Zukiswa Wanner

Ever since I can remember, I have always written. When I was in my early years, immediately after discovering this art, writing was an outlet as is evident from the many diaries that I look at now that never cease to amuse me; my teenage years were influenced by the readings I used to do and an impotent feeling of injustice, mostly for social or political reasons, thus the horrific lines that I then claimed to pass for poetry that I find myself looking at in moments of mental self-flagellation (yes. The so-called poems are that bad!); and now as an adult, I find myself writing for both these reasons and additionally I write because I find myself feeling , to paraphrase James Baldwin, ‘as a witness of these times in which we live.’

The writing that I did as a child, was largely encouraged by my parents who thought it would help me academically to clarify my thoughts and as such, become a better student when I had to write ‘compositions’. The way it worked is that, whenever I was walking anywhere and I had my satchel, I was to ensure that I had a pen and a piece of paper, that way I could always write down my observations which later on would be placed in an exercise book as diary entries for my own amusement. Or sometimes, these pieces of papers were just kept so that I could read them at a later moment and smile by myself (well yeah. I am an only child and I had to get my amusement where I could!). I find myself still carrying a pen and paper when I have the benefit of a handbag. This becomes a particularly great tool when one attends one of those tedious conferences, dinners, or balls, usually government-sponsored, with long speeches. I use the pen and paper to write observations and comments to the neighbours who are around me at the table. If the neighbours are friends of mine, the pen and paper can provide tons of lighthearted moments at otherwise boring functions, and if the neighbours are strangers, it never fails to break the ice. Incidentally, the last of these that I have in collection was done at some grand affair sponsored by some people who shall remain nameless during the Cape Town Book Fair. Every time I look at the comments and read them, I still find myself laughing, and then remembering how utterly bored I was, I yawn and fall asleep. So there you are, one way to ensure that you never suffer from insomnia!

I do not write poetry anymore as I did when I was a teenager, thank heavens because my stuff was so dismal even Mzwakhe Mbuli would have been ashamed instead, I use the essay format to express deep felt injustices, anger, and even joy.

Someone – probably dead, possibly a man, likely white – wants questioned how people who did not write, compose or play music, maintained their sanity and I understand this feeling. On a personal level, writing soothes me and allows me to let go of my anger when someone pisses me off. The truth is, I do not like being angry and I often find that when I write something I feel so much better and I find too, in retrospect that my anger may have been blown out of proportion. The things I have written about some of my friends in moments of anger would, if they had been vocalized, have severed good relations forever.

And sometimes I write because I am happy or amused. The joy I feel when my two year old son says some witticism to me or imitates me when I am shaving my bikini line in the shower (for the record, I have stopped taking showers or baths with him since then!), usually result in my writing an amusing little piece that I hope one day when he is older, he will take a look at and be able to laugh at himself.

On a more international level, the impotent rage I felt at say, when the Americans decided to keep their Idiot-in-Chief for a second term back in 2004, ended as a shake of the head and a shrug of my shoulders about what cannot be changed after I had written a piece on it which aptly began with a quotation of the first verse of William Butler’s Yeats’ Second Coming excluding the first couplet,

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;

Clearly I am not totally over my love for poetry but nowadays, I just quote those who can do it. But back to what’s-his-face and writing, some may question why I cared at all about something happening in the United States, my excuse is that I am an internationalist but more importantly, an African, and the leaders the people in the West place in the positions of power affect how much the petrol price will be, the exchange rate when some well-meaning foreign friend sends me a gift of twenty dollars will be, or whether I will be able to get a visa to go to some conference or other in said country and if so, how much harassment I will get at their ports of entry. As my dad used to say, politics affects everything we do whether one chooses to be political or not, so it is better to be politically aware and avoid the pitfalls. It was incidentally, the angry essay on the US elections of 2004 that, after sending to a few characters, threw me on the path to being a fictional writer. Here is how it happened. A certain elder statesman of South African literature, obviously observing that I was better at creative non-fiction and could therefore probably make a go at it as a fictional writer, suggested that I consider writing fiction, to which I responded that I was too much of a realist to write fiction. He thought I was talking bull, I felt a challenge coming and rose to the occasion and egad, a few weeks later, my first novel was born. Strangely enough, since then I have felt myself a bit of a loser as an essayist. I know now that I will never have the ingenuity of a Binyavanga Wainaina in writing an essay so maybe this older statesman helped me well, particularly now when I consider myself a full-time writer.

Finally, I write as a witness to the times in which we live. What exactly does that mean, you wonder? As a fictional writer, be it short stories or essays, I tend to write very contemporary stuff. The issues I try to address (and sometimes grossly fail to do so in spite of all the writing tools), are things that I feel affect my world today. I like to fantasise that thirty, forty, maybe sixty years from now, some reader will be able to take something that I wrote and get an idea of what South Africa was like in the twenty noughties.

All this of course, why I write and such, would be marvellous if I kept my writing to myself without feeling the need to torture a lot of readers, but I, like many writers, am also egotistical enough to believe that what I write is of any importance at all and thus the need to publish – but that’s for another article.

I end this piece, feeling that I have been self-indulgent enough spending so many words writing about myself (but with little regret. I am, after all, a writer).

I sign off to observe:

A world that inspires me to write,

A world that angers me to write,

A world that mocks me to write –

With a promise to continue to write on!