IN CONVERSATION
Crossing boundaries
PAROMITA PAIN
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Fiction is about journeys of imagination into the lives of others, says Beverley Naidoo.
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Photo: Linda Brownlee
Reason against segregation: Beverley Naidoo.
CERTAIN images that have refused to go away from her past form the basis of most of Carnegie medal winner Beverley Naidoo's works. She says, "To me, every image that leaves an impression is the seed of a story." Her fiction deals with children and is generally known to be "tough teenage fiction" and its enduring appeal lies in the vigour and refreshing candour with which it deals with issues of ethnicity, gender and violence against the young.
Brought up in Johannesburg, Beverley went to an all-white school and didn't question what was happening around her. It was at university that she first became aware that perhaps South African society wasn't functioning the way it should. "I didn't have much pocket money," she smiles. "In retrospect that proved lucky. I had to carry sandwiches, which of course weren't cool. It was the early 1960s. The African National Congress was banned and Nelson Mandela was `underground' before his arrest. That proved to be my best introduction." She became a part of the movement and also underwent eight weeks of solitary imprisonment at the age of 21.
Memories of difference
Beverley's most lasting memory of such differences is of her childhood black nanny. "I knew she had children of her own but it didn't seem strange that she didn't have more time with them. One day she received news that two of her daughters had died of diphtheria. A large smiling woman, whose face was the first I saw on returning from school, she shrank, physically, before my very eyes," she remembers.
Journey to Jo'burg, her first novel, was dedicated to her nurse and her two little girls. A story of two children who brave enormous odds to reach their mother living and working far away from them, the South African government banned the book when it was published. The ban was lifted after Mandela's release. A sequel, Chain of Fire, followed soon after.
The South Africa of today is different. Beverley has reflected the changes in her narratives. Her story "Out of Bounds" starts with Rohan's father topping his fence with bricks and barbed wire in the year 2000 in a South Africa no longer at the mercy of apartheid. She agrees, "There is generational change as well as social and political change". However, certain fundamentals probably remain constant.
"I cannot say that racism finished with the end of apartheid laws, but this is not unique to South Africa. I have been shocked, for instance, to see the promotion of Herge's Tin Tin in the Congo in major bookshops here in India, as part of a global promotion. The book was first published in the 1930s and this translation is from the edition of 1946, before India's independence. The images of black Africans are disgraceful. When we think of the savage atrocities committed against the Congolese people under European colonialism, we can see how books like this, wittingly or unwittingly, demeaned black people so that they were thought of as little better than animals. Books for children reflect values present in adult society. While books like these are interesting for research, putting them into the hands of children is like offering them sweets that are poisonous," she asserts.
As a writer of fiction with and for young people, Beverley believes her primary responsibility as a writer is to write well — "to tell my story well". Do her kind of writing help heal issues of racism? "My writing is part of my own journey of crossing boundaries and imagining myself into the lives of characters often very different from myself. We are in a very unstable world dominated by those who use `might' over 'right'. If we used our imagination more, imagining what it is like to be on the `other' side, perhaps we would be less inclined to conflict. Perhaps we would be less vulnerable to manipulation by those who profit from conflict and wars. However, fiction, whether for adults or young people, is a means of exploring what it is to be human. I hope by doing so, I excite, engage and encourage my readers to make their own journeys of imagination into the lives of others."
As a white South African, Beverley has never felt unqualified to write from a black perspective. "Can men only write about men, women about women and 21st Century writers only about the 21st Century?" she asks. "Of course, divisions in society, such as racism, segregate our minds. But ever since coming to what I regard as my `age of reason', I have tried to challenge that segregation. I sometimes receive letters where it is clear that the letter-writer believes that I am black. I have often arrived in schools where students and teachers are surprised that I am not black. I then like to question assumptions, to ask why they imagined that. However, before and while I write, I research areas of my own ignorance in order that the characters I create, and their world, are credible. My work, like any other writer's work, must be judged on what it is, not on who has written it. That is what our struggle against racism, whether in South Africa or elsewhere, is about."
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