Elaine Proctor's Blog

I had no idea what an exiting process it would be to think about the work of writing in this way. I was most interested in how stories build relationships and community. Take a look if you are interested.

I listen and listen and listen. There is no literary festival like it. It's really only half about literature. The rest of it is about the state of the nation and the very best people speak to that.

~The Cricket Bat and the Porcupine~



A Story in Three Parts



...which began life as a short blog on my book tour to South Africa in Spring 2012 and became a kind of blogelogue of a homecoming...





Part Three: Franschhoek Literary Festival



The morning after the launch of Rhumba at The Book Lounge, J and I pack our bags and head out to the Franschhoek literary festival. As we approach the spectacular mountains that mark the wine country, I think about boyfriends.



I have been happily married for 22 years and have every intention of dying in my husband's arms, but when you've lived life in a wild place (rather than a promiscuous one, please note) there will be people who you know there and spoor you leave on the sand. My first boyfriend, with whom I went to my very first matric dance, turns up at my Jo'burg launch. He has a family and a lovely wife and is a marathon runner. Generous of him to come. Looking at him, I see across the thirty five year map of who he and I were as virtual children.



Second boyfriend, also from the high school era, is now a writer too. He is, rather amazingly, also at the festival. His delightful wife is a journalist of note. More spoor. Different map.



Third boyfriend, from an altogether later and more volatile encounter, turns up at one of my sessions just as it is about to begin. Spoor rampage across my skin and bones. Cricket bat.



Fourth boyfriend (or so he claims) looks at me and I swear to God I have never laid eyes on the man with the bright red hair in spite of the fact that he clutches a photograph of my eighteen-year-old-self under his arm. I wonder, momentarily whether I have entirely lost my mind. He apologizes for 'walking out on me' I then I wonder if it is he and his marbles who have parted company. No spoor there. Let's hope his fantasies remain benign.



Then there are the old friends, almost family now, with whom I have a greater continuity. People who hosted our wedding, people who worked with me in plays, people who made films with me. Spoor, crisscrossing the sand like so many scurrying animals and all so clearly visible now that I am here.



The way this brilliant festival works is that you kind of get thrown onto panels and you end up talking about the most unexpected things with the most unexpected people.



My first panel posed the question, "Are The Eighties History Yet?" I am seated between an older, brave, journalist and a young Muslim South African who works for Al Jazeera and has published a couple of very funny and very brilliant books. All of us have dramatically different perspectives on the dying days of Apartheid and what it means for us going forward. I'm terrified to speak at first but before I know it I'm having fun, incredibly good fun. I'm home, in a grown up sort of way, though there are questions I wish I could answer all over again, like the one posed by the graying gentleman in the middle of the hall, 'Is there such a thing as a white African?' I wish I'd told him that I knew what he meant, but that the language and thinking around the question did not belong to me. I wish I'd been able to refine my answer and say that my connection with the continent and country, although not simple, is a given. It is the stew of other things that define me that give me longer pause; my deeply Afrikaans extended family, my English father and English education, my Ouma who came from the Southern United States and was my earliest teacher, my American husband, my polyglot children who also consider South Africa their primary identity in spite of not living here all the time. I wish I'd said all that...



Along with just about everyone else over the next three days, I become a drunk (although my modest level of consumption becomes the subject of some derision by my fellow writers and I never have to be carried home by a fireman). We are in the wine country after all. Porcupine Ridge wines sponsor the festival and there it is wherever you turn. The sauvignon blanc goes particularly well with the cricket bat and before long I embrace all who come my way, those who love my book and those who look stricken when it is mentioned.



I sit on two more panels, one is solely concerned with RHUMBA and its evolution from film script to book. A wonderful, really experienced journalist handles this session. We talk about the difference between film scripts and novels and I am aware in a new way of how grateful I am to have found my way to books. I'm reminded of the email I sent to my wonderful editor at Quercus Books when I first held the book of RHUMBA in my hands, 'I'm aware of the cliche' of the first book moment as I write this. But it is just true that holding one's first book in one's hand is a moment of radical transformation. It's thrilling, raucous, unbelievable. I'm so grateful.'



I am so grateful, now to be talking with her about it in this context.



The third panel I have been invited to sit on is concerned with the Congo diaspora. I share it with Jamala Safari, a Congolese writer and poet who has written a wonderful, soon-to-be-published book on the Congo called 'The Great Agony and Pure Laughter of the Gods'. A crucial book. We are led by a sharply intelligent, wonderfully able writer and teacher of creative writing. I fear that this will be the audience least willing to accept my decision to write about the "other" as our chair so clearly articulates it. Not so.



For three heavenly days - admittedly with its fair share of skinless terror - I have the privilege of learning to talk in this context. It is amazing. What is more amazing still, is the listening.



I listen and listen and listen. There is no literary festival like it. It's really only half about literature. The rest of it is about the state of the nation and the very best people speak to that. They are the most densely packed sessions and there is worry in the air. How much shit are we in people? A whole lot apparently - education, services, jobs, housing, transport, corruption. And most relevant to this audience The Secrecy of Information Act, a measure that will silence reporting of any wrong-doing by government officials.



The most brilliant commentator there says, 'There are the good guys and the bad guys and right now the bad guys are winning'. Salutary.



Thank God he can still say that. We talk a lot, and we laugh. And for every corrupt politician (for now anyway) there still seems to be a potential whistle blower. And for every conundrum of the human spirit there seems to be someone prepared to unknot it in a book. And best of all, session after session we are reminded that ALL governments are corrupt and that the streets are waiting for our pounding feet to keep our leaders accountable. There will never be a time when we can stop pounding. When, in the words of perhaps the most experienced political observer there, our leaders confuse promiscuity with polygamy, corruption with due process, self-interest with the needs of the nation, we must pay attention. Just as Miller did for Willie Loman. Attention must be paid. By us and our cricket bats.



Elaine Proctor

Spring 2012

A Story in Three Parts...which began life as a short blog on my book tour to South Africa in Spring 2012 and became a kind of blogelogue of a homecoming...

~The Cricket Bat and the Porcupine~



A Story in Three Parts



...which began life as a short blog on my book tour to South Africa in Spring 2012 and became a kind of blogelogue of a homecoming...





Part Two: Cape Town





Day 4:



En route to O. R. Thambo airport, we stop in to do an interview for a Jewish radio station. A glimpse of a bright, curious, sub-culture tucked behind a kosher butchery in the Northern suburbs of Jo'burg. I'd like to switch places and interview them.



Landing in Cape Town I am reminded, once again, of the city's intense beauty. On the approach I see the dry ridges of the Limietberge where my family has retreated every Christmas for as long as I can remember. It remains my favourite place on earth. It is where we go to be quiet.



This time I have a different purpose.



The Cape Town launch of RHUMBA takes place in a wonderful independent bookshop called The Book Lounge. In my humble opinion it is one of the great bookshops of the world. A place to browse, learn, buy...to sit and read downstairs with tea and coffee on hand. It is the hub of the reading community in this city and this time the interviewer is indeed there, along with friends family and curious others.



I once had dinner with a Harvard intellectual and author of a seminal book on culture, during which he and his friend, an eminent fine artist, discussed the artist's newest work. It was a riveting, tough, conversation and although it was very clear the Harvard Academic was ambivalent about the work, every phrase that came out of his mouth advanced the thinking of the artist in a lucid way. It was not HIS own brilliance that was on display, it was his understanding of the work and how it could grow. Granted, this may not have been the case had the conversation been in a more public forum, but it certainly remained for me, a model of genuine discourse.



It did not prepare me for what was to follow in this beautiful bookshop in Cape Town. The interviewer (who I know to be a lovely person) now sat beside me in front of the very full room and whispered something somewhat gladiatorial along the lines of, push back as much as you like...she said...Cape Town book launches are dull, dull, dull. And she then launched into a bewildering series of questions, or were they questions? Hard to know with the buzzing in my ears, they seemed more like a stream of consciousness critique. In the peculiarity of the moment all I could think was, Why would she want me to push her? Is the heel of her shoe stuck between the floorboards?



Later, she told me her training in England had instilled in her this adversarial style. I wanted to tell her I had just had the most tender, celebratory night of my life at my book launch amongst the literary establishment in that same country very probably educated at her alma mater.



It seems equitable, in this modest context, that both the writer and the critic be held to some sort of account. A book launch is a celebration, a bar mitzvah, a birth. There can and must be content but literary jousting is better reserved for a more adversarial platform. To conflate the two serves neither.



I do finally fight my way through the ringing in my ears until I can at least comprehend what she is asking me and when I read the opening chapter I am myself reminded of its value.



When I get home to my hotel I wipe the tear streams of mascara off my cheeks and I email my very brilliant editor Shomit Mitter. I tell him that I'm kind of shaky from the absent academic experience followed quickly on by the encounter with the gladiator and he writes the following life-saving email in his beautiful Indian English.



'When you buy a new cricket bat, you have to hit it with a wooden hammer. In fact they sell you the hammer with the bat, so necessary is it to "break the bat in". The harder you hit the bat, the stronger it gets, the more easily the ball flies to the boundary when you hit it...



By the time the Cape Town hadedah's (less raucous than the Jo'burg variety but then Jo'burg is altogether more Darwinian) have shrieked their shriek the following morning I write to tell him that not only am I armed with my cricket bat. I AM the cricket bat, and he says...



But more: you are the player and the bat! You are in this for the long haul - you are training to go into a bigger league with your new book. Know that.



I hold onto that idea as if my life depends on it. And, who knows, maybe it does?





Day 6/7/8/9



The interview with the Independent on Sunday takes place over breakfast and it begins with the reporter's confession that she hated Knight (my main man and sort of redemptive hero of the book who just about everybody loves) so I don't anticipate an easy ride in those pages either. She also tells me she is presenting a paper at an academic conference that weekend on the subject of sapeurs (of which Knight is one) and just doesn't see the verity of my characterization. Cricket bat...cricket bat...cricket bat.



I wonder if academics and novelists are the same species, really, for the first time in my life I wonder that. Perhaps it is only the great ones from either camp that have elevated one another?



Elaine Proctor

Spring 2012





Part 3 to follow next week...

~The Cricket Bat and the Porcupine~



A Story in Three Parts



...which began life as a short blog on my book tour to South Africa in Spring 2012 and became a kind of blogelogue of a homecoming...





Part One.



Day 1. Sunday Morning. Land in Johannesburg.



And I see the light. The density of it, luscious, I bask a moment. My light. And the dry air, waiting, as it did all the winters of my childhood to crack my lips and knees and elbows. High world air. My air. A choking nostalgia reminds me that my natural habitat is 6000 feet higher than the stately roll of the Thames beside which I now live.



My straight-talking, seriously good publicist who I will call J drives me from the airport along Jan Smuts Avenue unaware of my already somewhat skinless state and before I can stop myself I call out, 'Sarah! ' And it is indeed my teenage friend Sarah's house that we pass - the place we learnt to be almost-sexual, completely-political beings, and where we gathered to mourn her premature death. I count the number of my contemporaries who died in the span of those late teenage years - 5 including Lulu. Surely that is a high number?



J settles me in my hotel with a view of the "biggest man made forest in the world" the canopy covering the suburbs of Jo'burg. She takes me to the shopping mall attached to my hotel where I buy a pair of running shoes, (my battered favourites forgotten in the chaos of my leave taking). I know the place well from my youth but since I last saw it, the supermarkets and fish shops and chemists have been replaced by Burberry and Celine, by shops dedicated to fine watches and horse riding attire, it is finer by far than Bond Street and I don't yet understand who sustains it. I suspect, though, that the spoils that provide this sleek comfort for the rich must surely come, at least in part, from government coffers meant to create a public safety net for all.



That net is certainly not there for the stick-thin young woman who walks across the street in front of our car asking for nothing. Her dress raised up in her hands like a ship's sail, revealing her entirely naked body underneath. She is thin as a stick, beyond the sexual. I wonder if she is in the final stages of HIV/AIDS and its ravages? There is grace in her fine neck, antelope legs and her face, when she turns to look at us, has already emptied out. I weep, no surprises there. The soft, skinless person I have become in the cold north prepares me badly for my old city. As I weep, I wonder if I should apologise to J - she saves me the task by discretely averting her eyes.



My first interview is with radio SAFM (the journalist runs a culture and book program from 1-4 on Sundays). She's a beautiful woman with a mission to celebrate books and encourage a culture of reading. She gives her listeners, off the cuff, the best synopsis of my book I've ever heard. The questions that follow are half-blood-half-brain, intellectually challenging but full of feeling. It strikes me then, that RHUMBA, although set in the Congo and London, feels owned by her, a South African. By the end of the interview, she is finishing my sentences and I hers. I am home and she's my companero.



There is a question one always dreads if one is white and well-heeled (though clearly not with Burberry and Celine and certainly not atop a horse) which basically goes something along the lines what gives you the right, white person, to take on the telling of a story about a place and people who are not your people?



I look to Willie Loman, fresh in my mind after seeing Phillip Seymour Hoffman's transcendent performance in Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman'. Willie is a fantasist, alternately vicious and sentimental. When his two sons threaten to reject him their mother upbraids them thus...I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person. I realize as I say it, that although Willie Loman may have been closer to Miller than my Flambeau is to me, telling this story about a Congolese immigrant boy in London is not a presumption on my part, but an obligation.



We finish the interview and the eye-grit from a sleepless night beside the largest man to ever fold himself into a British Airways seat fills my nose and eyes and mouth. Must sleep.



From my hotel room window I look down on the swifts and the hadedah ibis's flying above the canopy. They shriek as if to say if there is anything you haven't done yet that matters to you, you'd better get on to it before the curtain closes on the day and the nocturnal hunters, human and animal, come out to play.









Day 2/3.



I wake up to that same screech. I swear if those birds had been around in Shakespeare's day he would not have needed the ravens to herald the dark arrival of Duncan under Macbeth's murderous battlements. After the polite twitter of the robins and jays outside my English window, this raucous sound rips me from my sheets, as yet unready for the day.



For the first time in years, I spend the day meeting my contemporary countrymen in a professional context. The journalist from Sarie magazine (with its childhood associations of old tannies (aunties) baking rusks and giving cleaning tips) is astute. The Sunday Times journalist is too - good conversations all. The photographer who comes with her is a hunter. You know the ones, who look and look and find a way of saying what's going on inside something. They were a good team. The young black TV presenter has, unusually for a busy TV guy, read the book carefully. His producer, still just a girl, cracks the most irreverent of whips to keep him to the six minutes the piece allows.



There is one among the many women journalists I speak to who is authorial in the way a president would be. I have a brief and demented thought that she should go into politics to sort out the corruption that abounds. She is electrifyingly intelligent. But it is clearly more important for her to be the protector of South Africa's writers (make that the writer's of the world) particularly as the Protection of Information Act refuses to go way. More about that later.



By the evening of day 3 as I sit again above the circling hadedah's at my window it seems clear that - although the nation is still ravaged by the rasping shadow of brutalized criminals who spoil what they can - in the peaceful corners of the land, the once half-formed evolutionary fish of our new country, has flapped its way on the bank and is crawling towards a new self. An efficient, equitable, self-actualized, disciplined, self.



And then, just to complicate my certainties, as life is want to do, we arrive for the official Jo'burg launch of RHUMBA at Exclusive books in Hyde Park. I have been looking forward to this for weeks. A great African academic is going to interview me about my small book and I know I am going to emerge enriched in my understanding. Sorbonne trained, Oxford University educated, a spell of teaching at the university of Pennsylvania. He is simply brilliant and I am amazed he has agreed to this small collaboration.



As J and I wait for him to arrive I greet old friends and relatives and we sip our water or wine and I sign books, all very pleasant - but where is our academic?



I see J-the-unflappable begin to panic. Maybe he fell asleep? Maybe he was visited by an old friend and forgot the time? Maybe one of his children has a cold? Maybe he simply didn't care? Or it could be that a wild force of nature, quite beyond his control, swept him away? Even then, surely he would call, just to relieve us of our imaginings? Surely he himself had a first book once and knows the terrors that attend its emergence. Surely?



I feel my small lifeboat begin to fill with water and the longing for my children becomes an ache, as it does whenever hardship strikes. A kind young woman from exclusive books steps in to read out the questions I dig out of my bag from a prior Q&A with an audience in London. And, as we converse, question by question, we scoop the water out of the leaking boat. Finally, we are floating as a boat should, on the surface of the water, even without our brilliant academic to show us the way.



Elaine Proctor

Spring 2012



Part 2 to follow next week...

It was hot the day my child stood on the Cape Cobra. It is always hot in the Namibian summer but the rain the previous day had made it more so. It was clear-aired too so the distance between things became harder to judge. Or perhaps that's just how it seemed to me.

It was hot the day my child stood on the Cape Cobra. It is always hot in the Namibian summer but the rain the previous day had made it more so. It was clear-aired too so the distance between things became harder to judge. Or perhaps that's just how it seemed to me.



We had a strict rule on the film set that the attending children had to wear shoes at all times. My three-year-old daughter had strapped on her sturdy sandals that morning and so could run ahead on the path that led to the horses. Excited. Laughing.



The snake bit her twice on the ankle.



As I drove the twenty or so dirt kilometers to the clinic where she lay, I didn't know whether she was alive or dead. It felt like being burned in a fire. HOW I LIVED became visible to me on that road.



In South Africa in the 1980s and 90s if you'd asked the film-makers and journalists working to record and respond to the dark final days of apartheid about Work/Life Balance they would have wondered what language you were speaking. As far as we were concerned balance was what you did when you were trying to get a shot of the convicted political prisoners leaving courtroom 16 from the narrow ledge of the building next door.



We associated the idea of a personal life with a utopian future that may never come to pass. We were young enough not to be oppressed by that uncertainty. Of course our personal lives happened anyway, often intensified by the political pressures around us, fierce connections between busy people with a shared mission. We banished ordinary life, ordinary needs, ordinary loves, to some other time. We worked, and worked, and played occasionally as hard as we worked, and before we knew it the pathways of habit and practice were deeply engrained in our bodies and minds. The country and its history led us there and we followed, eager trainee workaholics.



It is true that some of us fell exhausted by the wayside. Maybe it was my version of burn that seeded my increasing impatience with political film-making. I knew that the deeper story eluded us at the barricades. That I had to get off the street and into the bedroom to tell that story because the bedroom would be more revealing of who we were and what we were doing to one another.



It required a shift from documentary to a fiction, first as a writer and then as a director. I had the great privilege of learning the necessary new skills as I completed a Masters Degree at the National Film and Television School in England. But I took my restlessness with me.

I made a film in Zimbabwe as my graduation film. It was called 'On The Wire' and it was about a South African Defense Force soldier and his wife. It went into the bedroom and it saw their emotional ruin. I wrote and directed a second film called 'Friends', which traced apartheid's endgame through the friendship between three young women.



Then my husband and I had a baby. I adored motherhood. Loved it. Our child was the most important thing in my life. Still, when she was very small, I prepared to take her to the desert with me to make a film. Because that is what I did. That is who I was.



I didn't know then that all desert creatures came out after the rain, all the hunters and all their prey.



Only when she had made it through the first night without acute respiratory failure did Heinz Modler, the film's brilliant, life-saving doctor, confirm that she would live. Her leg swelled to five times its size and she was badly affected by the anti-venom. But she was alive.

My producer (and friend) made it clear that the film's insurance did not cover eventualities such as seriously injured offspring and guilt-stricken working mothers, so I went to set every day but really I couldn't remember what scene I was doing or why I was doing it.



The film was not a success. The months of editing and post-production remain a blur of indecision and struggle. I realised I needed help.



Bad things happen. They do. To all of us. My child could just as likely have been knocked down by a passing scooter while we were shooting in London. Yes, of course. But she wasn't. The space, place and time in which she was hurt was characteristically extreme. It was the kind of place I was attracted to. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder but it was clear that it didn't belong to the cobra only, it belonged to my whole working life. Jacob, our son, was born soon after. We named him after his grandfather.



In the months that followed, the phrase Work/Life Balance began to sound a little more like English. The idea became at least recognizable to me, particularly when spoken by a friend, Rhona Rapoport (Dual Career Families, 1971), who was a pioneer in the field. But it continued to elude me in life. The idea of work, once absolutely defining, seemed to have disappeared. My husband now worked and I mothered (and wrote, of course I always wrote but now for others, to pay the rent). He travelled a lot.



I paid attention to our recovery. My daughter's scarred foot and associated terrors and my unbearable guilt took some getting over. Somewhere in that process I began to understand the pleasures of ordinary life. The falling asleep in the afternoon with a toddler and a baby squished up close. The simplicity of going to the park, the wonders of birthdays and trips to the Natural History Museum. These tender lessons accumulated a kind of density, laid down a new pattern of being, closer to nature maybe. Certainly closer to the modest passage of ordinary existence.



I so loved being a mother that there were times when I wondered if I would ever want to work again? I had been able to retreat, recover and nurture my family, I had even been able to think about balance without remembering the ledge above courtroom 16 in Johannesburg. It occurred to me, gently at first, and then with increasing shrillness, that most people did not have that privilege. What did they do when bad things happened? What about those mothers and their children who could not find peace? The question waited, raucous, in my life's calm pools.

In Tuscany, one bucolic summer's day, I was driving home to our rented villa after a day of swimming with my family, when we passed a lay-by hacked out of the scrub on the side of the road. In it stood an African woman, provocatively dressed. She held an umbrella over her head to protect her from the sun's rays. She was a prostitute.



It's difficult to describe the force with which the anachronistic sight of her standing in the Italian dust took occupation of me. I began my research and understood how many women there were like her, in Europe, and beyond.



People trafficking and the ensuing enslavement of its victims accounts for millions of ruined lives, destroyed families, extreme suffering. It is an urgent and important problem.

Preparing to imagine a story that could, in some small way, communicate the human cost of this phenomenon demanded a level of research that was new to me. For six months I read, watched and listened. Each day I spent amongst the Congolese immigrant community in the far reaches of London brought me closer, until, eventually and mysteriously, a story began to take shape in my imagination.



It was a story about a small Congolese boy looking for his missing mother in London. In the course of writing it, I shifted shape one more time from film writer to a writer of books. The resulting novel, RHUMBA, was published by Quercus Books in May. The truth is that I have my children to thank for it. It was they who required me to do it. To describe what happens when this crucial communion is interrupted, when it is snatched away.



I accept now that I will never work moderately, nor is it likely that my stories will ever be comfortable tales. I spent too much formative time on the dark side to be very interested in stories about certainty. I still work very hard. My new book is a compelling, tumultuous, sometimes dangerous companion. But I (mostly) remember to pick my children up from school. I'm there when they get knocked sideways. I'm always there.



There is a cobra in RHUMBA too, naja nigricollis, which occurs in the forests of the Congo where Flambeau, the ten-year-old hero of my book hails from. It's my way of saying, yes, I see now.