Photo of Aryan Kaganof: provided
Short.Sharp.Stories is a platform showcasing established and emerging South African short story writers. For the 2025 anthology, Power: Short stories that light the dark, writers imagined “power” in fictional terms – how it influences and affects us, including political and personal power, and the ever-present issues of loadshedding.
In this Short.Sharp.Stories interview, Joanne Hichens chats with Aryan Kaganof, author of the short story “Xabanisa”, a vibrant, volatile, lustful tale of star-crossed lovers.
Aryan Kaganof is curator and editor of Herri (https://herri.org.za/10/), winner of the HSS Award for Best Digital Publication in South Africa.
Many writers refrain from speaking about their prose or answering questions about it, for the very good reason that a reader must make his or her own inferences as they read. Bearing this in mind, and understanding that you are such a writer, I’d like to ask you a few questions that speak more generally to short story writing and also to power and powerlessness.
You might want to start off by commenting on this – that text/prose should speak for itself?
Yes. It should.
What is it about the South African short story, yours and others’, that interests you?
My interest lies mainly in asemic poetry.
As a curator yourself, being editor of your award-winning and indeed spectacular online publication, Herri, what strikes you as noteworthy about the Short.Sharp.Stories anthology Power?
At a time when South African literature is marked by the long shadow of the novel as a mode for grappling with national history and social transformation, the curation of Power demonstrates the short story’s vitality as a space for testing ideas quickly, for sketching character and place with precision, and for allowing the anecdotal or the fleeting to carry the weight of allegory.
Moreover, this new Short.Sharp collection frequently exposes the absurdities of contemporary existence in Mzansi, whether in the realm of precarious labour or fractured family dynamics, always returning to the question of how individuals inhabit and narrate themselves against broader currents of historical memory and social expectation. Mthobisi Myeni’s “The denizens” is exemplary in this respect.
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Power confirms that the South African short story, far from being a minor genre, remains one of the most agile, responsive and experimental sites of literary production in the country today.
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Power positions the short story not merely as an aesthetic form but as a diagnostic tool, one attuned to the pulse of the present while remaining attentive to the lingering ghosts of the past. A strong example of this is Vuyokazi Ngemntu’s “The cost of freedom”. Power confirms that the South African short story, far from being a minor genre, remains one of the most agile, responsive and experimental sites of literary production in the country today.
You have written that power and powerlessness are not opposites. “They are intertwined, recursive, layered.” Could you give us a sense of how inexorably linked the concepts are?
Typically, we conceive of the relationship between power and powerlessness as being of polar opposites, a fixed binary. Actually, this relationship more resembles a Möbius strip: when you place your finger on the surface of one side and trace that finger along, you eventually find yourself on the other side of the strip without ever having crossed over. This is how power works. It never exists in a vacuum; it only manifests in relation to others. The exercise of power presupposes a field of vulnerability, dependence and potentially resistance.
To experience powerlessness is to be caught in a system of relationality where force, authority or influence is being exerted on one. Power and powerlessness are constitutive of one another; you cannot understand or even describe one without invoking the other. I get this notion from the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant, whose book Poetics of relation, first translated into English in 1997, has been enormously influential on decolonial thinking.
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The recursive dynamic is that every exercise of power generates conditions of powerlessness that can circle back and destabilise the original position. Built into this relational model of the power dynamic is that every exertion of power holds within it the seeds of its own demise. Hence the imperative always to resist power. Resistance is life.
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The recursive dynamic is that every exercise of power generates conditions of powerlessness that can circle back and destabilise the original position. Built into this relational model of the power dynamic is that every exertion of power holds within it the seeds of its own demise. Hence the imperative always to resist power. Resistance is life.
How does this apply to lived experience?
At the level of lived experience, power and powerlessness coexist simultaneously. One can be powerful in one domain (economic, racial, gendered, institutional) while powerless in another. More crucially, one often feels both at once: we all know the manager who exercises authority over workers but feels powerless under corporate directives; the activist who feels daunted when pitted against systemic forces, yet paradoxically wields tremendous symbolic power in shaping public discourse.
This relationality means that power and powerlessness are not opposite endpoints of a line, but overlapping textures of entangled being-in-the-world. Power draws its sustenance from what looks superficially like its opposite. The “powerful” are anxious about their dependence on those they dominate. Their wealth, legitimacy and even their sense of self, rest on maintaining structures of inequality. The “powerless”, meanwhile, are imbricated in systems that extract their labour, compliance or recognition. I have written a sestina about this called The rainbow homeless vs the prisoners of luxury. This dialectic is the core economic concept governing the labour camp called “South Africa”.
To sum up: power and powerlessness are not simply locked in struggle, but form a recursive loop, a structure of mutual contingency. One folds into the other. The moment you try to isolate “pure power”, you discover its cracks, its fault lines of dependency; when you describe “utter powerlessness”, you are always also describing the contingent forces it generates: endurance, resistance and inevitably explosion.
Without going into detail, your story is a love story of sorts. I’d like you to speak directly to power between individuals, and how in short fiction the intensity can be exploited – that power can drive a narrative and create intensity between characters. Is that what we read for?
French philosopher George Bataille reminds us that power is not only political, but also erotic, ecstatic, transgressive. In sado-masochism (SM), the roles of “master” and “slave” are staged and performed with a highly self-conscious theatricality. The sadist seems to wield the power, yet that power only exists because the masochist grants it, desires it. The conditions of their relationality are mutually decided upon.
The “powerless” position is thus the necessary condition of possibility for the “powerful” one to exert power. The masochist derives pleasure precisely from performative powerlessness, which becomes its own form of control: setting limits, orchestrating the scene, holding the ultimate power key of consent.
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Every exercise of domination exposes dependence; every condition of vulnerability reveals subterranean forms of strength. This is the specific love story trope I have investigated in “Xabanisa”, where M/F cis-het gender-binary friction is exacerbated by “the colour of the skins we are wrapped in”.
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Bataille links this individual power play between sexual partners to sovereignty and expenditure: true power is not in mastery but in surrender, in loss, in the moment where power dissipates into ecstatic dissolution. Every exercise of domination exposes dependence; every condition of vulnerability reveals subterranean forms of strength. This is the specific love story trope I have investigated in “Xabanisa”, where M/F cis-het gender-binary friction is exacerbated by “the colour of the skins we are wrapped in”.
There is an image in your story that speaks directly to power in a visceral way. It brings us a blaze of fire. My question is, what is it about “burning down the house” that we are especially good at in South Africa?
Tyres.
Where does South African power lie?
“South Africa” is a colonial construct. It, too, shall pass.
Your latest issue of Herri is devoted to Gaza. What is your driving force behind this shockingly relevant issue?
Here, I would like to quote one of the issue’s contributors, Dr Síona O’Connell:
To be able to make our positions clear, to draw a line in the sand with those who still say, “I suppose you are one of those who believe it’s a genocide,” means that for me, now, I will do two things: use this remarkable repository (Herri) in my teaching, and withdraw all support from anyone who hides behind silence and claims of academic freedom when such moral clarity is demanded. This issue of Herri represents more than solidarity; it represents the kind of cultural and intellectual courage that our moment demands. The vision and curation by (journalist) Atiyyah Khan, (BDS activist) Roshan Dadoo and (PhD candidate) Cole Meintjies has created something that will endure as both witness and call to action.
And a last question, with reference to the asemic, the wordless, the visual, the emotive. You “leave space” but also “create space” for your readers. In your customary few words, who is Aryan Kaganof?
Blank space.
Tell us, then: what keeps you writing, publishing, producing?
It’s true that the body is an illusion, but still it must eat.
Find the latest issue of Herri at https://herri.org.za/11/ – an urgent agitprop response to the genocide in Gaza in the form of poetry, writing, photography, sonic responses, DJ mixes, visual art and more. Contributors include novelists Zukiswa Wanner and Imraan Coovadia, Reverend Allan Boesak, artists Tracey Rose and Candice Breitz, academics Malaika Mahlatsi and Tshepo Madlingozi, and 80 more.
Joanne Hichens, author, editor and publisher, is based in Cape Town. She believes in the multiplicity of South African writing talent and has edited numerous anthologies of short stories showcasing the diversity of the South African voice. She is best known for curating the Short.Sharp.Stories series, including anthologies Bloody satisfied, Incredible journey, Adults only and Fluid: The freedom to be, winner of the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) Award for Best Edited Collection (2024). She has written crime fiction, YA and, most recently, the acclaimed Death and the after parties (2020).
Power is available at good bookstores and directly from Tattoo Press: joanne.hichens@gmail.com.
Tattoo Press is an independent small publisher, specialising in contemporary South African short fiction.
Also read:
Short.Sharp.Stories anthology Power: interview with Mthobisi Myeni, author of "The denizens"