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Writing MaverickLauren Beukes
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Compared with the laboured agony of writing fiction, I thought unravelling real people's stories would be as easy as refolding a map. After all, you know what the story is, how it starts, how it ends, all the main characters and the major plot points in between - now it's just a matter of following the lines. Of course, as anyone can testify who has ever made the mistake of even attempting to restore an opened map to its former state, with or without guiding lines, there's a reason cars now come with built-in GPS. To put it another way, unravelling biographies is a bit like having a neatly packed suitcase and then working it over in one of those whirlygig centrifuge contraptions used by cosmonauts-in-training. The suitcase might contain everything you need, but when you click open the latch, it's to be confronted with a jumbled tumble of clothes, socks and scants and shoes and dented duty-free and all of it sticky with a viscous aromatic sludge made up of a combination of spilt cosmetics and the contents of that extra bottle of whisky you were hoping to sneak past customs. Lives, like suitcases submitted to the physics of simulated anti-gravity, are not tidily compartmentalised. They're messy and complicated and occasionally, inexplicably miss a shoe. Of course, it helps when other researchers have already made attempts to unpack the material, but some of them go too heavy, while others go way too light, so you still need to sort and re-sort and find your own kind of order. I had an inkling of the challenges going in, but what really surprised me was how badly informed I was about these women icons and heroes from our past in the first place. In my day job I'm a journalist and I'm accustomed to throwing myself into previously wholly unfamiliar subject matter (like nuclear pebble-bed reactors, trendoid swingers or Rwandan refugees, just for example), but it was a shock to discover just how blatantly crap the canned apartheid syllabus we were force-fed in school pre-1994 really was. The smattering of high school history I can recall was about far-distant people like Robespierre rather than the likes of Moeshoeshoe, who barely got a mention between the Groot Trek and the Birth of the Republic covered in class - and women didn't feature at all. I knew a lot of the big names, of course, like Ruth First and Daisy de Melker, but I'd never even heard of Krotoa-Eva, the ill-fated Khoekhoe translator for Jan van Riebeeck, or Sarah Raal, the reluctant Boer commando, or Rifles, the navy leopard, who had all paws on deck 20 years before Just Nuisance. There were names I was glancingly familiar with, like Nongqawuse or Olive Schreiner, but whose stories I didn't know in any detail. I'm embarrassed to admit now that I thought Olive would be tedious, that I was going to have to do some hard labour to make her story interesting. Instead, hers became one of the longest chapters, because her suitcase was stuffed with so many wild and intriguing details, I couldn't bear to leave them out. Even those stories I thought I had down, such as those on the lives of Sara Bartmann, Brenda Fassie or Helen Martins, were rife with bombshells and twists I didn't anticipate going in. I handled the book (and my relative ignorance) the same way I tackle any story, with a ton of research and consulting with experts ranging from historians to family members. I spent months collating and reading biographies, history books, newspaper articles and reputable scavengings from the net, supplemented with interviews with intimates. Some of the books were better than others (I've mentioned the especially insightful, engaging and well-written by the likes of Petrovna Meterkamp or Professor JB Peires in the acknowledgements, which are all well worth exploring in fine detail), but there were also glaring absences. Sometimes the division in information was as blatant a sign of colonialism and apartheid's legacy as the "whites only" notices once marking beaches and benches. Sara Bartmann, Eva-Krotoa and Nongqawuse, for example, were never given the opportunity to tell their own stories in the context of their time. They're recorded only in as much as they influenced events around them - the cartoons and outrage in the papers in London about Sara dancing on a leash, Van Riebeeck's satisfaction with "Eva's" canny bargaining recorded in his journals, and the stories handed down about the prophet girl, Nongqawuse, in Xhosa oral tradition that nevertheless leave out her side of her role in the controversial great cattle killing. Even in more recent times there was a divisive schism between black and white, most outrageously obvious between peers, struggle comrades and friends Helen Joseph and Lilian Ngoyi. While Helen left behind three books on her life and her life's work, Lilian, who earned the moniker "the raging lioness" and arguably had a more accomplished career, never wrote anything down and gave her brilliant, roaring speeches off the cuff. The material available on her is skimpy in the extreme and, frustrated by the failure of the books and articles I'd read to be able to provide some of the important details, like her husband's name, for example, I phoned the ANC Women's League, hoping they'd be able to fill in the gaps. They put me in touch with Memory Ngoyi, a wonderful woman who lives up to her name and who turned out to be Lilian's adopted daughter, who doesn't get so much as a mention in any of the literature available on her - another bombshell I hadn't anticipated. And really it was the surprise I enjoyed the most - uncovering Memory, for example; or the hints of story behind the creepy "bag body" with its one cloven hoof that was the only artwork the Owl House's Helen Martins made with her own hands; or that Dolly Rathebe once had a sideline in selling dope from her shebeen to survive; or the irresistible snippet that 70s stripper Glenda Kemp never did like snakes. Of all the research I did, the interviews were the most gratifying, whether I was having coffee with poet Patrick Cullinan reminiscing about how he helped smuggle Bessie Head out of the country and the agony of how she later betrayed him with the furious and partly insane invective of the scathing letters she wrote behind his back, which he discovered only after her death (now bravely collected in his new book, Imaginative Trespasser), or reconstructing that day back in the 50s when jazz chanteuse and filmstar Dolly Rathebe was arrested on a mine dump with ex-Drum photographer Jurgen Schadeberg. I was humbled by how many people were willing to share their deeply personal memories, from André Brink, talking about his tempestuous affair with Ingrid Jonker, to David Klarer, Memory Ngoyi and Smilo Duru recalling their remarkable mothers, and, of course, Glenda Kemp, the only "maverick" still alive and kicking, who welcomed me into her home and spoke candidly about the incandescent young stripper she once was and the devoutly Christian schoolteacher she is now. Others proved impossible to get hold of and, occasionally, people weren't prepared to talk at all, especially about Brenda Fassie. The hot question everyone asks of me is which of the 18 women (and one big cat) featured in the book is my favourite. I always find myself stymied for an answer. I loved Ruth First and I adored the quirkiest stories, such as those of the cross-dressing doctor James Barry, UFO-advocate Elizabeth Klarer and, naturally, Glenda Kemp, but then I also became totally hopelessly embroiled with Brenda Fassie and Ingrid Jonker and Irma Stern, and suffered rage and despair through the tragedies of Bessie Head and Nongqawuse. Considering I handpicked the selection (with recommendations from experts various), it should come as no surprise that they all resonated with me, but it was more like a series of love affairs. I immersed myself in each woman's story faithfully and utterly, heart and head, but by the time I started a new chapter, like the most fickle and ruthless of players, I had moved on completely. Looking back, it was intense and difficult work to recreate the stories of these extraordinary women in a way that was true to the facts and the spirit of their lives, but at the same time it was also an education and a delicious joy. I'd like to think that comes through in the writing.
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