Cherish sacred story time to face monsters under bed
LAUREN Beukes is an award-winning, internationally-renowned bestselling novelist who also writes comics, screenplays, TV shows and journalistic articles.
Her novels, including The Shining Girls , Broken Monsters and Zoo City, have been translated into 23 languages and are being developed for film and television. We asked her a few questions:
Why are books important?
Stories allow us into people’s heads and worlds. They allow us to be more than we are – to open up this mental doorway into someone else’s life. That’s important in a world with too little empathy.
How can we get more South Africans reading?
Well the first thing we should do is kill the import tax on books. What we also really need is super affordable, fall-apart pulp paperbacks that are sold readily in stations and just get people reading. If they’re really light, fun stories that doesn’t matter – we need the equivalent of Sweet Valley High set in Soweto and Melville. It’s so important to see our own stories and ourselves in a way that’s affordable and accessible. And our books are not affordable.
You’ve got an eight-year-old daughter. How does reading figure in her life?
It’s one of our most sacred things, story time. We might get home late from a movie and it’s very definitely bedtime. She’ll say to me “but what about stories?” and I’ll say “But of COURSE stories!” It’s a non-negotiable. She’s just as responsible for making reading a part of our daily rituals: we were laying the table for a dinner party when all of a sudden she said “Oh mama I know – we should put books at every place setting in case people get bored!”
And it was such a brilliant idea, so I chose some really cool nonfiction and laid them out and all the adults had five minutes of reading aloud before dessert.
Do you think we underestimate children’s capacity for darkness?
Look, my books deal with a lot of social issues: feminism, race, history, violence and the vagaries of the internet. I think kids really respond to that in young adult fiction because they like seeing thorny aspects of the world. Of course it’s told allegorically: the monster under the bed is never actually a monster but being able to confront the darkness means that maybe you can fight the monsters in your own life.
That’s not to say that books are a solution to the entire world, but it is an ongoing process of the mental evolution of who we are.
was set in Cape Town and in Johannesburg. How important is it to see our own worlds in South African fiction?
It’s vitally important. I think the idea of the US is so powerful in part because of popular culture. But there is a cultural cringe factor – too often South Africans think that our fiction is not as explosive or good or interesting as international work. And I guess part of that is escapism, that we don’t want to be reminded too much of who we are, and that’s why I think it’s important to have really engaging stories that reflect us back to ourselves.
● For more information about the Nal’ibali campaign, or to download more benefits of telling and reading stories with children (available in all 11 South African languages), visit www.nalibali.org or www.nalibali.mobi