Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlist: Jonathan Jansen on his memoir ‘Breaking Bread’

Non-fiction Award

Criteria: The winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity.

We asked Jonathan Jansen, author of Breaking Bread: A Memoir (Jonathan Ball Publishers) some questions about his book which is shortlisted for the non-fiction award:

You write in your introduction that you kept putting off writing your memoir because you “felt that this is something you do in your 70s and 80s. But then I was confronted with the problem of memory.” Can you elaborate on why you decided to write your memoir now and how were you able to overcome the problem of memory?

I was concerned about forgetting some essential content from my life, something that happens with ageing. It also felt like the right time, enough people close to me, like parents, have departed some decades ago, and so the time felt right to be more open about their lives, fully told. I tested my story lines, developed from memory, with those who know me, from school, from church and of course from the family. They filled the holes in memory but also enriched the interpretation of things remembered.

Breaking Bread is more than just a motif taken throughout the book. It’s the actual heart of the memoir; there’s breaking bread together as a family, breaking bread with the community and also the absence of it when you commit a terrible sin (or you are deemed simply not worthy) in the evangelical church which your parents belonged to. Was this always a mainstay in your life? And a way to elaborate and explain about how bonds can be formed and broken?

The breaking of bread, in its narrow sense, formed such a major part of our lives as evangelical Christians. You qualified or not, included or excluded. It was a powerful way of being brought into that community or being kept out of it. It was so important to your emotional and spiritual wholeness, and also enduring traumas for those who fell short of the standard. And that is why it was so hard but also so necessary to reinvoke the concept, transform it, actually, towards a more generous faith, even inter-faith, that I now believe is what being spiritual really means.

Even though you have shared your life in your columns and previous books, was it difficult to share the more personal aspects about yourself, your family, friends and faith?

It was not, actually, partly because of the passage of time and partly because that is how I live my life and leadership, to put it out there, to make yourself vulnerable, which is for me the foundation of personal growth and development; and I continue to grow, change and develop.

You wrote about how you used to preach on trains when you were young. Do you still consider yourself a type of preacher — one of truth, reconciliation and hope?

Good question: a man followed me for weeks while I was a dean in Pretoria; one day, he came to me from the back of the conference venue, and said this: “you pretend you’re talking about education or policy or politics, but actually you’re preaching”. I felt relieved that somebody actually figured out what I was doing, both analysis but also encouragement to live in ways that improve the lives of others.

What impression do you want readers to take away with them after reading the book?

That the good life comes from living your life sacrificially, giving not simply of your material resources but giving of yourself. And that when you do that, there are transformations of your life (from a narrow, fundamentalist, mean-spirited Christian) that bring deep joy to yourself and in the lives of others. There are parallels, up to a point, in one of my favorite books, by Tara Westover in Educated and her struggles in the Mormon church. I am surprised by the many happy accidents, blessings actually, that gave me more than I could ever imagine as a Cape Flats boy who this week was inducted by peers into the world’s leading academies of arts, humanities and the sciences in the UK and the US. None of this is my own doing; it is the consequence of so many good people who come into your life, at the right time, and for the right reasons.

In what way do you think the book “illuminates truthfulness”?

Most people, including friends, say they did not actually know me until the memoir, that it reveals the truth in ways that makes it their truth as well. THAT is the best compliment I could possibly receive about the book. Two young Black women, tellers at two different shops, came to me separately over the past two months, one overjoyed and laughing, the other crying. We read your book, each of them said, it tells my story… Beyond the individual, therefore, the book offers truthfulness about the South African condition, worn down and oppressed, and yet rising with hope beyond our pasts.