Alhamra Interview

Here is the Q&A exchange with Sara Mahmood as she prepared the interview published in the Alhamra Literary Review, Issue 1, Spring 2005

Q: Your first language is Afrikaans. Why did you choose to write in English?

There are approximately three million Afrikaans speakers in the world; writing in English means that I can reach a far wider audience. I like the way D.H. Lawrence differentiates between ‘head speech’ and ‘heart speech’: for him his Derbyshire dialect was ‘heart speech’. Afrikaans is my ‘heart speech’, the language in which I express myself spontaneously and, mostly, orally. My English is more considered, more analytical and therefore an excellent tool for writing. I see language as a vehicle for communication and, as such, English offers a large and varied palette of vocabulary necessary to express subtlety and nuance.

Q: There is a strong autobiographical strain in your poetry. How has writing helped you to come to terms with complicated emotional and cultural transitions?

My autobiographical poems are part of the infrastructure for stories from my life. This work is now in progress and is called The Layered Life of Tok-Tokkie; Tok being my nickname and tok-tokkie the Afrikaans for dung beetle.
I rarely write prose when I am in the middle of a crisis but when I am upset writing a poem with a strong imagery can serve as a kind of liberation. The process of arranging the thoughts and images involves not only analysis but also leads to a synthesis of my feelings about a particular physical or emotional space. Once my thoughts and feelings are dressed in poetic imagery it is almost as though they have a legitimate life of their own; they help me gain ironic distance and I am free to go on to meet other challenges.

Q: Are there writers whose influence on you is especially powerful?

Different writers have moved me for different reasons at different times. With Doris Lessing I found an ‘African’ connection, with Margaret Drabble an ‘English’ connection, with Margaret Attwood a ‘Canadian’ connection, with Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir a ‘womanly’ connection. But I am influenced by the way they express their ideas rather than their writing styles.
Among English poets I think of Shakespeare as the master but the Romantics appeal to my emotions and the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century have a spirituality I admire.


Q: How did your time in Islamabad affect your writing?

It was in Islamabad that I wrote my historical novel, Kites of Good Fortune, a work to be published in South Africa in August 2004.It was a very peaceful place to work. I think this has to do with the fact that the climate and vegetation was exactly as it was in my childhood except that the seasons were reversed and the sun was ‘on the wrong side’. The light was right and all the flowers that grew in my father’s garden, grew in my garden in F6-2.

But was not only the flowers that were familiar: The Puritanism controlling the behaviour of people around me was very similar to the dogmatism that dominated my childhood. My father was a Calvinist minister who based his imposition of a strict moral code on a literal interpretation of the Bible. I have heard it said that Calvinism is to Christianity what Wahabism is to Islam. In Hunza Landscape I try to combine my awe for the Karakorams with a comment on the current influence of religion on life in Pakistan.

Legacy, while ostensibly about my grandmother’s experience during the Boer War, was also influenced by the many stories I heard about Partition. I identified so strongly with the personal tragedies visited on the innocent by power and politics and I knew from my own experience that the negative emotions resulting from such suffering permeate the thinking, feeling and actions of subsequent generations.

A Luta Continua was a slogan that could be seen as grafitti on walls all over Mozambique during the war of liberation against the Portuguese. The political fight may be over for the people of Mozambique but for many women of the world emancipation is still a daily struggle. Living in Pakistan made me intensely aware of that. I also like the way in which it incorporates the process of my own personal liberation. To keep one step ahead in the struggle women should be aware that knowledge is their most powerful weapon against domination.

The poetry group to which I belonged in Islamabad renewed my interest in reading as well as writing poetry. My anthology grew as I wrote ‘poems to order’ on the themes supplied by members of the group.

Q: Can you identify patterns in your writing over time?

I never consciously paid attention to literary trends or formulae; I think of myself as a story teller rather than a literary writer. There are some pretentious things I have written that are best left where they are - in boxes somewhere in the dark. I think of these as necessary exercises in discipline rather than in creative expression.


Q: Your poems have great compactness of structure. Are you aware of this as you write? How much do you work or rework a poem?

My poems are as crystals to the liquid of my prose. I feel that economy of words and condensed emotion creates the kind of tension that allows the reader to embrace the images and identify with the ideas privately.

Most of my poems begin in my head and sometimes stay obscure for a long time. Then, suddenly one day, Inspiration shines through and I grab a pencil, an eraser and graph paper. The words tumble out, I scribble and erase, scribble and erase, scribble some more. Then I let it sit for a day or two before the computer sees it. Here I have my editors ‘Delete’ and ‘Backspace’ and my helper, ‘Thesaurus’. Between the four of us we puzzle those words into the poem Inspiration intended.


Q: Which is your favourite poem? Why?

It is difficult to choose because each one appeals to me for different reasons. I like Hunza Landscape because of its ‘woven’ texture. I like the ‘story’ aspect of Legacy and the ‘truth’ of A Luta Continua.

Jakarta, 2004