A History of Terror

UK-based South African writer Ishtiyaq Shukri won the EU Literary Award for his book The Silent Minaret, a wide-ranging novel whose highly personal narrative runs parallel to continuing narrative of empire and its endless atrocities. In a wide-ranging interview, I spoke to Shukri about power, politics and literature.

Peter Machen: Hi Ishtiyaq, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. Congratulations on The Silent Minaret, not just for the European Union Literary Award but for the fact that you’ve managed to produce such a unique and engaging book that covers such a breadth of human history.

Ishitiyaq Shukri: Well… Thank you very much.

PM: I finished it about two weeks ago and it has stayed with me since then. I sit on my balcony at night and wonder where Issa is, what happened after he left his table. But I’m still not sure what his disappearance means to me. Does the ultimate recognition of the patterns of history show a path to freedom from conflict, or does it suggest that these things never leave us, that colonialism continues ad infinitum until it destroys us all?

IS: Perhaps I should start by saying that I wonder too what happened to Issa… the novel leaves me with that question too. If I knew the answer, I think I would have written it. But I don’t, so, like the reader I am also left with the loss of a character only ever glimpsed. What may have become of Issa haunts me too. He never revealed himself, even to me. As regards the patterns of history… I think the novel tries to grapple with some of them, to demonstrate the cycle of conflict and, as Issa postulates in his thesis, the perpetuation of colonialism and imperialism.

Now whether in the end, as you ask, that cycle destroys us all… I don’t know. That would seem to me a rather defeatist view. Colonialism and imperialism can, and have been resisted. And, I suspect, would hope, will continue to be, if not resisted or defeated, then, at the very least, demystified, identified and named.

PM: The book unfolds in many ways like a detective novel, but what is investigated is not only Issa’s disappearance but also the broader history of colonialism and terror. Was this an intentional mechanism or did it develop as the novel grew?

IS: A detective novel without the detective… a missing detective. I don’t know… it is hard for me now to untangle the investigation of Issa’s disappearance from the investigation of colonialism and terror. I think, as Issa’s thesis demonstrates, both were central. It is Issa-the-missing who in his thesis most intently investigates colonialism and its processes. So no, I don’t think it was an intentional mechanism, more a matter of, as you suggest, something that developed as the story grew.

PM: Is Issa based on someone you know? Or is he a fictitious amalgam of yourself? And the other characters? Kagiso, Katinka, Frances? Are they based on people you know?

IS: The autobiographical question! Was waiting for that one. Well, the easy answer is no. Fiction is not autobiography – they are very different genres. The more complex answer of course, is yes, by which I mean that one writes best, I think, if one writes about what one knows and has observed.

As Hanif Kureishi has said, writers observe the world around them and then translate it into fictional words, sentences and paragraphs. And even then, in trying to write about what one presumably knows, one soon realises that knowledge of other people is only ever partial, which would perhaps go some way towards explaining the partial representation of all the characters. They are all only ever glimpsed. Who can claim to know anybody entirely?

PM: The stateless moment when the old South African flag comes down and the new one has not yet been hoisted is for me one the most beautiful scenes in the book, the one that brings tears to my eyes.

IS: Gosh, well… I don’t know. The power of the pen to move, I suppose. I particularly struggled with capturing that moment – a very precious one to all South African’s I think, and rightly so. Not many countries have the benefit of such intense moments of reinvention – Britain could do with one – a moment when you see the old dying and the new being born there, right in front of your eyes.

So it is not easy to stand back from such a moment and be critical of it. But this has a lot to do with the mysterious process of writing because, in the end, I don’t think that I captured that moment. Katinka did. There is, I think, some truth to the adage that characters write themselves. And so I mean to say that of all the novel’s moments, I am myself… moved… that that is the one that touched you.

PM: Yes, I dream of a world without borders, without passports, one where the word ‘foreign’ has disappeared from our language, where monoculture and nationhood have given way to difference and diversity not in an advertising image but in a visceral sense.

IS: I dream that dream too, the difference between us is where we dream it. You dream yours in South Africa, which at the moment is celebrating its differences. I dream it in Europe, which is straining to contain difference. This is so well demonstrated in the General Deflection Campaign in the UK at the moment – where the Benetton ads stand in sharp contrast with the shrill Tory campaign posters with their hideous caption lamenting immigration, which I’ll refrain from quoting because no publicity is bad publicity.

PM: As a person I want nothing more than for all identity to dissolve, and yet as a writer I feel a responsibility to help build this new South Africa and I feel something akin to patriotism.

IS: Patriotism. The very word makes me shudder.

PM: But is South African patriotism different because at its best, South Africa is a celebration of difference and commonality? (And then there is also a patriotism being built that is hugely xenophobic and fills me with sadness).

IS: Patriotism is by definition xenophobic, parochial and, at its Greek root, patriarchal – of the fatherland. And we all know where that one has led us. So no, I don’t think any form of patriotism is any different to any other form of patriotism. And to me the danger of patriotism is most demonstrated in its opposite – to be unpatriotic – and the stigma and potential punishment reserved by the State for dealing with those it deems unpatriotic.

Let me say this about one particular manifestation of patriotism, which I have observed in South Africa – the prominent display of the national flag – the only other country in which I have seen the national flag more displayed is the United States, a country which also claims to celebrate difference and commonality. When did we become Americans?

PM: I really loved the characters of Ma Gloria and Ma Vasinthe. They provided a centre of calm, rationality and compassion and their relationship was just so real. They also provided the feminine alternative of love and nurturing in contrast to the masculine expression of war and oppression. I’ve always thought that the world’s problem could be solved simply by putting women in charge. Of course the structure of power are not going to let that happen, but do you think this is a ridiculously naïve position?

IS: Yes. And no. I felt it too. When I saw the footage of those planes flying into the World Trade Centre in New York, I thought it too – that men have ruined the world. I felt that even more with the retaliation that ensued and felt very strongly that the time had come to call a halt to the world and the way in which it does its business, and that the first thing men should do is acknowledge that they have wrecked the world and that they should hand the reigns over to women.

But then, Condoleezza Rice is a woman. Madeleine Albright who, when asked whether the half a million Iraqi children who died under sanctions was worth it and replied, “We think it worth it,” is a woman. “Blair’s babes” are women and there are women in the British cabinet who support the war. Thatcher is a woman and Britain is still reeling in the wake of her appalling legacy. Benazir Bhutto is a woman and so was Indira Ghandi who, when charged with electoral fraud, responded by declaring a state of emergency in which… well, in South Africa we know well the power the State reserves for itself when it declares an “emergency.”

PM: Do you see a light at the end of this tunnel for the planet? Do you think that the forces of global apartheid and war and violence and economic oppression are ever going to end?

IS: The Silent Minaret concludes rather bleakly on this matter, though Katinka, ever brave, offers hope. Much has been made of Issa – perhaps because we want heroes. Less has been made of Katinka – perhaps because we seldom contemplate female heroes. But at the moment I’m reading a paper by Issa Shivji, Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam in which he concludes that racists and imperialists and, by my extension, warmongers and unfair traders, are primitive animals doomed to extinction. I hope Shivji is right. But whether these forces end or not, it is true that they will always find resistance.

PM: The ever-increasing disjuncture between reality and that thing called western morality is one of many things that is fragmenting Western consciousness. When I fill up my car at the petrol station I am linked in some way to the war in Iraq. It is almost impossible to remove oneself from the global context, and yet most people manage to live lives that tolerate or ignore all these things.

When the war started, a huge proportion of the planet stood up and shouted that it was wrong. Yet it happened and continues to happen with no end in sight. Does your own sense of outrage and powerlessness in the face of all this violence ever become too much for you?

IS: I would argue that it is not, as you say, almost impossible to remove oneself from the global context. It is impossible, and the example of the petrol station is a good one – we South Africans love our cars. The war happened and continues to happen not because people opposed it, but more because corrupt and powerful leaders willed it. I think the people across the world who demonstrated against the war in Iraq still feel strongly about it – across Europe many thousands marched in protest again on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

I think the difference for some, especially in those countries that have troops serving in Iraq, the difference now for some is that “their patriotic [– that word again –] duty is to support their troops” so that patriotism in effect muffles resistance. And I think Chomsky astutely identified the real question: not whether we support our troops, but whether we support our government. In this duplicitous climate, I think it admirable that the families of those British servicemen killed in Iraq debunked that patriotic mythology by taking their legal petition right to Prime Minister Blair’s front door this very day.

Yes, it is easy to be overwhelmed and to feel powerless in the face of so much extreme violence, but I would also offer that there are many ways of staying involved. For a start, just Google “stop the war” and follow the links. Much easier and no less significant than writing a book.

PM: To end, I know its up to the reader to decide, but as a hypothetical reader of your own book, do you think that Issa disappeared into the night to disappear as a person, to remove himself from this whole human mess, or to join what Blair would call ‘the forces of terror’, to become once more an active revolutionary in a world where violence is sometimes the only response to violence?

IS: A very hypothetical reader, indeed – I cannot read the book. But your question cuts to the heart of the matter – the role of the activist, the revolutionary, today. How does one oppose an arrogant supremacist ultimatum, which posits one of two options – for or against?

I picked up the pen. Yet nothing is simple – my companions who have reached for the sword argue, very eloquently, as persons of action often do, that my weapon assumes literacy and speaks only to the privileged. The truth is, as I’ve said, Issa never revealed himself or his intentions to me so that, like any reader of the book, I can only speculate. But as its writer, my speculation will perhaps take precedence, and that I cannot allow. Writers are dead remember.