Ruth Hartley's Blog: Storyteller, page 8

"The Nature of Boundaries" Ruth's art in the chapel at the church at Mazeres

 The archway into the chapel   The ancient church at Mazeres 

  I began work on these panels in 2000 using my body as a template and playing with the ideas from my MA in Women's Studies I was questioning the preconceptions we have of our separateness as a limited being contained in a skin. In fact the boundaries of self are porous, changeable, and often indefinable. 
 
 Panel Four

 John made all the supports for the18  paintings and one for the transparent panel of new work.I decided that the work would be better free-standing. The church is beautiful but a listed building and the walls and floor are not easy to place work on. My art is part of an exhibition by several other artists in the main body of the church. The problem is of course lighting.
 Panel FiveThe new panel created for this exposition.It is a work in progress. I would like to make it in better materials but as usual work with what I have or can afford.
  This panel is called Margin of Error and features a transparency of a recent photograph of my face taken by Geraldine de Haan, an artist and photographer. 


 Panel Five and Panel One

  Panel One and Panel Two
 Panel Four and Panel Five

 Panel Two and Panel Three
 Panel One and Panel Two.John is sorting out the internal lighting for Panel Five.Contrary to the apparent size of John the panels are 8 ft high approx. and the figure is life-size. My life-size and shape 14 years ago.
“THE NATURE OF BOUNDARIES” RUTH HARTLEY 2000 – 2014


18 paintings questioning our understanding of how our bodies contain us and keep us separate from other people and the world around us. My art asks questions about life. It also questions the art market and how art is selected, promoted, sold and owned.
The paintings can be rearranged and reconfigured in different ways. Some of the quotations are philosophic ideas borrowed from Cixious, Ettinger, Kristeva; some are inventions of the painter.
Acrylic and oil stick on canvas. Panels constructed by John Corley.


PANEL ONE
I am fluid and my body is a processUnwriting the bodyMateriality is necessary to manifest desireIf I wrap my skin around me, close my eyes . . . what do I see?
PANEL TWO
The boundary between flesh and spirit is imprecise.Paint is a skin.Where are my edges?Scratch the skin and the memories leach out.Earth is the second disguise. Paint is the third disguise.
PANEL THREE
Texts require surfacesCover spirit with a skin and then it can be named.Reach. Skin is the original mask/disguise.Love is the confusion of boundaries.Grounded.
PANEL FOUR
To find the essential requires much splitting.Hold. The embodiment of my concerns.The nature of boundariesMupane. The caterpillar sheds its skin.
PANEL FIVE
Margin of Error. 2014 Acrylic drawing on Plexiglas.

« LA NATURE DES LIMITES » RUTH HARTLEY 2000 – 2014


18 Tableaux qui questionnent nos connaissances de comment nos corps nous contiennent et nous gardent séparément des autres gens et le monde qui nous entoure. Mon art pose des questions sur la vie. Il questionne aussi le marché de l’art et comment l’art est sélectionné, promu, vendu et possédé.
Les tableaux peuvent être redisposés et reconfigurés de manières différentes. Quelques-unes des citations sont des idées philosophiques empruntées de Cixous, Ettinger ou Kristeva, quelques-unes sont des inventions de l’artiste.
Les médias sont acrylique et oil stick. Panneaux construits par John Corley.


PREMIER PANNEAU
Je suis fluide et mon corps est un processusDéconstruisant le corpsLa matérialité est nécessaire pour manifester le désirSi je m’enveloppe dans ma peau et ferme les yeux…qu’est-ce que je vois?
DEUXIEME PANNEAU
La limite entre la chair et l’esprit est impréciseLa peinture est une peauOù sont les limites de mon corps ?Grattez la peau et les souvenirs s’échappentLa terre est le deuxième déguisement. La peinture est le troisième déguisement
TROISIEME PANNEAU
Les textes exigent les surfacesCouvrez l’esprit avec une peau et ensuite il peut se nommerJusqu’où? La peau est le masque/déguisement originalL’amour est la confusion des limitesEnraciné.
QUATRIEME PANNEAU
Pour trouver l’essentiel il faut beaucoup d’élagageTenir. L’incarnation de mes inquiétudesLa nature des limitesMopani. La chenille mue.
CINQUIEME PANNEAU
Marge d’Erreur. Dessin de 2014 en acrylique sur plexiglas

http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/books/ru......

 http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/books/ruth-hartley-411023.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz6JuSsero0

1 About 'The Shaping of Water'
The Shaping of Water is unique.
It is a story that has never been told but that needs to be heard. It is set in a little known part of the world that is beautiful, fascinating and challenging. The historical events did take place but they are part of a history that is not widely known. The characters are fictitious but entirely believable. The novel weaves together the characters, the lake, and the historical events with the themes of political damage, environmental damage, damaged relationships and the survival of individuals. It is a very readable book with a compelling plot.


2 The central characters in the story.
The main characters are all very different to each other. The times they live through are exceptional. Charles and Margaret are a conventional couple from a colonial background, but committed to the land and people of Africa. Marielise and Jo are radical South Africans and Freedom Fighters who want to build a different kind of future. Manda and Nick each have a troubled past and have to survive a changing world, as do Natombi and Milimo whose village home lies drowned under the new lake.


3 Affect your heart, change your ideas, remain in your memory.
My readers have said that my novel does the three things that any good book will do and any good writer would hope to make happen.
It makes the reader care about the characters even those who are bad or mistaken.
It offers a new perspective by understanding what motivates these characters. It opens the door on new places and different cultures
It makes the characters, the places they loved and lived in, and the risks they took for their ideals and beliefs memorable.


4 My life in Africa
I was born In Africa and have spent most of my life there. A Chinese proverb says it is a curse to live in interesting times and I certainly have. It is true that during my years in Africa I have experienced pain, loss and some degree of trauma as I grew up in a world of racism and Apartheid. I have however learnt very much and my life has been enriched by the generosity and the dignity of the people I have known who have suffered much more than me and shown much more courage as they tried to change that world and create a better one. Some of this experience I have tried to reflect in my novel.
More than anything I grew to love Africa, its people and its landscapes. This is the place I write about in this book.


5 Art School in Cape Town.
As a child I lived in a world of books and fantasy inventing stories in which I was a cowboy hero. I drew comic strips of these stories and had lucid dreams in which I lived them out. At Art School I discovered that women were second class citizens. Racism and sexism made the life and art difficult. For a large part of my life creativity came second to political action, to family and to children. Somehow I kept secret notebooks and continued to try to paint and write, to dream and to fight for women's rights and for the rights of all humans. For the last twenty years writing and making art has been my focus.


6 Travelling around Europe
I always wanted as a child to 'see the world' – to travel, to learn, to look at art and architecture, but most of all to find out what life was like for other people in other places. It is my good fortune that I have a partner who wanted to do this also. As soon as we stopped paid employment, we set off for a year in a camper-van and made a huge figure of eight journey that took us from England all over Europe, to the Arctic Circle in Norway via Finland and the Baltic states until we looped down again through Croatia across Turkey and back to France through Greece and Sicily. We saw extraordinary landscapes, tragic and inspiring histories and fascinating and amazing people. Art and poetry and writing has come and will come from this experience.


7 Settling in France
My partner and I were looking for a way to live better, more simply and more economically. Every day we have experiences that teach us something new. Life is a challenge and a pleasure and we enjoy our rural country life. Most of all it has given me the opportunity to concentrate on my creative life and in this I am generously supported by my partner.


8 Next.
Writing and making art, while also working for Women's rights continue to be occupy me fully. My next book, under the working title of 'The Tin Heart Gold Mine', is an exciting mix of wild Africa, London city life, art, sex and political intrigue all experienced by Lara, an artist, but also a mother who does not know which of her two lovers fathered her child, Tim the journalist – or Oscar, owner of the Tin Heart Gold Mine. For “The Shaping of Water” I used and recommend the excellent Troubador Publishing. Like me, many good writers of quality books have no option but to self-publish as the world of books, publishing, marketing and digital changes and competition increases.

A TRIBUTE TO LUTANDA MWAMBA, ARTIST AND FRIEND.

A TRIBUTE TO LUTANDA MWAMBA, ARTIST AND FRIEND.


Lutanda Mwamba was a student in my class when I was teaching art at the International School of Lusaka in about 1982-3. He was a quiet and shy boy of about 14 or 15 years who appeared rather isolated among the other students. He was unusual, as I discovered subsequently. ISL students came from relatively wealthy backgrounds and many were from expatriate families. Lutanda's devoted and hard-working mother, a single parent, lived in Chilenje and the family were poor, but she was determined that her mixed race son should have the best education she could afford. Lutanda had a very long, very hot walk to school each day. This was but one of many things that put him at a disadvantage among his fellow students.
I noticed Lutanda at once as he showed a natural talent for drawing in my class. When I asked him about his future plans he told me that he hoped to be an electrical engineer. I suggested to him that art was a good way to make a living in a place like Zambia which offered at the time so few opportunities to people from poorer backgrounds, but Lutanda was set on his course. Another ISL teacher had told me of Lutanda's long walk to school and from time to time one or other of us would give him a lift back to his home. He never wanted to be taken all the way. I think that he was not given an easy time in Chilenje either, though he always had one very good friend there, another artist, David Chibwe. I had an unused bicycle at home and in the end I gave that to Lutanda for his school journey.
I was obliged to give up teaching as it did not fit in with my husband's work and I did not see Lutanda again for some years. A few years later I was working at Mpapa Gallery in the Pilcher Graphics building in Cha Cha Cha Road. One evening driving back from the Lusaka Showground I passed Lutanda and David Chibwe and recognised Lutanda at once, though he was now very tall and thin and had dreadlocks. He saw me also and came around to my home that same day. He told me that he had got his GCSE exams but had not been able to get any work at all apart from occasional gardening. He had left home and was finding it hard to afford food. He still wanted to become an electrical engineer.
I tried to help Lutanda find employment that was more appropriate for his qualifications and abilities but any job was hard to find. Not even Lewis Construction was able to help. Finally after consulting with my partners at Mpapa Gallery- Cynthia Zukas, Joan Pilcher and Patrick Mweemba, we decided to offer Lutanda a trial period as a gallery assistant. Also at this time Lutanda married his wife Mary, and they had their first child.
Lutanda was such an intelligent, hard-working, and able assistant that he very soon became indispensable to the gallery. There is no doubt in my mind that Lutanda played a very important part in the success of Mpapa Gallery and therefore in the success of Zambian artists and Zambian art at the time. What thrilled me was that in the context of the gallery, and through Lutanda's contact with artists like Patrick Mweemba, Henry Tayali, Style Kunda, and many others he began to experiment with art himself and very quickly became one of the best printmakers we had.
His talent and ability meant that he was offered a place at Reading University to study printmaking and the very generous Lechwe Trust was able to fund his further studies there.
Circumstances forced me to leave Zambia in 1994 and regretfully I lost contact with many friends and artists. In 2012, thanks to Cynthia Zukas, I was able to meet Lutanda, his wife, Mary, and his children at the Henry Tayali Gallery. It was a very happy and pleasant encounter that did my heart so much good. I was very proud of Lutanda and cared very much for him. The news of his death is deeply tragic and my thoughts are with his wife, Mary, and with his family and friends. He is a great loss to Zambia and to Zambian art.
I shall always treasure the gift that Lutanda and his family gave me.

THE CHILD WHO KEPT HER MOUTH SHUT.

THE CHILD WHO KEPT HER MOUTH SHUT.
The child kept her mouth shut and did not smile in photos. When she daydreamed and her mouth fell open, her father tapped her under her chin.
“Careful or you'll look like a half-wit.” he said.
He meant it kindly. He kept his chin up and his top lip stiff. He was never rude or unkind to those he considered half-wits though he would get very angry with employees who behaved like half-wits.
When she wasn't daydreaming she made sure her mouth was shut because though she was nine years old she only had one front tooth. The other children in her class at school had sung to each other, “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth!” Soon they all had two front teeth.
She would whisper, “All I want for Christmas is my other front tooth.” but it did not appear.
Her baby teeth had all become loose one after another. They had wobbled in an interesting fashion when she pushed them with her tongue but they hung on by tiny red threads of flesh. Her mother had suggested using string.
“Tie one end to your tooth, tie the other end to the handle of an open door. Slam the door shut quickly. It won't hurt.” She had smiled. It was her joke.
In the end all the little teeth had come out one by one, as easily as pearly orange pips. Only a couple had little black spots of decay. Each had to be treasured in her sticky palm, then it went into a spare matchbox for safe-keeping till bedtime. It would be carefully tucked under her pillow. Her father always forgot to give the tooth fairy the silver coin she needed to pay for the tooth and he had to hand it to the child at breakfast. Perhaps it was this casual neglect of the tooth fairy that prevented one of her front teeth from growing. All she knew was that if she smiled a grown-up would ask.
“Ooh! What has happened to your front tooth?”
So she didn't smile and they simply said, “What a solemn child!”
Then she was ignored because solemn unresponsive children are dull.


At last her watchful mother took her to a dentist whose surgery was on the third floor of a dark building. To reach the surgery her mother shut them into an iron cage with doors that expanded, then clanged. It groaned all way up and squeaked faster all the way down. The dentist's room seemed to be all made of dark brown sagging leather with shiny lumps and bumps. Behind the white-coated dentist, there was a machine like a giant dissected spider's leg. In front of him was a metal tray with detached silver spider’s fangs arranged on it. The dentist and her mother talked together for a time and then they both looked at her for a while. They put cheerful smiles on their faces. She even had a hard machine pushed into her mouth to take an x-ray. The dentist explained that she had an extra little tooth in her mouth and it had stopped her adult tooth from developing as it should.
“I will have to cut the extra one out,” he said. “I will give you an injection so you won't feel anything.”
After the appointment with the dentist, the child's mother took her hand and they crossed over the road to the office of the Christian Science Practitioner. The Christian Science Practitioner was a nice lady with tight curly hair, teacups and sugar cakes, spectacles, tight clip-on earrings and tight stockings.
“It’s mind over matter.” she said, “If you have the right thoughts in your mind, you will feel no pain. I will pray for you.”


The child however, was very frightened and her mind did not win over the matter of the pain. The injection hurt and its numbing effect did not seem to last very long but she sat very still while the tears ran down her cheeks and the blood ran down her chin. Her mother and the practitioner didn't look cheerful at all.


The ordeal ended of course, her mouth healed, and the child put the matter out of her mind. One day when she and her father were in the town, a man in a bow-tie and tweed jacket came up and greeted them.
“Hello, how are you?” he said to her. He had a kind smile. The child had no idea who he was but she did not smile at him because she still had no front tooth. Her father looked at her surprised.
“Don't you recognise your dentist?” he asked.
“No.” she said, also surprised.


Two years later she was no longer a child, but a girl in her first year at boarding school. She still had no front tooth. She still kept her mouth closed. She even looked serious when she was daydreaming. Daydreaming meant that she was often last in the line for going to classes or even for going into meals. One day she was so late that all the other girls were seated at their supper tables when she stepped through the door. The teacher on duty was a plain, shapeless, almost young, woman who could not remember what it was to be a child or to be happy.
“Stand up!” she ordered the girl. “How did you get to be so useless and toothless!”
The girl kept her mouth closed as her father and her life had taught her. She knew that no grown-up worth their salt would ever be rude or unkind to someone without a tooth. Besides she knew that her tooth had begun to grow. She could feel its razor-sharp edge against her tongue and she knew that one day the spicy bite of revenge would be hers to savour.

THE NOVEL 'THE SHAPING OF WATER' BY RUTH HARTLEY AND THE KARIBA DAM CRISIS TODAY.

An excerpt from my novel in which the current crisis is foreseen by Nick one of the fictional characters in the book.     MANDA RETURNS TO THE LAKE AND TO NICK

  Now on her return journey, Harare was behind her, with all its stylish, glossy smartness; its supermarkets, galleries, cinemas, gardens, tourists, aid workers, hospitals and its bitter, scarred memories of the Bush War. Manda would not go to Chirundu this time to cross the border. She would leave the Great North Road at Makuti and take the scenic road to Kariba through the valleys full of trees, rivers and wild animals. Every mile would take her closer to the lake and the cottage that felt like her real home in Zambia. She would go past Kariba Airport, along the lakeside drive and climb up to the Zimbabwe border on the south of the dam wall where a colony of hyrax or dassieshad their home among the boulders. Once she had cleared customs and immigration, Manda would make that extraordinary transit over the arching concrete wall. On one side, she would see a 300 foot drop through air, empty except for flying swifts and swallows, to the bottom of the gorge where the Zambezi once again continued its muscled flow to the sea. On the other side, she would see and feel the pressure of almost 200 billion cubic metres of Lake Kariba water. Then she would be back at the cottage in Margaret's beautiful, green garden where Milimo would have magically arranged the household and her children and Nick would be waiting for her with smiles of greeting.

That hot evening, Nick and Manda sat together on the dark veranda mesmerised by the extraordinary stroboscopic light show exploding over the Matusadona Hills. Phosphorescent sheet lightning made the towering blue thunderheads continuously visible. Jagged gold streaks flashed and crackled across the sky and hurled themselves at the endangered earth. The constant noise of thunder rolled back and forth, above the savage din and crash of lightning strikes. The wet and fecund smell of rain reached their nostrils. The threatening storms made lush promises.
“Isn't this wonderful!” said Manda in awe, “Aren't you happy to see the lake filling up again Nick?”
Nick nodded.
“Yes” he said quietly. “It will be good to go out sailing again without the danger of clattering into those iron-hard dead trees and holing the boat.”

“It's amazing that they haven't rotted away,” Manda said, “I rather like their dramatic appearance and the cormorants like them too.”
“Aquatic life generally likes them,” Nick continued. “No one really knew what would happen to the mupanetrees when the lake filled. Everyone calls them ‘petrified’ but of course they haven't turned to stone – they are just hard. The drought exposed many more of them even though vast areas were cleared of trees for the fishing industry.
“Do you know that the water from the floodgates has scoured out a plunge pool below the wall that is almost eighty metres deep? That was not expected and it is quite close to the dam wall foundation.”
“Let's face it – in many ways the lake was a giant experiment. Just like our life is.”
Nick turned with a smile to Manda.
Manda smiled back. She looked at her husband, wondering momentarily if his words signalled an awareness of his need to change. There was no sign of any self-knowledge. It was with a curious sense of relief that she turned again to watch the storms and see them reflected in the lake.
She said after a while, “I feel sad though, for the Zambezi River, lost and dispersed in the lake.”
“No – it isn't!” Nick responded, “The Zambezi continues to flow through the lake as an identifiable current and so does the Sanyati River. The smaller rivers that dry up in the rainy season don't continue but the Zambezi is always there.”
Manda looked up at her husband's face in the uncertain light under the storm lanterns. She wondered about the strong, dark and secret currents of his personality.
“So,” she said softly, watching again the gentle ripples on the surface of the lake, “the drowned river is still there, flowing onwards through its valley.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-20/zimbabwe-s-kariba-dam-may-collapse-threating-millions-newsday.html

http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/35m-in-danger-as-Kariba-Dam-faces-collapse-20140320

http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=46822

www.ruthhartley.com

GASTROPODS AND GARDENING IN GASCONY

GASTROPODS AND GARDENING IN GASCONY
On Saturday I felt well for the first time in 2 weeks and summer happened.
We gardened.
I collected a bucketful of snails from around the compost heap and John and I wondered about eating them.
At the kitchen sink later, I saw two heads ducking below the window along our back wall. Gerard, our neighbour, had warned us earlier about local thieves so I jerked the window open and asked what was going on.
Two men smiled up at me - they were collecting snails.
“Oh good!” said I. “Tell me how to keep them, feed them, prepare them, and purge them.”
In the end they took away the snails I had collected and offered to bring me snail soup made with vinegar and vegetables. Claudine tells me that this is a Basque/Spanish recipe. The soup will be at least 3 weeks away if the process of raising snails is followed. I must find out about their nutritional value.
I don't use pesticides or slug pellets and giant red Spanish slugs destroy much that I plant even though I make extensive use of beer traps.
Gardening was impossible while it rained so hard and so continuously because of the jelly-like state of the clay on which we live. Impossible to mow the plot so we just enjoy the dandelions - we can eat them too. I haven't yet.
This week John has started on the repair of the raised beds in the potager. It will be a two year project we think. I have dug in my green manure and planted potatoes, onions and beans and a few store-bought salad plants. I also am planting my courgettes inside bottomless plastic buckets that once held fat balls for birds.
Hope this protects against slugs too.
My strawberries are into a third anti-slug plan and being grown on window boxes on an escalier this year. I hope it works! I reckoned the cost of the escalierwas the less than the cost of building one ourselves.
Oh and what a delight! This year we have tadpoles both frog and toad. Do goldfish eat them?
Our moles appear to have all drowned this year or moved miles away to higher ground. As they did not seem to have much impact on the slug population I will enjoy not having molehills everywhere for a while but I expect they will return.

THE BEDROCK ERODES . . .

   The bedrock erodes -
A troubled writer's responsibility. A writer's troubling responsibility.
Or simply a troubled person – me!
Many questions are tumbling around in my troubled mind at the moment.
I chose to write in the context of a particular place and about a particular time in history.
What was I trying to do? Why write about that historical context.
My current business card quotes Camile Paglia -
“Emotion is chaos. Art is order.”
I write, draw and tell stories to find meaning and order but only of a sort – it is always conditional and compromised. There are no laws to be laid down – the bedrock crumbles -
Writers write because they are writers – to tell a story - to communicate and to share. The story starts us on a journey – or a quest with an end. No matter how inconclusive the ending of the book may be - the book – or the story comes to a stop.
My story is about the people who are left out of history and are not considered important. They are not fashionable and did not do or shape anything that was world-changing. They are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of them are white. In the context of the time that may make them doubly wrong – or does it? It is what happened at that time and in that place. To quote Shakespeare's Hamlet.
“The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!”
But the time remains always out of joint and everyone always has to work to set it right.
It is hubris to imagine that anything I wrote might have an effect on a current event. I suppose that very successful writers may be able to create trends but I doubt that is the reason why they write.
It is even more ridiculous to feel responsible for compromising events and places by writing about them when they were already compromised.
It is ridiculous to feel that the danger to Kariba Dam now openly acknowledged, is made worse by the unplanned coincidence of the publication of my book. This is superstition and fantasy but writers do feel responsible and are made responsible and are punished for what they write. Messengers are shot. Harbingers of ill-luck are unlucky. Swallows are responsible for spring and one magpie is responsible for sorrow.
The characters in my novel discuss the dam and its potential for disaster. As their creator I feel appalled at the latest news about Kariba Dam even though the latest news is in fact old news and has been known for a long time.

I trust that solutions will be found and the catastrophe averted. The builders knew that they could not claim that the dam would last forever. https://www.newsday.co.zw/2014/03/20/kariba-dam-wall-faces-collapse/

http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v7/wn/newsworld.php?id=1023056

http://bulawayo24.com/index-id-news-sc-national-byo-44551.html

www.ruthhartley.com

WHITE WRITING RIGHTBefore the end of Apartheid South Afri...

WHITE WRITING RIGHT
Before the end of Apartheid South African writers who questioned racial privilege were simply known as writers not white writers. Alan Paton, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, AndréBrink and J M Coetzee were great writers. The main protagonists in their novels were often white but engaged with their world in some way that countered the 'dominant discourse of white superiority'.  I read them all, admired them, loved them and learnt from them.  These writers still open doors onto new perceptions and new empathies. They still shine lights that illuminate the road to change.  Today writers who write about people different from themselves are questioned as to their motivation and authority. That may be as it should be. We want to hear an authentic voice but do we also want to prescribe limits to a writer's imaginative and creative abilities? If writers were to be forced to contain their intuitive and empathetic leaps into other states of being and other worlds then we humans will never understand each other. There will be no future Charles Dickens, no future William Shakespeare, absolutely no future science fiction or fantasy and a future Ursula le Guin will not be able to imagine a world where there is no racism or sexism. Autobiography might be the only acceptable literature or perhaps there would be a cultural apartheid where writers and books only served their own communities.  In a western culture and society which has largely legislated for racial and sexual equality but not yet achieved it, there is a vociferous and necessary debate about the complex ways in which privileged positions are maintained including those in literature. The safe position to adopt would be not to write, not to speak but to hide one's thoughts. The result of that position would be not to learn, not to adapt, not to develop ideas and not to hope to change the world. Writers must write, thinkers think and speakers speak out for their beliefs. Questioning whether a particular writer understands what it is to be without privilege and not white is quite different to saying either, that if writers are white they must not write on this subject, or if they do, what they write will be biased. All writers have a bias and their readers will take that bias into account and judge them for it. Readers have their biases too and the writer's task is to challenge this fact.  Good books have been written about Africa by writers who were not African. John Le Carréwrote two books set in Africa, 'The Constant Gardener' and 'The Mission Song'. Barbara Kingsolver wrote 'The Poisonwood Bible'. Should a literary version of the Bechdel Test for movies be applied to these books? For example the number of black protagonists who are not servants, the ratio of main black characters to main white characters, even the blackness and cultural authenticity of the characters. Would black writers have to have the same questions asked of their books? The Bechdel Test fails movies where female characters are objectified or reduced to stereotypes. Good literature will have fully drawn characters and good plots and also be well written.  Good writers do not write to a dictated political formula. Good writing may however be political. There are therefore questions I have to ask myself and to keep asking myself. How am I to write today? What am I to write about? Who am I to write about? What am I? What kind of writer am I?     

HIDING FROM THE ENEMY AND THE BOMBING.(Discarded chapter on the Tin Heart Gold Mine)

There were dreadful and terrifying noises everywhere and all the time but the noises were at their loudest in the silence.
The silence roared and hummed. The silence made panting sounds and drummed and throbbed. Straining to hear what might be approaching through the deafening stillness terrified him. When there were bangs or shouts, explosions or engines, whines or cries, or all of them together, then he was allowed to bury his face into her bony ribs and to pull her circling arms over his ears and not listen and not think, just feel the breath and beat of her body. Thinking demanded knowledge and explanation and nobody said what was really happening. How could he understand when he could not think and no one spoke to him?
The noise was worst in the silence because then she pushed him away and he was alone, detached from safety in the small room, staring at the window. In the girl’s thundering arms he could force the noise away by filling up his small rigid body with screaming and tears. She was not a stranger. She always responded to all his needs except for that for more food unless she was simply not there – absent – disappeared – as happened most days at sunset. When she made him stand up on his own with her fingers across his mouth, he had to be absolutely quiet and then the noises invaded him like bees, humming into his ear-holes and shrilling in his brain. That was her vanishing time.
There was no time past, just the deafening and eternal present and the small room-world that they hid in. As soon as it grew dark, the pale girl would slip away and the noise would settle into a threatening out-of-breath monotone until whoever had gone returned and brought back the wailing. After that he could return to the thudding cradle of her arms.
As it grew brighter each morning they ate a little and dozed. Then tiny fragments of memory swam into the sunlight of his dreams, quiet comfortable words, a woman’s voice, clean warm fabric cosy around him and a song that vanished when he stirred and found he didn’t have the words or the questions to hook the feelings back before the noise overwhelmed him once again.
There must always have been noise – he would never get used to it but it had always existed and it would not stop - ever. He knew that. He accepted it but he fought against it with every breath. Whereas the girl kept the noise at bay by her quiet dumbness, he kept the noise away from them all by the physical effort of surrounding himself with a sound barrier.
If that barrier ever broke –
what would happen if that barrier broke –
if it broke and the girl - and finally himself became the noise -
if he became the screaming he would annihilate the only world he remembered - his world - this room –
What would happen to them then?
What had happened before today had been so terrible that he would never let himself think of it or remember it. It was secret that must be kept forever.

“THE SHAPING OF WATER” Writing the novel – the origins of the book.

“THE SHAPING OF WATER”
Writing the novel – the origins of the book.


My father took me to see the Lake Kariba dam wall being built when I was sixteen.
That is quite another story.


I first saw the lake in 1972 when my husband went to work for the North Bank Construction Company and we lived there for a year. Once we were settled in Lusaka, the lake became our favourite weekend retreat. It was beautiful, strange, dangerous, vast and mysterious. A human experiment with the environment on a scale that was difficult to comprehend.


This painting made by me in the late 70's or early 80's tried to capture my conflict about the lake and its destruction of the environment. The girl holds a stone and a stick. The lake has reduced the earth and the forest of the valley to its elements. She stands on the shore full of doubt and wonder.
It is too simplistic to condemn the builders of the lake and the dam but the questions remain to be asked even if it appears there are no easy answers. My novel is a story not a argument for or against but perhaps it will be thought-provoking.


For anyone concerned about the proposed Batoka Dam – ask the questions and keep asking. The environment will and must change but how and why, how much and for whom?