| In conversation with Tracey Farren, author of Whiplash |
Tracey Farren, Janet van Eeden
 Tell me a little bit about your background. You are a freelance journalist and have an honours degree in psychology. What made you choose to write a novel, and then why did you focus specifically on a novel about prostitutes in Cape Town? For a few years I wrote newspaper pieces about social and governance issues, like child justice and prison conditions. I was especially interested in the decriminalisation of prostitution debate. It was easy for me to research the issue as I lived in the pretty suburb of Marina da Gama near Muizenberg. A few years ago, the road that borders the Marina was lined with beautiful young girls selling their bodies. I became friendly with them and once they realised that I was not there to judge them, they spoke openly about their working lives. Newspapers have little space for personal stories, and magazines like to keep their protagonists middle or upper class. The women's stories weighed on my heart. I needed to find a way to release them. I did a creative writing workshop with Anne Shuster in Kalk Bay and, to use a Whiplash analogy, it felt as if someone had opened the cage and freed the birds. I started writing Whiplash, then stopped out of sheer terror. The book was too edgy, too risky. Then one of the women I had come to know was picked up by a client and sliced to pieces. He left her half buried in Clovelly. Her life was not even worth an inquiry. The police did not even bother to question her pimp. The tragedy gave me the will to continue with Whiplash. Aspects of the murdered woman seeped into the character I was creating.
Why did you choose to make Tess the protagonist in your story? You could have chosen to tell her story through a social worker, or someone at the abortion clinic. The reader might feel a little more comfortable if the story were told through a third party, through the eyes of a less involved person, perhaps.
I wanted the reader to identify with Tess on an emotional level. Tess's daily job is alienating and crass, and a third-person narrator would have had to focus more on her external behaviour. Tess needed a chance to explain herself. I thought that if readers lived in her mind for a while, if they witnessed her thoughts and her fears, they were more likely to love her. I chose her rough street language for the same reason. I hoped that Tess would come across as authentic. If people could believe her, they could feel for her too.
How do you think your novel might work towards creating a better understanding of the circumstances sex workers endure? Was that your aim in any way at all? And how would an article address the subject better than a feature article, for example?
 The response to Whiplash has been incredibly gratifying. It seems to have changed the way that people see sex workers in the street. Readers from all walks of life, affluent business people and hardened journalists contact us to say, "I will never look at another prostitute without thinking how hard their life must be", or "Whenever I see someone on the side of the road, I think, that could be Tess." A waitress at a beachfront restaurant said that she and her friends used to laugh at the street prostitutes. "But now it makes me sad. It was easier to laugh. But I can't anymore." A few prostitutes have read Whiplash. They say that it is intensely real. One young girl from an escort agency was in tears all the way through. She kept saying to her colleague, "This could be me." South Africans are overwhelmed with horror stories. We try to cut off from them to save ourselves. A mere news feature on the issue of the brutal conditions of sex work in South Africa would have merged with all the other "normal" atrocities in South Africa. When people read a novel, however, they commit their attention and their emotion to imaginary characters. They live through the experience and internalise the political message in the process. In this case, I think a charismatic character and a fictitious story worked far better to raise awareness than a quick magazine or newspaper feature could have done. Whiplash dramatises the crying need for protection of sex workers. The women on the road are tortured and killed like disposable dolls. The fact that they are selling sex illegally seems to detract from their right to life. This needs to change. The industry needs to be controlled, not outlawed and ignored. It makes it too easy for mentally ill men to act out their worst fantasies with impunity. Tess is very realistic. Did you do much research into the plight of street workers or is she based on someone you know?
I spoke to a lot of sex workers on the road, at escort agencies and brothels. I also interviewed a few people who had been addicted to painkillers and some women who had suffered childhood sexual abuse. Tess grew out of all of the women I spoke to, including the lovely woman who was killed while I was doing my research. Tess also took on a strong resemblance to a little girl I knew when I was very young. She was a fiery, freckly little girl who was having a terrible time at home. Even then, I was impressed by her survival spirit. I heard later that she had become a prostitute and, like the people who read Whiplash, always wondered how and why. What made you decide to create the narrative device of Tess talking to her mother throughout the novel? It's an effective one, but I wondered why you chose this particular convention.
There are several reasons for this: I needed to justify Tess's defiant honesty. She is not likely to show her heart to a stranger, but in the letter to her mother she could explode secrets and talk with an intent that charges straight from the heart. The communication with her mother reveals the child in Tess. This makes it easier for the reader to set aside judgement. It is easier to forgive who she is now if we remember that she was once a beautiful, trusting child. I hoped that people would sense this vulnerability and get caught up in the intensity of her need to be heard. Tess, the character, is undereducated. The spoken word is her natural, most persuasive medium of expression. I used the ruse of a rough, "tell it like it is" letter to her mother to allow that sense of desperate insistence, letting Tess communicate in the best way that she knows how. I read on the back blurb that you have two children. How do you manage to find time to write, earn a living, and look after two children as well? I wait for windfalls. Whenever I receive a tax cheque or a renewal on an old job, I stop what I am doing and work on fiction. This is why it took me years to complete Whiplash. I managed to finish it on the profits of the sale of my house! I have started my second novel on the strength of an NAC grant. It is not easy to find money and time, but stubborn tenacity goes a long way. I never work in the afternoons - I am way too busy with my children. They are fourteen and seventeen, so they are not exactly clamouring to hang out with me all the time. So, instead of feeling rejected on the weekends, I write. Do you plan to write another novel soon? Or are you busy with it already? If so, can you tell me a little bit about it? My second novel is called Snake in the Grass. It is about a little farm girl who must stop a charming psychopath from destroying her family. It is written for older children and adults. I am hoping that it has crossover appeal. I am glad to say that it has almost no sex in it at all! I am hoping to publish it next year. Do you live near the sea? Does being close to nature help you write? I live in Fish Hoek now, halfway between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. I need to see the sea once a day and surf every weekend. I find that the sea empties my mind of words and anxieties. I feel like a marine creature for a few hours, rather than mother or a writer. After the single-minded focus on the beauty and the momentum of the water I feel renewed and ready to be still and cerebral. Writing, after all, involves a lot of sitting! Do you think Whiplash could have a positive affect on the people portrayed in the novel at all? Or is it something you believe will be read only by those who would never consider taking up such a profession themselves? What, then, is the value of such a book?
Sex workers who read Whiplash respond to it as a portrait in which they recognise themselves. It seems to acknowledge their fight for survival, their cynicism and the good reasons for it. One prostitute wrote to me saying, "Thank you for showing that we are ordinary people who have just made some mistakes along the way." I think they like it that Tess is kind and intelligent. I am guessing, but perhaps Tess's shame touches a nerve in them. Among general readers, the book is definitely helping to dissolve prejudice. Readers come away with understanding and affection for Tess. Whiplash urges readers to look for the good in unlikely places. It seems to open a gap in people's minds, throwing their old judgements into doubt. When they see someone soliciting on the side of the road, instead of thinking, "whore", they think, "I wonder why? She must have her reasons." The message Whiplash conveys is that we are all the same at the level of the soul. The only difference lies in belief. If people believe that they are dirty and bad, they tend to do harm to themselves or others. If they believe that they are gorgeous and pure, they tend to care well for themselves and for others. This shift in identity is critical to a change in behaviour, especially in a country as violent as ours. "Whiplash is a charming novel even though its subject matter is not. This harsh portrayal of the lives of women at the base end of society never forgets their longing for beauty just under the surface. For example, Tess performs a few ‘jumps' just to buy a cement statue of an angel which she keeps in her flat. She calls her ‘the princess'. Tracey Farren has written a brave novel and its very well worth reading." Extract from a longer review in The Witness.
A shortened version of this Q and A appeared in The Witness.
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