The Writer & Process: An Interview

This probing and penetrating, deeply-personal interview on The Writer & Process – was done on 4th February by the Poet and Singer, SUSANNE ANIQUE, as part of the Lantern Meet of Poets’ SHORT-FICTION LAB & WORKSHOP, held between January and March, 2017.

[Interview Subject: Surumani Manzi]

If you had a free day with no responsibilities and your only mission was to enjoy yourself, what would you do?

Make a cup of ‘‘whitened’’ coffee. Secure lots of leavened bread and margarine.

Draw all the draperies in the house. 

Turn on a movie about medieval Europe or Asia; horses, epic battles and armored knights – that sort of thing is quite romantic for me.
One might even say I harbour a penchant for the antique, and I wouldn’t label them mistaken.

That’s likely to keep me busy all day. Till my eyelids grow too heavy, so I have to return to bed.

I nap quite a great deal.

So I’m probably (marginally) lazy and, to an extent slothful.

What was the first book you remember reading with absolute excitement? Why? What were the circumstances? How old were you?

The Moses series, by Barbera Kimenye, were my first serious encounter with gripping story-telling.
I’d been exposed to picture-books and some Fountain Publishers’ series that were themed around the AIDS scourge and its devastating consequences to African family life; but Kimenye’s Moses and King-Kong and Itchy fingers and their dramatic school – MUKIIBI’S EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR THE SONS OF AFRICAN GENTLEMEN (MEISAG) – were characters and settings I instantly identified with; and probably still do.

I think the school I later chose for my secondary education was a romanticized rendition of MEISAG in my adolescent mind, then.

I should’ve been about eleven.

If you were abandoned for several years on a deserted island and were only allowed four (non-scripture) books, which 4 books would you take and why?

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

The Pearl - John Steinbeck

I write what I like - Stephen Bantu Biko

The list was a hard one to zero upon; but those four books would probably be craters deep enough, in the poignancy and tragedy of their narratives, to contain the turbid and sorrowful waters of my soul.

The real, tangible and yet ineffable sadness with which they are written is something I have a psychological craving for, I think.

Biko’s is non-fiction, and is essentially a compendium of sundry essays written throughout the course of his tragically-short life – yet extremely compelling nonetheless. 

Parselelo Kantai, the Kenyan journalist, essayist and soon-to-be novelist would come in a close fifth.

Describe your favorite writing spot.

I wouldn’t say I have a physical or geographical favorite.

What I have is an emotional spot or bower – sad and reflective enough, I could write through a nuclear war.

Very grave sadness enables me to capture the deepest pulsations of mind and being.

I feel more alive when sad, more in touch with everyone and everything, than in moments of supposed bliss and hysteria.

Melancholy sobers one up, grounds them. 
Elation blurs and blunts the sensory tips.

This is especially true for the poetry process I’ve made mine.

I am still finding the footing for my prose however; and what I’ve noticed is that I require a degree of silence, or even more – soundlessness.

I need to be able to listen to myself.

What do you like best about yourself?

Balance. I think I strive to live a balanced life.

Not too excellent at any one thing, but not too disinterested in any, either.

I’m often reminded (as well as inspired) by something Malcolm X’s elder brother, Philbert was his name I think, said in one documentary-film concerning Malcolm’s mannerisms  –

‘‘Malcolm was tuned into life in such a way that he didn’t ever miss much of it ...’’

I am certainly not drawing any parallels between the great man and my puny-self, but there goes (chuckles)!

What do you like least about yourself?

I am very deliberate about not being ‘rushed’.

I am not too sure I dislike the habit – but I would rather forfeit a ticket to heaven than be told; ‘Hey you, hurry up – the pearly gates are quick closing!’

The stunning irony of course, being that I can be quite ‘rash’ in both decision and action when sold onto something.

What would you like your tombstone to read?

That can only be a tentative desire and answer. Time is probably bound to change my wish from –

‘‘Here, lies a son who could have loved better.’’

Also, I’d very much rather the epitaph was engraved in Runya-Kitara, Swahili or another of the tongues native to our people.

If you were a literary character who would you likely be?

Wolf Larsen – from Jack London’s THE SEA WOLF.

Literature’s most memorable character ever, for me.

I don’t suppose I have half the impressive sea-captain’s gifts – but I’d say we share a lot in our preference for, and inclination toward a very inflexible philosophical materialism.

For the record, Wolf Larsen met with a cruelly tragic end.

Is there any writing that frequently haunts you, that makes you question the things said or things that happened in that story and makes you wonder or wish that they could have gone differently in that particular story?

When I re-read Steinbeck’s THE PEARL, I really wished Kino and Juana’s baby boy – Coyotito, had not been killed in the story’s denouement.

Juana tried so much. She tried so much, for a feeble-bodied, delicate woman – to keep the family together, and drive the evil away, and keep life from turning ugly, even grotesque.

She was that elusive blend of robust and tender that all our women must be if they’re to survive the exactions of marriage, motherhood and the fiercely-male order of things that pervades human society.

However, cruel fate, or rather Steinbeck, took Juana’s baby boy away from her.

That really shattered me.

Is there a book that created a paradigm shift in your life? Which book, which paradigm shift? How or in which ways did the book achieve this?

Mahmood Mamdani, the Indian-Ugandan scholar – has a way of talking about the ‘‘African post-colony’’ – the simplicity of which would make my unlettered grandma in the village smile, and probably nod in approval as well.

His essays and lectures, taken from the main thesis of his seminal CITIZEN AND SUBJECT, are perhaps the most honest, balanced and accessible statements I’ve heard from the shores of (African) academia, in quite a while.

He expounds, very clearly, the difference between direct and indirect rule as variable approaches to Britain’s colonization of Africa.

When direct-rule produced certain undesirable results under the Raj in India, namely – an indigenous middle-class that eventually gestated nationalist agitation – the British, convinced by Lord Lugard, conceived of indirect-rule as a workable alternative in the African colonial experiment.

It is this change of strategy that eventually yielded the conflation of political, legal and cultural identities which still bedevil contemporary state formation & negotiation in Africa.

In another essay – and in an action-packed, almost thriller-like manner – Mamdani tells of his altercations and confrontations with Faculty Heads at the University of Capetown over a syllabus-design he’d been asked to undertake, for an undergraduate course in African History.

The narrative highlights Mamdani’s wit, valor, dynamism and intellectual-candor in ways that few other of his works do, or can.

Also, for a long time, I harbored for Prof. Mahmood the natural and almost inexplicable animosity of the indegene toward the alien – until I read the quasi-memoir and account of his own synthesized distinction between India’s Sidi community (Indians of African descent), and East Africa’s Wahindi (Africans of Indian/Asian descent).

His philosophy is of course geared toward self-preservation, him being descended from an unbroken line of ‘‘exploitative’’ Asian immigrants in an African country.

I think, deep down, that he’s trying to earn his keep.

But then – we all have a right to our biases, and so does Professor Mamdani.

Do you relate to books as absolute works of fiction or as truth hidden in fiction?

‘‘Fiction is nothing more than a popular version of the truth.’’

Either some great fellow once said that, or I just thought it up.

What’s your deepest philosophical preoccupation at the moment?

The moving-target of Identity. I was speaking to a brilliant young woman named Davina a few months back, who is also an up-and-coming writer affiliated to the Uganda Women Writers’ Association (FEMRITE), about the issue, and she expressed her frustration, even disgust, with the endless manner in which people around her were overdosing on conversations about identity; to the point of being so paralyzed that they were unable to produce art. 

I found her concerns legitimate.

But in a world where one’s skin and gender mean more than they’ve ever meant; even more so today than during the gory ages of chattel-slavery and territorial colonialism – the greatest obstacle to honest art for any black person, is how to be truly Negroid both within and without, skin-wise as well as soul-wise, so to speak.

At a time when so many of our people, especially our womenfolk, are striving to eliminate the pigment from their skins, facing up to the Identity conundrum is of crucial necessity.

What’s the most important thing in your life? What do you value most?

Dignity. Human dignity.

This snippet in my value system is, probably, the one point where I depart slightly from Captain Larsen’s cold and aggressively materialist world-view alluded to before.

I think every one of the 7 billion humans on the planet is entitled to dignity, without condition.

Poverty, illiteracy, race, pedigree should never be standards to determine how much of it one deserves.

Even when we hate people, their superstition and religion, their customs, their past crimes (as for instance we resent Europeans for colonialism) – we MUST never strip them of their innate, inherent dignity as human PERSONS.

People may occasionally turn bad, even beastly – but they’ll never become beasts.

They’ll always be human.

© Susanne Anique