THE BACKSTORY

Dominique Botha on writing False River (Umuzi, R230)

Some years back I was walking along a pan, redolent in the summer stink of rot and regrowth, when longing struck me. Like an arrow perforating a membrane of silence to make a small wound. My brother Paul and I used to set foot on that same path into a rich world of animals and stars that now eludes me. Childhood is the original Atlantis flooded in the deluge of time, then sanded over by the present.

Like water recedes, so does memory. I took up a pen when even Paul’s absence was ebbing away. Writing is a way to fasten and rehabilitate the past. At some point the story outruns the history.

The hero in False River is a charismatic, selfdestructive older brother whose life and death bookend the telling. The writer is both the narrator and a character whose “innocent” eye acts as prism and mirror. Pa and Ma are the mythological archetypes of mother and father. Pa, in particular, is a complex oddball, both a contradiction and an affirmation of his time. Into this are woven madmen, policemen, good women and brave priests peopling the flat landscape of a paper Free State.

Nature pervades, in all her conjugations of beauty. The languages around you, the birds you hear, the sounds of thunder and flies, the bended light, the food, the history, the music, all imprint on the writing. No environment is neutral.

I allowed myself to write freely in the manner of a novel. To uncage memory is to allow a first wingbeat in the flight of the imagination. And the better the writing, the more readers may recognise themselves in the pain and joy that “everyman’s story” embodies.

I wrote the book as one builds a cairn. In revolt against loss and in commemoration of love. It fails and succeeds in its objectives, as most small shrines do. What remains true, the residue, is feeling. — Botha spoke to Jennifer Platt