Tug Boats

It's time to turn around. My women's commercial novel is out. I have a book under my belt. Reviews have been thoughtful and rewarding (mostly), and I've stopped reading them. I am peddling - the peddling required if a book is to make any headway - but I'm hoping a grassroots campaign will take hold. In the meantime I am allowed to turn back to the short story collection coming out next year. I am revising and editing. Easier than a novel in the sense that most of the stories have been published so they have been clarified and worked over. But it's never enough, I've learned. Editing is a microscopic process, requiring various lenses, clear lighting, a tense kinked neck.



But I'm up for it. The stories in their wide range of locations and subject matter provide a new home for my thoughts, both elated and bruised by the uncertainty of publication, and the greater uncertainty of sales in a cold, multinational-slapped world. It's quite a relief to come back to the silent, word-crammed page. No other voices from beyond, no pressure to reply, just the words of my stories. Bright polished stones looking for attention and company.


PS I am reading Deborah Robertson's delicate and compelling novel of stories, Careless. It tugs me back to Australia.

A Lost City and Photo of Haji Nur

I didn't really mean for this blog to become an Africa-vent for me. The short stories in the Pelt collection are varied. Some are set in Europe or Australia. Some are set in Africa and travel close to the seam of my life. One is set in Somalia, for example, where I was a young wife without a clue how to mother.

The other night I felt a jarring when I saw my old street in Mogadishu on the news. There had a been a bombing at the National Theatre of Xamar, whose whining singers used to go on and on into the night, almost until the morning muezzin. I saw the junction where twenty years ago a cunning thief put his hand into our jeep and stole my young husband's glasses. I saw the hill we used to chug up to our turn-off, a rutted dirt road where one evening we found a blabbering man, an ex-soldier, who used to live in our street. He had fought in the Ogaden border world and lost his senses, his family, and years of his life.

I don't think of Somalia often except in bursts of guilty pain. It was my first foray out of Europe, the first strange tongue I began to learn beyond the European languages I'd learnt in high school, the first African capital I explored on foot with a driver who was as skinny as myself. It was the first time I ever had help in the house, slow Faduma who pasted magazine cut-outs on our walls and cooked fermented bread like pads of white earth.

The guilty pain comes because I wonder. I don't know what happened to my co-secretaries from the office. It was pre-internet, we left in a rush when Siad Barre's young quat-chewing soldiers took the centre, claimed cars, killed and raided houses. I don't know what happened to the children my friends were trying to raise, or those who came after in their complex and - for Westerners - uneven marriages. I just don't know. Every time I see a tall Somali man and recognise their gutteral language I don't know what to think - was he a man who as a young soldier shot at women in a market? Or a man who truly wants to harvest peace for the future?

I remember my first-born receiving his first vaccination in a filthy clinic that made me grimace. I told myself, be equal, your son is living here - quite a joke given we were able to escape. I remember the tough exterior of Somali women colleagues, so fragile and damaged inside. I remember the flat rooftop of our old Italian-built house with the spiral staircase, watching an eclipse of the moon with our watchman Elmi, the way the city cascaded down towards the sea.

Elmi was gunned down by troops soon after we left.

On the road, always

Last year a friend nearly fell over his feet when I said I hadn't read Jack Kerouac's classic 'On the Road'. Shamefully, I had not. Not even when I left my continent at 21-and-a-day, never to return, a woman who's been on the road for decades.

So I ordered a copy on Amazon and read it into the night.

For those of you who read Kerouac at the appropriate age - I would say an itchy-footed nineteen - I'm sure the book held its allure. I probably would have fallen for its powerful flux of restless movement, moneyless, sex and young love under endless starry skies. And its gaudy untempered language, the rush of it.

But as a post-40 year old who has done a lot of moving around, given birth in a third world hospital, gotten lost in deserts, been moneyless in Bamako and other assorted places, had AIDs victims in the household, Kerouac's book didn't make me feel like overturning the boat. Throughout, I was conscious of Kerouac's landmark style, an albatross that almost condemned him to early death through alcohol abuse - that I adored. But his restlessness became irritating early on, as well as his young self-centredness. As I read I couldn't help wondering how his writing style might have expanded and his subject matter deepened as he reached middle age, as his excitability ebbed and his inwardness changed shape.

That was what I wanted. I even wondered if the guy who suggested the book had remained braked in his twenties, imploded and repressed, unable to grow up.


As I have moved I have written diaries, but these diaries are tied together, locked in a cupboard, for no eyes to see. They are private. What I was searching for in Paris at twenty, as I cropped my hair and grew skinny and did the Lolita with older men, I no longer wish to know. I remember one summer I hired a car and drove it around France, from top to bottom, stopping at every town looming on the flat horizon, examining haunted Gothic cathedrals with the passion of a young woman with a shoddy colonial past. On one occasion I remember buying strawberries from a market, knocking on a man's door to open a bottle of wine, and stretching out in my bikini in a field full of cows.

Cartography

Back in the 90s I was a diplomat's wife about to go into existential crisis. But before I did (there is always lots of writing material in any sort of crisis), I wrote this story. It was when I belonged to the bitchy French Ambassadors' Wives Literary Club. It was when I wore linen suits to cocktail parties. It was when I hadn't even tried local Ghanaian food, nor eaten with my hands, nor driven around that hot rich country except in a convoy of diplomatic corps vehicles that were never flagged down.

I didn't fit well in that arid world of shimmering swimming pools, gardeners bent over lawns, whispering house staff. Nor with the French Ambassadors' Wives who took their dinner parties so seriously; their charity events, their art purchases.

It amazed me how people who I knew were ordinary in Europe, who pushed their own shopping trolleys, looked for specials along supermarket aisles and took out their own garbage under the moon, were able to hoist themselves above a whole society of people, a nation where they were guests.

After my crisis that changed. And so did my stories. But this one belongs to that period. It was picked out, I don't even remember how, by Virago, and placed in an anthology of women writers called 'Wild Cards'. I still remember walking down Shaftsbury Avenue with my new lover and baby, and seeing the book jacket in the window. Colossal, beaming pride.

This month Cartography is Story of the Month on www.inktears.com, and it will be part of my collection 'Pelt and Other Stories' coming out next year. It makes me think of cool nights, friction, skin.

If Della had never walked into that café in Stuttgart looking for her German-loving friend Stacey Mahler she would never have ended up at the bar with Luce and his odd, leggy son. Luce who was leaving for West Africa in a week; Luce who said There are other worlds while exerting a take-it-or-leave it pressure on her knee. Della wrote to Stacey a month later from the rainy season, half-deluded by the stinking multifarious setting, half-drenched by Luce’s unfiltered sexual coaching. What Della had been told afterwards was that Luce’s thirty-six-year-old wife Chanel had perished in a plane crash on a runway in northern Nigeria. If Della had siphoned off moments of the tragedy to crystallise her own mortality, she was also conscious of being a fast substitute. Uneasy, beyond her climax of flames and metal she might think: Luce had made love to a woman who had died.

The Year of the Short Story

I heard it on the blogvine. That 2012 is the Year of the Short Story. Did you know? This makes me thrilled for two reasons. First because my short story collection has been accepted for publication and will be coming out with this spirit in the air (sadly not till 2013 – I have my debut novel on my other plate!), and next and more roundly because it will increase the standing of this accessible but tricky form.

As a young thing I never wanted to study writing. Didn’t want to have my ideas pushed into shape. I was devoted to Katherine Mansfield, whose shimmering stories I think we should still go back to read. To feel the lightness of a beautifully seamed work, its spilling cloth and crafted movement. To travel quickly grasping the writer’s knowing hand. To feel pulse, labour, precision.

I’m sure so many short story writers have heard it all before – the marvels of the short story, with sudden gusto brought forth by big publishing companies while many have toiled long into the night with smaller publishing companies, or independents, or in self-publishing. But surely there is still reason to celebrate, to dress up and come to the party, wearing an extravagant pair of heels?

I’ll be there. Etherbooks have just put up two more stories of mine on www.etherbooks.com. For the unconvinced, my story ‘Innocent’ is free. Try this for size: Flemish aid worker Toby Vlaminck deals with a kleptomaniac driver wearing Peter Fonda sunglasses.

The Year of Well-Written Wonders.

The day the Klan came to Italy

Recently we've been talking about race at home. And today a blog posted by a friend made me remember a particular incident that in its warped way became educational.

My kids grew up on the old Gold Coast, today's Ghana, a country where slavery has a lengthy and even current history. I mentioned the slave forts in my last post, and while not wanting to linger in those cold dungeons I will mention standing in the pit, looking up to where it was said the governor had a wooden walkway installed, so as to look down for the prettiest captive. It was said that a woman who became with child became a freed woman: she did not have to crouch and grovel along the tunnel called 'the gate of no return'.

One of the things about being white in Ghana, apart from sunburn and never being able to be invisible, nor wear swishing local fabrics with any sort of stylishness, was that one often felt one represented the evil conqueror, the culture of the slavers, the scramble for Africa, the whole school of European thinking about the 'noble savage', the many wars of independence, today's neo-colonial wars of mineral wealth and mercenaries...

A heavy burden. But it was my fault. I studied Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in university, where I learned that capital sought new markets in order to refurbish its greedy mechanisms. I also studied African and Asian Independence Movements and in my innocent way fell in love with Isak Dinesen's beautiful opening words, 'I had a farm in Africa' (years after I went to her homestead - not the one used in the film - with a hostile guide who made me feel every bit the Dane handing out sticking plasters and paracetamol).

But back to my educational incident. For I could go on endlessly about the friction between cultures, the discomfort of history, the stories, the stories. The ancestors of today's Ghana were sent off in slave ships to the Americas. Somehow, my half-Ghanaian kid hasn't seriously studied this in school yet, Italian school I might add. They do the Civil Rights Movement, but history, which he fortunately loves, is seriously euro-centric. Perhaps that is why he made this discovery in a school friend's bag he brought home by mistake. It was around Halloween time, everyone was thinking parties, pumpkins. Masks.

My kid pulled out a triangular white cone of cloth with three holes in it. The rest of us, his older siblings, sat there staring. My youngest called out What is it? What's wrong? Slowly, we explained to him. About the raids in the bush. About the men and women chained together, families broken, never to see each other again. About the long congested journey over the oceans with the stench of death.

What type of mother handstitches a child's Halloween mask from this type of terror and cruelty? What type of idiotic being?

I used to fight battles verbally. Charge up to people. Seek justice. Rant and rave. In Africa I learnt how to fight. But strangely, my older kids calmed me. Told me how dumb these people were, how rich. That didn't stop me going to the school and having them labelled, showing my outrage. Seething.

God knows that ignorant woman had better never cross my path.

Infection

Years ago I wrote a story. It was the first time I tried to write anything after our return from Ghana. We had moved into a frigid old house in the middle of fields, the fog low upon us, rudimentary heating and the occasional country mouse. It was hard. If I thought living in the tropics was hard - malaria, thieves, power cuts, no water - I had no idea.

Eventually I pulled myself together and started to write. I was inspired by a postcard I had for some reason attached above my bed. It showed the Princes Town Fort along the Western Region coast, originally built by a Brandenburg Prince with stones imported from Prussia. It would have been the last construction seen by many a terrified slave sent across the Atlantic.

Along the sea there are several of these forts, evil bastions set among the coconut palms. Though they are frilled with fishing boats and market mammies and gleeful children, they are cruel to the core, chilly inside, burdened with enraged and frightened souls.

I don't know why I kept the postcard. We only visited that area a few times, and there were other more extensive structures at Cape Coast and Elmina where we took visitors to see the museums. This was a smaller, quieter place. But mouldy and dark; cruel. Deep down I suspect that is why I put that postcard on the wall in those early days. I had just been through a long period of cruelty, a grave injustice, a situation I never thought I would escape.

My story was originally long. Too long, too loaded. A failed son of the old regime comes back to Ghana to his hometown near the fort to witness his half-sister's last days. Her body is devoured by AIDS. His cranky mother wants the young woman's shame banished from the house. Eugene, my character, does not know how to act in this contemporary African society whose traditions he has not absorbed from birth. He is British-educated, a visitor here, only able to see so far.

Now, 'Infection' is up for publication with a prestigious magazine next year, and is part of my collection Pelt and Other Stories, the contract for which I excitedly signed this week.

Somehow, that story is my escape.
* * * *

Read my interview on http://womensfictionwriters.wordpress.com