| Bright Lights, Bleak City: in conversation with Lauren Beukes |
Lauren Beukes, Michelle McGrane
Lauren, tell me something of your family origins and what you were like as a child.
I was lucky to grow up with very liberal parents, which gave me a more sane upbringing in '80s South Africa than many kids would have had. They weren’t struggle activists, but they both had an active sideline in development. It was more about the people than the politics.
My dad helped found Friends of Alex in the early '80s with community leader Linda Twala and was involved in establishing Habitat for Humanity there. I have great memories of lugging bricks around (and briefly entertaining the thought of throwing them at a passing Casspir loaded with troops) at 9, helping to build a house in Alexandra. My mom ran a job creation scheme making culturally authentic Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Sotho and Shangaan dolls.
We’d have huge parties at our house, mentioned in Miriam Mathabane’s memoir Miriam’s Song. I went to a mixed-race private school and grew up with a sort-of foster brother (as in not officially), Thabo, who now works with me at Clockwork Zoo Animation.
Otherwise, it was a fairly ordinary suburban life. We were lucky enough to be able to travel and our house was opposite the zoo, so we’d hear the lions roaring at night and occasionally find puff adders in the garden.
My family is a mongrel mix of European origin with some 350 years in South Africa. It’s entirely possible that that means someone in my ancestry did terrible things (in keeping the same warped cultural values of the time that put Sara Baartman on the stage), but the ones I know about were generally good people, like my oupa who used to own Goudini Spa – famous for its “radioactive” healing waters - and who was called a “kaffir boetie” for such minor heroics as treating his staff with compassion or trying to tell the Broederbond that things would never be right in this country until white and black kids could all ride on the same school bus.
Was your home full of books? Do you remember when you started reading? What did you read as a child?
Apparently, I got fed-up of waiting for my parents to find time to read to me and started reading myself. I read The Hobbit when I was five, with a big yellow marker that I used to highlight all the words I didn’t understand (total book desecration) and my dad would sit down with me the next day and explain them.
I was always a reader. My mom used to threaten to tie my eyelashes together to try and curtail my habit.
We were encouraged to be creative and it’s really my parents’ fault that both my brother and I pursued ridiculous and impractical careers (he runs a boutique ad agency in London).
When did you start writing?
I declared that I wanted to be a writer at about five years old when I heard that Enid Blyton had made a million pounds from her books and I realised that it was a viable career option.
But I started getting paid for it only when I started a job at SA Computer Magazine in 1997 as staff writer, covering games, sound cards, motherboards, tech trends and (thrillingly) colour printers.
I did more interesting work for the sister magazine, @home, which I took over as editor in 1998. It was more about culture and technology, Lara Croft as cultural icon, LAN parties and making music in your bedroom. It was probably five years too pioneering for its time and when it died from lack of advertising, I went freelance. I did a lot of stuff for SL, which was the most exciting magazine in the country at the time, writing gritty investigative stories on teen vampires and sex workers, and went on to write for most of the big glossies as well as some high-profile international magazines like Nerve, Dazed & Confused, The Hollywood Reporter, Colors and Nature Medicine.
Of course I had to do a great deal of filler pay-the-rent-feed-the-cat work as well, so it would be township vigilantes for Colors today and trendoid swingers for Cosmo the next, with a round-up of small conference venues in the Western Cape for an events magazine thrown in for good measure.
Journalism taught me to be able to vary my style, to do research and really get a feel for the way people speak (nothing like transcribing hours and hours and hours and hours of interviews to learn dialogue). I don’t know why dodgy journalists like Stephen Glass would bother making stories up – real life and real people are generally more inventive and surprising than most of the things you can pull from your head.
Good fiction is rooted in experience and perspective and people and understanding context. Journalism was the best foundation I could have hoped for.
I started doing my MA in Creative Writing at UCT and publishing short stories in around 2002, in SL’s fiction competition on donga.co.za and LitNet and in anthologies like Urban 03, Laugh It Off Annual 02, Itch and African Road. I wrote Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past in between doing my MA and a ton of freelancing, so finishing my dissertation and Moxyland took a little longer than I’d anticipated, even with a grant from the National Arts Council.
Did you always want to be a writer?
Always.
You lived in New York for two years in 2000 and 2001. Would you recount a little of that experience?
It was fairly awful, actually. I moved continents for love, which only sounds like a good idea. I was that worst combination of idealistic and headstrong and it bombed horribly.
I had some fantastic experiences of the city, attending crazy theatre with bawdy mermaids or lying blindfolded in the dark while actors whispered Beckett into my ear, discovering 100 kinds of apple at the Farmer’s Market, attending a “how to break into adult movies” course for a story for SL and getting paid to hang out at FAO Schwartz for a toy industry magazine.
It’s an incredible place, a sensory overload of culture and effervescent energy. But it was also very difficult. I’ve never been more unhappy. At the same time, I realised if I could come through this okay, I could probably handle just about anything (short of real human atrocities).
André Brink was your MA supervisor at the University of Cape Town. What was that like?
André is a wonderful mentor. He was always encouraging and never tried to impose his own style, even after I sort of ambushed him, switching from writing more lyrical literary stories to a crazily futuristic political pop-culture cyber thriller. It was more about allowing me to develop my own voice, like a Polaroid, although that’s not to say he wasn’t beyond giving me a hard shake occasionally to help the process along. He’s very much about creating thoroughly rounded characters, down to knowing how they were born and how it affected them. I learned a great deal from him.
For you as the head writer on the animated show URBO: The Adventures of Pax Africa, what makes your job fulfilling and fun?
Creating worlds with the nicest and craziest and most crazily talented bunch of people I’ve had the privilege to meet. We started URBO with seven people and the foolish idea of creating South Africa’s first half-hour animated series. Three years later we have over 50 people working with us and we’re 104 episodes in (that’s about 30 feature films' worth) with a third season on the way. What I love about working on URBO is how we’re able to tackle big issues that are relevant to South African kids. It’s subversive, smart satire like The Simpsons for kids, that also attracts an adult fan base. We’ve taken on some heavy stuff, from tik to dodgy cell phone videos, media freedom, high-tech bullying and HIV/TB, but we do it in a way that’s fearless and funny with giant burping robots and virus monsters and addictive cola made from smelly bathwater. We don’t believe in talking down to kids.
We’re also developing new shows, like Lucy and the Nightmares, about a sassy girl who battles bad dreams with the littlest nightmare Meh Bear, Deadbeats, a very dark adult comedy about four zombies trying to make it in the world of the living without losing their heads, and Banna Banana, about the comic mishaps of a fruit-tastic banana crimefighter and his longsuffering sidekick, Strawberry Boy.
Everyone I work with is outrageously talented, especially the script team, which includes Sarah Lotz, who has just finished her second novel (look out for her first, Pompidou Posse, out this month from Penguin), Sam Wilson, who is wickedly funny and completing his MA in Creative Writing at the moment, and our new recruit, Greig Cameron, fresh from UCT, where he teaches a scriptwriting course.
Which writers have inspired and influenced you?
I love novels of ideas, fiercely imaginative stories with the capacity to surprise you. I’m inspired by the likes of David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Alan Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, William Gibson, Sarah Waters, Paul Hoffman and Mark Danielewski, to name but a few, as well as writers who cut deep to expose the workings of the human heart as in an autopsy – TC Boyle, William Boyd, Lorrie Moore, Ian McEwan, Ali Smith.
I also read select interesting non-fiction about culture and technology and the world such as Freakonomics, Bruce Sterling’s Tomorrow Now, Malcolm Gladwell, Jonny Steinberg, Max du Preez, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. I’ve been reading a lot about interesting psychology experiments lately.
When you're working on a book, do you find you have to be very disciplined about setting aside time for writing? Do you set yourself deadlines?
I’m very bad. I tend to put paying deadline work first. It will reach a crisis point where I have to put everything else aside and focus purely on the fiction. I’m getting better though, putting a few hours aside every day (or, okay, I confess, every couple of days).
Where is your favourite place for writing? Are you able to work under varied circumstances?
It’s more about headspace than a physical location. I can write in coffee shops and on aeroplanes or at the gorgeous and really quite uncomfortable green-leather-top teak desk I nicked from my dad, but I have to be both focused and playful.
This year Jacana published your novel Moxyland. What made you decide to write about a futuristic Cape Town? Where did the idea for Moxyland come from?
 It started as a short about a girl who was branded with nanotech that made her literally addicted to the sponsor’s product. It was featured in SL’s short story competition and Ron Irwin and Jenefer Shute at UCT encouraged me to turn it into a novel. The story eventually became about much more than that. Although it’s set in a future Cape Town, it’s really about all the things that interest me about where we are now and where we’re going: about a surveillance society that treats us like terrorists every time we walk into an airport; about growing economic divides and corporate influence in government; about AIDS orphans and terrifying global epidemics and slippery online identities and video games and biotechnology.
It’s not an apartheid novel, but it does have elements of that legacy, which I think any depiction of a repressive local police state would.
The original title was Branded. What was the motivation for the title change?
The short story in SL was called “Branded”, but as it developed into a full-fledged novel with several narratives of very different characters with their own agendas, branded no longer covered the bases of what the story was about. Moxyland is more of a thematic title, like Cloud Atlas or Lunar Park. It’s roguish trust-fund kid Toby’s description for a saccharine online kids’ game that turns out to be a far more brutal place than he’d expected. It’s the shiny, happy façade over a fundamentally damaged society, its glossy celebrity culture and Hello Kitty and designer handbags distracting us from xenophobic attacks and rape in the DRC and genocide in Darfur.
Would you briefly describe your characters Kendra, Toby, Tendeka and Lerato for people who haven't read your book?
I’m going to steal the descriptions from Miranda Sherry’s Something Wicked review, which summarised it best.
Toby is a futuristic slacker, living off his mom, stream-casting his daily blog, and carelessly dipping into an underworld of drugs, anarchy and subversive revolution.
Kendra is an art school dropout, offered a second chance at cool by becoming a "sponsorbaby" – a nanotech-implanted, living advertisement for a corporate brand.
Tendeka is a hot-headed revolutionary, surviving below the corporate radar, struggling to make a stand against the social order he despises.
Lerato, a brilliant corporate programmer, is just bored enough to risk everything by hacking the system that makes her privileged lifestyle possible.
In my own words, Toby is the most fun and the most awful, like the spirit of Long Street come to life. He’s a viciously amoral rogue, but in an irresistibly likeable way. Kendra is very young, very idealistic and a little lost in herself. Tendeka is blinded by his moral outrage, less Che Guevara, more Raging Bull, and Lerato is very savvy, very ambitious and in a very dangerous place.
How did you research the technological aspects of the book and how long did your research take?
I didn’t sit down and plan to do hard research. It’s more an accumulation of articles and books I’ve read over the years on all the interesting places that technology and culture intersect, from Steven Johnson’s Emergence to Bruce Sterling’s Tomorrow Now to BoingBoing, Wired and New Scientist. It’s been about paying attention to what’s happening in the world right now. I’ve been inspired by everything from laser graffiti projects to RFID chips in passports to Theo Jansen’s mechanical animals, the Strandbeests.
Some writers seem to prefer not to plan a book's structure. Did you use a detailed plot outline from the outset, or did it unfold, page by page?
I knew exactly where it was going from very early on; it was the getting there that was challenging. But that’s not to say I wasn’t ever surprised by the interesting diversions the characters made.
Richard Ford talks about how he has absolute agency over his characters - they don’t do anything he doesn’t tell them to, but my experience is that there are strange things that can happen between your brain and your fingers. That subconscious revisioning that happens as the words hit the page is almost always a good thing.
How much revision did you do?
It was originally written in a Clockwork Orange-style lingo that was stylistically gorgeous and incredibly difficult to read. It would have been fine if it was intended as an experiment in language, but for me it’s all about story. Anything that interferes with that has to go.
I spent several months ditching the language, which meant rewriting the whole book and backwards engineering very cool sentences like "[the bioengineered animal artwork] looked like a cow, schmangled unrepair” to read “… like something dead turned inside out and mangled”. Not as exciting, but much more readable.
During the final three-month editing process, Helen Moffett stripped out even more of the language (Toby is the only one who still gets away with it), curtailed my over-descriptive tendencies and we fleshed out some of the chapters and plugged some leaky minor plot holes, but the core story never wavered.
What was the greatest challenge you faced when writing Moxyland and what important things did the experience teach you about yourself?
Making the time to write it.
What feelings would you like readers to take away after having read your book?
Satisfaction at a tale well told. I’d like readers to have been caught up in a story that hopefully managed to surprise them. And a sense of disquiet about where the world is now and where we could possibly be going.
Tell me about the Moxyland launch at The Book Lounge in Cape Town.
We wanted to evoke a sense of the novel, to give people a glimpse into the world, so for one night we transformed The Book Lounge with hipster gatekeepers who randomly assigned guests to the warm welcome of the Corporate entrance or being abused by the bouncer at the Non-Corporate entrance round the side.
We had rabid animal rights protestors handing out flyers about nanotech in police dogs, a digital slideshow of evocative images (the most harrowing and traumatic sourced from Zimbabwean activism group Sokwanele, an Easter egg hunt for adults, tracking down four items of evidence related to the novel, from Ghost sponsorship applications to Tendeka’s police file.
There was sinister mad science involved; people were warned they might be infected, handed a test-tube and told to take it downstairs for testing and possibly receive a vaccination shot. We had a free bar sponsored by Red Bull, who were very open-minded about the irony of being involved with a book about a girl who gets addicted to a soft-drink.
Rob Van Vuuren took on the role of the fictional Vukani Media spokesperson announcing the fictional Ghost Sponsorship Programme launch, and African Dope’s Fletcher was on the decks playing a mix of “ill-bient uneasy listening” to promote the upcoming Moxyland soundtrack album.
You can read my full take on it here.
The Moxy mutant toy designed by Michelle Son made its first appearance at the launch …
Moxy was conceptualised by the cover designer Dale Halvorsen and transmuted into physical form by animator/designer/occasional toy maker Michelle Son, who very generously gave up her pattern so we could create a limited edition range of Moxy toys.
The ideal was to get a women’s empowerment group to make the toys, but I would have been at a loss if it weren’t for Sarah Lotz and her mom Carol Walters who rounded up a group of women living below the breadline in the Klein Karoo, dubbed them the Montagu Sew & Sews and set up a production line.
Currently the toys are available only through the Book Lounge (e-mail booklounge@gmail.com to order), but we will have some at the Jacana stand at the Book Fair as well. R100 of the R150 price goes directly to the women making the toys - and putting food on the table.
And if you have more work for these women, e-mail sarahlotz@mweb.co.za.
What can we expect from the Moxyland soundtrack album?
The official Moxyland soundtrack was compiled to match the mood of the book by African Dope’s Honeyb and me; a mash of rock, punk rock, electro, breakbeat, glitch and indie with a distinctly Cape Town flavour and a dark, gritty, futuristic edge. The album includes artists like The Tone Deaf Junkies, Taxi Violence, Sibot, Mr Gelatine and Jacob Israel; some old favourites with a fresh twist, others previously unreleased tracks.
It will be out in all good music stores (and select indie book stores) by the end of June, sold on its own or bundled with the book. It’s a hugely exciting project.
What was the motivation and inspiration for Maverick? How did you choose your "extraordinary women from South Africa's past"?
Michelle Matthews, who started Oshun, approached me to write it, so I can’t claim credit for the idea, but she gave me free reign to choose who I wanted to write about. It was too daunting and, I felt, presumptuous to try to create a definitive list of the most influential women of the past 350 years, especially when some of them, like Mamphela Ramphele or Nadine Gordimer, are still very much alive and active, so I looked to the past, to chapters already closed, and for the most interesting stories among them.
At one stage I had almost 40 names on my list, including Modjadji the rain queen, struggle hero Cissie Gool, the murdered AIDS activist Gugu Dlamini, and 19th-century Cape Town mystic Madame Helena, but I had to be ruthless or I would have still been writing the damn thing.
The final selection covered all the bases from glamorous revolutionary Ruth First to protofeminist Olive Schreiner, serial poisoner Daisy de Melker, Sara Baartman, Bessie Head and Brenda Fassie, snake-dancing stripper Glenda Kemp, Africa’s first black movie star, jazz chanteuse and gangster’s moll Dolly Rathebe, and even the mother of an alien love child (supposedly), Elizabeth Klarer.
Both Maverick and Moxyland have imaginative, funky covers. Did you have any say in the cover designs?
Both covers were designed by my obscenely talented friend Dale Halvorsen, who also goes by the moniker Joey Hifi. He was very open to my ideas and developing the character of the book, but there is no way I could have come up with the concepts he did. He constantly surprises me with his inventiveness. He’s very, very good.
Although the covers are very different (different subject matter for different publishers, after all), there are elements that link them, like the use of shesheshwe fabric and the carefully crafted clues to the content. You can finish reading either book and gain new appreciation for the covers, because, of course, the pink skeletons on the back of Maverick refer to the pink bleach of strychnine that dyed the bones of Daisy de Melker’s unfortunate victims, and the soccer ball badge on Moxyland refers to, well, a major event in the novel.
Dale's designs are subtle and smart and just ravishing. I’m very lucky to have been given the chance to work with him twice!
Tell me about your collaborative novel, Exquisite Corpse, and the new novel you've started writing, Pale Crocodile Waiting.
I’m writing Exquisite Corpse with Diane Awerbuck, Mary Watson and Henrietta Rose-Innes, who are some of the most exciting young women writers in this country. I’m clearly not the only one who thinks so, because they have fists full of prizes between them.
It’s been a long time coming because we’ve all been working on our own stuff as well (and some of us have been incubating DNA remix combos as well as new books), but we’ll be done by September.
It’s based on the Surrealist’s party game of passing around a folded piece of paper with everyone contributing without seeing the other parts to complete a drawing or story, with strange results.
But traditionally, passing the buck on a story doesn’t work. People kill off other people’s characters or turn a noir into a slapstick comedy. So we’re taking a different approach, sharing a time and a place (an upmarket mall, Christmas Eve day) but maintaining control of our own narratives. Our characters and stories overlap, even shape events in other stories, but it’s more about separate interlinking tales.
Pale Crocodile Waiting is the working title of my new novel set in a strange magical-realism inner-city Jo'burg where a girl with a sloth on her back, living in a tenement slum with a 419 scammer with a mongoose at his laptop, specialises in finding lost objects. She runs foul of the minions of a crime lord magician, the White Crocodile, when she finds something he wants. It’s in the style of Neal Gaiman or Jonathan Lethem, with a touch of Jeff Noon and a dose of China Mieville.
What are your thoughts about literary prizes?
It’s a tremendous opportunity to be recognised for your work, especially for African writers, but, even more importantly, to reach a wider audience. I’m sure some are arbitrary and I can’t say I agree with all the choices (Alan Hollinghurst’s plodding coming-out meets class issues story The Line of Beauty, winning the Booker over David Mitchell’s inventive twisty Cloud Atlas? C’mon!), but I’ve found some amazing writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Jeanette Winterson through prizes.
Could you name a few of your favourite books? Why are they important to you?
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake and The Handmaid’s Tale, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, Jonathan Lethem’s Gun With Occasional Music, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Paul Hoffman’s The Wisdom of Crocodiles, Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, Alan Moore’s graphic novels, particularly Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The Ballad of Halo Jones (please, no more movies – the last one raped the material). They’re all smart, inventive, surprising novels and perfect stories, densely plotted, finely unravelled in a way you never saw coming. And I have a weakness for unreliable narrators.
What books have recently surprised you?
John Mark’s Fangland, Chris Cleave’s Incendiary,and The Monsters of Gramercy Park by Danny Leigh, the latter both books I picked up by chance at Exclusive’s last sale.
Fangland manages to reinvent Dracula and make it chillingly relevant to the 21st century (just when I thought there was nothing interesting to say about those sad, lost goth children of the night, vampires), recast with a jaded 60 Minutes producer in the role of Mina and a gangster warlord bloodsucker who is the epitome of every human atrocity.
Incendiary is very black comedy about a working-class woman in London who lost her husband and son to a stadium bombing writing an open letter to Osama Bin Laden. It’s got a real Children of Men feel to it. But it’s also poignant and human.
Monsters of Gramercy Park is about moral ambivalence and ambiguities as a has-been crime novelist tries to reinvent herself through Truman Capote-style interviews with a charmingly amoral Latino gangster.
And Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, about how good people turn evil. I knew about the Stanford Prison Experiment, where a bunch of nice, psychologically well-adjusted college boys turned abject shivering wrecks or vilely abusive dictators in a week of playing at prison, and Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments where something like 70 percent of volunteers were willing to shock someone apparently to death because an authoritative man in a white lab coat told them to; but it’s how that ties into the genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust and the abuses in Abu Ghraib (and hey, xenophobic attacks) that makes it so riveting and harrowing. We all have that capacity to flip like a switch – just put us in the right (or rather the wrong) circumstances. It was very uneasy reading.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’ve just finished Joyce Carol Oates’s Wild Nights about the re-imagined end days of literary figures like James Joyce, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson and Poe. It’s dark and witty and really quite malevolent. I like that about Oates.
I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to read next. I’ve found the more I read, the less tolerance I have for poor storytelling. Pretty sentences can hold your attention for only so long – they’re like ornamental features attached to a building, but without the infrastructure, the solid girders of story to hold the building together, all you have is a tangle of pretty art deco twirls that aren’t much good to anyone. I may start working my way through the rest of the Sunday Times book prize nominees. I loved Blood Rose, and Blood Kin was just astoundingly good.
Thank you for your time, Lauren.
- Moxyland by Lauren Beukes (ISBN 978-1770-09567-0) is published by Jacana and can be purchased from all good bookstores in South Africa.
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