BY BONGANI KONA
“I was trying to learn about humility, to answer a question about life and purpose without using myself as the sole lens,” Masande Ntshanga says about the process of writing his astonishing debut novel, The Reactive. The book revolves around Lindanathi Mda, a young man from the Eastern Cape, traumatised by the hand he played in his brother’s death. It’s at once a meditation on family and community, mourning and memory and redemption. It’s all of these things and more. A great book is, after all, seldom about one thing.
Although he’s set to begin work on his second novel but the 2013 PEN International New Voices award winner took some time to answer some questions about his craft and the journey to becoming a writer.
Let’s start by talking about the way you work. Do you write everyday?
In a way. I work on writing, I think, more than I would say “I write”. This means that even though I read, revise and write on a a daily basis, on some days I’ll do more of one than the other two.
Looking back, what made you want to become a writer?
It sounds like a worn phrase, but I’ve always had a restless imagination. From a young age, I had a strong interest in creating things, which was mostly in the form of reproducing the images around me. In the beginning, I had no say, and would only try to recreate what I took in, and this was done mostly through drawing. It was only when a friend of mine and I started composing comics to curb our boredom in primary school, that I got introduced to narrative and it’s power to reform and recast reality. Until that point, I had only been aware of stories as something to receive from sources that had more authority than me. I started writing more, and one day, a teacher asked me if I wanted to be a writer — I suppose having gleaned the amount of gusto and effort I’d poured into a junior composition — and I answered in the affirmative. Of course, I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I was already growing attached to the idea of what fiction could be. It seemed, even then, like something that could speak to a part of me that had always felt misplaced in the world I knew.
Did you read a lot when you were growing up?
My mother kept a lot of newspapers and magazines around the house, and I used to read them a lot as a child, both out of curiosity as well as from the simple fact that she had them lying around. I wasn’t a very serious reader, though, as my imagination, like most kids in our area, was captivated by television and video games — visually fixated by nature. In fact, my first intimate experiences with narrative, with immersing myself in it, could’ve been through video games. For some reason I can’t explain, it was a skill that was easy for us to pick up, and it didn’t hurt that it was gilded with the allure of middle class consumption, as well as access to communities that were beyond our means. The more I played, the more I was able to engage in longer, more challenging games, heavily based on text, culminating in RPG’s like Final Fantasy VII and survival horror like Resident Evil 2. To backtrack slightly, though, It wasn’t it until I was old enough to visit the local library that I made my own reading choices. This was during prepubescence, and I read comics for the most part. Like a lot of other children, I was guided towards R.L Stine’s Goosebumps series by librarians, but I spent a lot more time on the Lone Wolf game books — and even more than that, was taken in by a manga series called Ironfist Chinmi. It was during this time, and with the aid of my older cousin, that I discovered Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers, which had been in that same library, as well as The Killing Joke and A Small Killing by Alan Moore. This was all before I would start on novels proper, but each of those was transformative for me, and would guide my reading for a certain amount of time in the future. I’d found something, I thought, and I wasn’t the same going forward.
I’m curious to know though, what kind of books are drawn to now?
I’m drawn to books I can learn from. My feeling is that I can never stop learning about what’s possible in fiction, and maybe I’m a little fixated on that. There are some books which consolidate the knowledge a writer already has, and others that reveal possibilities the writer wasn’t aware of. Of course, not every lesson is made out to every writer, but that’s part of the appeal, I suppose, part of what permits one to walk in and walk out and be accepting of how they were left uninspired by the English canon, for example. We all etch out our own trajectories in order to further our projects, and the work we come come across that resonates with us, and inspires us, serves as a kind of fuel, and often, finding your way to that fuel is something guided by instinct rather than category.
Are there any South African books or writers that have had a particularly strong impression on you?
I think the first South African novel I could say I was able to absorb in that way was High Low In-Between by Imraan Coovadia, which then led me to The Institute for Taxi Poetry, a chapter of which Imraan had allowed us to workshop in class the previous year, and as a result, I always combine their reading in my head. The novels were a gift in that sense, fortuitous. There are a lot of strong novels by South Africans, both old and new, and I’ve read my fair amount of them, but that was the first instance in which the work had charged me enough to allow me to make the transition from the more experimental short pieces I’d been working on, to a to kind of reconciliation with realism that would allow me to do what I always wanted — which was to write not only about where I’d come from but also about what was around me. Imraan took it for granted that we had to apply ourselves on craft, and instead what he emphasized, which was needed, was that we pay attention to our surroundings. Despite all the good publishing that’s occurred over the years, South Africa still isn’t close enough to being sufficiently written about, I think. Maybe we suffer the opposite of a saturation problem.
One of the most striking things about The Reactive is that you write with sensitivity and insight about places like Dunoon (a township near Milnerton in Cape Town) which are almost completely absent in contemporary South African fiction. Was this a conscious choice?
It was. I’m glad you appreciated that. It was definitely one of the things I was determined to do in the novel, and in general, I’ve grown quite invested in the idea of writing about the kind of spaces you’ve just described.
You were quite young when you published your first short story in Laugh it Off. What did that experience do for you?
I was excited to have my work acknowledged by people I felt were similar to me, and it also felt as if I’d been granted permission to continue writing. It was encouraging that people were able to get some of the same things I’d received myself from writing the story. It pushed me into the company of friends, in other words, even if it was just for a night. I’d written my first stories in isolation, from a cubicle in high school at Pietermaritzburg, where we had a good library, but not much in the way of individuals. It was too early for me to make more of the publication than that, though, as I still had to find my way into my work, but it was what I needed as a start.
You completed an MA in Creative Writing at UCT. In what ways did that contribute to your growth as a writer?
It was instrumental, although I have to say that writing programmes work in ways that follow a unique logic. Even though it’s spoken of as tutelage, the results rely on being an autodidact to some degree. It was instrumental for me in the sense that I got to meet people that helped me along with my writing, as well as providing me with a period of focused reading.
You have a very distinct voice. Was there ever a point when you wanted to sound like someone else?
Thank you. There was. In fact, in my early twenties, there was a time in which I read and wanted to recreate Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera, and Laduma by AK Thembeka. I thought each was a great book, but it took me a while to figure out that I was more impressed than influenced by how they’d been put together. Needless to say, my experiments in trying to appropriate their styles didn’t succeed. I’ve never been able to consciously select an influence, and sometimes, it’s difficult for me to even predict one. For example, a lot about how The Reactive is structured isn’t only taken from The Stranger by Albert Camus, but it’s also influenced by Bloc Party’s second studio album, A Weekend in the City, which I listened to a lot during the revisions, to not only find my way deeper into the kind of experience Nathi might be having, but to also decide on how to handle time in the story, as I knew I wanted it to have a revealing, but compressed feel — since it’s a short novel, I thought it needed that in order to feel complete — and I remembered that A Weekend in the City had done a good job of that.
In a recent interview with the Daily Dispatch you said writing The Reactive involved a process in which you “became increasingly receptive to the difficulties of those around” you. Can you say a bit more about more about that.
I was trying to learn about humility, to answer a question about life and purpose without using myself as the sole lens. It was revealing in the end, too, as in doing that, I was then also able to take on the distance I needed from my characters, to allow them to become believable renditions of people who weren’t me. I suppose that’s the strange thing about fiction. Even though it requires a lot of self-awareness and self-absorption to get started, in the end, what strengthens it is a kind of selflessness that allows one to imagine people and situations beyond their own personal space. For me, that’s still an ongoing process.
Lastly, what are your plans for the future?
I’m about to work on my second novel at the moment, so I’ll most likely get absorbed by that for a while. There’s a friend of mine who’s also expressed an interest in adapting The Reactive into a film, but it’s still too early to say. We’ll have to see.
The Reactive is published by Umuzi. Read an extract from the novel here.
AERODROME 