Author Paul Williams Featured in Mazwi: Zimbabwean Literary Journal
Good conversation, Tinashe Mushakavanhu and Paul Williams. We need more honest dialogues like this about Zimbabwe, about any country really. Now I want to read everything Paul has written. I want to interview him even!
There is nothing as invaluable as a writer's voice that treats issues as they are (with their complexity), without seeking to impress certain interests or simply following what's in fashon at the time. Examples: everyone is writing a memoir about farm seizures in Zimbabwe, let me write a memoir about farm seizure in Zimbabwe; or everyone is writing a short story about this and that, let me write a short story about this and that too. Of course, this seems to be the case in Zimbabweean writing because of the current rise in themed anthologies; so writers have to satisfy the editor's needs, which is a practical consideration, but eventually, after that one or two short stories, start to treat matters the way you want to, even if it means taking a radically different position on an issue. I sense that Paul Williams is one such writer, at least in his memoir....
Anyway, I thought I should let this out, and then direct you to the real post. First, read this excerpt; then follow the link to the rest of the interview:
Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Would you agree that Zimbabwean literature is a literature of two halves: black and white? I find that there is a serious disconnect. Black writers write about the black experience. White writers write about the white experience. Can it ever be one?
Paul Williams: Unfortunately, it is very divided. Just look at the last two Zimbabwe novels I’ve read this year—I had to keep asking myself—is this the same country these writers are writing about? JM Coetzee once said “Am I white? Am I black? These are the first questions one has to ask in this country.’ He was talking about South Africa, but the same applies to Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe inherited two separated cultures and they have not been integrated. But there is also an ideological problem in trying to resolve this literary Apartheid. The South African writer Njabulo Ndebele points out that we tend to write characters as types, caricatures, and unless we share total living conditions, we cannot write accurately about others. I’ve noticed that when white writers write about black characters or vice versa, they tend to portray one dimensional stereotypes. It’s hard to get outside one’s skin and the prejudices imposed on us by history. However, there’s also the danger of appropriation, especially from white writers–speaking on behalf of other races, speaking on top of them, silencing them. I became interested in JM Coetzee because he writes about this very problem–the inability to get outside yourself and understand the other. What is interesting about Coetzee is that he writes without a single direct reference to race. Disgrace for example has no mention of skin colour, and that’s perhaps the way to go, to consciously erase race from our writing…. I also like writing that attempts to cross over this great divide. Tim McCloughlin’s novel Karima (1985) gives voice equally to white and black characters. I’ve tried to do the same in my own writing. Soldier Blue is told from the perspective of a naïve white boy, but I have inserted voices of ancestors, alternative histories and interviews with ZIPRA and ZANLA combatants that intrude upon and disrupt this ‘white’ narrative. And in The Secret of Old Mukiwa, I consciously try to bridge that divide by writing entirely from the point of view of two black teenagers.
There have been a few “white memoirs” coming out of Zimbabwe from writers like Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Judith Todd, Dan Wylie, and Jennifer Armstrong. Why was it important for you to write a memoir about growing up in Rhodesia [or Zimbabwe]?
Catharsis? Confession? Nostalgia? Actually two books influenced me to write Soldier Blue. The first was Julie Frederikse’s None but Ourselves (an illustrated history of Rhodesian war propaganda). It opened my eyes to re-examine the lies my childhood was founded on. Second, Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind helped me decolonise my ‘white’ mind. So my memoir was an act of deconstructing my race and gender. I documented how I became a white male, a racist, sexist, a ‘Rhodesian’, and traced my attempts to wriggle out of this ‘white skin’. But the book is also an emotional act. Living away from the country you love, your heart yearns to recapture the smells, tastes, memories, feelings of the land. I felt very alienated living in the USA: I felt the tug of Zimbabwe’s red earth, its past, its energy and this is the nerve point of the memoir.
Read the rest of the interview at Mazwi
There is nothing as invaluable as a writer's voice that treats issues as they are (with their complexity), without seeking to impress certain interests or simply following what's in fashon at the time. Examples: everyone is writing a memoir about farm seizures in Zimbabwe, let me write a memoir about farm seizure in Zimbabwe; or everyone is writing a short story about this and that, let me write a short story about this and that too. Of course, this seems to be the case in Zimbabweean writing because of the current rise in themed anthologies; so writers have to satisfy the editor's needs, which is a practical consideration, but eventually, after that one or two short stories, start to treat matters the way you want to, even if it means taking a radically different position on an issue. I sense that Paul Williams is one such writer, at least in his memoir....
Anyway, I thought I should let this out, and then direct you to the real post. First, read this excerpt; then follow the link to the rest of the interview:
Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Would you agree that Zimbabwean literature is a literature of two halves: black and white? I find that there is a serious disconnect. Black writers write about the black experience. White writers write about the white experience. Can it ever be one?
Paul Williams: Unfortunately, it is very divided. Just look at the last two Zimbabwe novels I’ve read this year—I had to keep asking myself—is this the same country these writers are writing about? JM Coetzee once said “Am I white? Am I black? These are the first questions one has to ask in this country.’ He was talking about South Africa, but the same applies to Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe inherited two separated cultures and they have not been integrated. But there is also an ideological problem in trying to resolve this literary Apartheid. The South African writer Njabulo Ndebele points out that we tend to write characters as types, caricatures, and unless we share total living conditions, we cannot write accurately about others. I’ve noticed that when white writers write about black characters or vice versa, they tend to portray one dimensional stereotypes. It’s hard to get outside one’s skin and the prejudices imposed on us by history. However, there’s also the danger of appropriation, especially from white writers–speaking on behalf of other races, speaking on top of them, silencing them. I became interested in JM Coetzee because he writes about this very problem–the inability to get outside yourself and understand the other. What is interesting about Coetzee is that he writes without a single direct reference to race. Disgrace for example has no mention of skin colour, and that’s perhaps the way to go, to consciously erase race from our writing…. I also like writing that attempts to cross over this great divide. Tim McCloughlin’s novel Karima (1985) gives voice equally to white and black characters. I’ve tried to do the same in my own writing. Soldier Blue is told from the perspective of a naïve white boy, but I have inserted voices of ancestors, alternative histories and interviews with ZIPRA and ZANLA combatants that intrude upon and disrupt this ‘white’ narrative. And in The Secret of Old Mukiwa, I consciously try to bridge that divide by writing entirely from the point of view of two black teenagers.
There have been a few “white memoirs” coming out of Zimbabwe from writers like Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Judith Todd, Dan Wylie, and Jennifer Armstrong. Why was it important for you to write a memoir about growing up in Rhodesia [or Zimbabwe]?
Catharsis? Confession? Nostalgia? Actually two books influenced me to write Soldier Blue. The first was Julie Frederikse’s None but Ourselves (an illustrated history of Rhodesian war propaganda). It opened my eyes to re-examine the lies my childhood was founded on. Second, Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind helped me decolonise my ‘white’ mind. So my memoir was an act of deconstructing my race and gender. I documented how I became a white male, a racist, sexist, a ‘Rhodesian’, and traced my attempts to wriggle out of this ‘white skin’. But the book is also an emotional act. Living away from the country you love, your heart yearns to recapture the smells, tastes, memories, feelings of the land. I felt very alienated living in the USA: I felt the tug of Zimbabwe’s red earth, its past, its energy and this is the nerve point of the memoir.
Read the rest of the interview at Mazwi
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