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Between the Lines |
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Interview with André Brink |
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The Other Side of Silence
André Brink
Hanna X leaves behind an abusive life for the opportunity to travel to Southwest Africa to attend to the needs of male settlers in a German colony. Few women are as well prepared as Hanna for the harsh realities of colonial life. But soon even Hanna finds that life can always get worse when she is mutilated for refusing a German officer and then banished to Frauenstein, an outpost "prison, nunnery and brothel" for rejected women. When the excesses of visiting soldiers threaten the young girl who has become her only companion, Hanna revolts.
Mounting a ragtag army of women and native victims of brutality, she sets out on a dangerous journey to punish the German Reich and expose the brutalities of its soldiers. Combining the history of colonialism with the myths of Africa, this is an exquisitely written tale of suffering, violence, revenge, and, simply, love.
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Biography |
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André Brink is one of the world's most prominent novelists. The author of fourteen novels, he has won South Africa's most important literary prize—the CNA award—three times, and has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into thirty languages. André Brink lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
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Interview |
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Q: The Other Side of Silence is the story of Hanna X (and other women) shipped to Southwest Africa during its colonization by the Germans. In your acknowledgements you say that "most of" the life of Hanna X exists in your imagination. What can you tell us about the true portions of Hanna's life?
A: Almost everything in the historical background to the novel is based on fact: Hanna's life as an orphan girl, working conditions in her different positions with private families, the exploitation by masters and mistresses the processes of recruiting young women for the colony of German Southwest Africa, conditions on the ships coming down the west coast of Africa, the process through which women were allocated to sex-starved men who had previously registered their applications, and also the terrible fate of those women who were rejected by all the males and were then carted off into the Namib desert to the place Frauenstein. Using this factual basis, and still drawing on memoirs and reports and travel accounts from the early 20th century, I then invented the particular individual I called Hanna X (but the idea of a woman deprived of a name because of a blot in the ink-written list of transportees supplied by the colonial office is again based on fact). She becomes an individualized composite portrait in which many life stories mingle into one.
Q: When referring to the wall to "heaven" [read "nowhere"] being built to keep busy the "lazy, stupid, brutal breed in need of discipline, " Reverend Gottleib Maier states, "We must keep Africa out." Was this the mindset of the soldiers, missionaries, and settlers in this period—to colonize a strange country while remaining separatists?
A: I'm afraid this mindset was indeed very common among all early colonists in southern Africa: the idea of being a superior race was introduced by the Hollanders in the 17th century as much as by the Germans in the late 19th century, and certainly also by the British early in the 19th century. It goes with colonisation. Sometimes with pseudo-moral overtones: bringing civilization and then the Gospel to poor heathens. Often with crude directness: the law of the stronger, which George W. Bush is reviving in America right now. And much of it constructed on the old Christian "work ethic": Keep them busy; then they won't have time to harm us.
Q: Reverend Maier shared many interesting thoughts including a reference to "humble female skills" which "may not amount to much" but which "in a small way...is honorable in the eyes of the Lord." In your research, what did you find to be the most useful purpose of a woman in this time and in this place?
A: Practically all the contemporary documents bear this out. In real terms there was not much difference between the fate of a woman (even white) and a native African. Which is the trigger that has led to this book, and to the idea of gathering in Hanna's "army" representatives of all the deprived and nameless colonised peoples. In this respect I was also inspired to some extent by the much more modern—in fact recent—history of the "bandit queen" in India, who mounted an army to fight against the exploitation of women in that country. It is precisely because of the universal nature of this kind of oppression—and its presence into our own time—that I felt driven to write the book.)
Q: Hanna hates and thrives on her hate, but until she discovered the love she bore for Katje, she did not act. Is The Other Side of Silence more about the power of hate—or the power of love?
A: I don't think the two can be separated. Not for Hanna. Without moving through the valley of the darkness of hate she could not have arrived at love. There are always variations of this polarity in human life and human society. In our own time humanity has shown itself capable of producing a Milosevc, or a Saddam, for that matter. But also a Mandela. It is because we are capable of both extremes that the battle between good and evil can never be simple; and can never be decisively won—or lost!
Q: In the end Hanna finds justice—or rather administers it. But what of Katja—what did she find?
A: I'd say that Katja finds, through her close association with Hanna, the possibility of choice. Which is the ultimate freedom. She has seen the good and the bad of the world. And of Hanna. And can now, hopefully—perhaps through her child—move towards a personal, and informed, choice. And deep in the back of my mind lurks the temptation one day, perhaps not soon, to write a novel about Katja's child.
Q: The Other Side of Silence is a powerful, emotionally charged story which you obviously felt compelled to write. How does the knowledge that humans treated each other in these atrocious ways affect you as a writer and as a person?
A: It was the most painful novel I have ever written. Ever since I first stumbled upon the story, I knew I would have no choice but to write it. But I kept on postponing it, as it was too terrible to contemplate. Yet in the end I had to. And ultimately it has been, for me too, a liberating experience: being forced to face the extremes of which a human being is capable. I can only hope that it has helped me to have a better understanding, and a deeper awareness than ever before, of what, in so many ways and in so many societies; even in the most "enlightened;" women have had to bear in the name of our humanity.
Q: When writing historical fiction what do you believe is your greatest obligation to the reader—the historical facts? Or the "feeling" of the period and the story?
A: Facts are important, but only as a starting point. Then the truth that I can sense about the period, through a myriad of documents and testimonies; many of which may have no direct bearing at all on the story as such; in this case the political histories of Bismarck and others, the philosophy of history as written by Taine or by Carlyle, etc., takes over. Because only through that can I, hopefully, eventually be true to my own time and my own humanity.
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