Interview with Wemar Strydom, originally published in knaap.brief (9 June 2024)
Alistair Mackay and I chat about his sophomore novel, and about how our generation of gay, white South Africans gets to navigate both dashed idealism and eco-futurity.
Note: This chat is not a literary review, so some knowledge of the plot might come in handy (but isn’t essential). Read an extract from the novel, here. For a review of the novel, check out Deborah Steinmair’s piece (paywalled) for VWB, Siya Khumalo’s review (paywalled) for news24, as well as on-point Goodreads reviews by Gerhard Hope and Anschen Conradie.
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Wemar: I don’t mince words when I speak of how highly I thought of your cli-fi debut It Doesn’t Have to be This Way (2022, Kwela Books), and so come to your second novel with a bag full of gentle assumptions – primarily based around how well your debut showed the extent to which relationality has become tinged with eco-affect.
And The Child’s opening scenes deftly build on a related notion: the awareness that so many of us are now stuck in a delicate end-dance of consumption and movement:
On our last morning in New York, I slide the mattress down three flights of stairs and leave it on the sidewalk, propped up against a tree trunk. The A4 note I’ve taped to the white fitted sheet reads: No bedbugs. New-ish (3 years). Help yourself. It’s February. There are mounds of mud-streaked snow at irregular intervals on the concrete, and the crystallised remains of the chemical salts they throw down to melt pathways through the ice. For all their filth, I know I’m going to miss these winters. This upside-down world of winter in February and shadows that fall to the north.
The apartment looks as it did the day we moved in: bare walls; ashwood veneer floors; and tall, narrow sash windows overlooking naked trees and an overcast sky above Brooklyn. I have been distributing house plants to friends over the past few weeks, and smaller items of furniture, like the bronze drinks stand and the antique wooden chair I bought because it reminded me of my grandmother. I tried to sell a few of the nicer pieces on Craigslist, but mostly people wasted my time. I’ve been leaving the functional furniture on the street in tranches these last few days. The side table. The TV stand. Even the TV. I never saw anyone stop to look at these items, but the people who wanted them must have been watching. The furniture disappeared every morning before sunrise.
Are all novels now, in effect, eco-narratives on some level?
Alistair: I recently finished reading Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, which was billed as an Irish family saga and none of the marketing, as far as I can tell, referred to climate breakdown and yet I think the climate crisis is one of the central themes of the book. The eponymous bees get mentioned in all of the interweaving storylines, sometimes as metaphor for nature, and once specifically in reference to colony collapse. One of the characters becomes so anxious about the future that he starts building a bunker. And there’s a speech late in the book, given by a politician in the story, about humanity’s response to the climate crisis, that I found so moving and powerful I wondered if Murray had written the whole 600+ page saga just so that he had somewhere to include that speech.
I do think we’re at the tipping point now, when climate breakdown is starting to be felt rather than only prophesied, and so there is this realisation dawning on people that not only is it as bad as the scientists predicted, but it may be too late to avert anything but the absolute worst case scenario. I think most of us feel very afraid about the future. You see it in movies like ‘Don’t Look Up’ or ‘Leave The World Behind’. In my darker moments, I think we’re living through the beginning of the end of human civilisation, and I have to try to remind myself that it’s only civilisation as we’ve known it, and civilisations have ended many times before.
I can’t speak for all novels being written these days, but certainly the ones I find myself reading, are eco-narratives on some level. The stories that I find interesting are those that grapple with how to live in this moment of transition, dread and uncertainty. In The Child, climate breakdown is not quite as central to the story as it was in It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way, but the protagonist is very anxious about it. It’s one of the reasons he questions his choice to have a child. And one of the ways in which he finds it so difficult to know whether his anxiety is ‘natural’ and a ‘normal’ response to the world we’re in, or a dysfunction from his childhood. The book begins in the Cape Town drought of 2018 and the story takes place over the course of a year, with the seasons and weather and nature all exerting a strong influence on the psychology of the narrator. The low hum of background anxiety is always there for the narrator, as it is in all of our lives.
Wemar: That buzzing “low hum of background anxiety” is also how I’d imagine the expectation field around a sophomore novel sounds. (Perhaps akin to that of a diesel-generated generator.)
As a sometime-academic, I find my reading of any second novel coloured by how powerfully expectations circulate in smaller literary systems. (Interested readers can check out Marni Bonthuys’ illuminating work in this regard, in/on Afrikaans, here and here.) To what extent did ‘sophomore novel’ expectations – from readers, your publisher, yourself – weigh on you?
Alistair: Thankfully, I started writing The Child before It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way was released. I began to piece it together from fragments I’d written during the lockdowns and in the beginning, at least, it was actually easier to write than IDHTBTW. The structure is simpler. It’s told from one perspective. It is, however, intensely personal, especially as it relates to mental health, and so once it was accepted for publication I was hit by this wave of panic that I have struggled to shake off ever since. There are so many expectations when it comes to second novels, as you say. The idea that they either prove you’re a ‘real novelist’ or that the first book was a fluke. The pressure for commercial success. (I can’t count the number of times people have told me that A Little Life was Yanagihara’s second novel, so this could be my big break.)
Because I like to dive deep into uncomfortable stuff, I think I need to feel that I am alone when I do it. I know people will read this book, in a way that I didn’t really believe with my first novel until it happened, so it has been difficult to shut out that sense of being public, or on stage, while I was editing – but I had to shut it out to the best of my abilities.
I was able to delay worrying about market appeal until later in the process, which helped me a lot. And I have my publisher to thank for this, because their commitment to the project never wavered. There is the specific expectation of genre, which I think is especially the case when an author writes speculative fiction. The whole literary community seems to view spec fic as a different world from ‘realism’, which irritates me. I have always wanted to be able to move freely between spec fic and other types of fiction – like Margaret Atwood does, or Zadie Smith. I think it will disappoint some readers that The Child is not spec fic, others hopefully will love what I’ve done with the story, and maybe it will even appeal to whole new sets of readers who haven’t read my debut. I try not to obsess about this because I can’t control how others view my work and I find it very stifling to my creativity.
I was going to say I’m more apprehensive about how this book will be received than I was the last time, but I don’t think that’s true. It’s just a different kind of apprehension. I’m trying to remain focused on the work itself, and whether it says what I want it to say and makes me feel things I want readers to feel – and it does.
Wemar: I’m reminded that Kim Wright wrote that it is not so much the sophomore novel that is different from the debut, but instead that the author themself has become-different:
I started to write that a sophomore novel is much different from a first book, then I stopped myself. It’s closer to the truth to say first-time writers are different from second-time writers. It takes a whole different mindset to get through your second book.
Alistair: I think the most important shift to happen for me, and it might sound contradictory after having just spoken about the pressures of a second novel, is that I feel a little more confident in my abilities. I tried really hard to hear people when they told me how much my debut meant to them. I know we’re not supposed to have our locus of identity outside of ourselves, but my debut did feel like an audition for something – maybe to be taken seriously – and I think I’ve been able to hold on to that feeling that what I have to say is worth reading. That’s allowed me to trust my instincts, and to fret a little less.
Even though it’s a very different book, The Child has similar concerns to It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way, because I suppose I have these concerns as a writer. Inequality. Mental health. Climate breakdown. Queerness. I approached these from a different angle this time. The contemporary novel, which might feel more real to some readers than ‘the future’, and I think let me explore these things in more subtle ways, in surroundings which are very familiar. The memoiristic style was new for me, and demanded a level of vulnerability which I was working towards in IDHTBTW but wasn’t yet ready for. I have tried to be as honest as I can in this book, without adornment and without hiding.
Wemar: The level of author vulnerability on display in The Child at times make it a difficult read. (In many ways not dissimilar to A Little Life.) I found much of your novel to be filled with uncomfortable generational observation; not only in how generations think differently about social (and socially progressive) issues, or how we think of our own forebears, but about how the landscape of affect has over time changed around what ‘queer’ means (and does, and looks like, and is responded to).
There’s that incredibly loaded sentence, for example, about how “we don’t live in the same city as our parents” (171), which felt like a queer supplement to the oft-cited idea that ‘the past is a different country’.
Why the focus on generational change (or difference) in the novel?
Alistair: We’re living in a moment that feels incredibly unstable, I think. Everything is changing, from tech to politics, and it’s happening more and more rapidly, and there is a lot of anxiety about the future. It’s as if the world we knew is falling away, but it’s not yet clear what will replace it. The protagonist is hyper-aware of this feeling of transition, globally, but specifically in the South African context, he wants to put some distance between his generation and the generations that came before. The South African past is so divided and ugly, and he is searching for a way to exist as a white man in a decolonising country and yet he also feels that maybe his generation’s idealism and hope is misplaced, because he had a clear idea of what we were working towards in this country when he was younger – he assumed we would become an integrated, mixed, increasingly creolised society – and now he’s not so sure. This new South Africa is still struggling to be born, and perhaps it won’t be anything like the rainbowism he grew up aspiring to. Perhaps he is part of the problem.
I was interested in exploring not just how the different generations feel about their place in South Africa, but also intergenerational trauma, and the idea that unresolved wounds perpetuate themselves down the generations – on a societal level and the very personal level of family dynamics and childhood wounds. The protagonist suffers from severe anxiety and depression, and he is searching for their cause within his family, himself, and the society we have inherited.
Wemar: I paused a bit when I read your last answer about “the society we have inherited”.
In a number of ways The Child is not ‘about’ the future, in the way your debut was. Instead, it makes the unflattering case that we, now, are the future selves of those idealistic lefty liberal moffies of the late 90s and 2000s – who revelled in the twinned emancipatory ideals of a society without racism and without homophobia/transphobia. (There’s always been a rainbow in rainbownism – even if that rainbow felt pretty monochromatically pale in the years when I first ventured out onto the scene.)
So the present in which the novel is set is the one we inherited from ourselves. And while it is easy for us to blame the Voortrekkers, or Jan van Riebeeck, or Apartheid’s grys ooms, we also have to look inward. We were sexual revolutionaries, it felt like, once. And we traded that for suburban homonormativity. There’s a weird affective tension in that, for me.
I mean, at one point, for two guys to have kids and own a white picket fence’d house in the suburbs seemed in and of itself queerly political – and almost necessarily disruptive. The Child’s protagonist explicitly ponders this throughout – at one point stating that “to be gay and ordinary seemed revolutionary when I was younger” (11).
Alistair: I think there has always been a tension in the gay rights movement between two competing ideals – acceptance into mainstream culture on the one hand (marriage equality, kids, etc.) and the disruption/subversion/creation of an alternative to mainstream culture on the other (gender fluidity, or polyamory). In my very subjective experience, it feels as if the emphasis has moved from the prior to the latter in the last few years, perhaps because many legal rights have been won. The protagonist in The Child feels ambiguous about his place in this shifting sense of queerness. He is enraged that his sexuality is even a consideration, still, for ‘mainstream acceptance’ when, for example, the social worker at the adoption agency where he and his husband are hoping to adopt a child reminds him that not all adoption agencies are as “progressive” as theirs, and he should be grateful they don’t have any problems placing children with same-sex parents. He mourns the parts of himself he killed in pursuit of acceptance which was only ever partial, and feels that he missed out on so much. When he travels up to Johannesburg he meets younger queer people who seem to have far fewer hang-ups than he does. They express themselves however they like, wearing blouses and attending balls, and seem to have no interest in blending in. What does he do with all of his damage? It seems so out of place amidst the freedom of this new sense of queerness.
Wemar: Often, writing about gay sex seems to be sanitised (and so neutered) for a straight readership. Not so here. To paraphrase the novel, the passages about sex are “strangely good” (164) even as it is unflinchingly honest and vulnerable about how anxiety is navigated during intimacy:
The sex is strangely good. He is tender and attentive, which I wouldn’t have thought I could bear without laughing or wanting to run away. We make out a lot. We take it slow. We even flip-flop. Because I know this can never happen again, will never happen again, I feel free to ask him if I can top him. I’m inexperienced in that role, and probably no good, and the urge is new, anyway, and unreliable, but I feel it tonight and I let it flow through me. Liam seems to enjoy himself. He seems to enjoy me. And when I get tired, when I am pulled back to familiarity, we swap places, and it isn’t awkward. It isn’t failure. He fucks me with slow, steady rhythm, kissing me often, smiling at me in the candlelight as if this is fun. Turns out: sex can be fun.
Alistair: Thank you for that. I really tried to be unflinching in my writing about sex, and to channel some of Garth Greenwell’s courage. He has said before that he tries to write sex in a way that is “100% pornographic and 100% high art”, by which he means it can be arousing to read, but it mustn’t only be arousing. Art should make us feel complicated, even contradictory things. And sex scenes can reveal so much about character and relationships. In this novel, they are very much part of the protagonist’s journey through his own psychology.
There are times when he initiates semi-masochistic role play around gender and submission, even though he isn’t certain it’s what he wants. Is he using role play as an attempt to process trauma from earlier in his life, to find pleasure from what torments him, or is having a kink perfectly normal and nothing to worry about? His partner tells him he overthinks it, but he’s not so sure. He struggles with intimacy during sex, finding it near-impossible to be mentally present. But then things start to shift. I suppose his development arc is that he is increasingly able to integrate the fractured parts of his psyche, to allow himself to become emotionally messy and vulnerable, and this plays out in sex scenes that are more intimate and loving, but also more playful.
I don’t think readers will be expecting this kind of engagement with sexual intimacy. As it relates to queerness, perhaps it is part of the larger queer yearning to throw off the shame that haunts us, and to accept ourselves as we are, shadows and contradictions and all.
Wemar: I’m aware that I’m taking up a lot of your time, Alistair. But with a book like this, which fucked with my head (and my heart) in so many ways, there’s just so much to talk about. Maybe I’ll end on the character (or image, rather) that resonated most with me: the “gay uncle at Christmas” (172). That passage – all the more powerful for its brevity – brought up much from my younger years that I had thought I had dealt with:
I realised in therapy that part of what was driving me was not wanting to be a peripheral character. You know, the gay uncle at Christmas, the fun, eccentric relative or friend who makes a short appearance in the main storyline. They’re never the most important person to anyone; they’re just included for a bit of comic relief, before the main family gets back to being a family.’
Tbh. I had to put the novel down for a bit after reading that. I took my cooling coffee mug and walked around the garden, where a splash of Rangoon creeper had just started showing their first blooms. That passage had hit a nerve, and the more I paced, the more angry I became. A far-off anger, of course, for the condescension of ‘well-meaning’ relatives, and for how little humanity our straight family members sometimes saw in us. For how much we, in those before times, had to empty ourselves, think less of ourselves, be less loud, be less flamboyant, have less flappy wrists.
I hurled the mug against a fishtail palm. Maddingly, it did not shatter, but instead plopped down with a decidedly anticlimactic, muffled ‘doef’ onto the grass. A smile started forming, slowly: at least having a limp wrist means you save on crockery.
And only then did I return to the novel. To read – with slowly building gratitude – how the protagonist starts shaking loose the ties of the past until, on the final page of the novel, he finds himself at a Christmas-time family gathering:
[My niece] and the dog run into the garden and I follow them, grateful to get away from the pile of toys and discarded paper and forced merriment. Lily shrieks with joy as [our dog] Frasier lunges at her hand and she tosses the ball deep into Mom’s bloukappies. […] Frasier tramples the flowers in his path to retrieve it, so I redirect the game into the driveway. A long stretch of running space, concrete pavers and moss, walled in by the bougainvillea on one side and a hedge of hibiscus on the other. Lily and I throw the ball to each other, with Frasier running his fastest between us. Lily holds the ball and runs with it in her hand so that he chases her.
Within a few minutes I find that I’m chasing her, too. I tickle her under her arms and run after her as she squawks. I growl at her as if I’m a big wolf and it’s fine, this silliness, I don’t care how it makes me look. I’m able to be playful with her the way I’m playful with Frasier when it’s just the two of us, no one else around. I remember those women at my gran’s eightieth saying gay people shouldn’t be allowed near children, and I remember the boys at school who told me I run like a faggot, like a girl, and it’s fine, now, to do this anyway. They aren’t here. Lily isn’t judging me. Frasier howls at us, delighted and overwhelmed by all of our movement.
In a moment that is so joyously tender that it makes me – months later – tear up as I’m typing this, she calls him ‘uncle’.
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We are a nuanced bunch, this loose grouping of gay and trans white South Africans who came of age in the 80s and 90s and therefore aren’t fully racist but aren’t woke either. And because of this complexity, our stories aren’t often told with authenticity. But here you did just did, Alistair. And I, with my limp wrists and my faggy idealism, can only say thank you for that.