WHAT’S IN A WORD?

FICTION CRITERIA

The winner should be a novel of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.

‘How to be a Revolutionary’ by CA Davids (Umuzi) is shortlisted for the Sunday Times fiction prize, in partnership with Exclusive Books.

Judges said: Masterful. A fascinating book made up of three different stories to create a whole that is increasingly relevant in a multipolar world where people’s pasts have to be grappled with to be made sense of.

THE BACKSTORY

Idon’t think there was one specific moment or point of origin for How to be a Revolutionary. I had lived in Shanghai, and when I came back home to South Africa I wanted to write about that experience — capture as much of the place that I could on the page: my sense of living in that metropolis, streets I’d walked, the light, the people — so much, really. But I also wanted to understand China in a way that I had not been able to when I’d been there, for a variety of reasons (I couldn’t speak the language, I had a young child with me and so on), but also because so much is unsaid, avoided, censored in China.

To connect the dots meant I had to do a lot of reading, and layered onto that is the imaginative work when writing fiction, so I would create a picture in my mind — which I certainly hope I imparted to readers — of how the massive political and historical events had shaped the contemporary place but, more importantly, how these seismic events might affect one human life.

Of course, I am always going to write about South Africa. Then, the novel developed quite organically: certain characters just became crucial to the writing of the text, including Langston Hughes. I like to think there was serendipity in following that kind of open process because it led me to interesting coherences, including the role that Hughes played in getting many South African writers published and known internationally, including Bloke Modisane and Richard Rive.

EXTRACT

The repetitive beat of typewriter keys always amplified at around 1am, because this was the time when life on the street below stilled. Shanghai never became truly quiet. Only in the slip of time between midnight and 4am did the traffic recede and the noise temporarily wane. All day long the din of construction filled the air as cranes and gantries, as common to the sky as birds and planes to other cities, criss-crossed the grey. Bamboo scaffolding woven intricately as fine cotton gave shape to the vertical city, while beneath, shift workers arrived all day long, the hum and thrust of metal always in the distance.

In those months when I was new to the city and its unfathomable sounds, I knew this was the time, if any, that I would hear him typing.

The procession of taps and clicks was followed by a quick ring, a slow zip; familiar sounds that had echoed throughout my childhood when my mother brought home extra work. It kept time to my weakening eyelids until, as always, I lost the battle. There was no music now in the beat that seeped through the skin of cement, and I knew my neighbour from above used only one finger. Ayi said he was a man; she’d seen him smoking on the balcony one morning. At least I think she said this. She didn’t speak a word of English and I’d learned only the most perfunctory Mandarin: hello, goodbye, thank you, excuse me, how much for that ... no, that, and so on. A combination of signs, gestures and incomprehensible words stitched together my and Ayi’s communication about the work she had to do when she came to clean. We never said much more, and I only gleaned the bit of information about my neighbour when something crashed one morning in the apartment above, surprising us both. Ayi responded in a stream of furious indignation, gesturing my neighbour’s chain smoking and, I guessed, his goatee.

Anyway, I was certain he was a man from the way his pee hit the bowl in a steady hard stream at 4am.

The typing kept me awake but also strangely comforted. It made up in some small way for the empty space beside me.

I had just unpacked the few groceries that I’d bought at the international store: bread, coffee, a bottle of South African wine that I’d already opened, and imported milk (the scandal where melamine had been added to dairy products to increase their weight had only just passed, people had died and everyone was still on edge).

The knocking startled me. No-one besides Ayi came to my door, and the roaring bronze lion head above the polished knocker was unused.

“Good evening.”

Words emerged from the draughty passageway that sounded studied, wooden: “... I would appreciate your assistance.”

I didn’t open the door fully, even though I felt safe in the apartment, in the city.

“You speak English? I am looking for a word please.”I opened the door a fraction more so I could see him properly. He must have been in his early sixties I decided from the skein of silver hair that hung around his ears, while his hands, delicate and careful, were cupped before him in a question. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“I am looking for a word ... something like ‘sad’, but not ‘sad’,” he said, shaking this idea from his head. “Something more rich.”

“You are writing something in English?” I asked. He nodded. “... Then it depends how you will use the word.

What’s the context?” I said, smiling now, but maintaining the door at 45 degrees. I was equally perplexed and intrigued by the stranger and wondered why, of all the doors he might have approached, he’d come to mine.

“No ...” his face broke into a bemused smile, “I am sorry cannot give.”

Sometimes it felt as if I were speaking into a body of water here: words spoken but the meaning distorted, warped in translation, even with people who had a strong command of English, so I was learning to adapt.

“I mean to say I need to understand how you will use the word, so I can give you the best one.” I tilted my head. He followed suit.

“I understand,” he said, “but cannot give.”