[English] Toby Lichtich / Interview Sheng Yun / Listening
Damon Gargut (painted by Shao Shu jiong)
In recent months, publishing circles around the world have lamented that this year African literature has gone crazy. After Tanzanian writer Gurner won the Nobel Prize in Literature, South African writer Damon Galgut received the Booker Prize, and Senegalese writer Muhammad Mbugal Sal received the Goncourt Prize for Literature. Galgut, who wrote nine novels and four plays, was a regular at major literary awards and was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Toby Lichtig, novel editor of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), interviewed Gargut as soon as the 2021 Booker Prize was announced, asking him to talk about the background of the winning novel The Promise. The Shanghai Review of Books was authorized to translate the interview for Chinese readers.
2021 Booker Prize "Promise"
You have won many literary awards, is it different to win the Booker Prize this time?
Galgut: The media has gone crazy, and I'm still digesting. Today is the day after winning the prize, maybe you will ask me in a few days that I can answer more specifically. But the signs suggest that they are very different.
So let's go straight to the novel, "The Promise" follows the history of the Swart family for thirty years, from the eighties when the apartheid system in South Africa was on the verge of extinction to recent years.
Galgut: It's certainly not a well-organized and good family, and many commentators think I'm writing about my own South African family. The mother in The Promise, Rachel, is Jewish and prefers to speak English, but she is married to a white South African, Mani Swavod, so both children speak bilingualism (English and Afrikaans) and are mixed with different faiths. This is typical in South Africa, especially in white South African families. I don't know what British readers will think, but South Africa is certainly not square, there are many mixed races and mixed cultures, and my novel wants to reflect this kind of "miscellaneous".
Rachel's return to Judaism before her death seemed to have departed from her white South African family.
Galgut: There's a little bit of my family here. My mother, who was a Christian by birth, converted to Judaism after marrying my father, and in order to educate her children, she felt it was better for the family to share a common faith. My father never practiced strictly, my mother didn't follow through, and I entered Judaism at the age of two, but I never received formal hebrew religious training. Everybody just get by.
Last year you wrote to The Times Literary Supplement an article about Andrew Harding's "These Are Not Gentle People: Two Dead Men." Forty suspects. The trial that broke a small South African town) book review, which mentions some of their own family backgrounds, but also violence, and the mentality of white South Africans. Does Marnie Swift have that mentality?
Galgut: The book review I wrote to you scared a lot of people, after my parents divorced, my mother remarried to a white South African (I was nine years old at the time), he beat us a lot, and violence was the most heartfelt part of my upbringing. We have to speak Afrikaans at home, and if we don't, we'll eat an old fist. The head of the family in The Promise, Marnie, wasn't as violent, but I wanted to be able to write about the atmosphere of violence that permeated the air of that era, even if no fist fell on him. The character of Marnie has the shadow of my stepfather, which can be said to be a "violent shrinkage" of him, and he is far more religious in faith than my stepfather.
Violence does linger in the novel, and the eldest of the three children, Anton, experienced the violence after joining the army, and his psychology was greatly affected.
Galgut: Back then, young people in South Africa had to perform compulsory military service for two years, which meant that many were forced to go to the northern border (now Namibia) to participate in ethnic wars. In South Africa, the apartheid government dealt harshly with social unrest in black towns. Anton falls into the latter case, where he shoots a woman in the black zone without thinking, and guilt follows him all his life. I myself served in the Air Force for two years and was fortunate not to experience this situation. But I have a friend who has experienced that an unprepared young man is suddenly thrown into an extreme confrontational environment, and you can be killed if you don't kill. This is not uncommon, but strangely enough, These are rarely discussed in South African society. This is an indigested part of South African history. By contrast, I was always amazed at The American obsession with the Vietnam War, which was deeply discussed in all aspects of the American psyche. South African society in general avoids violence and the pain it causes, and there are only sporadic documentaries and movies, and any psychologist will tell you that if you do not deal with these hidden pains well, it will only lead to further violence.
The three children in the novel, Anton, Astrid, and Amor, are very different, can you talk about these characters, especially these two sisters?
Galgut: I'm writing this novel also trying to portray the situation of women in South African society. The role of the traditional woman is rather disturbing, and the overall environment is extremely patriarchal, coupled with a sense of racial segregation hierarchy. In this kind of society, women can only manage the housework, keep having children, and cannot make decisions for themselves. The obvious example is Astrid, who spends her days worrying about her appearance, worrying about her safety, and not caring about politics or the social situation around her. The younger sister Amor is even more mysterious, and if there is a moral center in this novel, it is her. At the heart of the story is an unfulfilled promise, Amor is the only one in the family who cares, and in the thirty or forty years of the story's development, she is the only one who reminds everyone from time to time why they have not kept their promise. In this sense, she is a moral sign. But I'm also wary of writing her as an unattainable heroine and letting the novel fall into the trap of good guys and bad guys. She has a sense of morality, but does not force others to make good on promises, and her overall image is more mysterious and vague. If it is a traditional novel, the hero and protagonist must promise to be a model, which is not what I want to write. Amor was struck by lightning as a child, and her relatives thought there was something wrong with her. Maybe there's something wrong with her.
It can also be said that she has been treated differently since she was a child, and once this view is formed, it is difficult to change.
Galgut: But the view in the novel will change over time, the novel is divided into four parts, each part probably spans about ten years or so, first the young girl Amor, then the female eldest eighteen, out of the beautiful woman, she threatened the sister who paid attention to her appearance all day; then the beauty declined, she became an ordinary middle-aged woman, less threatening, she became the object of people's willingness to talk.
A lot of critics have noticed the timbre changes in your novels, each character has their own voice, how do you do it?
Galgut: I think every book has its own voice, not only whether you choose to write in the first or third person, but also whether you choose to use the past or the present, the tone and tone of the characters, I have to think carefully. I know writers who innately know which tone to use to write, but I take a little time. The Promise begins with a traditional third-person narrative because the book has many characters, breaking the pattern of my previous novels focusing on a central character, but at first I didn't find the right tone or language changes between character switches. I stopped for eight months to do the screenplay, and the day the script was finished I went back to the manuscript of the novel, and the character dialogue appeared like a movie. Cinematic dialogue is very different from fiction because you have to think about how it's presented on camera. So I began to do experiments, cutting between different characters, first of all, to the theme of the novel, that is, time and the passage of time, in the face of time, no character is more important than the other, you, me, the prime minister, the dog on the road can be in the same moment; secondly, I can present many different voices at the same time, which is very much in line with the temperament of South Africa, which is a discordant chorus, and it is impossible to present the country with only one voice.
Damon Galgut
You once said that the narrator of a novel is like an additional character who will suddenly speak to the reader, which is interesting. What kind of person is he? Positive, angry, resigned, or?
Galgut: If it is a third-person narrative of a traditional novel, the novel will also have a narrator, but in general, the author will try to dilute the presence of this narrator, not very abrupt, and the reader looks at the story as if through a layer of frosted glass. But if you jump around like I do, you need the narrator to switch between characters with the reader, so it's hard for the narrator to be non-existent. There is also a point of difference between fiction and other art forms, such as films and plays that remind the audience through voiceovers, narrations, and the like—"We're going to start telling stories now," which novels generally avoid. I simply wrote this in the novel this time, telling the reader bluntly that you are listening to the story. Returning to your question, I think the narrator is not necessarily the same person, so his tone is sometimes sympathetic, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes jumping out of the novel to point out the reader and counting down, and he doesn't even have to be human—sometimes he will judge human behavior from the perspective of an alien. The reader may wonder where the narrator came from, what it is, but in fact he is just reminding you that what you are reading is a made up story.
There is a character in the novel who is deliberately put aside, and that is the maid Salome, who is both the subject of the novel (the master's promise is to give her a house) and almost invisible, which I think is very clever, but also attracts some criticism, such as Adam Mas-Jones in the London Review of Books saying "Salome's thin existence". How do you respond to that?
Galgut: Fundamentally, it has to do with South African society. Of course, I can write about the psychology of black people and express their thoughts and feelings as I write about white people, but this will make people feel that they have normalized abnormal things, as if blacks and whites have equal places in society. If I write about Salome's heart like any other character, she exists only as a character, but she is more important than anyone else. My logic is that by writing about how the people around her perceive her, the reader can understand how South African society works. In South Africa, whites do not treat blacks as complete people, and although apartheid has ended for nearly three decades, society and people's hearts have not changed radically. Salome was an uneducated black country man, penniless and completely unable to speak up, and the problem with new South Africa was that it did not provide these people with the opportunity to change their destiny. From a literary point of view, the author will try to give each character a vivid sensibility, but I want to make the reader notice Salome's absence, to realize that she has no voice of her own. If the reader notices the narrator jumping around, they will also notice why the narrator never goes to Salome, why there is a blank space.
I also considered a way to write that would make Salome spit at the end of the novel, but in the end chose to let the narrator point directly to the reader: If you don't know anything about her, maybe because you don't want to know or care.
Religion is a theme of the novel, Rachel is Jewish, and Marnie is more religious as she gets older. Can you talk about the relationship between religion and South African politics?
Galgut: Apartheid itself has a deep connection with Calvinism, and I refer to it in my novels. In South Africa today, especially in Cape Town, where I live, outrageous New Ageism is rampant. For pragmatic reasons, I use four funerals in the novel as tools for storytelling. Self-repetition is boring, and if all four funerals are one religion, I'm afraid neither I nor the reader can stand it, so I use different religions. The last funeral was New Ageist, and I couldn't help but have some fun.
In the inscription of the novel, you say that you want people to take African literature more seriously. The last few months have been a great harvest of African literature, you have won the Booker Prize, the Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has won the Goncourt Prize for Literature, the French Senegalese writer David Diop has won the International Booker Prize, and the Tanzanian writer Abdul-Razak Gürna has won the Nobel Prize.
Galgut: I have to be careful about digging a pit. I recommend all the names you mentioned, and I have to admit that I don't pay enough attention to African literature. The fundamental problem is that there are too few influential publishing houses in Africa, and South Africa is probably already the best, except for Nigeria, few African countries can provide a decent stage for writers, and there are very few bookstores. So most African writers rely on Europe to provide platforms, which creates problems in every way, because basically you are exported and packaged and then sold back to your home country. I hope that the recent international attention will bring more Readers not only to the West, but also to more local African readers, and promote local government investment in literature.
Editor-in-Charge: Ding Xiongfei
Proofreader: Liu Wei