| ''Good poetry can open eyes closed to the truth'' |
Michelle McGrane, Helen Moffett
Michelle McGrane in conversation with Helen Moffett, academic, editor, poet and compiler of Lovely Beyond Any Singing: Landscapes in South African Writing
 Born in September 1961, Helen Moffett studied English and was awarded a PhD from the University of Cape Town (UCT), where she has taught regularly for years. She has held fellowships at Princeton University and Mount Holyoke College in the United States and is soon to take up a post-doctoral fellowship at Emory University.
In publishing, Helen was Oxford University Press’s academic editor for four years. She continues to work as a journalist, freelance editor, manuscript assessor, trainer, mentor, researcher and consultant. She edited In Our Lifetime: the Biography of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, which won the Noma Award. Three of the novels she has worked on have won the Sunday Times Literary Award. Helen is finishing three books of her own: one on the relation between race and rape in post-apartheid South Africa; one on cricket; and a collection of poems. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the African Gender Institute at UCT.
Double Storey has recently published a local anthology compiled by Helen, Lovely Beyond Any Singing: Landscapes in South African Writing. The volume is in three sections: "Journeys", "Regions" and "Ghosts and Dreams" – and contains powerful and inspiring descriptions of South African vistas by acclaimed authors.
Helen, tell me something of your family origins and what you were like as a child.
My family origins are covered in the question on apartheid and segregation below, so here I’ll just say that my parents were and are intellectual, creative, intensely moral and cerebral – and highly eccentric. We were poor – “shabby-genteel” – by white middle-class standards, and were taught to prize the life of the mind and intangible values rather than material possessions and status. Everyone intends to raise their kids this way, but my parents really did!
The eldest of three girls, I was that perplexing thing: a super-bright child. I learnt to read exceptionally early, and teachers struggled with me as a result. I often felt they were trying to hold me back, so I wasn’t very nice to them. I corrected one poor woman’s spelling and grammar mistakes when she wrote remarks on my punishment essays (given to me for reading in class, so she deserved it). But I had some excellent teachers who let me do my own thing, offering only the odd nudge or suggestion. Meanwhile, to protect my sisters, my parents underplayed my achievements to the extent of not seeming to notice them. One result was that I became an extremely solitary child. I escaped via books, nature or pets. I talked more to the family cats than to anyone else.
Your mother, a librarian, taught you to read. What did you read as a child?
My folks did an amazing job. As soon as I learnt to read, they stripped the house of any books unsuitable for consumption by a small child. (I realised only decades later that they’d done this.) That meant I could, and did, read anything. I made heavy weather of some of the classics – all that breast-beating in the one DH Lawrence I found seemed pointless, and I became hysterically distressed reading Steinbeck’s The Red Pony (the pony dies) – but I gobbled up wonderful versions of Shakespeare’s plays, Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, the Arabian Nights, the Arthurian legends, Robin Hood, the Bible – I had an illustrated Bible that I loved literally to bits. I read reams of poetry, and huge quantities of books about animals. Because I was so young when I started reading, I couldn’t really differentiate between real, fictional and fantasy worlds. So gods and fairies were very real to me, and I fell painfully in love, at age six, with Ken in the My Friend Flicka books. (I fully intended to go to Wyoming to find him when I grew up, but would he wait for me?) I went through it all over again at nine, this time with Persuasion’s Captain Wentworth, although by now I understood that he didn’t ever exist! And I wept over The Song of Roland and (you guessed it!) fell in love with him, too. Then there were the Silver Brumby books, and I became an elusive stallion galloping all over the Snowy Mountains in Australia. Talk about a magic carpet ride.
The books we loved most were those wonderful British war-time and post-war children’s books, especially the pony books. We worshipped Joanna Cannon, and her daughters, the Pullein-Thompson sisters, especially Josephine (her characters were as familiar to us as family members), and Monica Edwards. Then came Noel Streatfield, and later, representing an entirely different era in British culture, KM Peyton and Hester Burton. And I’ll never forget the school holiday we got Gone With the Wind – we queued up to read it one after the other.
What was wonderful about my childhood was that books were an adventure the whole family shared. We all read Gerald Durrell’s Corfu books together, shrieking with mirth. This communal reading happened in a context in which we were encouraged to make and listen to music, to paint and to dance. My parents barred alcohol and TV from our home while we were growing up, so in the evenings we did the whole pioneer thing of standing round the piano and singing our heads off. My mom turned the dining-room into an art studio not only for us, but also for our friends, while our dad made up grand shaggy-dog bedtime stories for us. Books were central to this lifestyle – we even read at mealtimes. I remember the shock of being sent home in disgrace from a playdate for “reading too much”!
The only local books (apart from history and a bit of the natural sciences) I read were in Afrikaans – I discovered the Afrikaans poets in my early teens. Children’s books set in Africa were represented by The Long Grass Whispers, Rider Haggard’s OTT yarns, John Buchan’s Prester John and Joy Adamson’s Born Free books. The colonial motif was echoed in lots of Rudyard Kipling and tales of the first ascent of Everest, etc. And we practically inhaled National Geographic magazines.
Did you see yourself in Jo March, Louisa May Alcott's protagonist in Little Women? Or in teenage detective Nancy Drew? Who were the fictional heroines and heroes of your childhood?
I was discouraged from reading Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, on the basis that they were not good literature. This I found to be true, especially of Blyton – I couldn’t stand her predatory, scornful, cliquey children. But Jo March – now there was a soul sister. I got tremendously excited when she turned down Laurie’s proposal – yes, yes! This girl was going to have a Life, with Real Adventures – and I was livid when Alcott then married her off to an ugly older man. I suspected that, deep down, Alcott knew she’d sold Jo out, and was proved right years later when I discovered that she wrote erotic penny-dreadfuls for adults that invariably ended with the heroine running away to join the circus.
I also identified with animal protagonists like The Maltese Cat. I was steered away from stories in which animals were used manipulatively as tear-jerkers (Bambi was verboten, for instance), so I was able to become absorbed in the worlds of the animal characters I read about.
What did you want to be when you grew up? Did you have an ambition to be a writer?
No, I was going to be an opera singer. Not as crazy as it sounds – I was a child musical prodigy, with an astonishing singing voice, and I began performing long before I hit double figures. My voice broke in my teens, although I was left with a perfectly respectable chamber music and choral voice. By then I played the violin and the piano, so it looked like I was on course for a BMus. But the world of literature had a siren song too, and so I ended up doing one degree after another in English literature. Really just excuses to keep reading.
In your early childhood you lived on a farm between Worcester and McGregor in the south-western Cape, where you learned to ride horses. Can you describe how your forays on the farm and surrounding bush influenced your appreciation for the natural world and your love of the countryside?
In a nutshell, around the age of six I bonded – no other word for it – with the veld, which was this boundless playground and source of loveliness, comfort, fascination and escape. My middle sister had severe ADHD (which went untreated because she was exceptionally gifted, with a very high IQ – educational psychologists just wouldn’t take my parents seriously when they said something was wrong). But she could be very difficult to be around, so I kept “leaving home” via two fail-safe escape valves: the land all around me (courtesy of my beloved pony), and the pages of books. There’s something magical about heading into the bush on horseback – you’re both alone and not alone. I adore travel to this day, especially in South Africa – my mother says I have the “wandering Jew” gene – I have to see what’s around the next corner. My dad is also a great wanderer who loves exploring remote places, and he took me and my sisters and our friends on the most glorious botanising trips right through our childhood and teens, instilling in us not only love, but also respect, for the natural world. I’m pretty “green” as a result.
Were you aware of apartheid and segregation as a child?
Now that’s a book in itself. My parents were extraordinary in that while not remotely political, they couldn’t stand lies or propaganda. So they never tried to teach me that being white made me special, or justified apartheid in any way. Quite the opposite – when I was ten, my mother sat me down and explained, calmly and logically, why it was intellectually and morally invalid to discriminate against people on the basis of race. She also reminded me that we ourselves were “Untermenschen”, mongrels of the Empire (I have Russian, French, English, Irish and Jewish antecedents), and that in a different place and time our Jewish ancestry would have meant a “Go straight to the gas chamber” card. She dealt with the problem of state schooling by marching us down to the local library and making us cross-reference the claims in our history textbooks. This caused consternation at school when I announced that our textbooks told lies.
My parents saw the writing on the wall – they believed their children would one day live under a black majority government, and it was their duty to prepare us for this. I remember a rare family movie outing to see Dr Zhivago (it was considered educational). The story takes place against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and on the way home I heard my mom telling my dad, “I cannot believe this country doesn’t see what’s coming – that the same thing’s going to happen here.” So I knew that things weren’t normal, that they needed to change, would change.
But it was all very theoretical, until I was fifteen. Then I started attending the local Catholic church – which was multiracial. I still remember my relief – this, at last, was normality. I converted three years later and am still a practising Catholic. You have no idea to what extent the Catholic Church in late-1970s South Africa normalised “difference” for me. So one of the most hegemonic and dogmatic institutions in the world opened up a space for me that wasn’t white-bread (and Somerset West, where we lived at the time, was very white-bread!), that flattened hierarchies, that was inclusive. I shared the Eucharist with Irish immigrants, Italian matriarchs with wobbly soprano voices, the Portuguese family who worked at the local bakery, two of the foremost Afrikaans families in town (the men had married Catholic girls during the war in Europe), and a handful of Lebanese, not to mention black and brown families. Some of us teenagers sang in a folk choir, and after a performance we wanted to go out for burgers and milkshakes – and couldn’t because William and Paul were “coloured”. I remember being beyond outraged – blind with a fury that’s never left me – the first time I realised that people I knew, human beings, could be barred from a public place on the basis of melanin distribution. I still feel driven by that fury. I stand in places like the District Six Museum and shake with rage.
You began writing poetry a couple of years ago. What drew you to writing poetry?
I always believed that I couldn’t write poetry. Why? is a long story, and told in my poem “Groundwater” in Robin Malan’s Leaves to a Tree. In April 2004, Finuala Dowling and I went out to lunch, and she literally told me how to write a poem. I dashed back to my office, wrote down two poems, and sat trembling at the temerity of what I’d done. That story is told in “Foal-legs” (Carapace 52).
At the same time, I came to know someone with bipolar-affective disorder very well. One of the features of this tragic illness is that there are times when the sufferer simply cannot hear what you are telling them. They just do not see the real you, and all communication breaks down until their mood shifts. I’d believed all my life that there is no problem that can’t be talked through (I was a Lifeline counsellor in my twenties). So I’d never before encountered such an implacable failure of communication, and was utterly bewildered by it. But I found that writing poems assuaged my need to be heard (go figure).
Meanwhile, a long-term crisis concerning my diminishing ability to have children of my own was coming to a head. At the age of 42, after having begun early menopause in my mid-30s (a major saga of snot 'n trane), the hormones I was taking to ward off endometrial cancer triggered ovulation. My gynaecologist told me I had a three- to six-month window in which I might fall pregnant (with a high chance of miscarriage if I did). I cannot describe the horror of realising that I’d spectacularly messed up the single most important decision of my life – choosing (or rather, failing to choose) a father for my children. I knew I couldn’t deal with a miscarriage alone. I’d always evaded marriage, had always planned on single parenthood. If only I’d known how the dice would fall I would have learnt how to negotiate the compromises of marriage/partnership; I would have had a daddy ready and waiting.
It was in this context that the poems burst into my head like fireworks and insisted on being written. Highly ironic, given my PhD research on the agency of women writers!
Would you give me your thoughts on the roles of literature, storytelling and the physical act of writing in the healing process?
It sounds melodramatic to say that my poems saved my life, but that’s what it felt like, when they started forcing my fingers across paper, across keyboards. They showed me that when you are silenced, when you are not heard, when you reach a cul-de-sac (emotionally, genetically) you can still turn to this medium and speak through it. And of course, it was embarrassingly symbolic – as I faced the fact that I was barren, that I could not do what even every wretched amoeba can do, all these poems came to life. It’s made me rethink the role of telling stories in healing grief and resolving trauma. I’ve spoken to therapists who believe that some kind of creative activity is critical to healing – one of them insists that her patients take a dance, art, music or writing class. Given that ours is a country of the walking wounded, I feel we should all be tapping into this source, looking at ways in which creative expression can make sense of pain, offer relief or closure. Take the powerful Aluta Continua exhibition at the Slave Lodge Museum in Cape Town as an example of how “ordinary” folk can use art (body maps in this case) to express unspeakable suffering.
Which poets have inspired and influenced you? When and where was your first poem published?
All my life I’ve loved mediaeval lyrics, including the chansons of the French troubadours, the metaphysical poets, Keats, Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, WB Yeats (I’d take the latter three to a desert island), Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas. As I child I adored the Edwardian poets, now often mocked for their sentiment –Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, Walter Savage Landor, Rudyard Kipling. In my teens I “discovered” the Afrikaans poets – Ingrid Jonker, DJ Opperman, Langenhoven, Eugène Marais – I still think “O, koud is die windjie en skraal/ En blink in die dof-lig en kaal” are possibly the all-time best (and most untranslatable) opening lines of any poem. During the 80s I read Steve Biko, and that sent me hunting for black consciousness poets like Serote and Mtshali – they made a huge impact. Interestingly, reading Biko also sent me back to look more closely at women’s poetry, but this time with a political agenda. Locally, that’s when I discovered Ingrid de Kok and Karen Press, who have been favourites ever since. When I went travelling abroad, Stephen Watson’s In This City went everywhere in my daypack, as a palliative against homesickness. I’ve been keeping an eye out for Lisa Combrinck’s extraordinary erotic poems ever since she was a student in one of my Middle English tutorials (!); other long-time local favourites are Mxolisi Nyezwa and Shabbir Banoobhai. In the last decade I’ve been reading more and more local poetry, but still feel like I’m just skimming the surface. Right now I’m loving Gabeba Baderoon’s poems, some of which have that magical ability to bring tears to my eyes. And check out the little-known Sandra Meyer’s Asa Nisi Masa – now there’s talent and technique in one brilliant package.
Influence? You’ll find traces of Hopkins in much of what I write, but this isn’t deliberate. I play with poetic conventions all the time, often realising only afterwards from whom I’ve been borrowing. Another major influence is liturgical language, particularly that of the Catholic Mass and the Anglican Evensongs of my childhood. Finuala Dowling once said that being raised Catholic taught her everything she knows about language. I believe that words recited or chanted as part of religious practice and prayer not only train the inner ear; they suggest that a set of words can offer comfort, or peace, or a fragment of truth – and that’s very helpful for poets.
The story of my first published poem is rather funny: clammy with terror, I handed my first 50 poems to Gus Ferguson for his assessment. Being Gus, he liked the doggerel (what I call catterel) best, and he fixed on “Homo erectus”, a poem about the peculiar qualities of the penis (from the perspective of a non-owner). So that was my first published poem – in Carapace 51. (He did offer me the option of a pseudonym!) I was hugely excited to become that magical being: a published poet. It meant much more than some of my more conventional honours.
You won the Slug Award for the best poem published in Carapace in 2005 (“Mined” on PoetryNet). Has receiving the award increased your confidence in your work?
Yes and no. It was a great boost to think that the judge, William Dicey, a writer I really admired, liked something I wrote that much. But my knee-jerk response was, “There must be some mistake!” It’s odd, because there’re some things I’m extremely (no doubt slappably) confident about. No matter how arrogant this may sound, I know I’m one of the most skilled editors around. And I’m a good teacher, and I trust my academic abilities. But when it comes to my writing, especially my poems, I’m always delighted and touched and yet a bit puzzled when someone says they like one, or they think it’s “good”.
Do you find poems come from images and lines rather than from ideas?
Yes. I rarely think, “I have an idea for a poem”. Instead, a set of words, or a line, will start beating inside my head – often, but not always, triggered by something I’ve seen or read. The pressure to “release” the words sometimes becomes so intense that I pull off the road while driving and hunt frantically for pen and paper. I have bills, maps and credit card slips covered in scribbled poems.
Do your poems sometimes take you by surprise with unexpected twists and turns?
Always. I never know what I’m going to say until I’ve written it. And then I’m usually astonished at what has emerged.
Is a poem an immediate creation for you, or do you put poems away in a drawer and return to rework them months later?
I’ll explain the process, because it’s pretty weird. A poem will possess me, rather like a bird flying into a room, and I have no peace until I start writing. The actual process is terrifying and exhilarating. The poem rushes out at a ferocious pace, while I act as a kind of secretary to my unconscious, copying down what it dictates – as I transcribe each line, the next one starts hammering away at me until it gets written down/out. I never know how the process is going to resolve itself, but after what feels like a kind of temporary possession, I see a poem on the screen or page, and feel tremendous physical relief (the kind one feels after vomiting – purged, shaking, sweating). I read what I’ve written and sometimes add a line or two of resolution or closure. Then the whole thing goes into a drawer. Sometimes days, sometimes months later, I’ll read it aloud and make small changes. Often I find that the ending I slapped on to round off the process doesn’t work, and I delete it.
Are there people with whom you feel comfortable sharing your work when it's in draft form, people you can use as sounding boards?
The first person I show every poem I write is my therapist. Initially, I intended showing them only to her, as I saw my poems as messages from the unconscious, not as creative entities. But she saw them as both, and that gave me the courage to start showing them to others. But it was terribly hard; I felt as if I was handing round emotional X-rays of my psyche. Two friends, Finuala Dowling and David Le Page, both poets, saw the first few poems I wrote, and made encouraging noises. That early support was invaluable. Nuala showed a poem I wrote for her (“Foal-legs” – only the fifth poem I wrote) to Gus Ferguson, and from there things snowballed. It was also Nuala who pointed out that others might benefit from reading poems written by a woman grieving her infertility, given that this tragedy affects thousands of people, most of them suffering in silence. As someone who has self-medicated with poems her entire reading life, I found that the idea that one of my poems might speak to someone experiencing the same loss appealed to me.
Lynda Gilfillan, a friend who is also a superb fiction editor, read my early poems, and her response was so acute, and yet so delicate and compassionate, that it mitigated my fear of disclosure. Likewise Mary Armour, a close friend of many decades, wrote (and continues to write) focused meditations on my poems that are full of insight. Once I got used to the idea that poems, like any other piece of writing, could be edited, I entered into reciprocal reading exchanges with one or two writers I admired, but didn’t feel intimidated by. It’s worked very well with Arthur Attwell – we swopped poems, so that felt safe.
What do you like most about your own writing? Do you have any favourite poems?
I’m not sure that I like my writing, but I like the fact that I write – other than as an academic, an editor, an assessor. What’s important to me about my writing is that it reveals a voice that feels authentic, but which is usually erased by the masks I adopt, especially as a teacher and editor. There is something true about my poems, especially those written in the grip of unbearably difficult emotions. And that truth feels liberating. So those are the poems I “like” most – the ones that emerged on days when I thought I would die of grief (and infertility is a very real death before dying – it’s the end of one’s genetic immortality, a Darwinian thumbs-down to one’s DNA). What I noticed, much to my surprise, was that some of these poems were funny, or effervescent, full of unexpected joy or aesthetic imagery. “Reply to Ariel” (on PoetryNet) is a good example of a lyrical, serene poem that emerged on a day of despair.
Marianne Moore said, "A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself." Do you abandon poems because they don't meet your standards?
I’m still unable to be objective about my poems, to read them as I do other poems, or with an editor’s eye. In the past month or so, for the first time, I’ve been able to look at poems I wrote 18 months ago and think, “That’s not bad”, but if I held them up to any kind of standard other than the one of authenticity I mention above, I might abandon the lot. And given that they feel like foundlings that arrived on my doorstep, I hate the idea of kicking them back into the ether. So I’m not looking at them too closely – not yet, anyway.
When you write a poem, do you sometimes think that it may be the last time?
Every single time. Arthur Attwell has been very comforting – he believes that there are sometimes long fallow periods, but that the poems always come back. Eventually the first rush of poems – from October 2004 to March 2005 – died to a trickle, and I thought it was all over, but that I’d written “enough” (there were nearly 150 by then) – it would be okay if I never wrote another one. Since then, the occasional poem has come calling, but it’s been a lot quieter.
Your English BA Honours thesis was Feminism in the Novels of Jane Austen: irony as a strategy for revealing discontent. You've also given lectures on Austen, notably, "Miss Austen meets Ms Jones" and "Jane Austen goes to Hollywood (and gets an Oscar)". What do you particularly enjoy about Jane Austen's writing?
The way she handles rage with such grace – she bamboozles the reader into believing that hers is this sunny, ordered, happy little world while offering glimpses of a society full of snobbery, cruelty, chicanery and stupidity, in which women were horribly vulnerable. She balances reality and fantasy in a tremendously reassuring way: she reveals a society in which middle-class women with no money have little choice but to enter marriages that are effectively licensed prostitution, in which male heirs can throw grieving widows and daughters out on to the streets (sounds like home, doesn’t it?) – and against this, she declares that women don’t have to compromise – they will ultimately be rewarded for sticking to their principles. I have a beautiful, witty, intelligent and successful friend who claims that the reason she and I are still single is that we read too much Jane Austen at an impressionable age! I guess we believed Jane when she told us that Captain Wentworth would one day return to us over oceans of distance and time, that Darcy would mend his ways and lay Pemberley at our feet, that Edmund Bertram would stop thinking with his penis and realise what a gem was under his nose. Dangerous messages!
I’ve learnt a lot from Jane Austen about using wit and charm as Trojan horses to import subversive ideas into classrooms and lecture halls. I can’t imagine life without her.
Your English PhD dissertation was Rewriting Christina Rossetti: cross-gendered sibling rivalry, fraternal intervention and the counter-poetics of dissidence. What interests you about Christina Rossetti?
At first, it was obvious: I wanted to do my thesis on poetry, and to study a woman poet. I loved the Victorians, and was fascinated by interdisciplinary work (still very much frowned on at the time). My Masters thesis had dealt with Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, so that led to the PreRaphaelites, idealistic Victorian poets and artists who reinvented a medieval era of honour and equality. All the signals pointed to Christina at that point. I started with a vague idea of doing a feminist analysis of her poems, but while working with her manuscripts in the British Library I came across letters from her older brother, Dante Gabriel, urging her publisher NOT to publish her work, or not until he’d persuaded her to make “necessary” changes. In 1988 not one scholar, including the feminists, had debunked the notion that she was this retiring spinster who came to prominence only through the coaxing and patronage of her more famous and well-connected brothers. So I had my dissertation topic: I examined how her brothers had actually been threatened by her brilliance, talent and fame, and had tried to mediate her writing, to control it or censor it. But it wasn’t until three months before I finished writing it that one of my supervisors at Princeton, the wise Linda Shires, said, “We need a title: What about Sibling rivalry in the Rossetti family?” I went hot and cold as I realised I’d spent five years writing about my relationship with my sister. As Andrew Ross, also a fantastic Princeton mentor, told me, “Helen, all research is autobiographical."
Many of your poems deal with female identity/identities and explore what it means to be a woman. Have you found that being a woman and an artist has presented you with any particular problems? As a woman poet, have you ever struggled to be taken seriously?
Thank God I started writing creatively relatively late, and in an environment that takes women artists seriously. How I survived my 20s and early 30s as a young woman academic (and a feminist one at that), I don’t know. Professionally, I was alternately marginalised, mocked and even persecuted for my gender politics – I’d love to go into details (and name names!) but will save that for another day. I found out the hard way that it’s no use breaking the silence if no one will listen. Fortunately, most of my students enjoyed having a teacher who showed them how feminist and Marxist theories could enliven their reading, and that lessened the dreadful isolation I felt.
But I didn’t do a single degree at UCT that wasn’t marred by sexual harassment - of myself, my fellow students and later my colleagues – sometimes outrageous, even violent, but mostly just a steady, demoralising drip drip drip of poison. In the end, I changed careers (from the academy to publishing) because of it – it felt like leaving an abusive marriage. And I saw similar patterns of patronage (“the ladies, God bless them”) alternating with abuse in struggle organisations, in the Church, in almost every institution I was part of. I left South Africa in the late 80s and stayed away for nearly two years, partly because of the relief of living where I could breathe without someone ogling my breasts or reminding me I was a second-class citizen. But the wheel turns, and now UCT has the African Gender Institute (AGI), which has given me a home, an identity and colleagues who affirm me. And they take everything I do seriously!
In Women and Art: Contested Territory, Judy Chicago wrote: "In contrast to some feminists, I firmly believe that women's art can and should be understood by men, and that the body of art by women about the female experience can help expand men's understanding of women and to broaden their view of what constitutes the human experience." Would you comment on this in relation to poetry?
Hmm. Very few feminists these days advocate separatism. Nevertheless, as a radical feminist I am very wary of the impulse to “save” men. It’s not our job, any more than it’s the job of blacks to help whites understand racism. That said, yes, the political function of art, including poetry, is to enlighten as well as entertain, and I do believe that men (along with others constructed as a dominant group) would benefit from entering the imaginative world of those who are marginalised, whose histories aren’t told, whose experiences are made invisible. Good poetry can open eyes closed to the truth, can dazzle those afraid of confronting it. Think of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”, or Gcina Mhlophe’s “Say No”.
And yet. Whereas women respond powerfully to my poems about infertility, they tend to leave men “absolutely cold” (a direct quote). I’m not sure whether this is an indication of the limitations of my own writing, whether men simply cannot identify with this aspect of living in a woman’s body, or whether they just feel squeamish reading about ovaries and ultrasounds. I’d like to ask Antjie Krog whether she’s had similar responses to her poems about menopause in Body Bereft.
Do you think there are advantages to being a woman and a writer currently in South Africa?
Yes and no – I seem to be saying that a lot! I consciously practise affirmative action as an editor and mentor. At AGI we have a stated policy of identifying talent in young black women, and offering encouragement and training, and it’s something I eagerly participate in. So yes, there are political spaces in which women writers are advanced and valorised, and of course I’ve benefited. Unfortunately, these spaces are still tiny and scattered. I’m amazed at the extent to which many white South African men – including writers – still expect to be first in line for the goodies (jobs, honours, publication, grants, prizes, promotions, et al). Yet there are some wonderful wise white “owls” out there – folk like Gus Ferguson, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Hugh Hodge – who encourage younger writers of every stripe and persuasion, and create platforms from which they can perform and publish.
UCT Writers Series and Snailpress are bringing out Blue: A debut collection of poetry. Can you tell me something about your collection and when it will become available?
Let’s not jinx this. Stephen Watson is busy working through my manuscript as we speak, and I’m convinced he’s trying to find a kind way to tell me he’s changed his mind, and my poems aren’t good enough to publish! If the collection does come out, I hope it’ll be before the end of this year.
Is there a "tradition" in South African poetry? Has your understanding of South African poetry and the way it is developing changed over the last few years?
Can I pass on this one, pleading “alps on alps arising”? I’m learning about South and Southern African poetry all the time (for example, I started reading the major Zimbabwean poets only a few years ago). Let’s just say that I’m enjoying local poetry more and more.
At the Cape Town Book Fair you chaired a panel discussion, Poetry 2006: The dividing lines. Is there a widening division between the conventional, conservative approach to poetry and a more inclusive, laissez-faire approach?
I think there are more and more kinds of poetry – those that lend themselves to performance, those that work best in print/book form, those that belong on a website or blog. There are confessional poems, therapeutic poems, religious poems – a lot of material that needs to be written, that serves an essential function, but that doesn’t fit the classical conventions for publication. I’m not sure these categories – which obviously blur together at the edges – can or should be polarised into camps.
You've worked with a number of respected authors as an editor and a consultant. How do authors today manage to make enough money to live? Should society feel a greater responsibility towards writers?
Hint to all writers: marry someone who can afford to support you. Seriously, this is a major concern. With a handful of exceptions, writers in South Africa (and increasingly, around the world) cannot earn enough to live on. They write part-time while hanging on to their day jobs, they write for the education textbook market (one of the few publishing sectors where royalties pay more than pin money, and then only if you’re lucky) in order to cross-subsidise their “real” writing. Or, like myself, they work alongside the writing industry, as editors, typesetters, publishers, journalists and so on. In the United States, many writers earn their bread by teaching creative writing courses at universities and colleges, but here we don’t even really have this option.
Society’s responsibility to writers? Tricky in a developing country. The state does do its bit – the National Arts Council must be the only government department in South Africa where you can pick up a phone and get directly through to a friendly voice who can help you to apply for funding. (Viva NAC, viva!) But until South Africans buy more books, we’re not going to see change. And only a tiny sector of our society can afford the luxury of books. What does bother me is that middle-class recreational spending sidelines books (unless there’s a movie tie-in) – folk would rather spend money in the pub, on DVDs, iPods, computer games, and so on. And when they do buy books, they’re imported – the latest Dan Brown, or those smug get-rich-quick self-help books. This really gets my goat. I’d like to see VAT charged only on imported books, with locally produced books being exempted. And what about tax breaks for second-hand bookshops and lottery funding for charity bookshops, so that they can offer good books for very little money? And I’d like the media to pay more attention to local writers other than the Big Three (Coetzee, Gordimer and Brink) – although I’m starting to see progress here.
Does conflict exist between your work as an editor and your creative writing? How compatible are the two, for you?
Are you kidding? Editing kills creative writing stone dead! I’ve written elsewhere that editing, and especially the kind of ghostwriting I’m so often asked to do under the guise of “editing”, involves turning myself into a writing chameleon and working as if I am that author. It’s a kind of ventriloquism, and it chokes my own voice.
And yet, even though I don’t enjoy what editing does to my writing, it’s hard to abandon. I love seeing an author’s vision grow clear, helping authors to express their ideas better and better – a lot of what I do is similar to what an academic supervisor does, and that mentoring is intensely rewarding. And there’s a certain kind of editing – development editing – to which I’m politically committed. As the managing editor of Africa’s first academic, accredited feminist journal, Feminist Africa, which is put out by the AGI, I work with brilliant women (and a few men!) all over the continent, and it’s fascinating and stimulating, and I never stop learning. What is so great is that my colleagues – Amina Mama, Jane Bennett and Elaine Salo – encourage me in a kind of synergy in which the contributors and I work together to produce high-quality academic writing. Given that African women intellectuals, even the senior ones, usually work in highly gendered environments that are woefully lacking in resources, peer support and guidance, they are extremely responsive to the pleasures and challenges of working with a writing specialist. Often they have fantastic, groundbreaking data, but it gets sidelined because they’re outside the conventional Western publishing loop. And I get to be part of a team that gets this material out there. So how I can stop doing something so exciting and worthwhile?
I don’t know how to resolve the editing/writing dilemma. I’m trying to persuade commercial publishers to let me train/mentor/oversee their editors on the job. Something like the pattern for Andrew Brown’s novel, Coldsleep Lullaby, which went on to win the Sunday Times literary award: Robert Plummer (one of my former students!) of Zebra asked me to do a specialist assessment that would enable Andrew to rework the manuscript. It helped that Andrew was also a former student, so I felt comfortable giving him detailed feedback. I also knew he was a lovely person who wouldn’t be offended by frank critique! But more important, I wrote editing suggestions and guidelines throughout the manuscript. This meant that when Martha Evans (no, not a former student, but almost – I worked with her when she first started out in publishing!) started line editing, she could use my edits as a guide for more focused work. She’s a brilliant editor (being a poet, she has the essential Inner Ear), and she told me my preparatory work made her feel more confident about making certain changes. I don’t know why more publishers don’t work like this – it’s a win-win-win formula. It improves the standard of first writing and then editing, and it offers me a way out of my dilemma – I get to mentor and train, but someone else does the line editing that involves submerging oneself within the writing persona of a stranger. I’ve worked in a similar way with Michelle Matthews and Ceridwyn Morris at Oshun, with very successful results. Anyone out there listening?
What do you think about the standard of book reviewing in South Africa?
A few reviews simply rework the press release, some praise really schlocky books, some are badly written. But many are carefully researched, judicious and accurate in their assessments, and beautifully presented. Has anyone else noticed that local books are far more carefully reviewed than imported ones? Kudos to those responsible! Given that reviewing books absolutely does not pay, I’m impressed at how seriously some reviewers take their work. I do sometimes wonder whether it’s wise for writers to review other writers in the same fields – I’ve seen this turn into sycophancy and sometimes even sabotage.
 What was the motivation for the anthology Lovely Beyond Any Singing: Landscapes in South African Writing? Where did you get the inspiration for the title?
I’ve known the opening lines of Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country by heart for as long as I can remember – my mother would recite them. So the title just fell into place. I’m hoping that most folk will recognise the source, and respond to that.
One of the things I enjoy about the book is that it affords the reader an opportunity to explore South African literature. If one reads an excerpt or a poem by a writer one doesn't know, one can then follow up and find out more about him/her. How did you go about collecting and selecting the pieces of writing? How long did it take you?
I’ve been doing the reading all my life. Some selections were obvious – the opening pages of Cry the Beloved Country, Buckingham Palace District Six, Story of an African Farm, The Plains of Camdeboo. Some authors were obvious – Pauline Smith, Athol Fugard, Sindiwe Magona, Herman Charles Bosman, Gcina Mhlope, Es’kia Mphahlele, Sol Plaatje. In fact, the hardest part wasn’t choosing what went in – it was what to leave out! I am still wringing my hands over the vast amount of material my editor, the aptly-named Jacqui L’Ange, gently but firmly managed to tug away from me. If it were up to me, I would have produced a doorstop. Anyone for Volume II?
How long it took? About 30 years of reading, ten years of brewing the idea (with the help of others), six wonderful weeks of rereading over the relative quiet of the holiday season, two and a half hellish months of actually compiling the damn thing between the hours of 11 pm and 2 am at the end of my normal working day.
What aspect did you enjoy most when compiling the volume?
Revisiting old friends and finding new ones! My publishers, Double Storey, paid me an advance in December, always the leanest time of year for a freelancer, and I had a blissful time reading and rereading and reading some more. Heaven. Does anyone else want to pay me to read? Experienced anthologist, not fussy about royalties, knows her way round the publishing business?
What would you like readers to come away with after reading the book?
I want them rush off to the bookstores and start an orgy of buying and reading local writing! I also want to give visitors a series of pictures of South Africa that go beyond tourist clichés and the Big Five. I’d like overseas scholars of South African literature to look beyond Coetzee and Gordimer, to dip into the wealth of our undiscovered and alternative canons. Finally, I want homesick expats to open the book and revisit the places they come from, the places they belong.
Helen, I may have skipped many things we should have talked about, so as a last question, would you like to say anything about Lovely Beyond Any Singing?
Michelle, you've been more than thorough – thanks so much. I’d like to close with something I realised only after the book had gone to press: that in many ways it’s a veiled autobiography, a memoir of both my reading and my relation to the South African landscape. It contains my favourite writings – not necessarily the most “important” ones.
Also, I hope everyone sees the list of further reading right at the back. I wrote a long Afterword apologising to the writers I left out, and explaining who else readers should track down and why, but we ran out of space. So it got cut down to a list of names in a teeny tiny font. Please check it out!
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A poem written by Helen Moffett from the anthology Lovely Beyond Any Singing: Landscapes in South African Writing:
'Route 62'
What do mountains dream of?
Lying slumbering in the sheet of heat
Smoothed gently across the Little Karoo.
No wind. Only warmth, but it doesn't press.
It floats, tenderly draping the spines and ribs
Into which history has folded these ranges.
Raging hormones of the earth's adolescence
Blasted entire continents into the sky
Leaving the remnants to drift down and lie
Locked into peace, immobile, their flanks
Not even twitching in the drowsy summer
Afternoons. Now they breathe in time with
The slowly passing centuries of geology's clock,
The beat too deep to resonate in our bones.
But the mountains hear it in their sleep:
Tick, and then the pause: aeons later, tock.
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· Lovely Beyond Any Singing, Landscapes in South African Writing
ISBN 1 77013 053 5
An anthology compiled by Helen Moffett
Published by Double Storey.
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