear are the black and white stories of the good guys and their enemies, and the ambiguities in between are never explored. So that’s how I decided to deal with noisy and overwhelming New York. EY Reading your last novel Bitter Fruit, which was published just before September 11, was quite an uncanny experience in terms of the way it deals with issues of Muslim identity and fundamentalist groups within Islam. What were the implications of the coincidence of the release of your book and the events of September 11? AD It makes my sequel to the book very difficult because in it Michael, who now becomes Noor, goes to India to find his mythical grandfather’s roots and ends up in Afghanistan in a school — not the Al-Qaeda, but an Islamic 54 Elaine Young school — where the disenchantment within him grows. But this disenchantment has nothing to do with ideology — this disenchantment is with himself. In a sense it is difficult to write this book because everybody is going to measure it against September 11. I’m sitting in New York, writing in an atmosphere of superpatriotism, xenophobia and a renewed interest in Islam — but from a very perverse point of view. EY Your penultimate novel has a strong storytelling voice. Do you write with a sense of yourself as a storyteller? And what sense of readership, or audience, do you have? AD I do see myself as a storyteller and one of my problems is that I see myself more as a storyteller than as a structured novelist. For example, I know that Kafka’s Curse is a very confusing structure for many people, but I’m primarily a storyteller and I rely on the strength of the story to carry my novel. As for my sense of an audience, I have none. I try not to think of an audience because that would undoubtedly colour things and introduce all kinds of other elements. I do try to think of readers and whether I am being fair to them and explaining myself clearly to them. I don’t think of a specific reader, though — and if I do, it must be deeply subconscious. EY As a former anti-apartheid activist and, more recently, Director of the Independent Development Trust and CEO of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, you have been heavily involved in bringing about social change in South Africa in various ways. How would you characterise fiction that is, to use the old catch-phrase, ‘socially relevant’ in contemporary South Africa? Do you think of yourself as having a kind of conscious role to play as a writer? AD I don’t think any writer should have a conscious role to play, trying to define society for better or for worse.