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Book interview: The man who eats words

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literary icon Nthikeng Mohlele chatted to City Press in Johannesburg about his writing processPHOTO: tebogo letsie
literary icon Nthikeng Mohlele chatted to City Press in Johannesburg about his writing processPHOTO: tebogo letsie

It’s been several weeks now since I spent an hour and a half with 40-year-old award-winning novelist Nthikeng Mohlele in the lounge of a discreet and comfortable boutique hotel in Johannesburg. His publicist has gone on leave and returned already, mailing to wonder when the interview will appear in print. As it is, Mohlele is not known for granting too many interviews.

I can name any of a number of excuses, but the truth lies in transcribing our conversation. It has taken hours, deep into the night, rewinding and replaying to get it perfect. It’s the least one can do with a novelist who is as fanatically particular with every word he writes as with those he chooses when he speaks, rolling his tongue gently across the choicest ones before picking them up and voicing them, sometimes with a lingering dramatic emphasis, to make his sentences land.

We are here to unapologetically discuss art. Because of Michael K, the beleaguered hero of the existential 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K by Nobel prize-winning JM Coetzee, rebirthed by Mohlele with subtle new humanity, sensuality and wit.

Holy cow

“An artistic sensibility as generous as it is complex.” That’s what Coetzee said about your early novel Small Things. Now you’ve returned the favour, you’ve given extended life to his Michael K, who must make a difficult journey to his mother’s village in the middle of an apartheid-era civil war. Why Coetzee?

Most of these things happen subconsciously, but you cannot ignore JM Coetzee, and his work speaks for itself. But I never planned to consciously do Michael K.

When I read the book, it really had less to do with Coetzee and even not that much to do with Michael K compared with the poetry-loving character of Miles, who surely has autobiographical references.

I wouldn’t say autobiographical, Charl. I wanted to just write a good story. The only direct thing is that my son is named Miles and I like Miles Davis.

I was thinking Miles as in distance travelled.

Younger artists are not so much inclined to take on established works of art, and I think that is lacking an artistic backbone. But, really, it could have been a Swedish writer or anyone.

I’m sure everyone asks you this damn question. Has Coetzee responded?

I don’t know, but I don’t lose any sleep over that. My intention was to write as good a book as I could.

I’m reluctantly compelled by Miles, who tells the story of Michael K, who he knew. He has a love of music and an obsession with poetry, just like you. In fact, poetry is a character in the book.

Very much so, and I think it’s true – those are things that I connect with, but I try to create aesthetic distance in how I create work. Though I think it is a little bit disingenuous to say that, as an artist, I don’t do autobiographical work because you cannot completely divorce yourself from the work that you create.

You say you’re not a poet ... however, this book is pure poetry.

I was starting at university and bought a Miles Davis documentary at some airport somewhere in South Africa, and they asked him about his work and he says: ‘I play above the orchestra, the band, but I play a countermelody to the melody.’ And that, for me, was invaluable in terms of literature – to say that one doesn’t just have to swim with the stream, you can do the counternarrative.

On words

I remember reading that you were told you would never be a writer, you would sooner be a bricklayer.

It was a review reader. I had submitted a manuscript. And I kept that letter that was written to me, my first rejection letter. I’ll be the first to admit that the manuscript was atrocious, but the review was even more revealing and atrocious.

So how has this been for you, as a black man, this world of publishing?

I did publishing as part of my postgraduate studies, so I know the value chain intimately, I understand when things are working and when they are not working. I was able to connect the dots for myself. But I would say I’ve been quite fortunate to work with people who know what they’re doing.

How did this happen that you have this fanatical obsession with words?

Really good musicians are obsessed with notes, and with what they can read and discover and rediscover and surprise with the musical alphabet. I think it’s the same for words. For painters as well – the way they work with colour. I don’t see art as mutually exclusive in any event.

The township and the village

You grew up in Tembisa and then in a village outside Polokwane.

Township life was … dislocated, but I didn’t know why. It was the 1985 state of emergency. But also you have the sediments of a culture. I am a Mopedi man. Once you are in the township, there is just this mishmash of many cultures in a very confined space that is not necessarily socially cohesive. Just because people are black in the township doesn’t mean that there is a root of a cultural reference point, like I discovered when I went to the village. I left Tembisa in 1986, quite a small boy. Then when I get to the village, there’s no running water, no lights, but the wealth in terms of lineage around family trees, in terms of cultural practices, in terms of music. And the rhythm of daily life. It is priceless.

But this was combined with a very unstable political environment, I mean people were burning stuff. I grew up around black smoke and fire, people burning government-owned things, police chasing people, rubber bullets everywhere, United Democratic Front marches. For a young mind, it was interesting but perplexing.

We feel the village rhythm of life in Michael K, especially with the travel and his love of gardening. Who were the instrumental figures in your childhood?

My grandparents were like walking libraries of the histories of what happened there. It was my very first teacher who drew my attention to storytelling. He taught me Sepedi and when I wrote essays, he was the earliest person who said: ‘You know, you tell stories very well. If you pay attention, you will do well.’

University blues

What interests me is that you frequently describe art as an instrument of social justice or having a social purpose, yet this is very gentle in the book, like the politics is very carefully refracted into the everyday and there’s a broader sense of humanity at play.

I tried to do that because my humble submission is that I don’t think art should be dogmatic. I believe there’s a responsibility for balance and for sensitivity because whatever I think doesn’t make it gospel. It is how those contradictions and alignments are handled while the work is done.

So you go off to Wits, the madness of Joburg. What was that white colonial space like for you as a black man?

Fortunately, I went to a Catholic high school and we had teachers from Georgetown, from England, so my world view was cultivated quite early. They exposed me to world literature very, very young. I knew about Albert Camus and Amiri Baraka. The whole civil rights movement, King, Baldwin, Malcolm X…

Life is not plotted

Miles’ Joburg is full of cosmopolitan possibility, but you have to scrape the poetry off the pavement.

You know, people have been writing for ages, so it’s very, very difficult to write material that is fresh or captivating. There should be unexpected details in a narrative and how it is told, and I try to not be predictable to myself and I just hope it translates to the work.

It’s unpredictable in that it doesn’t really regard plot greatly. It’s more cyclical. Old age is very prominent, it’s almost like the story after the plot.

I agree with you and thanks for that observation. It takes me back to Miles Davis. He spoke about hiring musicians and they would say: ‘What are we going to play? What are we rehearsing?’ And he’d take them straight to the studio. He said: ‘Play what you hear. There’s the basic structure of the song, if you’re a musician you’ll just know where to fit in.’ To work in a space that isn’t safe.

So do you still write by hand?

No. I write on the iPhone now. All my books from Rusty Bell to date were written on an iPhone. I email myself. So the book will come in, like, a puzzle and it speaks to me … I don’t think plot is that important. Life is not plotted. I could be planning to go for an interview and get to the intersection and get hit by a bus. Where’s the plot in that? I think the story should be coherent, but obsessive plotting robs the story of its naturalness.

There’s not a lot of plot, but there’s a great sense of destiny.

I think that is important because when you enter into the world, it must have multiple resonances. When you look at the work, you love some of it and you hate some of it, and that causes you to reflect. And I think Life & Times, the original, does that. Because, as you read it, there are new layers all the time.

Lives and times

I’m interested in the sense of implosion you write about, a sense of doom. Michael K, who hardly eats, who drinks water with a teaspoon, who sleeps for long periods ... He’s someone who opts out of the imploding world. Miles can’t. He’s gripped by his money running out.

We live in the information age where there are great demands and pressures on people, and you’re dealing with a plethora of value systems. Others are attached to money, others are attached to spirituality or making wars, but all of these things need to be seen as coherent. And I think therein lies the anxiety that we deal with in society.

I was intrigued when we got to the end and his greatest enemy as a gardener should be the birds, because he is obsessed with seeds and the birds eat the seeds. Yet he doesn’t feel the need to chase them away.

No, he doesn’t. For me, the seeds are very important because I thought: words, seeds, poetry. It summed up a lot of the things of the book for me. And the teaspoon and the string. The very last line in Coetzee’s Life & Times is that if you have a teaspoon and you can dip it in the water, you can live. And it was such a profound thing when I read it, to drink water from a teaspoon.

And the big comedy scene where Coetzee arrives at Michael K’s funeral and the world media is all over the reclusive literary giant, who comes off as just a man who’s bewildered by this slavish attention.

Oh I had so much fun with that. I wrote it last, by the way. Because if I wrote it early in the manuscript, it was going to colour the rest of the book. So I wrote the book finished and then went and wrote this scene, and I knew exactly where it was going to fit. In that way, I could write the scene for and of itself without interfering with the rest.

The erotica

For me, the shocker in the book is the Greek salad. I have not read a salad as an erotic metaphor before.

Ooh. I knew I was going to get into trouble for that. But it was so necessary, though. And you know I struggled with it because it was written, but then there was no end to it. Something was missing and it bothered me for days until I realised that if he really enjoyed the thing, part of the pleasure would be the napkin – and you know what the napkin is.

The napkin panties were my absolute best. But I also got shocked when Miles overhears his cleaner Irene, who he secretly desires, describing the sex she has with her older man friend.

But that’s how the world is, the people we presume to be innocent…

But for me, the big shocker is the scene at the airport where there’s almost an erotic moment between Miles and Von Ludwig. Where he smells the trace of sleep on his friend’s neck…

Yes. The reason is there’s nothing that annoys me like homophobia. Because I don’t think anyone has the right to say who should love whom. For a black man like me who grew up in a patriarchal environment, people will tell you it’s a no-no. But some of the best conversations and enlightenment for me came from gay people. My wife is exactly the same. In writing, my biggest failure to date is that I have not yet written a gay relationship.

Knowing when it’s finished

You say you’ve written countless drafts of some of the books.

I would write it then I would hate it even if other readers would say this is really good stuff. I have to believe in a work of art because I would feel very irresponsible to release a thing that I didn’t fully believe in. I write my books in such a way that if it were a bulletproof vest, the book, and I wore it, no one should be able to shoot through it. Of course, there are things I will get hopelessly wrong, but that is part of the risk of being human and an artist.

Was it the same with Michael K?

Not so much. The story came to me fully formed.

Do you see it as an optimistic work or a pessimistic work?

I think it strikes a balance between the two. It says the world is not perfect, but in its imperfections there are things to elevate the spirit and things to depress it.

There is this pain that we have in our country about these black people, the grandmothers, who have lived through it, have carried the burden. Plodded the country forward.

Yes, yes. And, believe me, I also try to wear multiple hats as a citizen and an artist to be conscious of the things that get me down personally.

And now? What are you working on?

I work on multiple projects. And then in weighing them, I’ll know which of them are ready for publication.

When do you know it’s finished?

I know it’s finished when I read it and there’s music flowing out.

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