André Brink
André Brink told me about the harrowing experience of writing his latest (and Booker longlisted) novel, Philida.
Q. I found many of Philida’s experiences quite harrowing to read about – were they painful to write?
A. They were among the most painful I’ve ever had to write. One of the results was that the writing of this book took longer than almost every other book I had ever attempted previously.
Q. There’s a real love of the South African countryside expressed in this book, was this something you felt it important to convey?
A. I didn’t have much choice, really. I’m totally obsessed by the geographical realities of this place.
Q. You make reference to slave women murdering their own children, was this hard to write about with a degree of empathy?
A. It was almost unbearable. But unfortunately it was such a crucial feature of slavery at the Cape that - again - I had very little choice if I wanted to remain faithful to the history.
Q. There is a lot of Afrikaans in the book – is that partly because you felt there are some words that just don’t have an equivalent in English?
A. The main reason was the attempt to capture the flavour of the time and the place.
Q. The black humour and ribaldry in the book struck me as being very South African – is that something you recognise?
A. Yes, indeed. But again it was unavoidable in order to remain faithful to the place and time.
Q. The germ of this book lies in your own family history. Francois Brink – the son of Philida’s owner – describes a ‘stain of blood on the farm’, can you relate to this kind of trans-generational haunting?
A. It came with the territory and was inculcated in me from childhood on (although many details could of course be added only much later).
Q. One of the slaves in the book, before he is freed says ‘The white people know very well how to wear a man out before he’s dead.’ I wondered if this could also be read as a reference to the people for whom the end of apartheid came too late?
A. Sadly, it was very much true of our recent history too.
Q. South African history pre-Boer War is not very well known about internationally – is Philida a corrective to that?
A. Not necessarily deliberately, but to do justice to the events I simply had to contextualise the facts as much as possible.
Q. One of the lines of the book, ‘A story is after all a story, it all depends on who tells it’, seems to signal to the reader that you are highly aware of your own subjectivity In retelling this story. Was that conscious?
A. I have for many years been deeply aware of the presence and the active involvement of a narrator in her or his narration; so I find it necessary to signal this in one way or another.