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| In 1995 I read an article in South Africa’s Weekly Mail and Guardian about the rampant poaching in the Limpopo valley. White farmers were hunting out of season, using helicopters to chase game onto their land from Botswana. One man shot 23 hyenas in the dry Limpopo riverbed with a 9mm pistol. The slaughter of those animals stunned me - hyenas are not trophy animals, no one eats their meat. I could not shake free of that man and his killing spree became emblematic of the violence that overtook South Africa for much of the 1980’s. I jotted down a few notes. I imagined he had a daughter. She was fourteen years old, frantically burying everything that her father shot. I saw her cajoling the African man who worked on their farm to help dig the graves. And then I asked myself, what else did her father shoot?
I entered the first notes into my computer on December 27th 1995 on a snowy day just north of New York City. Eight years later I was working on my final draft in Borrego Springs, a small town in the Anza Borrego desert in southern California. During the writing of the novel, I took great sustenance from this quote from Kafka.
"You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
Read -
African Odyssey; Lisa Fugard interviewed in BookPage
Audio -
Lisa Fugard interviewed on The Leonard Lopate Show |
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