Petina Gappah
Emmanuel Sigauke Interviews Petina Gappah
Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University, and the
University of Zimbabwe. Her short fiction and essays have been published in eight countries. She lives with
her son Kush in Geneva, where she works as counsel in an international organisation that provides legal aid
on international trade law to developing countries. Her story collection, An Elegy for Easterly is published
by Faber in April 2009, and by FSG in the United States in June 2009. She is currently completing The Book
of Memory, her first novel. Both books will also be published in Finland, France, Italy, The Netherlands,
Norway and Sweden.
Congratulations for An Elegy for Easterly. What does this big step mean to you?
Thank you very much. It is a huge step. It means the fulfilment of a life's dream. To be published by Faber, to be in the
company of T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Siegfried Sassoon, William Golding, Orhan Pamuk, Owen Sheers , P.D. James, Kazuo
Ishiguro and other writers I love is almost too good to be real.
How has your personal background contributed to your writing of Elegy. For instance, are there traces of yourself in
any of the characters in the stories?
I think of my writing as a compulsive form of theft. Every story I have written is based on at least one true thing. This could
be something that happened to me, to someone in my family, to a friend, to someone in a friend's family, or something I read.
"My Aunt Juliana’s Indian" was inspired by my childhood memory of Muzorewa’s UANC campaigning in the townships of
Salisbury in 1979 and 1980. "My Cousin-sister Rambanai" tells a story that is familiar to most Zimbabweans, the shedding of
an old identity to assume a new one in the diaspora. "The Maid from Lalapanzi" was inspired by the memory of some of the
domestic workers who assisted my mother when I was growing up. "The Mupanadawana Dancing Champion" was inspired
by a news report in The Herald. And so on. Stories sometimes come to me when I least expect them: I was walking at
Victoria Station in London a year ago, and playing a private game that I call "Spot the Zimbabwean" - I have the finely-honed
ability to spot a Zimbabwean in any crowd – and I saw two people who looked Zimbabwean. To prove this to myself, I
moved closer to them, and heard one of them say: Ufunge, kubva musi waauya haana kana kumbotengawo kana nyama. I
thought, Bingo, then I thought, Now there is a story there.
How long have you been writing fiction?
Almost every writer says, I have been writing since I was 3, or I began to write before I drew my first breath, or something
like that. I was not such a prodigy, alas. I have been writing for as long as I have been aware of the power of stories to
create a firmer reality than the present. Not that I would have put it in those terms then, I was just a kid who liked stories and
thought I'd try to write a few of my own. I wrote my first "novel", if you can call it that, when I was about 10. It was set
on Mars and called Return to Planet Earth! I was also ballet-obsessed at the time, and my second (and self-illustrated!) novel
plagiarised quite shamelessly the Drina books by Jean Estoril. To amuse my brother and sister, I also wrote nonsense poetry
in imitation of Ogden Nash and Hillaire Beloc, whose poetry we loved. These literary gems were taken for rubbish by the man
who helped in our garden, and he burned them with other trash.
My first published story, "Marooned on a Desert Island", was published when I was in Form Two, in the St. Dominic's
school magazine, Santa Dee Blues. My first earnings from writing came when I was in Form 4, when I won an award of
100 dollars in the Randalls Essay Writing Competition. I then started writing really bad poetry like this: The beggar in the
street sang out to me/I hurried on, averting the sight/To look on such suffering must be/Avoided at all cost/And still his
raucous voice haunted me/ His raucous voice still taunted me. It was grim. Happily, I very quickly got over that stage.
Then I went to university where I became consumed by my law studies, by being a Marxist-Leninist, and by falling in and out
of love. I kept a journal through my university days, but wrote no fiction. I left Zimbabwe in 1995 for postgraduate studies,
then I started working as a lawyer in Geneva in 1999. Although I sometimes contributed the occasional opinion piece to
newspapers, I wrote very little but talked all the time about how I wanted to be a writer. Like an unfortunately large number
of writers I have come to know, I wanted to be a writer without actually doing any writing! I really only started writing, and,
this is a crucial distinction, finishing things, in 2006. My first short story, "Something Nice from London" was published that
year. My second story, "At the Sound of the Last Post" did extremely well in the SA PEN contest, and the rest followed from
there.
It's been said that your book deal with Faber and FSG is a big step in Zimbabwean literature. Do you agree?
The book deal is one thing, whether the books are any good is the question that will determine whether this is a big step for
Zimbabwean literature. And that, of course, is not for me to judge. But there is this: I have found that in publishing, it helps
to have a precedent. So the fact that both Brian Chikwava and I are being published by top publishers may, depending on our
success, make other publishers take a closer look at other Zimbabwean writers who are coming up.
I have often told people that you are a hardworking writer, have noticed that you are involved in many writing
projects. You have participated in international writing contests, have won second place in the PEN/Africa Prize
judged by J.M. Coetzee. But you have also been a columnist for media outlets like Zimbabwe Times, where your
stinging criticism of poor governance in Zimbabwean politics has intrigued readers. You are also a satirist of the
highest order, and you maintain a frequently updated, professional blog. On top of all this, you are a busy lawyer.
How do you manage to do all this, and in what ways have you been able to balance fiction and non-fiction works in
your writing career?
Thanks for those kind words. I believe it was Susan Sontag who advised writers to engage with the world. Hemingway shot
things, climbed mountains and wrote. Scott Turow writes thrillers, and runs a legal practice devoted to death penalty cases. P.
D. James worked for the NHS, raised her children as a single mother, and gave us the wonderful Dalgliesh novels.
Lady James in particular is an inspiration, because she shows it is possible to have two lives: she had solid professional
achievements before she turned to writing. I was a lawyer before I became a writer, I published academic papers on
international trade law before I published fiction. I see no conflict at all between my professional life and my writing of
fiction. If anything, the one feeds the other, and I am grateful to have both. I love my job and being a lawyer, and I love
writing.
But as I want to do both, I realised right at the beginning that I needed to find a way to fit my writing into my life. The most
obvious thing seemed to be to create a longer day, so I get up very early around 4, 4:30, then I write, and around 7:30 I stop
and the rest of my day follows. As for the commentary on Zimbabwe, I have not found it difficult to balance the fiction and
non-fiction. Most Zimbabweans have views on what is going on at home. All I do is to write my views down, a thousand
words at a time.
I haven't read a review copy of Elegy for Easterly, but I am aware that some of your stories I have read are
anthologized in it, for instance, "The Annexe Shuffle", which was originally published by Per Contra, and a satirical
piece that appeared in Prospect. In reading these, I have been moved by your use of language, the playfulness of
your style. How much attention do you pay to language use and style in your writing? What does this playing with
language mean to you as a writer?
Language is important to me. I like precision, crispness; I like uncluttered sentences. I like writing to be musical. I want to
write dialogue that sounds like people talking. Three of my favourite writers, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster, in
their very different ways, have this quality, to give but three examples from their many books, The Life and Times of Michael
K, Moon Palace and On Chesil Beach are just wonderful.
Being Zimbabwean, I cannot separate the question of language from Shona. I use a lot of Shona in my writing because I write
about Zimbabweans who speak Shona. The Shona has to feel true to me, and has to be true to Zimbabwe. I had a crisis
when I wrote the slang term for South Africa as Ndaza instead of Ndazo, and the story was published like that. I have since
corrected it, but that kind of thing makes me nervous. Also, I positively detest glossaries so the Shona I write has to be clear
within its context. I am particular about the way people talk; I have a character called Ba’munin’ba’Thomas, written as one
word, because this is how we think of people in Shona, the identity is contracted, and the person has that one identity
depending on your relationship to him. So I aim for my writing to be musical yet crisp, and for it to feel true both in the
language and the characters.
In one story you deal with the challenges of the Zimbabwean Diaspora. How has living out of Zimbabwe influenced
you as a writer?
Living outside Zimbabwe has been good for my writing because it has enabled me to have the sort of financial security that is
not possible for a number of writers in Zimbabwe. I am also lucky to live in Geneva, a cosmopolitan city. I have friends from
all over the world, which has helped me to appreciate that we are all pretty much the same screwed-up people wherever we
come from, we are what Ian McEwan in a recent interview called "untrustworthy, venal, sweet, lovely humans".
Understanding people, or, at least, trying to understand people, is part of what drives me to write.
Do you agree that this may be the time for Zimbabwean literature to shine? Do you see it as a time for a kind of
Zimbabwean literary renaissance?
Every crisis presents an opportunity, this is a terrible thing to say but it is true. Award-winning war correspondents emerge
only in wars. I am a great believer in bearing witness, in writing things down so that those wiser than us can learn from our
mistakes. Without Jung Chang, from whom I learned the horrors of China’s Mao through her memoir Wild Swans, I might
still have believed the Zim government’s version of the history of China. One of my favourite writers of the moment, Yiyun Li
has, through fiction, unpeeled the layers of pain beneath the efficiency of contemporary China. The horror of Afghanistan
gave us Khaled Hosseini’s searing novel, The Kite Runner. Think of The Gulag Archipelago, and how Solzhenytsin opened up
the West's understanding of Russia. Closer to home, think of Es'kia Mphahlele, Dennis Brutus, Athol Fugard and that whole
body of writing that came out of apartheid. So yes, for writers like Chris Mlalazi from Bulawayo who is writing wonderful
stories and plays, for Brian Chikwava, for Raisedon Baya, another playwright, for all writers prepared to write the truth of
Zimbabwe as they see it, then this is the time.
Which writers influenced you?
I never know how to answer this question, so I will tell you some, just some, not all, but some of the writers I admire. I love
the three gentlemen I mentioned above, Coetzee, McEwan, and Auster. I also love Toni Morrison. I love the crime fiction of
P.D. James and Dorothy Sayers. I have great admiration for Daphne du Maurier. I reread Austen and Dickens every year.
Charles Mungoshi is my favourite Zimbabwean writer. And, as we are having this conversation in the context of Easterly, a
short story collection, I will also mention the following short story writers: Charles Mungoshi( his Walking Still is sublime),
Chekhov, who is, of course, the master of the short story, Can Themba, the most underappreciated writer I know, Edward P.
Jones and Yiyun Li who have written the two best short story collections I have read in years and Ali Smith who is strange
and funny and brilliant.
So what should readers expect in An Elegy for Easterly?
I hope readers will be amused and moved. I hope that my Zimbabwean readers will find echoes of their own lives in my
characters, and may even recognize themselves or people they know.
This book received a trans-Atlantic deal. Do you have plans to tour both Europe and the United States soon? Africa?
Asia? How busy are you going to be?
This year is going to be extremely busy. So far I am scheduled to appear at the Cuirt festival in Galway, Ireland, at the PEN
festivals in both London and New York, the Edinburgh Book Fair in Scotland, and the Melbourne Writers Festival in
Australia. I will also go to the Franschhoek Literary Festival in Western Cape. I will also have book launches here at home in
Geneva, in Johannesburg, and, I hope, in Harare.
You recently went to Zimbabwe. Did the trip give you new ideas about writing? In other words, how did the writer in
you respond to what you saw?
There is a lot to say and write about the terrible crisis at home. I wrote a short piece that has been published in the latest issue
of the Africa Report. I am currently writing about my tortuous experience in getting a passport for my son, which I hope will
be published by Granta. There is plenty to write about. The only issue really is filtering it all, because there is just so much
going on.
Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University, and the
University of Zimbabwe. Her short fiction and essays have been published in eight countries. She lives with
her son Kush in Geneva, where she works as counsel in an international organisation that provides legal aid
on international trade law to developing countries. Her story collection, An Elegy for Easterly is published
by Faber in April 2009, and by FSG in the United States in June 2009. She is currently completing The Book
of Memory, her first novel. Both books will also be published in Finland, France, Italy, The Netherlands,
Norway and Sweden.
Congratulations for An Elegy for Easterly. What does this big step mean to you?
Thank you very much. It is a huge step. It means the fulfilment of a life's dream. To be published by Faber, to be in the
company of T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Siegfried Sassoon, William Golding, Orhan Pamuk, Owen Sheers , P.D. James, Kazuo
Ishiguro and other writers I love is almost too good to be real.
How has your personal background contributed to your writing of Elegy. For instance, are there traces of yourself in
any of the characters in the stories?
I think of my writing as a compulsive form of theft. Every story I have written is based on at least one true thing. This could
be something that happened to me, to someone in my family, to a friend, to someone in a friend's family, or something I read.
"My Aunt Juliana’s Indian" was inspired by my childhood memory of Muzorewa’s UANC campaigning in the townships of
Salisbury in 1979 and 1980. "My Cousin-sister Rambanai" tells a story that is familiar to most Zimbabweans, the shedding of
an old identity to assume a new one in the diaspora. "The Maid from Lalapanzi" was inspired by the memory of some of the
domestic workers who assisted my mother when I was growing up. "The Mupanadawana Dancing Champion" was inspired
by a news report in The Herald. And so on. Stories sometimes come to me when I least expect them: I was walking at
Victoria Station in London a year ago, and playing a private game that I call "Spot the Zimbabwean" - I have the finely-honed
ability to spot a Zimbabwean in any crowd – and I saw two people who looked Zimbabwean. To prove this to myself, I
moved closer to them, and heard one of them say: Ufunge, kubva musi waauya haana kana kumbotengawo kana nyama. I
thought, Bingo, then I thought, Now there is a story there.
How long have you been writing fiction?
Almost every writer says, I have been writing since I was 3, or I began to write before I drew my first breath, or something
like that. I was not such a prodigy, alas. I have been writing for as long as I have been aware of the power of stories to
create a firmer reality than the present. Not that I would have put it in those terms then, I was just a kid who liked stories and
thought I'd try to write a few of my own. I wrote my first "novel", if you can call it that, when I was about 10. It was set
on Mars and called Return to Planet Earth! I was also ballet-obsessed at the time, and my second (and self-illustrated!) novel
plagiarised quite shamelessly the Drina books by Jean Estoril. To amuse my brother and sister, I also wrote nonsense poetry
in imitation of Ogden Nash and Hillaire Beloc, whose poetry we loved. These literary gems were taken for rubbish by the man
who helped in our garden, and he burned them with other trash.
My first published story, "Marooned on a Desert Island", was published when I was in Form Two, in the St. Dominic's
school magazine, Santa Dee Blues. My first earnings from writing came when I was in Form 4, when I won an award of
100 dollars in the Randalls Essay Writing Competition. I then started writing really bad poetry like this: The beggar in the
street sang out to me/I hurried on, averting the sight/To look on such suffering must be/Avoided at all cost/And still his
raucous voice haunted me/ His raucous voice still taunted me. It was grim. Happily, I very quickly got over that stage.
Then I went to university where I became consumed by my law studies, by being a Marxist-Leninist, and by falling in and out
of love. I kept a journal through my university days, but wrote no fiction. I left Zimbabwe in 1995 for postgraduate studies,
then I started working as a lawyer in Geneva in 1999. Although I sometimes contributed the occasional opinion piece to
newspapers, I wrote very little but talked all the time about how I wanted to be a writer. Like an unfortunately large number
of writers I have come to know, I wanted to be a writer without actually doing any writing! I really only started writing, and,
this is a crucial distinction, finishing things, in 2006. My first short story, "Something Nice from London" was published that
year. My second story, "At the Sound of the Last Post" did extremely well in the SA PEN contest, and the rest followed from
there.
It's been said that your book deal with Faber and FSG is a big step in Zimbabwean literature. Do you agree?
The book deal is one thing, whether the books are any good is the question that will determine whether this is a big step for
Zimbabwean literature. And that, of course, is not for me to judge. But there is this: I have found that in publishing, it helps
to have a precedent. So the fact that both Brian Chikwava and I are being published by top publishers may, depending on our
success, make other publishers take a closer look at other Zimbabwean writers who are coming up.
I have often told people that you are a hardworking writer, have noticed that you are involved in many writing
projects. You have participated in international writing contests, have won second place in the PEN/Africa Prize
judged by J.M. Coetzee. But you have also been a columnist for media outlets like Zimbabwe Times, where your
stinging criticism of poor governance in Zimbabwean politics has intrigued readers. You are also a satirist of the
highest order, and you maintain a frequently updated, professional blog. On top of all this, you are a busy lawyer.
How do you manage to do all this, and in what ways have you been able to balance fiction and non-fiction works in
your writing career?
Thanks for those kind words. I believe it was Susan Sontag who advised writers to engage with the world. Hemingway shot
things, climbed mountains and wrote. Scott Turow writes thrillers, and runs a legal practice devoted to death penalty cases. P.
D. James worked for the NHS, raised her children as a single mother, and gave us the wonderful Dalgliesh novels.
Lady James in particular is an inspiration, because she shows it is possible to have two lives: she had solid professional
achievements before she turned to writing. I was a lawyer before I became a writer, I published academic papers on
international trade law before I published fiction. I see no conflict at all between my professional life and my writing of
fiction. If anything, the one feeds the other, and I am grateful to have both. I love my job and being a lawyer, and I love
writing.
But as I want to do both, I realised right at the beginning that I needed to find a way to fit my writing into my life. The most
obvious thing seemed to be to create a longer day, so I get up very early around 4, 4:30, then I write, and around 7:30 I stop
and the rest of my day follows. As for the commentary on Zimbabwe, I have not found it difficult to balance the fiction and
non-fiction. Most Zimbabweans have views on what is going on at home. All I do is to write my views down, a thousand
words at a time.
I haven't read a review copy of Elegy for Easterly, but I am aware that some of your stories I have read are
anthologized in it, for instance, "The Annexe Shuffle", which was originally published by Per Contra, and a satirical
piece that appeared in Prospect. In reading these, I have been moved by your use of language, the playfulness of
your style. How much attention do you pay to language use and style in your writing? What does this playing with
language mean to you as a writer?
Language is important to me. I like precision, crispness; I like uncluttered sentences. I like writing to be musical. I want to
write dialogue that sounds like people talking. Three of my favourite writers, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster, in
their very different ways, have this quality, to give but three examples from their many books, The Life and Times of Michael
K, Moon Palace and On Chesil Beach are just wonderful.
Being Zimbabwean, I cannot separate the question of language from Shona. I use a lot of Shona in my writing because I write
about Zimbabweans who speak Shona. The Shona has to feel true to me, and has to be true to Zimbabwe. I had a crisis
when I wrote the slang term for South Africa as Ndaza instead of Ndazo, and the story was published like that. I have since
corrected it, but that kind of thing makes me nervous. Also, I positively detest glossaries so the Shona I write has to be clear
within its context. I am particular about the way people talk; I have a character called Ba’munin’ba’Thomas, written as one
word, because this is how we think of people in Shona, the identity is contracted, and the person has that one identity
depending on your relationship to him. So I aim for my writing to be musical yet crisp, and for it to feel true both in the
language and the characters.
In one story you deal with the challenges of the Zimbabwean Diaspora. How has living out of Zimbabwe influenced
you as a writer?
Living outside Zimbabwe has been good for my writing because it has enabled me to have the sort of financial security that is
not possible for a number of writers in Zimbabwe. I am also lucky to live in Geneva, a cosmopolitan city. I have friends from
all over the world, which has helped me to appreciate that we are all pretty much the same screwed-up people wherever we
come from, we are what Ian McEwan in a recent interview called "untrustworthy, venal, sweet, lovely humans".
Understanding people, or, at least, trying to understand people, is part of what drives me to write.
Do you agree that this may be the time for Zimbabwean literature to shine? Do you see it as a time for a kind of
Zimbabwean literary renaissance?
Every crisis presents an opportunity, this is a terrible thing to say but it is true. Award-winning war correspondents emerge
only in wars. I am a great believer in bearing witness, in writing things down so that those wiser than us can learn from our
mistakes. Without Jung Chang, from whom I learned the horrors of China’s Mao through her memoir Wild Swans, I might
still have believed the Zim government’s version of the history of China. One of my favourite writers of the moment, Yiyun Li
has, through fiction, unpeeled the layers of pain beneath the efficiency of contemporary China. The horror of Afghanistan
gave us Khaled Hosseini’s searing novel, The Kite Runner. Think of The Gulag Archipelago, and how Solzhenytsin opened up
the West's understanding of Russia. Closer to home, think of Es'kia Mphahlele, Dennis Brutus, Athol Fugard and that whole
body of writing that came out of apartheid. So yes, for writers like Chris Mlalazi from Bulawayo who is writing wonderful
stories and plays, for Brian Chikwava, for Raisedon Baya, another playwright, for all writers prepared to write the truth of
Zimbabwe as they see it, then this is the time.
Which writers influenced you?
I never know how to answer this question, so I will tell you some, just some, not all, but some of the writers I admire. I love
the three gentlemen I mentioned above, Coetzee, McEwan, and Auster. I also love Toni Morrison. I love the crime fiction of
P.D. James and Dorothy Sayers. I have great admiration for Daphne du Maurier. I reread Austen and Dickens every year.
Charles Mungoshi is my favourite Zimbabwean writer. And, as we are having this conversation in the context of Easterly, a
short story collection, I will also mention the following short story writers: Charles Mungoshi( his Walking Still is sublime),
Chekhov, who is, of course, the master of the short story, Can Themba, the most underappreciated writer I know, Edward P.
Jones and Yiyun Li who have written the two best short story collections I have read in years and Ali Smith who is strange
and funny and brilliant.
So what should readers expect in An Elegy for Easterly?
I hope readers will be amused and moved. I hope that my Zimbabwean readers will find echoes of their own lives in my
characters, and may even recognize themselves or people they know.
This book received a trans-Atlantic deal. Do you have plans to tour both Europe and the United States soon? Africa?
Asia? How busy are you going to be?
This year is going to be extremely busy. So far I am scheduled to appear at the Cuirt festival in Galway, Ireland, at the PEN
festivals in both London and New York, the Edinburgh Book Fair in Scotland, and the Melbourne Writers Festival in
Australia. I will also go to the Franschhoek Literary Festival in Western Cape. I will also have book launches here at home in
Geneva, in Johannesburg, and, I hope, in Harare.
You recently went to Zimbabwe. Did the trip give you new ideas about writing? In other words, how did the writer in
you respond to what you saw?
There is a lot to say and write about the terrible crisis at home. I wrote a short piece that has been published in the latest issue
of the Africa Report. I am currently writing about my tortuous experience in getting a passport for my son, which I hope will
be published by Granta. There is plenty to write about. The only issue really is filtering it all, because there is just so much
going on.
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Faber Edition Cover
| Petina Gappah |
| FSG (US) Edition Cover |
