https://www.modjajibooks.co.za/titles/go-away-birds/
Go away, birds
Michelle Edwards
Modjaji Books
ISBN: 978-1-928433-05-7
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Michelle Edwards’s debut work, Go away birds, is an engaging novel which focuses on a turning point in the life of Skye, a 30-something chef who finds herself going back to her childhood home after a traumatic experience.
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Michelle Edwards’s debut work, Go away birds, is an engaging novel which focuses on a turning point in the life of Skye, a 30-something chef who finds herself going back to her childhood home after a traumatic experience. Skye is not your run-of-the-mill South African woman, whatever that’s supposed to mean. She’s had a very unusual upbringing, which she’s ignored for many years by striving to live in the future without dealing with her past. Unfortunately, her denial of unpleasant memories has led to the unravelling of her current lifestyle and created her need to travel back to make peace with her roots.
The opening chapter finds Skye arriving at her childhood home, The Pines, for the first time in many years. The Pines is a hard-as-nails farm in Mpumalanga, and Heather, her mother, seems to be as heartless as Skye remembers her. Heather runs a no-frills-attached eco-farm, which, according to Skye’s adopted brother, Andile, is bankrupt. When Skye turns up at the farm out of the blue, she is surprised to learn that Heather was expecting both her and Andile. And, most remarkable of all, Heather has guests on the farm who are part of a writing retreat. The financial situation doesn’t seem as dire as Andile predicted. Skye has to find out who her mother really is behind the tough exterior she projects, and she also has to find out her own limitations and needs, both of which she’s denied for too many years.
Through a series of events in which Skye relives the past months, the novel covers a broad canvas of South African society – from the bleak environment of the independent farms in Mpumalanga, to the fragrant milieu of Cape Town’s Long Street restaurants, in which the protagonist, Skye, and her husband, Cam, reign supreme with their authentic Taiwanese food eatery, Bushy Bun. Then, to the privileged world of Cam’s parents, Deacon and Julia Carlisle, who have the relaxed easiness of those who’ve never wanted for anything materially – they have their Scarborough holiday home on the coast and their upmarket house in trendy Craighall – to the messy life of their far-from-perfect daughter, Rory. Rory disappeared from the family home years ago, and finally returns long enough for her parents and Cam to find out she’s been living in townships with an activist lover who doesn’t want Rory to be with him as he feels she might damage his struggle credentials.
The novel covers a number of themes, one of which is the crux of the plot and a huge spoiler, so I won’t mention it here. Another very topical theme is the power of social media to destroy lives. Without giving too much away, Skye and Cam are the victims of a social media campaign which threatens their livelihood in their beloved restaurant, as well as their marriage.
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The novel is page-turningly good. The plot moves swiftly through the first-person voice of Skye, who is that most delicious of literary devices: an unreliable narrator.
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The novel is page-turningly good. The plot moves swiftly through the first-person voice of Skye, who is that most delicious of literary devices: an unreliable narrator. The fact that I was surprised by the turn of events towards the end of the novel impressed me, as I usually spot plot twists a mile away. However, Michelle Edwards has woven the strands of storyline together subtly and seamlessly without drawing attention to their oddity, right until the final climax. There were moments that I felt that something wasn’t quite adding up, but it was only a subtle nagging. It takes clever writing to keep the reader focused on the apparently normal while sowing in small seeds of unease in innocuous ways. The final denouement is deeply satisfying, however, and the clues fall into place without flaw. This is a powerful debut novel for a writer who knows how to keep a reader intrigued by just enough information, but not too much. I look forward to the next novel from this promising author.
Q and A:
Michelle, I see that the novel was first published in 2018 and was longlisted for the Dinaane Fiction Award, which is a coup for a debut novel. Is the Modjaji publication a new publication for you, and how did this come about?
The Dinaane Debut Fiction Award is for manuscripts that aren’t published yet, by authors from SADC countries who have never been published before – so it is only open to debut novelists. I submitted the Go away birds manuscript in 2018, and it was one of six manuscripts to be longlisted that year, but it didn’t make the shortlist of three. The prize winner got their manuscript published by Jacana Media. Go away birds was published for the first (and only) time by Modjaji in April 2021.
I see you’ve lived in a number of countries: Taiwan, Zambia, the UK; yet the novel is very firmly rooted in South Africa. You studied at my alma mater, Rhodes, I see. Are you South African yourself, or do you feel like more of a citizen of the world?
No, I’m definitely South African. I lived in Taiwan for a year after finishing my BJourn at Rhodes. I moved to the UK for 18 months after that, and returned to South Africa in 2009. I moved to Zambia in 2018 for my husband’s job, and we returned to South Africa right in the middle of the hard lockdown in 2020. (We had to charter a flight back in May 2020 – going through passport control in a completely deserted OR Tambo was an extremely dystopian experience. Quarantine when we arrived meant sharing a hotel room for a week with my husband and two kids, while also working, and was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. But, wow, were we happy to be finally “released” into our home country!) My stints of living in other countries have never been for very long, and I’m hoping never to emigrate. I feel like I’ve inherited both the problems and the privileges of South Africa, for better or worse, and I feel a deep sense of belonging and responsibility to our country.
The protagonist in your novel, Skye, is quite unusual. Where did the idea of this character come from?
I am always hesitant to give the real answer to this question, but the truth is that Skye appeared to me exactly as she is, fully formed, without my having any conscious knowledge of how that happened.
I’ve given this a great deal of thought since the novel was published – while I was writing it, and when only a few people had read it, I didn’t have any reason to interrogate where Skye came from. The best way I know how to answer this is to say that I distinctly remember where I was when she first appeared to me (rounding a corner on my regular jogging route past Noordhoek Common in 2013), and that the only pragmatic way I can think about this is that I had a baby daughter at the time, and a full-time job, and not nearly enough time alone with my thoughts. I wasn’t even writing at the time, and wasn’t “trying” to come up with a story. All I can think is that I’d been “creating” her in my subconscious, without being aware of it.
Skye appeared, her sister-in-law Rory appeared at pretty much the same time (they are like two sides of the same coin in many ways), and the story unfurled and grew and blossomed in my mind like it had been waiting for me to acknowledge it. I don’t know where or when the seed was first planted!
I like how you described Skye here – living in the future without dealing with her past. I think that many South Africans, like me, are in this position. We’re the ones born during the last decade of apartheid – old enough to remember our lives before 1994, and to have either benefited from or been ground down by apartheid, but too young to have had a hand in dismantling or upholding it; old enough to remember the promise of the rainbow nation and young enough to have spent many years living with the disillusionment of 1994 not suddenly making everything easy and wonderful, but also young enough still to feel a sense of hope for our future. How do we deal with the darkness of our past in a way that allows us to move forward? I think I wanted to explore that in the context of an individual – not as a rhetorical question, but as an issue that an ordinary person would have to grapple with in the context of her life as an adult in the world, and specifically in today’s South Africa.
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I think I wanted to explore that in the context of an individual – not as a rhetorical question, but as an issue that an ordinary person would have to grapple with in the context of her life as an adult in the world, and specifically in today’s South Africa.
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The characters come from many different worlds in your novel. What inspired you to write about such a cross-section of South African culture?
I have experienced all of these places and milieus in my life. I don’t think I have a good enough imagination, or enough of a dedication to extensive research, to be able to write about places I’ve never been, or a place to which I don’t feel a connection. I’ve relished the purple jacaranda season in October in Craighall Park, I’ve felt the excitement of standing in a queue to get into a restaurant in Cape Town’s city bowl that’s been hailed as the Next Big Thing, I’ve worked in restaurants (not as a chef, but I have read enough about the industry to have written – I think – fairly convincingly about Skye’s work), I’ve spent years on the south peninsula of the Western Cape, I’ve gone running on the beach in Scarborough, I’ve lived on a no-frills farm in Mpumalanga. I’ve sucked sea snails out of their shells on the Penghu Islands off the coast of Taiwan.
But my background is not Skye’s background. I experienced these places and these environments from my own viewpoint, in my own circumstances, and Skye experienced them with hers.
South Africa is such a fascinating melting pot with so many different cultures and influences, but I felt strongly as a writer about not deviating too far from environments that I am familiar with (though I was writing about them from Skye’s point of view, not my own). Skye’s life, even on the farm, is that of a middle-class white South African, because that’s who I am. I know the idea of writers staying in their own lane can be problematic, but this was the only way I could see writing a novel that was true and felt real.
You’ve cleverly inserted reference to South Africa’s tortured past by making Heather’s backstory completely immersed in it. You give credit to Bridget Hilton-Barber’s novel, Student, comrade, prisoner, spy, as the source for your information about this era. I’ve read Bridget’s memoir, too, and it’s a powerful piece and takes place shortly after I left Rhodes myself, so it’s very familiar territory. Why did you decide to include this aspect of Heather’s life as the formation of her tough-mindedness?
Bridget is one of my literary idols, and after reading her memoir I hit on the foundation of who Heather was. I also went to Rhodes, and had lecturers who had been anti-apartheid activists in their time as students, and so that world was familiar to me in a second-hand way, but what Bridget’s memoir did was give tangible, everyday details that made the stories so vivid and real.
Heather had a difficult time in her early twenties, even setting aside the dangers and terrors of the Struggle. I think she would have been tough-minded and no-nonsense whether or not she’d been involved in politics. But if it hadn’t been for her activism while she was at university, she’d never have met Skye’s father, or Lola, and so this aspect of her life was the foundation for Skye’s whole life, too.
Some authors say that they use aspects of their own personalities to imbue the characters they create. Is there any part of your own story in Skye’s narrative? Is she like you in any way at all?
My background is much more suburban and ordinary than Skye’s. I grew up on the West Rand of Johannesburg as an only child, went to a convent school until I was 14, and then went to boarding school in White River when my father’s job moved the family to Swaziland. When I was a teenager, my mother lived on a farm that was similar in some ways to The Pines, for a short time – though The Pines is like an amalgamation of that farm, a couple of farms I’ve visited that belong to friends of mine, and a place entirely of my imagination.
Skye doesn’t really know herself, which I think is not uncommon among people in their early 30s, which was the age I was when I wrote Go away birds, but I think I was a little more self-aware than she is. I’m probably more socially adept and comfortable in groups than Skye is – but because I didn’t grow up in the same unusual circumstances, that’s not surprising.
I’m also much more risk-averse (and a lot less brave) than Skye. She’s had a run of impulsive decisions when Go away birds opens – marrying Cam after only six months together, leaving her job as a chef on a dime to become a food stylist, leaving that job to open Bushy Bun. I’ve been in the same job for almost seven years, have been with my husband for 17 years, and keep items in my cart when I shop for clothes online for at least 72 hours before I make a commitment to buying them!
There are plenty more differences, but one similarity between Skye and me is that, like Skye, I am always watching and listening. Skye sees things that nobody else does, and notices things nobody else would. This is part of what I think makes her such a good first-person narrator, and part of what makes me the writer I am. I’m very interested in people – the way they hold themselves, the words they choose, the tics they probably don’t notice, the idiosyncrasies – and their motivations; and certain aspects of each of my characters are based on the traits of people I’ve encountered in real life. (However, and I can’t stress this enough, not a single character in Go away birds is based on any single person I know or have met – I always get asked whether my family or friends are “hidden” in Go away birds, and my answer is always, “No, thank God!” I love my characters, but most of them I would avoid in real life.)
I was surprised by the final denouement of Skye’s journey, which I won’t reveal here as it would be a huge spoiler. Were you aware of keeping the full facts from the reader until the final moment, or is this just the natural way your story unfolded?
Thank you! It was a conscious choice. Though the editing process was extensive, and many scenes (and even characters) were changed or scrapped during the edits, this aspect was there from the very first draft. I love it when writers do this, when we’re distracted by the mundane, day-to-day things a character is busy with – cooking, fishing, chatting, getting dressed, going for a run, picking vegetables – but feel a sense of dread shimmering just beneath the surface. Doing this with a first-person narrator was the simplest way I could think of to do this, and it’s especially easy to do when the character is avoiding thinking about something that has happened to them, or something that they’ve done; they are constantly forcing themselves to focus only on the mundane, and so that’s all we see – but we get a sense through the subtle differences in their reactions and feelings as the plot progresses that things are building up to disaster. We think we’re seeing everything because we’re following a first-person narrator very closely, from within their own mind, but we realise at the end or at the climax that we weren’t being given all the pieces of the puzzle.
One of my favourite examples of this is Morvern Callar by Alan Warner, though he takes this technique to the extreme (I think it works because his character, Morvern, serves as an allegory as well as a “real” person). Kazuo Ishiguro does this brilliantly – The remains of the day and Never let me go both follow first-person narrators who aren’t fully aware of who they are and don’t let us see the full picture until the climax or the denouement. Sally Rooney was also a big inspiration to me – in her two earlier novels, her characters don’t really know themselves and don’t interrogate their own actions, at least not at first.
Your novel covers a number of themes, one of which is the power of social media to destroy lives. Without giving too much away, Skye and Cam are the victims of a social media campaign which threatens their livelihood as well as their marriage. Did you include this aspect to highlight the dangers of the cancel culture?
I didn’t intend for this plotline to serve as a message about cancel culture. There’s a scene where Skye realises that the backlash was fully deserved – that she and Cam were guilty of everything the social media campaign accused them of, even though she wasn’t really aware of what had been happening behind the scenes at Bushy Bun until it was too late. I thought it was interesting to look at it from this perspective – is it easier or more difficult for the “victims” of cancel culture to handle the fallout if they realise that they deserve it, if they acknowledge their guilt? (I am of the opinion that “cancel culture” is actually “people being held accountable for their actions”, though it does have the potential to be taken too far and is not a black-and-white issue.)
What would you like readers to take away from the novel? Is there any message per se that you wanted to convey?
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On the surface, it’s about a woman whose job and marriage are threatened and who is forced to go back home, where she confronts the traumas in her past and her relationships with the people who raised her.
But on a deeper level, it’s an interrogation and exploration of what it’s like to live in South Africa as a person who was born during the 1980s.
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There’s no single message I wanted to get across, but I sometimes think of Go away birds as a stealth-politics novel. On the surface, it’s about a woman whose job and marriage are threatened and who is forced to go back home, where she confronts the traumas in her past and her relationships with the people who raised her.
But on a deeper level, it’s an interrogation and exploration of what it’s like to live in South Africa as a person who was born during the 1980s.
I hope it makes readers think more deeply and critically about white privilege, and how the Struggle has shaped who we are as people and as a country. I want readers to remember where we came from, and that apartheid is not ancient history; I want them to think about redemption and forgiveness, and about love. One of the messages I wanted to convey is about the fluidity of sexual and gender identity, and it comes across in Andile saying, “It’s a spectrum, isn’t it?”
I also wanted to make the point that there’s no single way to be a mother. Two of the mothers in the book explain to Skye that they’re being the only mothers they know how to be. As mothers, we hold ourselves to impossible standards, and I wanted to remind readers that there’s no such thing as the perfect mother, and that motherhood isn’t limited to a relationship between a woman and the child who is born to her. Skye and Andile have two moms, and it was important for me that Skye felt more of a kinship to Lola than to her birth mother, Heather.
And, without giving too much away, I wanted to acknowledge the pervasiveness of toxic masculinity and how, in certain circumstances, it manifests as careless, almost casual sexual assault. That, for women in our patriarchal world, all men are to be feared.
But on a less serious note, I also want people to be reminded of life’s greatest joys – food, and family/friends. Food with family/friends. And, my personal favourite, food for family/friends.
I know all writers hate this question, but what are you planning for your next novel?
I’m about three quarters of the way through my second manuscript, which I started in 2019. I am not a writer who can churn out stories, and though I expected to have finished it by the end of 2021, here I am, still plugging away!
The working title is Falling water, and it’s about a wife and mother who drops out of her life – I am fascinated by the idea of women with a seemingly “perfect” life taking a detour and seeing what their life could be like, or how it could have been – and is faced with a choice that has no easy outcome. There’s a lot of Taylor Swift, a lot of sexual tension, beautiful, atmospheric scenery and settings, and some covetable thrifted vintage outfits.
As you can probably tell, it’s a lot lighter than Go away birds, and while it’s written from a feminist perspective about a mother who’s not behaving as a mother “should”, this one is not trying to be stealth-political, or stealth anything at all. It’s me, writing women’s fiction as a romantic fiction fan. It’s a bit of fun with some serious themes, and it’s been a really bright place for me to retreat to in the past couple of years. Fingers crossed it one day sees the light of day! If my Go away birds pace is anything to go by, it will be ready to be published in approximately the year 2029.