Writer believes in addressing bias without preaching on it
SISONKE Msimang commutes between South Africa and Australia, where she is programme director at The Centre for Stories, which collects, preserves and shares stories about migrants, refugees and diverse people and places linked to the Indian Ocean Rim.
Sisonke is a writer and activist who worked as the executive director of the Open Society Initiative for South Africa and the Sonke Gender Justice Network.
Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Mail and Guardian, The Guardian and Daily Maverick.
In October this year, Sisonke’s first book, which is tentatively titled Always Another Country, will be published by Jonathan Ball in South Africa. Her book is a memoir about her exiled childhood in Zambia and Kenya, her student years in North America, her return to South Africa and her experiences of family, romance and motherhood. Last year, Sisonke featured in a very popular Ted Talk titled “If a story moves you, act on it”, about the need to not just write and listen to stories but to take action against all forms of social injustice. Heather Robertson interviewed her for Nali’bali.
In your Ted talk you spoke about the strengths and limitations of storytelling. Why do you believe we have come to place where so much emphasis is on likeable characters and fiction over fact, when reality is so much more nuanced, more gritty and complex?
We are living in an era of over-simplification. Reality is nuanced and gritty but also hard and painful often.
So in our fiction, many of us are looking to escape, and in our non-fiction many of us are looking for answers. The rise of self-help books is a great example.
And so as more and more new outlets begin to play in the space of storytelling – in order to make certain kinds of stories more accessible – there is a huge temptation to make those stories and those people more palatable for ‘mainstream’ audiences.
What are the ingredients that make a good story and what makes a mediocre or downright bad story?
A great story is authentic. It’s written in a way that is true to the vernacular of the person telling it.
A shoddy story is one that seeks to hide or project things about its teller – it is invested in things other than itself. I guess I’m realising that a good story is one that is true to its own rhythms and cadences, and that completes itself.
How can stories work as an antidote to bias? Can you give examples of stories that do this?
Chinua Achebe writes about how Africans are not often depicted by Europeans as “quite simply as a continent of people – not angels, but not rudimentary souls either – just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society”.
For me a story is one that does what Achebe says – elevates people beyond the notion of rudimentary souls.
A story that does this is one that addresses bias without preaching about bias. The complexity and nuance of a good story is the antidote – not “the message.”
One of my favourite books - The God of Small Things – by Arundati Roy does this beautifully. It doesn’t give us Kipling’s India. It gives us two wonderful, wounded children and in the telling of their story we understand the wounds of colonialism, nationalism and the birth of post-colonial India.
How can stories move listeners and readers to act for social justice?
On their own, they can’t. That is why for me, initiatives like Amandla Mobi are so excellent.
What book or authors have inspired you and how?
Arundati Roy of course. She’s lyrical and her prose is so evocative. As a young woman I loved the poetry of Nikki Giovanni – she’s smart and quirky and plainspoken.
The plainspokenness really appeals to me.
Ursula K Le Guin’s commitment to story-telling has always inspired me. The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas is one of the most haunting and yet simple stories I’ve read. Of course in terms of non-fiction, Jimmy Baldwin is virtually unparalleled. His writing burns – it’s incandescent with fury and passion and ‘message’.
When did you start conceptualising Always Another Country and what inspired you to write it?
It’s a memoir. I started writing it in 2013 after a sabbatical at Yale University in the US.
It felt like the easiest way to write a first book - to write about growing up, to reflect on what it was like in exile but not from the point of view of an activist.
Reading and telling stories with children in their home languages provides them with a strong foundation for language learning and increases their chances of future academic success. For more information about the Nal’ibali campaign, visit: www.nalibali.org