Writings and thoughts from Motswana writer, Lauri Kubuitsile
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Saturday, April 14, 2018
Gaborone Book Night- be There!!!
I will be speaking about my novel The Scattering and about writing historical fiction in general. Other authors on the programme are: Modirwa Kekwaletswe, Kagiso Madibana, and Thabo Katlholo.
Some of my books will be on sale and I will be available to sign them for you, so I hope to see you there!
What? World Book Night
When? Monday 23 April 2018
Time? 5 pm
Where? UB Library Auditorium
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Book Review: Accident by Dawn Garisch
Dawn Garisch is a
South African writer, poet and memoirist who has six published novels, a poetry
collection, a memoir and a nonfiction book. She’s also written a play, a short
film, television scripts and numerous short stories. Her novel, Trespass,
was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Prize in Africa and her poem
“Miracle” was awarded the 2011 EU Sol Plaatje Poetry Award. And if that was not
enough, she’s a practicing medical doctor in Cape Town. Accident is her sixth novel.
Accident (Modjaji Books, 2017) is the story of mother,
Carol, and her grown son, Max. Carol is a single parent. She met Max’s father
during a trip to France where they had a brief affair. She went home to South
Africa pregnant, never finding Max’s father again. Carol is a general practitioner in Cape Town
and juggling her career and motherhood is difficult. Like most women in that
position, she does her best though it never seems to be enough and this creates
a lot of guilt and self-recrimination.
When Max is a teenager, he and a
friend have an accident, a passing man saves Max. Carol has the man, Jack, over
for a meal to thank him for saving her son’s life. Soon Jack and Max become
close and eventually Carol and Jack begin an intimate affair. But Jack is a
loner, an adventurer. His priorities clash with Carol’s and their relationship
falls apart and one day he disappears. Max loves Jack, almost as a stand-in
father, and he blames Carol for Jack’s leaving. Their relationship becomes
fraught from then on.
Max is grown at the beginning of the
book. He’s a performance artist who is trying to explore the line between life
and death. He set himself on fire and is in the hospital with burns. As a
doctor, and as a mother, Carol cannot understand this recklessness. Max’s
friends believe that he’s a genius and the art world seems to agree. But Carol
thinks he’s reckless and adding undue pain, violence and trauma to the world,
in particular her world. She knows when his burns heal, he will try yet another
stunt (which he does including a crucifixion and a car accident) and she
becomes obsessed by that, sure that her son will die during one of his artistic
performances. She doesn’t understand what he’s attempting to do or why. For her,
art is not a worthy thing to die for.
The book has many themes of interest.
What can a parent do when an adult child takes a path that they cannot accept?
What is a worthy thing to live for —as well as die for? Can art be an arrogant
crutch for a person wanting their own way? Or must artists always push
themselves to the very edge so as to feel the truth of what they are doing, at
all costs?
At one point, Max’s girlfriend,
Tamsyn, finds that she’s pregnant. Max warned her that his art doesn’t allow
him to be a father, even to have a relationship since he keeps pushing Tamsyn
away and insists they have nothing serious. Carol attempts to get Max to see
how selfish he’s being.
She says: “You’re a narcissistic child, Max, people like you shouldn’t be allowed
to have sex, bringing more misery into the world.” She knew she was going too
far, but she couldn’t stop the bile from spilling out.
“You think Picasso
wasn’t narcissistic? Or Lucian Freud? They put painting first, before the
people closest to them, but they weren’t only living for their own selfish
pleasures. That’s what you don’t get because you’ve never had one artistic bone
in your body.”
Carol
answers: “…I don’t care if you’re the
most famous artist in the whole bloody world, if that makes you unkind and
inconsiderate, it means nothing!”
Accident raises many interesting questions but makes no prescriptions on any fronts,
it’s up to the reader to sort out the issues for themselves. The shocking
ending will stay with you for a very long time, when mother and son find a
heart-breaking and unexpected way to find peace with each other’s choices. I
highly recommend this novel written by one of South Africa’s most underrated
writers who I feel needs a far bigger audience.
(This first appeared in my column, It's All Write, in Mmegi newspaper on 23 Feb, 2018)
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Cover-to-Cover Books
In
2011 teachers Dorothy Dyer and Ros Haden along with their friends Palesa Morudu
and Mignon Hardie decided to
establish Cover2Cover Books after Dorothy, who was teaching in Langa Township
in Cape Town, realised no books reflected the lives of her students. Ros Haden
explained to me in a recent interview that the students in Langa kids struggled
to find books that interested them.
“There were very few books in the library that
reflected their lives and excited them except for one series, The Blueford
Series, set in the projects in the United States that was fast paced, about
African American teens, that was about growing up in disadvantaged communities,
where gangsterism was rife. Readers in her class liked these books and could
relate to the issues the teens faced but still, it wasn’t a context they knew,
the language wasn’t the colloquial language they were familiar with. The rest
of the books were novels from the UK and very hard to relate to about teens
growing up in very different circumstances.”
That was how Cover2Cover’s first title was
born. “Dorothy asked the class if they
would like a ‘Blueford’ series but set in a SA township, they said this would
be exciting. That’s when Dorothy asked me if I could write a short teen novel,
along the lines of the Blueford novels and that’s how the Harmony High series
was born. I wrote Broken Promises chapter
by chapter. The sheets were circulated in her class as I wrote them, and went
viral in the school. I think that’s when we knew we were on to something that
could hook these teens on reading and keep them reading,” Ros said.
They now had the Harmony High series, but just
like in Botswana, getting books to teens is difficult. Books need bookstores
and the kids need money to buy the books which they don’t have. Ros explained
how Cover2Cover gave birth to FunDza to solve that problem.
“And so we formed The FunDza Literacy Trust, a
non-profit, whose goal was reading for pleasure amongst black teens in
SA.” Stories are put up each week on the
mobi site and can be accessed with a cellphone or computer. The stories can be read for free online. Now
FunDza has a big collection of short stories and books available to anyone who
logs on. Ros continued, “They were a huge hit, with the Rattray Foundation, who
work with rural schools in KZN, saying the teens couldn’t get enough of them
and that FunDza had started a Reading
Revolution.”
FunDza’s success is evident. “The mobi site:
fundza.mobi grew exponentially from when we started in 2011. We now reach 500
000 - 600 000 readers a month across South Africa and beyond with a regular
readership of 60 000 readers who come on to the site every day to read the
latest FunDza stories, blogs, articles, poetry and novels, and their own
stories,” Ros said.
Cover2Cover has eleven titles in their Harmony
High series now and has published a selection of FunDza stories in their Big
Ups anthologies, Jayne Bauling’s Soccer
Season series and Bontle Senne’s Shadow
Chasers series too among other books for the trade market.
On the FunDza mobi site they also have places
for fans to learn about writing. “We began a ‘Developing Young Writers’
programme where teens and young adults
can send in their writing, get it edited, get feedback and see their work
published on fundza.mobi and read and enjoyed by their peers. We also mentor a
number of young writers into commissioned writers for our weekly stories,” Ros
said.
Cover2Cover and FunDza have won quite a few
awards both locally and internationally for their work around literacy and
getting young people to get excited about reading again. I asked Ros, which
prize as of late has had the biggest impact for them.
“FunDza was delighted to win the Confucius
Literacy Prize from UNESCO for our work in improving literacy levels in South
Africa - one of five global literacy award given by UNESCO in 2017. It was a
huge honour and a great reward and international acknowledgement for the work
we do in spreading the joy of reading with all its lifelong benefits of
developing empathy, creative and critical thinking, creativity, a shift in
attitudes, and confidence and ability in writing and reading,” she said.
I’ve been writing for FunDza for quite a few
years now and it is one of the things I am personally most proud of. We need
more initiatives like this run by people with a commitment to reading and who are
as excited about stories as these women are. Big congrats to these women and
their initiatives!
(This originally appeared in my column It's All Write (Mmegi newspaper) in the 9th March 2018 issue)