LAHORE: South African novelist and playwright Damon Galgut, whose novel, The Promise, brought him the Booker Prize last year, says the book started with a conversation.

“Novels begin before the initial idea in which one is looking for a subject. In my case, it takes me years before I find what I want to do next,” he said about the point of origin of the novel while replying to novelist Kamila Shamsie during a digital talk of the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) on Friday.

Shamsie introduced Galgut in the session streamed on YouTube and facebook.

Galgut said writing a book would take years as it’s quite a task for the writers to make sure that it would keep them engaged and interested.

“I was looking for a story that fitted in with my preoccupations and it came to me during a conversation with a friend who meet him one day after attending four family funerals. He was the last person left in his family,” he said about the start of The Promise.

Galgut found the anecdotes of his friend interesting and moving at the same time and his novel became a means to tell the story of the family. Through the four funerals, which may look depressing, the novelist was actually looking at the antics of the living people gathered at the funeral with the underlying tensions. He called his novel a tragic-comic book.

Galgut said he broadened the spectrum of the book by showing the conditions of South Africa in four decades, including apartheid, national reconciliation and the decline since then.

Galgut was surprised when the critics and readers found the political background as the foreground. He agreed with Shamsie that history sometimes overpowered the stories in countries like South Africa, Israel and Ireland that had had political upheavals in the recent past. Calling it a South African curse, he said the writers in the country were expected to write the account of the country’s recent past that the writers in the UK were not obliged to.

Talking about the process of writing, Galgut said there were no easy novels and it’s a different challenge every time.

Galgut said it was a thorny area in South Africa where white writers (like him) represented black people. “There is a strong and angry identity politics that would claim that I have no right to speak about black lives because I have no understanding of that experience.”

He said his resolution and solutions in this regard had nothing to do with identity politics.

“Fiction is premised on how convincingly you make the imaginative leap and it’s on that basis, I want to be judged, not my ideological position.”

Galgut also read out an excerpt from the novel.

NAMITA GOKHALE: In a talk, titled The Blind Matriarch, Ameena Saiyid introduced Namita Gokhale, the author of 20 books and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Ameena termed The Blind Matriarch a saga of a joint family seen from the point of view of a blind grandmother.

Talking about her book, Gokhale said, “It began with an image of an old woman on the top floor of an old house living there alone.”

She said the story, the extended joint family could be a metaphor for India.

“I was brought up in a joint family and I live in a joint family, which brought enormous security and help. But the nature of joint family is changing and once the pandemic began I realised something had changed in the joint family and the people had to relate to each other in a different way”.

When asked by Ameena about the paradoxes in the book, especially the main character, Gokhale said she felt women in earlier generations had strength and resilience despite being weak.

Talking about her women characters and feminism, Ms Gakhale said, though she would like to be identified as a feminist, she won’t push men outside the picture, adding that there was a woman inside each man and vice versa. “Masculine is as important as feminine,” she declared.

Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2022