hadeda here and now is an excuse for her to look interested in one thing to deflect my attention from her interest in – or call it irritation with – the gardener.
It feels strange to think of Clare as ‘Clare’, to think of her not by her last name, Wald, which is the shorthand I’ve tended to use when talking about her with Sarah or with colleagues and students. Until these interviews began, in my mind she was her surname, a name acquired through a marriage that has now ended. Wald meaning ‘forest’, ‘woods’, ‘wood’ or simply ‘timber’. The surname has made me think of her and her work in this way – a forest of timbers that might be put to some practical use. Out of the forest emerges the person I’ve created in my head: half-ogre, half-mother, denying and giving, bad breast and good breast, framed by wood or woods. I try to find my place again in the list of questions I’ve prepared, questions that now seem rude, reductive, too peremptory, too simplistic and ungenerous in what they appear to assume.
‘In the years after the first democratic elections,’ I begin, ‘there was a programme of amnesty. Many applications were made,many people were granted amnesty for serious violent acts – ostensibly “legal” under the old government, because enacted by, and ordered by the government itself, but clearly violations of human rights, and quite obviously illegal by the standards of the country’s new constitution – but I can find no evidence that anyone submitted a claim of amnesty for having worked as a censor or for the censors.’
‘No?’ Clare says, her face blank. ‘I suppose they did not see their work as violent. Violence is the key, doing violence physically to someone. So much of the testimony, you know, it hinges on personal experiences of violence. Inability to publish a book, that’s relatively minor compared to what has happened to so many.’ Her eyes are tired, looking not at me, but again at the gardener, who has returned to the vicinity of the already compact bush to bully a neighbouring protea into a different shape. She makes no effort now to pretend anything else preoccupies her.
‘Even though the act of banning a book, or banning its author, might have had serious – one might even argue mortal – implications for the livelihood and life of the author and that author’s friends and family?’ I ask.
‘Yes. It is strange, as you say. I don’t have an answer.’
‘Perhaps no censors came forward because they trusted that their identities would remain secret.’
‘More likely they thought that no one would care, given the violence of so many other atrocities,’ she says, for the first time today looking directly at me for more than a brief moment. ‘I don’t know that anyone would have regarded the banning of a book as a gross violation of human rights. Which is not to say that one shouldn’t think of censorship in that way, as that serious. But we are speaking of degrees of violation …’
‘Were your own books ever threatened with censorship?’
‘Threatened in what sense? If you are asking whether the censors ever came to me and said, “We will ban this book unless you delete x, y, or z,” then no. No one ever did any suchthing. It didn’t quite work in that way, although I know that the censors reviewed several of my books and in one case there was an import ban until they could read the text in question and conclude it offered nothing that might threaten to destabilize the country. I have seen the reports. They’re quite amusing in their way – amusing and depressing and strangely, perversely, flattering. Woe to the writer who is flattered by the praise of a censor. But this is beside the point, really,’ she says, pulling her body into focus again, ‘because, as I say in “Black Tongue”, any writer working under the threat of state censorship, no matter how general, how diffused, is effectively threatened at all times. It is back to the battered
It feels strange to think of Clare as ‘Clare’, to think of her not by her last name, Wald, which is the shorthand I’ve tended to use when talking about her with Sarah or with colleagues and students. Until these interviews began, in my mind she was her surname, a name acquired through a marriage that has now ended. Wald meaning ‘forest’, ‘woods’, ‘wood’ or simply ‘timber’. The surname has made me think of her and her work in this way – a forest of timbers that might be put to some practical use. Out of the forest emerges the person I’ve created in my head: half-ogre, half-mother, denying and giving, bad breast and good breast, framed by wood or woods. I try to find my place again in the list of questions I’ve prepared, questions that now seem rude, reductive, too peremptory, too simplistic and ungenerous in what they appear to assume.
‘In the years after the first democratic elections,’ I begin, ‘there was a programme of amnesty. Many applications were made,many people were granted amnesty for serious violent acts – ostensibly “legal” under the old government, because enacted by, and ordered by the government itself, but clearly violations of human rights, and quite obviously illegal by the standards of the country’s new constitution – but I can find no evidence that anyone submitted a claim of amnesty for having worked as a censor or for the censors.’
‘No?’ Clare says, her face blank. ‘I suppose they did not see their work as violent. Violence is the key, doing violence physically to someone. So much of the testimony, you know, it hinges on personal experiences of violence. Inability to publish a book, that’s relatively minor compared to what has happened to so many.’ Her eyes are tired, looking not at me, but again at the gardener, who has returned to the vicinity of the already compact bush to bully a neighbouring protea into a different shape. She makes no effort now to pretend anything else preoccupies her.
‘Even though the act of banning a book, or banning its author, might have had serious – one might even argue mortal – implications for the livelihood and life of the author and that author’s friends and family?’ I ask.
‘Yes. It is strange, as you say. I don’t have an answer.’
‘Perhaps no censors came forward because they trusted that their identities would remain secret.’
‘More likely they thought that no one would care, given the violence of so many other atrocities,’ she says, for the first time today looking directly at me for more than a brief moment. ‘I don’t know that anyone would have regarded the banning of a book as a gross violation of human rights. Which is not to say that one shouldn’t think of censorship in that way, as that serious. But we are speaking of degrees of violation …’
‘Were your own books ever threatened with censorship?’
‘Threatened in what sense? If you are asking whether the censors ever came to me and said, “We will ban this book unless you delete x, y, or z,” then no. No one ever did any suchthing. It didn’t quite work in that way, although I know that the censors reviewed several of my books and in one case there was an import ban until they could read the text in question and conclude it offered nothing that might threaten to destabilize the country. I have seen the reports. They’re quite amusing in their way – amusing and depressing and strangely, perversely, flattering. Woe to the writer who is flattered by the praise of a censor. But this is beside the point, really,’ she says, pulling her body into focus again, ‘because, as I say in “Black Tongue”, any writer working under the threat of state censorship, no matter how general, how diffused, is effectively threatened at all times. It is back to the battered
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