Gabeba Baderoon: "The task of the poet is to develop an ear for the truth of the line"

It is not every day that a volume of poetry attracts the kind of attention that Gabeba Baderoon’s volume The Dream in the Next Body has. She received the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African poetry, and since her debut collection rolled off the presses at Kwela/Snailpress a month or two ago it has attracted widespread critical attention (and even brought Baderoon a brief appearance in the television series Hard Copy!) It is a testimony to her exceptional talent that poems showing such a sensitivity for the small, still and intimate moment can elicit such broad recognition from a variety of readers. Herman Wasserman was moved by the delicate poignancy of her poems, and asked her how they came about.

Your debut collection, The Dream in the Next Body, is being heaped with praise all round. Has this response caught you by surprise, or did you hope for it to do so well?

It has been a wonderful surprise. I was very hesitant about showing the work to people, from my poetry teachers, to my friends, to fellow poets, to the publishers, and certainly to the public. In one's writing one is very deeply present – though I don't mean that the content is simply transparent, or that people mistake the speaker in the poems for the writer. Yet, there is a relationship between a writer and the work which is nonetheless direct, and what if people do not like the poems, or the person whom they learned to know through the writing? It would feel like a very deep kind of rejection, I think. So, it has been a great pleasure to find that people feel a connection to the poems, to particular poems, about which they write to me, about which ones and why. I love the responsiveness that has resulted from bringing out the book.

The poems for which I was nominated for the DaimlerChrysler Award appear in the book The Dream in the Next Body. However, the Award and the book have a slightly more separate existence. The manuscript for the book had already been solicited when I was nominated in August, and the award was decided through a multi-layered jury process, including a public reading, a taped interview, as well as the poems themselves. I was deeply honoured by both the nomination, which placed my name alongside those of Vonani Bila, Mac Manaka, Lebo Mashile, Danie Marais, Napo Masheane, Ilse van Staden and Bernat Kruger, and of course to receive the award itself was a complete joy. It's an interesting thing – in some ways, the accolade has been a very public matter, yet it has had the most deeply-felt impact on me personally. The prize has given me the time and the quiet to write – an immensely precious resource.

Could you tell me how the collection came about?

Since 1999 I have taken a number of poetry courses, from my first, an evening class in which retirees and young people who had never been to university before sat next to seasoned students of other disciplines, like myself, to a Masters course in writing poetry. Eventually, at the end of one of the courses, I had assembled a portfolio which I sent not only to my professor, but to two friends, Keorapetse Kgositsile and Ingrid de Kok. These gentle and generous poets contacted Kwela and Snailpress, who then invited me to submit a manuscript for publication. I didn't think I was ready, but they knew better. I'm very grateful to them for their faith in the work.

What inspires you to write poetry?

I'm lucky enough, I feel, to have come to poetry relatively late in my life. For me, this means I had a long incubation period as a person, and therefore as a writer. As a poet, I try to be equal to the depth and darkness and beauty of the world in which we live. This means I tend to be quiet and observant. Many things come to me as moments of pure wonder or recognition. And then I write about them. In The Dream in the Next Body there are poems about simple things, like the serene beauty of a tiled floor, or the way a kitchen can be “heavy with years”. I also write about everyday experiences that strike me powerfully, like reading a newspaper article about the fate of children in a war, or the expressions on people's faces when they are trying not to say something directly. On the other hand, I try to be very careful about not exploiting life for poetry. After all, one lives in the world as a friend and daughter and worker. For instance, I won't simply use a sentence from a conversation with a friend in a poem. Instead, the process of writing is a bit more indirect for me. The moment itself may be glancing, but it is the feeling which is startling and resonant.

A poem by the Dutch poet Gerrit Komrij (recently translated into Afrikaans by Daniel Hugo) describes words in a dictionary jostling during the night, hoping to find a position in a poem, so that in the morning the poet only has to pick them up and use them. How do you go about writing poetry – is it a drawn-out, arduous process, or do poems present themselves to you, ready for the picking?

They come in both ways, for me. In some ways, the task of the poet is to develop an ear for the truth of the line. My method means that I write a lot – every morning I keep a journal, and Komrij's jostling words perhaps write themselves then. But then my task is to recognise which ones are already poems and which need me to live with them for longer and listen to them and work until I know what they want to be.

What do you read, and whose work has served as an example or inspiration? What is your opinion of current/contemporary South African poetry?

I read all the time. Today I sat on a bench in the sun after lunch and read Peter Anderson's Litany Bird, Angifi Dladla's The Girl Who Then Feared to Sleep and Ingrid de Kok's Transfer. I've read them before, but as always, I felt the impact of good writing, a line which I'll remember for a long time, a very internal feeling. With the sun on my skin, there was a perfect balance of outside and in. I've loved reading from the time I was a child. I used to prefer to read rather than to run around outside with the other children, and I don't read only to learn, though that is a very deep kind of illumination for me, to learn from other poets. I read detective stories for sheer pleasure and Hanif Kureishi for the delight and the often cruel pleasures of his short stories; and just recently, on the insistence of my sister, I overcame my snobbishness about very successful books and read The Edge of Reason, the sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary. I wept with laughter on the airport, drawing startled glances, and remembered this kind of physical reaction from when I cried with laughter when I read Gerald Durrell at school, and my father was so curious that he read the book too. I also read a lot of theoretical works, again with deep pleasure. I read Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European recently, and it still rings in my mind. Freud often enters my poetry.

Current South African writing is enormously exciting. We've caught a poetry fever, I think. From performance to publishing, there is something new and excellent every month, it seems. I'm having to ration my spending on poetry books – there's so much to buy right now. I bought two copies of Lebo Mashile's In a Ribbon of Rhythm, one for me and one for a friend. Look out for anything written by Vonani Bila. Bila's publishing company Timbila has also brought out the powerful book These Hands by Makhosazana Xaba. The compilation Nobody Ever Said Aids contains exquisitely beautiful short stories like Leila Hall's “Girls in the rearview mirror”. And then, an event I'm truly looking forward to is the release of Rustum Kozain's collection This Carting Life by Kwela/Snailpress in August 2005.

I am also busy with Tatamkhulu Afrika's Bitter Eden and Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney. I enter into the world of novels and poems very deeply – to me, they are not so much about something as they are actual experiences. What I appreciate about these novels is the tender interiority of Bitter Eden, and how it shows the connectedness between human beings even in the most desolate circumstances. In The Devil's Chimney there is the grand tradition of seeing the madness of the colonial and apartheid world acting itself out in the minds of individual human beings, yet they do not lose their capacity for surprise, nor are they just illustrations of an idea. I'm looking forward to being able to read uninterruptedly again – for the past few weeks I've been too busy to finish these novels and focussed on poems instead, since I can read them in brief, intense bursts. At the moment, being on a three-week residency in Germany as part of the DaimlerChrysler Award, I am starting both to read and to write. Conversing with my hosts, I've been inspired to return to Rilke and, under the influence of my friend Louise Green, who did her thesis on him, the philosopher and essayist Theodor Adorno. The writing that is starting to emerge here has been surprising, very interior, circling around memory, but also forgetting and loss.

The sense of starting, of not knowing where something will lead, is an enormously exciting stage. I look forward to finding out where it will lead me.

You are an academic as well as a poet, having been awarded a doctorate in English last year. Do these two areas of work complement or contradict each other?

It's a bit complicated, partly because I like doing more than one thing at a time. I received my doctorate from the University of Cape Town and during my doctoral studies spent one year at the University of Sheffield. While working on my thesis during that year in Sheffield I simultaneously took a Masters course in poetry at the nearby Sheffield Hallam University with the prize-winning poet and playwright Sean O'Brien. My education was infinitely deepened by taking such courses in poetry. Learning to write poetry taught me to approach language with an attentiveness and respect which even as a literary scholar I'd never known before. I also find that creative writing is very restoring, whereas critical writing usually demands more of me than it gives. At the same time, the excitement I feel with theory and criticism is undiminished. Many of my friends – Rustum Kozain, Louise Green, Pumla Gqola, Mary Watson – are scholars as well as creative writers, and the conversations I have with them have had a profound impact on me in both these arenas. Our discussions often go on for hours. So, all in all, I've found that the two arenas complement each other very well.

In your academic work you have done very interesting work on the representation of Islam in the media and in literature. You do touch on similar issues in your poems, for instance "Contemporary Architecture", the cycle "War Triptych", but mostly the poems in your collection are of an intimately personal nature. How do you see the relationship between the personal and the political?

The theorist Fredric Jameson said memorably, “history is what hurts.” For me, the personal is the route to the broader world. That is where I feel the political most directly. I think the dichotomy between them is false. For me, wherever I look, from paintings of the city to my partner's face to the day's newspaper, everything is inextricably linked together. I most resist the assumption that to talk about the personal is to evade the political. I think many people search for the more recognisably South African settings, the more overtly social themes, in recent South African writing, yet this seems to me to misperceive the reach of the political, as though it is absent when we fall in love, or that we're overreaching ourselves as South Africans when we write about Tashkent, as Rustum Kozain does in his poem “Maitland” (This Carting Life, Kwela, forthcoming 2005). I take the political to mean a broader swathe than this. I have a scholarly interest in images of Islam, and sometimes the detail of the reading I do during my research enters my poetry. “Contemporary Architecture” was inspired by the sound and architecture of mosques and by my listening to the exquisite account by the feminist scholar Soraya Abdulatief of what it is like to walk into Gatesville mosque, a place usually seen only from the outside. “War Triptych: Silence, Glory, Love” is a series of meditations on the experiences of people living in the middle of a war. The utter recognisability of the human beings in that experience is what seemed to me most urgent. Surely we do not rest if we can feel that so directly.

In Afrikaans literary and publishing circles there has been some debate about the relatively limited number of poetry debuts, stemming from what seems to be publishers’ view that poetry “does not sell” (although this situation seems to have been ameliorated the past year or two). I remember a quote (I don’t know who said it, but I saw it on an Exclusive Books shopping bag!) that “Poetry is proof that rhyme doesn’t pay.” How could one stimulate interest in poetry in this country? Is having a large audience important for you?

I suppose that the normal audience for me is changing. For a long time, it was only my partner and my teachers. Now it can be as many people as come to a bookshop on a Saturday morning, or who listen to SAfm. That's wonderful. I also feel a new interest and energy around poetry in South Africa, and I'm very happy to think that it is being translated into more books being bought and read. Festivals like Poetry Africa in Durban and Tradewinds in Cape Town attract full houses to hear poets like Kgafela oa Magogodi, Napo Masheane and Shabbir Banoobhai. This interest in poetry is something that needs to be nurtured. I'd love us to have a poem in every newspaper, every week. Can you imagine that? On the editorial page, in addition to all the necessary discussion and opinion, also to find a poem? And creative writing taught in the schools. And when we have a birthday party to go to, or a wedding, for us to consider buying a book as a gift rather than a glass bowl. I'm sure publishers would like to be proven wrong about their assumption, and perhaps as readers and writers we are starting to do so.

Would you also consider writing prose, or are you committed to the poetic form?

I have written my first short story, called “High Traffic”, which appears in the latest issue of Chimurenga. It also appears in my second book, The Museum of Ordinary Life, a shorter work that has just been published by DaimlerChrysler in Germany. Ntone Edjabe, the editor of Chimurenga, as well as other people with whom I have shared “High Traffic”, say it feels like a series of poems. So maybe the answer is yes, I've started writing longer forms, and no, I haven't left poetry behind.

What is next for you – I believe you are already finalising your next volume?

I am now working on a full-length volume of poetry which will be published as part of the DaimlerChrysler Award in March 2006. I am at that stage where everything is delicate and exciting and also a bit frightening. Will the new poems be good enough? But then, to write with the intention of seeking a positive response is not the path to good poetry. So instead, I am trying to live healthily, be a good friend, do the dishes, and also show up every day at my desk, be still and allow the pen to show me the way.

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