What does it mean to be a woman in contemporary South Africa?
Every age and time has challenged our idea of what it means to be a woman, and even within each age, our identity and how we express ourselves is a dynamic and very unique experience. Contemporary South African women are reaching higher than before despite local and global challenges, aiming for personal dreams and sometimes defying social expectations to achieve those visions. And even with economic and other constraints, we’re smashing those ceilings. The best is yet to come.
Which book(s) by a South African woman writer made the single biggest contribution(s) to your literary work?
We are blessed that the path of women writers has been a long and powerful one, and it’s difficult to pinpoint a singular storyteller because we are a conglomerate of narratives with strong female energy. I feel like I am one boat on this river to the sea, and I read as many of our local women writers as possible as a form of respect to the craft and to my own creative process of writing and giving voice to women’s narratives. Women pass down culture and the labour of intimate living through the stories we write and share, and there’s a kind of responsibility to being part of that dynamic. I’ve also read women’s writing across the African continent, and diaspora literature written by women from South and West Asia and beyond — these inspire and influence my own commitment to continue telling the stories that swirl in my head.
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?
The spaces where women lose their power are in relationships where we are expected to conform to surrender and virtue. Writing is a profound way to reclaim that voice, to say out loud what might not always be acceptable in polite society even if through wayward characters. Writing allows us to make uncomfortable representations of serious issues and allows the audience to decide on the results. I think that freedom brought through writing gives tremendous power to a writer, and also arrives with some amount of added forgiveness that wouldn’t necessarily be available in everyday social life. Whether we’re reclaiming or claiming the power at the outset, it’s through writing as a catharsis or a form of activism that the opportunity presents itself.
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