Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements and note on references
- South Africa, 1930–1996: a chronology
- Maps
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Interrogating silence: new possibilities faced by South African literature
- 3 I am dead: you cannot read: André Brink's On the Contrary
- 4 Endings and new beginning: South African fiction in transition
- 5 The post-apartheid sublime: rediscovering the extraordinary
- 6 Postmodernism and black writing in South Africa
- 7 Shame and identity: the case of the coloured in South Africa
- 8 A man's world: South African gay writing and the State of Emergency
- 9 The final safari: on nature, myth, and the literature of the Emergency
- 10 Interview
- 11 Speech and silence in the fictions of J.M.Coetzee
- 12 ‘Dialogue’ and ‘fulfilment’ in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
- 13 Interview
- 14 Inside out: Jeremy Cronin's lyrical politics
- 15 Spinning out the present: narrative, gender, and the politics of South African theatre
- 16 South African theatre in the United States: the allure of the familiar and of the exotic
- Position papers
- Select bibliography: South African literary writing in English, 1970–1995
- Index
10 - Interview
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements and note on references
- South Africa, 1930–1996: a chronology
- Maps
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Interrogating silence: new possibilities faced by South African literature
- 3 I am dead: you cannot read: André Brink's On the Contrary
- 4 Endings and new beginning: South African fiction in transition
- 5 The post-apartheid sublime: rediscovering the extraordinary
- 6 Postmodernism and black writing in South Africa
- 7 Shame and identity: the case of the coloured in South Africa
- 8 A man's world: South African gay writing and the State of Emergency
- 9 The final safari: on nature, myth, and the literature of the Emergency
- 10 Interview
- 11 Speech and silence in the fictions of J.M.Coetzee
- 12 ‘Dialogue’ and ‘fulfilment’ in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
- 13 Interview
- 14 Inside out: Jeremy Cronin's lyrical politics
- 15 Spinning out the present: narrative, gender, and the politics of South African theatre
- 16 South African theatre in the United States: the allure of the familiar and of the exotic
- Position papers
- Select bibliography: South African literary writing in English, 1970–1995
- Index
Summary
I interviewed Miriam Tlali in December 1994 at the Harbour Castle Hilton in Toronto. She was attending the African Studies Association of America meetings as a guest speaker, and trying to combat the Canadian winter at the same time. We attended a reception in her honour hosted by the South African Consulate. The master of ceremonies was polite, but failed to pronounce Miriam Tlali's name, or the titles of her books, correctly. It was clear that the end of apartheid did not signify the end of an entrenched ignorance of ‘non-white’ writing.
RJ How did you get interested in literature? It is not common, I think, for people who came from your situation to be interested in writing. MT It's not. I didn't sort of sit down and say, hum, I'd like to be a writer one day; this was never the case. I admired good writing and read a lot, whatever I could get hold of. I was introduced to the idea of books, of learning and so on, because when I grew up trying to understand things around me, I heard my grandmother and my mother speaking about my father. They would speak about this teacher, and to me that was one of the first things that I put in my mind – that he must have been some kind of special person. Especially in the forties teachers were so special.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing South AfricaLiterature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, pp. 141 - 148Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998