Daddy Love

Joyce Carol Oates reminds me of long-distance who has perfected her art over a long period of time.  (She is in fact a runner and has written that she works out her plots and the structural problems of her novels while she is running.)  I have only read three of her books.  That I have the goal of reading all of them says much about her ability to hook a reader into the story and keep them there.  When she hits her stride the writing is taut, economic and well paced with no wastage on sensationalism or superficial detours.  In Daddy Love for instance, thump, thump, thump sums up the horror of Gideon Cash’s life as a child abducted by a predator as Oates conjures up every parent’s nightmare from the perspective of the abductor and the abducted.

 Oates’s anger is palpable beneath the surface of her words as she creates the despicable Daddy Love; lover, hippy, evangelical preacher, murderer and child predator and she doesn’t spare the reader the details of what life must be like in the hands of dear old Daddy.  Some reviews I have read have suggested that reading is something people do for entertainment and that with this dark tale of a putrid section of society Oates oversteps the mark.  The question then becomes what do we expect novels to do for us?  Do we want them to make us think about the world in new ways, or even at all, or do we want to sit back and passively absorb neatly redemptive confections to feed our fantasies that everything will work out in the end.

Things don’t always work out well in the end.  People are tested, maimed, disfigured and broken physically and psychologically sometimes through no fault of their own.  Should their stories be swept under the carpet because they are too upsetting to read?  (And this muteness when confronted by another’s tragedy is a theme that weaves through the book through the shattered bodies and lives of the family that is left behind).  I read once that fiction offers a space in which writers, should they be of a mind to take up the challenge of social dysfunction, may ethically imagine and bring to the light or speak for those who are voiceless – either because they are not present or because the stories they have to tell are abhorrent to the rest of us. 

The world is full of abusers and abused children who have no words to articulate their physical and emotional brutalisation.  Daddy Love gives a nail-biting masterful and hauntingly sad voice to something that has become all too depressingly familiar on the evening news – child abduction and how little we know, or care, about what happens around us.   Throughout this book I kept seeing the five-year old face of Madeleine McCann staring back at me and I wondered if she is still out there.

Home and Exile

“The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening”

Chinua Achebe – Home and Exile.

Many writers and theorists have written about the haunted narratives of post colonial writers, particularly white ones, who stumble around besieged by longing and loss as they try to make sense of their fractured worlds and their place in that world.  In Home and Exile, Achebe discusses the difficulty experienced by African writers in the past as they struggled to give voice to their experiences and tell the stories of their countries in and through English, a colonial language.  He cites, as an example, the story of Nigerian novelist in London during the 1960s who masked her African identity by perfecting English and hiding behind the stylistic formulations of the English novel.  Achebe saw this as a form of cultural dispossession and made no bones about his irritation with it.

In my novel a protagonist runs around a lake in Canberra, struggling to come to terms with her fractured past and her own dispossession.  It was a difficult novel to write because I drew from my own life and realised, like the Nigerian novelist in London, that I hated what I saw.  What I hated, apart from my own glaring shortcomings, was the refusal of my life to fit into an untroubled Western version of how life should be.  I tried in vain to squeeze the broken bits into a template that would fit easily onto the shelves of airport bookstores.  It didn’t work.

Because I was raised in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, a culturally diverse,troubled and some might say eclectic neighbourhood, I enjoy diverse writing that reaches outside my comfort zone and forces me to stretch my imagination to keep up with it.  The reason I have prefixed this post with a quote about dispossession is because dispossession does not only mean dislocation from country but also from self.  One of the best ways to find out who you are is to try and write a novel about who you think you are or who you wish you could be.  There is something about the hard truth of the writing process that strips us bare of our glossy pretensions.