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Tom Eaton discovers what influenced Zakes Mda to write The whale callerInterview by Tom Eaton
Buy The whale caller now by clicking on the book cover!
The first question might seem simplistic or a little facetious, and you don't have to answer it, but why whales? Zakes Mda writing about whales seems a little like John Coetzee writing comedy. Why whales? Because they are there. They are there! What I mean is, is this some new consciousness on your part about whales? It's not a new consciousness in as far as human life is concerned. I've always had compassion for all human life, that's why I don't even eat meat. So whales are part of our natural resources out there. In Heart of Redness I wrote about aloes and birds in the Eastern Cape that were threatened with extinction. It's always been my interest - our natural heritage has always been our interest. But of course I knew nothing about whales - I'm not a sea person. I only learned about whales for the purposes of this novel. I had to go out of my way to find out about them, and observe them, and get videos about them and read about them, to the extent that by the time I'd finished writing the novel, I was an expert on whales and their behaviour. So I didn't begin by saying, "Let me write a book about whales because I know so much about them." I began from a position of ignorance about whales. My main inspiration was just Hermanus. You know, I said, "Hermanus is a beautiful place - I should write a story set there!" There's a real whale crier there, and before I went to Hermanus myself the impression I got was that he called whales to himself with his horn. When I got there I found out that he actually blows his horn to call people rather than whales! So I thought, I'm going to create my own whale caller, then, who calls whales. Having done that it became more important to me to learn about whales, their behaviour and their mating habits and so on, because I wanted my whale caller to have an intimate relationship with whales. So it was important for me to know a lot about them, so that whatever they do isn't completely out of this world, but something that a whale could do. You've named Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an influence on your writing in general … Have I? Yes, in an interview you did with John B. Kachuba about The Madonna of Excelsior … Okay … … and the flavour of magical realism is very strong in this novel (the millipede on Saluni, the ruined house with its history of ruination in which the Bored Twins live, the final catastrophic wave, etc). Are you deliberately engaging with magical realism, or was this more a product of the story you were telling? No, no, that's just a product of the story I'm telling. That's why I'm surprised that I named him as a specific influence. I think all I've done in previous interviews was to discount any notion that he would not be an influence. Of course he's one of the writers I've read and loved, and he might be an influence, the same way I've read Athol Fugard and JM Coetzee, who's my favourite writer. So, for instance, if anyone told me they found the influence of Coetzee in my work, I'm not going to "No no, you are lying!" So I think that's all I've done here as far as Marquez is concerned. I was writing magical realism long before I heard of Marques! In fact I don't call it that myself. What do you call it? I don't call it anything! I leave that up to you and the critics and the scholars. I just tell the story. It's the business of the critic and scholar to call it whatever they want to call it. But I've never argued with them and said, "No, it's not magical realism!" You know I've read some papers where I'm quoted as saying my work is not magical realism. But who am I to say what my work is, or is not? I'm just a mere writer! I can't be arguing with scholars. They know best how to analyse and categorise. That's their role. My role is to tell my story. And how do I tell me story? I tell my story the way my grandmother told me stories. Her stories contained magic and the supernatural, but they operated in the context of the real, the context of objective reality. If I write magical realism, that's fine - it means my grandmother was a magical realist. And so was her grandmother before her, because that's the mode in which stories were told. I was talking to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Mexico City, and he was very excited when he heard I was from Africa. He asked me, "Do you know where my magic comes from?" I said, "No, I just know you are a magical realist." He said, "My magic comes from my grandmother - the stories she used to tell me." Then he asked me, "Do you know where my grandmother got her magic?" I said I didn't know. He said, "She got her magic from the African slaves." So his source of magic is the same source as mine. Of course his was enriched not only by the African slaves but also by the indigenous cultures of South America - the Native Americans and so on. He could draw on those as well to manufacture his magic. Even today, if you go to the rural areas of Africa, you'll find that many people have no clear demarcation in their lives between what you'd call objective reality and the supernatural. This line doesn't exist in their everyday lives, let alone in the stories they tell. So as you can see, I don't sit down with a plan to write a particular kind of story. I just write it as it unfolds. I don't agonise over theoretical aspects, because the story is an integrated part of a whole. It all functions together. The language you use can be unsettling because it seems unsettled. For instance, a lyrical, earnest passage describing the mating rituals of whales will suddenly describe a male as "horny" or refer to their mating as "hanky-panky". That's another thing I don't do consciously. There are many things that I do that I only learn about afterwards from people like you. Sometimes I find them in my own reading and I'll say, "Oh, look at what I've done here. Good gracious! What was I trying to do?" Usually there was no intentionality on my part. I also teach literature, but when I'm wearing my writer's hat, I shut off that discipline completely. When I create, whatever literary theory might be in my head is gone. The death of Sharisha is lent an almost comic aspect with the comparison to heavy metal bands and spandex. Often in this novel tragedy seems to be dealt with lightly, while joy is described with a certain anxiety or pessimism, for example the Euhophoriac twins who make everyone so happy and yet are such destructive little sadists. It's an inversion that seems deliberate. I'm glad you've observed that, and I see that I do do that a lot. But why do I do it? I don't know. It just seems the right thing to do at the time. It's not deliberate. I don't have a scientific mind when I create. You've also spoken out against the corrupting influence of power, and the arrogance that often seems to accompany it. It's no coincidence, then, that as soon as explicit power struggles begin between the whale caller and Saluni, the relationship heads south … [Laughs] It wasn't a conscious comment on my part, but it is exactly as you say, even if when I was writing I had no intention of commenting explicitly on power - it just seemed right for them to behave in that way. The Madonna of Excelsior ended on a fairly hopeful note, and yet the end of The Whale Caller finds lives and hopes and the promise of continuity in tatters. It drained me emotionally. Immediately after finishing this book, when I got to that final full stop, I broke down and cried. I cried for a long time. I felt completely drained. For that day I couldn't do anything. I just slept. I had to write something like this novel. And there couldn't be any other ending. If I had tried to force my optimism onto the ending … [shrugs]. Are you optimistic? I am, very much so. But if I'd forced it onto the ending, it would have ruined it. All my novels are optioned for movies, and when this one is, I know for sure that they're going to change that ending. The whale will die, but Saluni and the whale caller will live happily ever after. It's an ending I could have opted for, but it just didn't work for me. Will you try to defend your ending when it comes to a film version? No no, I won't fight them. I won't raise any objections because I would have done the same. In fact I almost did do the same! I think when people go to see a movie they want to leave with some sort of feeling of upliftment. Critics seem to love talking about outsiders: if any character is even tangentially unconventional or solitary in a novel, they seize upon him or her as possessing some sort of intrinsic literary merit. I know you don't like talking about what critics say … I don't like to dispute what the critics say, let me put it that way. Okay. But how important is the outsider in this novel? If I were to write about insiders, I think I would write boring stories. The outsider is more interesting to me because I'm an outsider myself. In what way? I would have said that as one of South Africa's leading novelists you are very much an insider. Inside of what? That is the question! I'm not inside of anything. I'm not inside literary circles, for instance. I'm not inside government circles, or party political circles. I'm not even inside academic circles. So I'm writing about people like myself. I am the whale caller. You often explain South African idiosyncrasies in the novel, for instance "koeksisters" and the incongruously explicit outline of the economics of the perlemoen poachers and the lack of empowerment in the life of Lunga Tubu. Are you writing for an international readership? No, I'm writing for anybody. That came about because I was writing about Lunga Tubu, and I had to explain where Lunga Tubu comes from. He is a real person - I haven't changed his name. He comes from Zwelihle township, and it was important for me to talk about his circumstances because I was amazed to see a boy from the township singing to the whales. He was standing there, with a restaurant owner throwing stones at him and yelling, "Get out of here!", stubbornly standing his ground on a rock surrounded by water, singing his Pavarotti. When I called him over he started telling me about the Three Tenors - he knows a great deal about their history and some of their great concerts. This amazed me, and I was keen to know where he came from and what his circumstances were. For a black child of his age to be that keen on that kind of music, you'd expect him to come from some bourgeois family; but he comes from a shack. So it was important for me to share these circumstances with the reader. Novelists mostly tend to keep their professional vanity out of the public eye and indulge it only with colleagues. And yet you can't submit work for publication without having at least a faintly impartial attitude towards it. Removing the concept of vanity from this conversation now, what aspects of this novel are you most pleased about? It's difficult to say, because I love everything. I love this novel very much. I read it over and over again with enjoyment. After that I send it off to my agent, who auctions it. All my books are auctioned: Penguin SA won the bid for this one. My agent says, "Here's a new work by Zakes Mda," and they bid. For this one, Penguin bid, Picador bid and Oxford University Press bid, but Penguin came up with best offer, and it was tied up with their English division as well. In the beginning I was with Oxford, with Ways of Dying, before I had
an agent. Oxford took Ways of Dying after some others had turned it down
because they said it was a feminist diatribe. [Laughs]. I felt very offended
that those people, who had published such a lot of rubbish in one of their series,
said my book was a feminist diatribe. They said if I changed this and that they
would be willing to reconsider, and I said they were crazy, I was not going
to change my book, I'd rather just put it away (unpublished). And in fact I
did put it away, until Oxford wrote to me, even though they were asking if I
wrote plays, because they were publishing plays for schools. After that novel
and the next one, I was clever enough to get an agent, and my work was in demand
enough to be auctioned. Have your say! Send your comments to webvoet@litnet.co.za,
and become a part of our interactive opinion page.
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