Authors interview Authors:
This month, Rosalia Gitau talks with Parselelo Kantai about writing fiction in Kenya and beyond.
It was at a crowded reading at Shakespeare & Company in Paris’ rive gauche that I first met Kenyan writer and journalist Parselelo Kantai. He was reading his stirring piece, You Wreck Her, a short story about street life and the street hustle in contemporary Nairobi, published by the St. Petersburg Review and finalist for the Caine Prize of African literature.
I was not the only person in the crowd hanging onto his every last word: the story was so gritty, so unique, so creative- I could hear whispers of it for days. I pursued an interview with Parselelo with the type of relentlessness that I usually reserve for my own New York City hustles. Planes, trains, and an international phone card later, I was able to get to know the man who had successfully awed the Shakespeare & Co. crowd. He makes it all seem so easy- and I suspect it might just be, for him anyway.
What’s the view outside your window?
The view outside my window is my garden. I live in Nairobi, in Kilimani.
When I first met you, you were reading you story, You Wreck Her, at Shakespeare & Company. Can you explain how your career evolved from journalism to award-winning fiction writer?
It’s not a big story. I had been working as a journalist since the mid-1990s and somewhere along the way I started writing fiction.
The impulse to write fiction was always there. But the avenues of fiction were very few in Nairobi… in Kenya. The possibility of writing fiction really came together when we had a series of Caine Prize winners [in Kenya], in 2002 and 2003: when Binyavanga Wainaina and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor [respectively] won it. That gave some impetus to writing fiction and writing fiction seriously.
When you said that the avenues for writing fiction in Kenya were limited before- in what ways were they limited?
The publishing industry in Kenya, like most in Africa is heavily heavily tilted towards the production of textbooks. There is very little space, if any, that makes writing fiction of any kind viable. So for a lot of budding writers, fiction is discouraged by the lack of infrastructure for it.
Would you say that in order to gain prominence, most Kenyan fiction writers had to go abroad?
No. You don’t need to go abroad anymore. Getting yourself or getting your work to an audience that’s more receptive or more appreciative to fiction is now possible. For instance Wainaina’s Caine prize-winning story of 2002 was published online. So all these things have provided an infrastructure outside of mainstream publishing.
Would you say the Kenyan public was always interested in reading fiction or is this a new phenomenon?
For most Kenyans, their relationship with literature is rather traumatic. Literature is the stuff that you read for high school exams. So most people, as soon as they’re done with [school], then they’re done with books; so people tend not to read that much.
That is a broad generalization. But if you then combine that, with the fact that the mainstream publishing industry does not focus on encouraging or developing a situation where fiction can be produced, then you have a situation where you have this truism which is as relevant to Kenya as it is for the rest of the continent, [namely] that people don’t read.
It is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy: people don’t read because no one is writing, no one is writing because there is nobody publishing.
So you made Kwani as a response to a void left by the publishing industry: how has Kwani been able to change reading patterns and reading habits of young people who grew up with an absence of literature for pleasure?
It would be a gross generalization to suggest that it [Kwani] has actually changed habits in significant ways. What it has done is that it has brought a lot of people out of the closet on one hand. So what you now have is … people appreciative of local literature- of Kenyan writing. They come out and come together and are part of a scene- a movement- that is all about trying to celebrate and promote Kenyan writing.
How did Kwani Start?
Kwani is the brain-child of a whole bunch of people. It is kind of embodied in Binyavanga, a Kenyan writer and journalist who is now based in the US. He won the Caine Prize in 2002 and came back to Kenya having won the prize and became the inspiration as well as the engine of this organization- for this movement- and eventually of the [Kwani] journal which comes out approximately once a year.
How did you get involved with Kwani?
I was part of the original group that began this thing- talking up ideas. We used to meet in the back garden of a Nairobi editor’s house, Ali Zaidi, on Sunday afternoons and we began talking about what we could do. Because of Wainaina’s victory, suddenly a whole set of possibilities actually got within reaching, touching distance.
Who are the people/writers that Kwani tend to be publishing now? Are you reaching out beyond that?
I’m a friend of the organization, I was there in the early days. Kwani is not the only organization involved in these things- [though] it is perhaps the most prominent. There are a lot of groups springing up across east Africa. They are part of this movement trying to revive the kind of literary tradition that existed in this region especially in the 1960s and the 1970s. So in terms of how people are recruited and so on, it’s fairly straight-forward: if you build it they will come. It’s being built.
You read your stork You Wreck Her at Shakespeare and Company- was this your first reading there?
Yes.
What compelled you to write that piece particularly?
A deadline (laughing).
Really?
I had to submit something for my class. I was doing a Masters of creative writing and literature in London.
How did it go from the classroom, to becoming a Caine Prize finalist to eventually being read in Paris?
Elizabeth Hodges, the Editor of St. Petersburg Review, was someone I had known for some years. I had met her in St. Petersburg some years ago during a writer’s workshop. And so she contacted me and asked me for a story- and I gave her this one.
[The Reading at Shakespeare & Co. was to highlight 2 Kenyan writers published in the latest issue of the St. Petersburg Review]
Why did you choose to write You Wreck Her from the perspective that you did?
It sounded right that way. I don’t write pedantically. I don’t like too much explanation; I like voice and context. I think that’s the most powerful way of communicating many of our stories. It just came to me, and the voice sounded right, and I just went with it.
What were you trying to communicate with that story?
Well, a whole bunch of things. One [thing] was kind of the lived reality of Nairobi. Nairobi streets are full of these kinds of stories, these kinds of incidents. The whole encounter between the contemporary culture between Europe and Africa and what they produce; the kind of mixed up conceptions of beauty: the fact that what Africans consider to be beautiful may be totally different from European, and especially European commercial ideas of beauty. The mixed up conceptions of value …what is valuable here is not exactly what is valuable elsewhere, and vice versa.
Would you say your story was a recurring theme in Nairobi?
It’s actually quite an old theme. We’ve had the whole business of light skin/dark skin for years and years. We’ve had the whole industry of skin-lightening products for ages. It was fairly simple…
But you decided to write about it now- why now?
Well as I said, the story is a cocktail of very many things. On the one hand one can say that it’s about street life, it’s about commercial sex workers in Nairobi and what they go through on a nightly basis. On the other hand, I also try to introduce an element of coincidence and chance and how arbitrary this kind of life is. Places like Kenya have been informalizing for decades. Nairobi is no longer directed: it’s not just about to an office and working for the man. A lot of people are unemployed, a lot of people are… working on whatever it is they have got.
Was that borrowed form elements of your own life?
No, not at all. (He laughs)…as a journalist, you end up picking up these stories all the time. I have encountered a lot of people like that.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment, I’m working on a novel, which I’ve been working on for a couple of years now. It is about the assassination of Tom Mboya, who was a young nationalist politician who was assassinated in Nairobi in 1969; it had huge political implications in the direction of this country. I’m using that incident- that assassination- to both tell that story- which is in itself a very compelling story- as well as to kind of try and explore a lot of political events, past and present, in this country.
Is this fiction or non-fiction?
It is the kind of fiction that I’m trying to develop at the moment which is a fiction that weaves in an out of actual events, especially political events. In other words a fiction that goes very close to the bone of actual events. So a lot of people ask me when I explain to them what I’m doing- because I’ve had to interview dozens of people [for the book]. I tell them that I’m doing this as a fictionalization of the assassination of Mboya, because that gives me a lot more room to play around with things; [using this approach] I have the freedom to say a lot more that I could say if I were giving a straight-up account of Mboya’s assassination.
When you say you will have freedom to say a lot more, what do you mean? All the facts in the book will remain true but the dialogue between the characters can stray, for example?
Yes, exactly, this kind of thing. But also creating new characters who are not necessarily there, or conflating characters- creating new characters out of actual people to say other things.
When do you think you will be finished?
If I could finish it by the end of this year, I would be very happy.
You’re a full-time journalist, short-story writer and now the novel. How do you balance all of these projects as a writer?
It’s not easy. It’s a question of segmenting… your time. When do you write your fiction? When do you work to pay the rent? That kind of thing. It’s no different than if I were an accountant, working full-time in some accounting office in downtown Nairobi, and waking up at five in the morning to do my other stuff. It’s all in the same headspace.
So how do you approach your work?
I’ve got a space for the fiction everyday. There are times I‘ll get up and stare at the screen and not write anything. There are times when I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and work for hours. There are a lot of days that I’m not working on any particular journalistic projects and this time is devoted to research and interviewing [for the book] or writing out what I’ve got. But it’s not been easy. It’s [the book] taken me a lot longer than it would have if I were working on it full-time, which I’m hoping to do at some point. I thought when I left my last full-time employment- editing a magazine in Nairobi- I thought I’d left journalism permanently, but you don’t ever actually do that. Journalism itself can be a little bit of a drug.
If you could proffer any advice to someone who wanted to do what you were doing, what would you say? Are workshops important? Have you had any mentors to help you through this process? In terms of discipline, how should one approach it? If someone wanted to make writing their life, what should they know ahead of time and how can they best prepare themselves to do what you’ve done?
I think writing comes from within. You can’t really structure yourself like that- it has been my experience. I could be wrong that anybody who has tried to structure themselves asking the question “I want to be a writer, how do I best approach it?” is not someone who has writing in their bones. Writing is a thing that courses from the inside.
I started writing by reading, from a very young age. Reading pushed me into writing. I’ve never known it any different. I write because I read, I read because I listened and see and I want to say something. I don’t think there is a template. I don’t think I can offer any better advice than to say go for it. If you feel you have something to say, if you feel you now how to say it, if you love words, if you love playing around with words, if you recognize and feel the magic of language then it becomes, it is something that will course through you and pour out onto the page.
