Joy Watson Women’s Month: Going off script

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What does it mean to be a woman in contemporary South Africa?

There is a version of this that lists the difficulties of being a woman in a struggling democracy. You have read it. So have I. I am not going to write it. What I want to write into is this. My mother left school after about three years. So did my grandmothers. No jobs. No opportunities. No one ever thought to ask any of them what they made of the world. And here I am, being asked. I have a freedom they were never offered. I want to write into the language, too: the eclectic mishmash we have made, belonging to nobody’s grammar book: Suka wena; Eish; Nogal. And the sentence that holds the whole country in it: “hulle weet nie wat ons weet nie”. I want to write into humour, which is our particular genius: the ability to find the laughter sitting inside the ordinary, and reach for it first. And into home, which is both place and people. Texture. Food. And loss, because home is also longing: my grandmother’s house in De Waterkant is rented out to holidaymakers now. So I walk the streets of Cape Town, conjuring the past, imagining what this was a hundred years ago, its contours and smells. And I dream of it after me. Some other nameless woman walking where I once walked, looking up at the same blue sky.

Which book(s) by a South African woman writer made the single biggest contribution(s) to your literary work?

At my graduation, I was on a chair, half attending to the speeches, when Antjie Krog said the word “penis”. In the middle of the ceremony. I sat up and took note. That was the lesson, before I knew it was one: a woman can stand in a formal room and say the thing, and the room must deal with it. I have hung on her every word since, for different reasons now. For the way she writes into contradiction rather than tidying it away. For her willingness to make herself present in the writing, implicated and exposed. And because she taught me that language can misbehave and still tell the truth.

Margaret Atwood wrote: “A word after a word after a word is power.” How do you reclaim your power as a woman writer in South Africa?

I have been told, many times, to be careful. To protect myself. To keep the personal out of it. As though distance makes the writing more serious. As though revealing yourself diminishes your authority. I am done with that. Protectionism is a small room and I have spent enough time in it. I write to challenge power, with power, and to redistribute it. Increasingly, I understand that this cannot be done from a safe distance. Power is not only something out there, held by governments and institutions and men in important rooms. It moves through all of us. I am interested in what happens when we stop pretending otherwise. Writing about power means acknowledging where I have it, where I don’t, and what I do with it. It means risking something of myself. It requires going off script.