Cherish sacred story time to chase away monsters
LAUREN Beukes is an award-winning, international best-selling novelist who also writes comics, screenplays, TV shows and journalistic articles. Her novels, including The Shining Girls, Broken Monsters, Moxyland and Zoo City, have been translated into 23 languages and are being developed for film and TV.
Why are books important in our lives?
Stories allow us into people’s heads and into their 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?
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 see 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 books and stories feauture in her life?
It’s one of our most sacred things – story time. We might get home late from a movie and there’s no more messing around, 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 non-fiction and laid them out and all the adults had five minutes of reading aloud before dessert. I highly recommend it!
Do you ever think we underestimate children’s capacity for darkness?
Look, my books deal with a lot of social issues: feminism, race, history, how we talk about violence and what it does to us and the vagaries of the internet – all the things that I’m interested in.
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 under the bed 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 ingoing process of mental evolution of who we are.
‘Moxyland’ was set in Cape Town and ‘Zoo City’ in Johannesburg. How important is it to see our own worlds in SA 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.
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