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"Every one of us is a little crazy at one time or another in our lives …"

Michelle McGrane in conversation with Rosemund Handler, author of Madlands

Rosemund HandlerBuy this bookRosemund J Handler completed a Master's degree in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. She has published short stories in South Africa and in the United States.

Madlands, Rosemund's debut novel, recently published by Penguin South Africa, is the story of bright and beautiful Carla, a bipolar disorder sufferer. The author describes Madlands as "a tale of family - of damage and the hard road to healing".


Rosemund, tell me about the main social, political and cultural influences and the environment of your youth.

My grandparents on my mother's side were Russian Jews from Moscow, members of a privileged minority permitted to live in that great city. When the Bolsheviks took over they fled to South Africa, where my mother was born. My father's parents came from Latvia and my father was born in Johannesburg. I grew up in Johannesburg in a traditional Jewish family. My three siblings and I attended the nearby Jewish day school, King David.

My earliest memories are from the age of about four. My family had three servants who took care of our every need. My siblings were interested in the presence or absence of my working parents, but I enjoyed being with the servants, because they liked kids. They listened patiently when I pestered them and laughed easily at the stories I babbled while they scrubbed floors or cleaned toilets or ironed endless heaps of crumpled laundry. I asked my father why we needed so many people to take care of us. Why couldn't they work in an office or a shop, like white people? I asked all kinds of questions, and sometimes my pensive father chose not to answer. I told him that the servants were my friends, that their food was much better than ours was, and I liked it that no white person understood a word they said. I loved the way the maid swayed her comfortable haunches over the stove to the endless kwela music on the radio, and I happily devoured her samp, wild spinach and chuck stew, which tasted far more interesting than our bland meals.

I often implored the servants to tell me about their children, but the details were sparse, and I could not picture them in my mind. Occasionally I was shown a bleached black and white photograph of small underdressed children clinging to an ancient woman, the grandmother or aunt. I never laid eyes on a black child in my neighbourhood growing up. It bewildered me that blacks were almost invariably servants and labourers, and it was unimaginable to me that they saw their own children once a year. But I realised one thing early on: that the love and energy that rightfully belonged to their own families were expended instead on other people's children.

Brought up in relative privilege, I had no idea of the impoverished, remote villages so many people called home - the mud huts that made the cramped servants' quarters seem positively luxurious. I knew that in school I thought differently from many of the other students, who took the status quo of apartheid pretty much for granted. I was extremely well schooled on the horrors of the holocaust at my school and it perplexed me that few, adults and students, appeared to see a connection between apartheid and our own devastating past. Having said that, I'm proud of the fact that some of the most prominent anti-apartheid activists were Jewish.

I was close to my father, who had a business in Pritchard Street in the city and made time for every beggar and vagrant for miles around. They came not only for money, but also for my father's warmth and kindness. To him street people were visible; they mattered. He never turned away a living soul. Every broken, ragged person that came through the door would give vent for a minute or two about a sore back from the cold night sleeping outdoors, or aching limbs, or a knife attack by tsotsis. Then my father would deposit a few cents into a hand or pocket. He gave these people something few others did: acknowledgement. Their raw, difficult lives counted to him and they knew it. A one-eyed Indian fruit-seller I knew only as Harry had made my father's acquaintance, and used (rent-free) a corner of the Pritchard street shop as his depot while he carried produce on his back and sold it across the city. He put his two sons through medical school in this way.

It was from my father that I first learned about social justice, and observed the terrible depredations of social injustice. He deplored stigmatisation of any kind. As do I.

When did your passion for words develop, and which writers inspired and influenced you when you started writing?

I wrote as a child, reams of poetry that my grandparents delighted in. I then wrote for the school magazines and took pleasure in learning new words. I loved the density and power of the English language. Stories were the key to the kingdom for me. I read everything I could lay my hands on, from Enid Blyton to the Hardy boys, Pippa Longstocking and Anne of Green Gables; my mother read the poetry of Walt Whitman and Wordsworth to me. I powered through Dickens, Brontë, Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, Stefan Zweig, Turgenev, Joseph Conrad, Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, JD Salinger. I also read Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine which my parents' subscribed to - and of course my sexual bible, Peyton Place, was regularly sneaked from my parents' rather fusty bookshelf.

At university you decided you wanted to work in journalism. You were farmed out to a national newspaper to get a taste of "researching and writing a local article". What did you learn from that initial stint?

At Wits University I decided I wanted to work in journalism, and was sent to the Sunday Times to "experience researching and writing a local article". I was dispatched together with a bored, jaded photographer to the home of a Chinese family in Mayfair whose son had just been butchered. My job was to elicit the juicy details while the corpse was cooling in the next room and the mother kept breaking out in agonised bouts of weeping. When I later told the editor that intruding on the family's grief made me feel as if their son was being murdered before their eyes all over again, he informed me that journalism wasn't "for a pretty young thing" like me. Women in journalism, he said, had to be like Molly Reinhardt - hard as nails and beyond sexuality of any kind. (!)

You were politically active as a Wits student and subsequently arrested at John Vorster Square in Johannesburg. Would you describe your memories of your brief incarceration?

Through some misunderstanding, instead of being in the same cell as the other students, I found myself in a cell with two prostitutes, whom I engaged in a fascinating discussion about what they did for strange men, and how much they charged for each bizarre act. I asked for, and was given, all the gory details and left prison much the wiser and not the least daunted by my short sojourn.

In 1988 you, your husband and three children emigrated to the United States. You lived there for fourteen years and then, in 2002, you and your husband returned to South Africa leaving your grown children in the States. Why did you come back?

We left South Africa because I did not want our children to be brought up in a system I had detested all my life and that I knew offered no future; but leaving the country we loved was a wrenching and painful experience.

Only by living for a long time in another country can anybody truly understand the profound meaning of the word home - and the bone-deep sickness of longing for it. America never became my home. We succeeded in providing for our family there, but I wasn't a good transplant. My blood flowed sluggishly in a foreign landscape, and my impoverished spirit yearned for the smells, the people, the scenery and vast spaces that are so uniquely African.

Unlike many exiles, we had the choice of going home. When we left South Africa my children were too young to be involved in the decision, and when we left the United States they were too old - but splitting up our family was one of the hardest decisions we have ever taken.

Penguin South Africa has recently published your powerful and accomplished first novel, Madlands. How did you feel when you held a copy of the finished product in your hands for the first time?

Holding your own novel in your hands is an extraordinarily powerful experience of affirmation - a bit like holding your own life in your hands! I felt enormous gratitude to the people who facilitated the birth of that solid little rectangle: my husband, my MA supervisor, the many people I spoke to, and of course the believers at Penguin. I have probably been swimming (under water, unknowingly) towards Madlands for much of my life. Hopefully I'll keep on swimming, but no longer underwater.

Would you briefly characterise your protagonist, Carla, for people who haven't read your book?

Carla is gifted, bright and beautiful, but her life is profoundly impacted by her all-consuming struggle to manage her disorder.

Can you describe what is meant by bipolar disorder as a medical term?

I think it would best be described by me as a layperson in a layperson's terms: as life-altering mood swings that gravitate between irrational and exuberant highs and debilitating lows which can be life-threatening in that some bipolar people repeatedly attempt suicide.

Before I read Madlands, a woman at my favourite bookshop was raving about how much she enjoyed it. When I told her I was interviewing you she said, "Please ask Rosemund if she has had personal experience with family or friends who have bipolar disorder … Ask her what motivated her to write the book." I promised her I would ask you.

I have good friends who are bipolar and have had the opportunity, at different times, of being involved with their experiences and treatment. Some of it made me angry. I also had contact with people who had been victims of paedophiles. I spoke to people across the board - those suffering from various mental disorders, alcoholics, their families and caregivers; also homeless people.

You describe the grounds, the buildings and the daily routine of being an inmate at Valkenberg Hospital in detail. How much time did you spend at the hospital and what general observations did you make? Did you have frequent opportunities to speak to the psychiatrists, nurses and inmates?

I have spent time visiting Valkenberg, and a few private institutions as well. I explored the grounds of Valkenberg, sat in visiting areas of some wards, and spoke to medical personnel, but mostly on these visits I observed people - medical staff, inmates, and the places themselves. It is important to bear in mind, though, that in my novel the description and experience of Valkenberg is particular to my characters, and the place portrayed through their eyes rather than my own.

While you were gathering information for Madlands, a book which deals with the confusing, devastating symptoms and effects of mental illness, and paedophilia, were people forthcoming about helping you and talking to you?

Yes, people spoke to me - a lot. There is a vast need to talk and be heard out there - whether one is bipolar or not - and not enough good listeners.

Many people I had contact with who are not bipolar themselves know of friends or family members who have been diagnosed as bipolar. From a layperson's point of view, if this is the case, the condition seems so widespread as to be on the scale of an epidemic - which makes me suspect that the diagnosis may have become a catch-all for a spectrum of complex mental disorders.

In a short but very important chapter called "They think I don't know", Carla says:

The nurses think I don't know what they do to the inmates.
The inmates think I don't know what they do to one another.
The inmates think I don't know that they steal from me.
The nurses think I don't know that fear rules.
Mention is made of chronic under-funding and abusive staff in mental hospitals; generic drugs dished out by overworked doctors without due diligence; the terrifying side effects of powerful medications that make gentle people dangerous, and dangerous people dangerous zombies …

What do you think of the current state of South Africa's psychiatric institutions?

Carla's experience of a state psychiatric institution is not necessarily the general rule, but I believe these places suffer from chronic under-funding. In private psychiatric clinics, as with all other medical facilities, money paves the way to better care and treatment, as well as better food and a pleasant environment - though the path to healing is no less elusive and challenging.

What were your emotions as you worked your way through the book? Did you find writing from different characters' perspectives affected you differently and altered your moods unexpectedly?

Fired up by all I had witnessed, heard and read, I knew I had to find a way to depersonalise - to distance myself, and the people who told me their stories, from the story I wanted to tell. Images and stories had to fuse with my imagination so that the fictional structure could grow organically and my characters be freed to express their own unique voices. Once that was in process the work didn't affect my moods too much other than a sense of satisfaction when I had a good writing day and a sense of deprivation and disappointment when I didn't!

One of the chapters called "Telling", towards the end of the book, is excruciatingly painful. Without giving too much away, how did you find writing from the viewpoint of Jake Jensen, Carla's father?

I had in some sense - oddly enough, not a contradiction to the above - to become Jake for a while. How would I feel if I were such a man? Once I'd put myself through that, I could distance myself and Jake took over.

Carla's relationship with her mother, Anna, is intricately woven throughout the novel and told from both viewpoints. When you started writing the book, did you anticipate how the complicated mother/daughter dynamic would evolve and resolve itself?

No, I didn't. It evolved, seemingly, all by itself. Carla and Anna made all the moves.

I love the comment made by Dr Gold, one of Carla's psychiatrists, on page 156. He says, "Nobody is very sane, Carla; at least nobody I know." For me, that single sentence encapsulates simply and beautifully what the novel is about …

You are absolutely right. Every one of us is a little crazy at one time or another in our lives, under certain stresses, and perhaps that's part of what makes us individuals - and should empower us to be empathetic rather than to cast the first stone.

If Madlands had a soundtrack, what songs would you include on it?

I'm a Leonard Cohen fan and I'd definitely include one or two of his more doleful earlier works and one or two of his more cheerful (but even darker-voiced) later songs. Vivaldi's Four Seasons - a prosaic choice, I know, but I love it and always will. I love Bruce Springsteen's heavier stuff (for institutional parts) and I have this exquisite soundtrack by two magnificent counter-tenors that would lend enormous power to various parts.

How long did it take you to write the book? Tell me a little about the process. Did you write every day?

I wrote on and off for twenty months, perhaps a bit more. I tried to write every day, but there were interruptions, like a trip to see my kids in San Francisco, and other more mundane distractions. But the discipline was there, and as time went by, the essential focus needed to fine-tune the details and the language sharpened, which is when the pleasure of crafting the work really came into its own.

How important is "a room of your own" for your writing?

A room of my own was the womb for my newborn babe …

What was the greatest challenge you faced when writing the book?

Believing that I could do this thing, if I put my soul into it.

A manuscript is rarely finished when the last page is written; constant revision and refining are involved. How did you know when you were ready to let it go and allow it to find its way into the world?

I didn't know. I finally just sent out the manuscript and hoped for the best. But I only really finished cleaning it up thoroughly, chipping away all the rough edges, shortly before Penguin's deadline for me to hand in the final draft.

Can you recommend any accessible fiction or non-fiction for readers who want to increase their insight into bipolar disorder?

The internet is more useful than I am for this one, and there are a ton of medical tomes. The Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jameson is probably still one of the non-fiction templates for bipolar disorder. Locally, Swing hi, swing lo (2002), a self-published manual by Esje du Toit about her own bipolar experience, with some medical analysis of the condition as well as stories of famous people who may have suffered from it.

Other books which may be of interest are: A brilliant madness, by Patty Duke and Dr Gloria Hochman (1992), Bipolar Affective Disorder - SA Federation for Mental Health; Bipolar Disorder: Mary Lynn Hendrix, National Institute of Mental Health USA (1997) and Bipolar Disorder Frequently Asked Questions File (1996). (There may be updates on some of these.)

The Western Cape Bipolar Association (which is also, I believe, the South African Bipolar Association) will increase anybody's insight, and of course AA and Al-Anon, both of which I have visited on quite a few occasions. (I had an employee who was severely alcoholic.)

Could you tell us anything about Katy's Kid, the novel you are currently writing? When can we look forward to seeing it on the shelves in bookshops?

Katy's Kid is about a different kind of divergence from the straight and narrow. It is a story of two prostitutes from very different backgrounds, and a child. It will be published by Penguin early next year.

In Madlands you quote fragments of poems from writers such as Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forché and Ted Hughes. You also write poetry. Who are your favourite poets?

Ted Hughes, especially Wolfwatching, Adrienne Rich, Sophie Cabot Black. I still read TS Eliot, Alan Ginsburg, Stevie Smith now and again, Leonard Cohen at his best, Sylvia Plath, Shirley Kaufman - and many others, including a bunch of the good old romantics, especially Keats and Byron. South Africans: I like Ingrid Jonker, and some of Stephen Watson's work. I loved Uys Krige, whom I had the privilege of meeting and spending time with. For humour, Antjie Krog and Gus Ferguson.

Can you name one or two individual poems that have been important to your development?

TS Eliot's "Wasteland" and DH Lawrence's "Snake".

If you were in solitary confinement for an extended period of time, which five books would you choose to keep you company?

TC Boyle's Tortilla Curtain, to remind me of the polarisation of our planet; Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full - lovely satire; Wuthering Heights, for unquenchable romance; Anna Karenina for tragedy; Jane Austen (possibly Emma first); Annie Proux's Close Range (short stories). I can't leave out Charles Dickens, especially Nicholas Nickleby, Nadine Gordimer's early short stories, and Disgrace. If I were in solitary confinement I'd need a library in the cell. I know I've left out a bookshelf full of favourites!

Rosemund, what are you passionate about? What moves you, what inspires you, what brings you joy?

Relationships, reading, writing, hiking, travelling, good music, good movies, open spaces, wild animals and birds, Africa, and my family. To quote Nadine Gordimer in down-to-earth mode: "Writing is making sense of life." That's a big passion of mine too!

For what would you like to be remembered?

For passion and spirit in my writing, for memorable novels about the human condition. I know these are lofty ambitions at this stage, but that's the joy of dreaming.

Madlands
Author: Rosemund Handler
Price: R95.00
Publisher: The Penguin Group (SA) (Pty) Ltd
ISBN: 0143025023
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 2006/4
Pages: 250
Click here to buy this book from kalahari.net. It can also be purchased from all good bookstores.




LitNet: 03 May 2006

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