Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2022-booker-longlist‎ (13)

You were born before Elvis had his first hit. And died before Freddie had his last. In the interim, you have shot thousands. You have photos of the government Minister who looked on while the savages of '83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants. You have portraits of disappeared journalists and vanished activists, bound and gagged and dead in custody. You have grainy yet identifiable snaps of an army major, a Tiger colonel, and a British arms dealer at the same table, sharing a jug of king coconut …………… If you could, you would make a thousand copies of each photo and paste them all over Colombo. Perhaps you still can.

The initial manuscript got a great response from Indian publishers, but seemed to baffle the international ones. Many found the quagmire of Sri Lankan politics in 1989 too hard to follow, and the local mythology perplexing. What began as simple tweaks and edits for clarity, turned into more extensive revisions and rewrites. Penguin India were happy with the book and keen to launch it at the Jaipur Festival, and did so. But Natania and I ended up editing the novel all through the pandemic as our publishing dates kept getting pushed back. It’s the same story in spirit (ha!), with roughly the same characters, but with a few subplots revised. The new version is perhaps tighter, pacier, more textured and nuanced, and hopefully more accessible to a wider audience

“You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone has. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse”.

[Originally] I wrote it in the first person, but I just found it hard to separate his voice from mine and so on, and then I just looked at it technically. When the body dies, what survives death? What is the soul? Is it breath? And I just came to the conclusion that what survives is the voice in your head. And mine is in the second person, it’s always ‘you, you, you’. So when I took that on the book started moving forward, so it worked from a philosophical point of view but also stylistically. And he questions it, ‘does the voice belong to me, or are there ghosts whispering in my ear?’

All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.

Braithwaite was born in Darlington in 1925 and, from the scant information available, appears to have had a brief period of celebrity in the mid-1960s

If there is a recurring theme through the cases he presents though, it is that his clients are traumatised not by their eccentricities themselves, but by the stress of concealing them; of being forced to present different personae to different audiences. Braithwaite’s remedy is to embrace the idea of ‘being several’ (a phrase he uses repeatedly): to give up the idea that one persona is any ‘truer’ than any of the others. Once one has thrown off the idea of a ‘hierarchy of selves’ one can happily be whoever one wants, whenever ones wants.

Subjecting oneself to therapy from Braithwaite must have been terrifying. Reading about it is tremendously entertaining.

He describes this new way of being as ‘schizophrening’. As the decade wore on, this would become an idea perfectly in tune with the be-whoever-you-want-to-be mood of the time, and copies of Kill Your Self would be soon found in the back pocket of every student and bar-room philosopher. ‘Phrening’ (or sometimes ‘phreening’) passed into beatnik argot, and the slogans ‘Don’t be yourself: phree yourself!’ or the more succinct ‘Don’t be: phree!’ were graffitied on the walls of university campuses up and down the land. The concept also gave rise to the short-lived Phree Verse movement in which often acid-fuelled performers channelled their various selves into a spiralling cacophony, until the different personae melded into one incomprehensible but ‘authentic’ stream of consciousness. Ironically, more than one participant in these happenings would later find themselves recovering in psychiatric facilities.

“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life. If that Griffin book had been Lynched Like Me, America might have looked up from dinner or baseball or whatever they do now. Twitter?”

It would be very easy to write a dark, dense novel about lynching that no one will read; there has to be an element of seduction. Humour is a fantastic tool because you can use it to get people to relax and then do anything you want to them. The absurdity of the inattention to the subject was the driving force of the comedy, but the novel lives as much in turning around stereotypes as it does in revealing the truth of lynching. I’m happy to say I’ve [annoyed] a lot of people for my stereotyping of the white characters. Someone in an interview [objected] and my response was: “Good, how does it feel?” When I started the book, I said to my wife [the writer Danzy Senna], “I’m not being fair to white people”, and then I said, well, f.. it: I just went wild.

What was most unsettling was that they all read so much alike, not something that one wouldn’t expect, but the reality of it was nonetheless stunning. They were like zebras, he thought—not one had stripes just like any other, but who could tell one zebra from another? He found it all depressing, not that lynching could be anything but. However, the crime, the practice, the religion of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realized that the similarity of their deaths had caused these men and women to be at once erased and coalesced like one piece, like one body. They were all number and no number at all, many and one, a symptom, a sign.

‘What’s amiss?’ said Joe. ‘I’ll tell you what’s amiss. I shall. I shall that. You come here, you and your box and your pots and your donkey stone, and fetch in enough to make me frit to death. You’re on about bones and all sorts; and then you’re off, some road or other, and I can’t tell where I am. I’ve got a pain in my eye. I can’t see proper. And I go down the bog and get stuck; and this chap with no clothes on and a daft silly hat, he sits up in the water and he makes no more sense than you do. He says I’ve got glammeritis, and then Stonehenge Kit, he’s gone, and so’s my best dobber; and Whizzy’s with a Brit Basher and they’re after Kit and the mirror’s all wrong then he’s back in the picture.

‘Fair do’s. Treacle Walker?’
‘Joseph Coppock.’
‘What is it you want for you? What is it you want most? For you. Not some wazzock else.’
‘Never has a soul asked that of me.’
‘What’s the answer?’ Treacle Walker leaned his head against the timber behind him and looked up into the stack.
‘To hear no more the beat of Time. To have no morrow and no yesterday. To be free of years.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Oblivion. Home.’
‘That’s not daft.’
‘It is everything.’

"I don't know." I tell her, and I really don't. Telling her would have been like saying this is my life now, like committing to the streets. Letting the streets have you is like planning your own funeral. I wanted the streetlight brights, the money in the morning, not the back alleys. Not the sirens. But, here we are. Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun's out.

In these new lives, Virginia Woolf wrote, there would be that queer amalgamation of dream and reality we knew so intimately: it was the alchemy of our own existence. These biographies would bring forth moments of becoming that lasted for centuries; there would be more than one life unfurling in every life. The lines would not break off on the page just when we had fallen in love, and in each chapter Sappho might become a different one of us.

This is a work of fiction. Or possibly it is such a hybrid of imaginaries and intimate non-fictions, of speculative biographies and suggestions for short pieces (as Virginia Woolf called them while she was drafting Orlando), as to have no recourse to a category at all.

Moreover, men like Gabriele d’Annunzio – who swaggers prepotently through every account ever written of Eleonora Duse and Romaine Brooks – do not merit here even a footnote about who they married or how they died. It has been surprisingly easy to leave out these sorts of men: a simple swift cut, and history is sutured without them. I think of Vita Sackville-West, who said in a letter in 1919 that the only revenge one could take on certain men was to brazenly rewrite them.

In 1923 “The Birth of the Day” was published … What, we demanded plaintively of Colette, what genre of thing was this? Smiling mischievously, Colette replied that its genre was feminine:

Biographies without births, elegies without deaths: we could hardly tell what bounded a life any more. Moreover in French genre means both gender and the form of a book. Some autobiographies were disintegrating into solipsism while others were turning their warmest parts outwards, opening at the centre into a dizzying constellation of moving parts.

The sign that says 'Bulawayo, 10km' takes her by surprise - it doesn't feel to her she's even been that long on the road. Yes, you've actually been that long on the road, Destiny, and besides it being a relatively short drive you've been practically flying most of the time. And good thing you slowed down when you did, otherwise you'd have missed the turn. Bulawayo-Bulawayo-Bulawayo. She says the name out loud, lets it linger in the mouth, thinking, and not for the first time, What a dark, dark name.Meaning, where one gets killed, where there is killing. Yes, tholukuthi an ominous name that has made Destiny wonder endlessly about the proph-ecy of names, the terrible odds that the events of April 18, 1983, and the dark immediate years would fulfil the name. And in just a short while, she thinks, slowing down a bit, she'll be standing on Bulawayo earth. A kind of home, yes, but also a ruin. A place of slaughter. Of massacre. Of devastation and despair. Of blood and tears. Of disruption. Of the annihilation of families and family lines

So that very soon it was noted that Jidada was actually not a country but two countries - there was of course the Country Country that was the real, physical space in which Jidadans walked and lived and queued and suffered and got pained, and then there was the Other Country, where Jidadans logged on and roared and raged and vented.

"This war was as complicated thing, Mother of Destiny. If I don't write this book then one day animals calling themselves the Real Liberators and True Patriots will call ugly names and then erase us from the story of the very country we sacrificed so much for because now that the war is over many will be perceived of the wrong ethnic group, the wrong clan, the wrong gender, the wrong clique, the wrong politics, the wrong whatever else they decide constitutes authentic Jidadaness. If I don't write, who will I blame when I then wake up One day to find myself in the belly of a crocodile that calls itself History, that devours the stories of everyone else and goes on to speak for us"

She stands for a long time looking out the parlor window, where Father's death has not changed the view. The clouds are low and unbroken, a gray lid set over the city. A strong wind is ripping the few remaining leaves from the trees, tossing them into the air, trapping them against the fences and the snowdrifts. A man passes on a plodding bay horse. Another, on foot, keeps his hat on his head with his hand. There was no reason for Mother not to have taken her along. Father would have been pleased to see her face. She turns back to the room.

It was a stupid idea. The book was too advanced for her; too advanced, she was sure, for a student of science. But she was trying, at least trying, to understand what was happening to her daughter's body. 
 
Anthracycline, antibiotics. 
 
The problem with it was the lack of story. Narrative. When asked for his definition of Neighbour, Jesus did not turn to his glossary. He had a parable and a Samaritan up his sleeve. Human example is everything, thought Anne, as her hands shaped and carved and built and bent through pathology and insulin and enzyme activity and junctions and ecosystems.

“There are three narrative threads in the book that are not only in constant communication, but are actively competing against one another to ‘tell’ the story. The events happening in Lia’s past and present are mapped onto the landscape of her body, the first person eats away at the third, there are fragments of anatomical science and religious philosophy, of poetry, painting and dance and typographic moments where words drip, or swell, as if magnified — they mirror and bend. By experimenting with form like this, by shifting between styles and building up patterns to pick at and unravel I found that the novel had become about the very act of storytelling; about the way we choose to frame our lives, and which version of ourselves we let take the lead. As Lia (an illustrator with a vast imagination) nears death, she is attempting to make sense of her choices, her illness. The piecing together of self is her final creative act.” 

for all the play and ‘fizz’ there were also simple delights that emerged unexpectedly along the way. I learnt that a fully realised character or frank, honest dialogue can be just as poetic as a perfectly constructed metaphor, or a bit of clever word play. This, I think, is growing up. It’s realising that you have nothing to prove. It’s leaving your coat and scarf and pretension in the hall, taking the hands of your characters, and letting them lead you through the house.

Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

“Because I am a novelist, I have to write this almost like a novel, but it is true – as true as I can make it. And I want to say – oh, it is difficult to know what to say”

This is not the story of my marriage, I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of it, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us. But I can tell you this; My mother was right: I had trouble in my marriage. And when the girls were nineteen and twenty years old, I left their father, and we have both remarried. There are days when I feel I love him more than I did when I was married to him, but that is an easy thing to think – we are free of each other, and yet not, and never will be.

“I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William. William has lately been through some very sad events – many of us have – but I would like to mention them, it feels almost like a compulsion; he is seventy one years old. My second husband, David, died last year, and in my grief for him I have felt grief for William as well”

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.