After being shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize, the third time’s the charm. Did you feel relief? Validation?

Profound alarm. The first time, in 2003 for The Good Doctor, I was too unknown. The second time, 2010 for In a Strange Room, I thought the book was too obscure to win. I was by no means certain I’d win in 2021, so it was a shock in the sense that I’m a very private person and I felt my privacy disappear.

How do you balance writing a deeply personal story while ensuring it has global appeal?

I didn’t believe my approach to The Promise was going to have international appeal. It’s my most South African book and I made a conscious decision not to ‘translate’ South Africa for other people. I decided to speak and think like a South African and I left it to fate whether readers would make the effort to understand. You can clarify from the context what’s being talked about, and if the specifics are a little elusive. I didn’t abandon the reader completely, but I didn’t make concessions anymore. I planted my flag in my native soil and made South Africa the centre of the universe for a change. It was a risk because it was very possible that publishers outside South Africa would say, ‘Ah, it’s too obscure.’

Author of nine books and four plays, South African writer Damon Galgut won the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise — a saga of damaged families and moral failings in post-Apartheid South Africa. Galgut is currently in Pakistan to participate in the Karachi and Lahore lit-fests. He chats with Eos about his win, South Africa’s black-white divide, his mistrust of ‘brilliant’ writers and the future of writing in a world of ChatGPT

The Promise shows how even after abolishment of Apartheid, very little changes. Promises made were not upheld. As a South African with a conscience, how does that affect you?

I was never at the receiving end of Apartheid . I was born into privilege by virtue of my skin, which was the iniquity of the system. But everybody is affected because the revolution was meant to deliver a new future to the majority of the people. The majority of the people are not unlike Salome, a black housemaid in The Promise. For millions of uneducated, rural people — often women having menial positions as domestic workers — nothing has changed. At all. Which is what I was trying to make the reader feel. That, of course, affects one’s conscience, but in another way it affects our future. We are very close to a second revolution in South Africa now, because the fruits of the first have benefited a very tiny minority.

The division remains?

Worse than ever. The gap between the wealthy and the poor in South Africa is, I believe, the largest in the world and an alarming statistic.

We hear that reparations and apologies will be proferred to mitigate the consequences of colonialism, racism, structural inequality etc. Are these false promises, or are you witnessing a positive change happening?

The South African dream has not delivered. For years, white people excluded black people from citizenship and any sense of belonging or ownership. That situation now looks as though it may tip in the opposite direction, which won’t be a resolution for anybody, because most of the country’s wealth is still concentrated in the hands of white people. We’re hearing the sound of drumming in the basement. What’s being perceived is that white South Africans are intruders who have seized the land. That’s alarming to white people. For me, I was born in South Africa. My parents, grandparents were born there. If I get told to ‘go home’, I’d go to Pretoria, where my roots are.

Do you buy into the paradigm that one must experience adversity and be somewhat tormented to be taken seriously as a writer?

[Laughs] You don’t have to be knotted up with torment to be a writer. I say this with some irony because everyone tells me how tormented I am. But it helps if you’ve struggled. The raw material of writing is conflict. Harmonious situations make the reader’s mind slide sideways. A life in which you’ve struggled a bit — hopefully not too much, because that can destroy a talent — gives you some sense of the conflicts of the world. I don’t know how it feels to be somebody struggling in Pakistan, but perhaps an earlier struggle in my own life will give me the imagination to make that leap. Struggles give you an emotional vocabulary to understand people.

Why does the conflict resolution in The Promise feel so incomplete?

I’m not a fan of literature that glibly provides resolutions that are mostly not available in the real world. It’s why I’ve taken care that my book’s resolution is not that satisfying. There’s a tension because books have to provide closure or they’re unsatisfying. But then, books are meant to throw the real world into sharper relief. I try to observe literary conventions, but push them as far as I can towards what seems to me a more realistic paradigm. In the real world, closure is often not available.

Where did the family dynamics in The Promise come from?

Most writers draw on their own experiences to some extent and my family is especially dysfunctional and fractured. My father is Jewish and we were raised in that tradition. When my mother divorced him and married a Christian man, we went to Sunday school. She is now Satsangi.

I’m not a fan of literature that glibly provides resolutions that are mostly not available in the real world.

You’ve said in an interview “I’m mistrustful of writers who are certain they’re brilliant.”

[Laughs] I don’t remember saying it, but it’s true. I’ve met some writers for whom ‘cocky’ is an understatement! Writers are not film stars, but if you have a successful book and everyone tells you how wonderful you are… that’s damaging. The moment you believe you have the skills at your fingertips, then you’re in great danger of writing a bad book. It helps to have some self-doubt and to be your own worst critic.

Romance doesn’t seem to be something you would dabble in.

I struggle to depict the more tender emotions, which is strange because I have them in my life! I know it’s part of the human experience that people are not always unkind, unjust, harsh. I’ve experienced kindness at the hands of other people and I’ve extended it to people, too. I don’t know why that region of human behaviour seems so inaccessible when I start writing. With The Promise, I was looking back over my life. I grew up in a violent household with an abusive stepfather. That probably marked me deeply. And South Africa is a harsh place. My memories of growing up in Pretoria are of being in a state of trauma all the time.

How can that be true for a white person?

Living under a distorted system makes for distorted personalities. People think some of the characters in The Promise are grotesquely exaggerated, but in truth, those were the adults looming around me. Extremely judgemental, pious and violent and angry people who mirrored a much larger system that was also judgemental, pious and violent.

South Africa has ‘moved away’ from these harsh times. Except really it hasn’t. You can’t walk down the street without seeing evidence of horrible human suffering and we’re numb to it. We’ll walk past somebody collapsed in the gutter, whether from drugs, alcohol or hunger, and nobody really blinks. There’s something morally blind in having to negotiate a day-to-day life like that. My sense of moral outrage about South Africa’s condition dictates me. I want people to be shocked by it, rather than consoled by soft messages of love, because although it’s there, it’s not saving us. Not at the moment.

What are we looking forward to now?

I was working on a collection of short stories when the Booker axe fell on me. I’m tentatively returning to them, but it’s going to be a long time before they’re done. I’m the slowest writer I know. I average about three years. Some books have taken five. I wrote one of my earlier books in six weeks, but that’s possible only if you’re drawing closely on your own life. The shape of it has already been provided by life, so you’re just venting your pressing emotions. I love cinema. I’d love to script films in the future but, if some writers are arrogant and unpleasant, they’re absolutely dwarfed by the egos of the — some truly awful — film people I’ve met. I far prefer the literary world.

Do books still have a future?

When I was growing up — which is not that long ago! — books were still very much at the centre of cultural life. Now they might be the last thing people reach for. You can tell a story visually, of course, through TikTok, whatever, but nothing will replace the value of a narrative through language. Language is absolutely, primally coded into our DNA. It reaches into places that images just can’t reach. But while I won’t be a pessimist and say they’re dying, we must recognise that books are now at the edge of culture. We’re speaking from the margins. It’s not such a terrible place to speak from, but it’s not as powerful as it used to be. If the internet existed in the 1970s and ’80s when I was a child, authors would have been getting hundreds of thousands of hits.

If all else fails, we’ll learn how to dance.

Well, I’m doomed in that case. I’ve no sense of rhythm whatsoever!

What do you think of writing produced by artificial intelligence, ChatGPT etc?

Computers may be able to authentically mimic styles, but they will never have the experience of negotiating daily life and the internal struggles that go with that. All the stories have been told; what cannot be replicated is your unique way of relating. I don’t turn to a book because ‘ah, a story that’s never been told before’, but because I want the encounter with the mind of the particular person relating it. That’s what I’m after.

The interviewer is co-founder of My Bookshelf, an online library which delivers books to you and picks them up when you’re done reading.

www.mybookshelf.com.pk, @mybookshelfpk

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 26th, 2023