A Brief Conversation with Richard Mason

Abstract

notebook photo : michael lionstar Richard Mason’s first novel, The Drowning People, published when he was twenty-one, sold more than a million copies worldwide and won Italy’s Grinzane Cavour Prize for Best First Novel. Born in South Africa in 1978, he is also the author of Natural Elements, which the Washington Post chose as one of the best books of 2009. In 1999 Mason, with Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, started the Kay Mason Foundation (www.kaymasonfoundation.org), which helps disadvantaged South Africans access quality education. WLT: The South African hillside where you sometimes live and farm sounds quite unlike the first-class accommodations Piet Barol pursued in History of a Pleasure Seeker. How did you end up there? Richard Mason: When Piet Barol reached South Africa, I knew I could not continue his story. I knew what happened to him, but I did not know the people among whom it happened. I wanted to bring the richness of South Africa’s Xhosa society to life— with the confidence I had brought to the European characters in History of a Pleasure Seeker. As a white child raised in South Africa under the Apartheid regime, it was impossible for me to render truthfully a story that involved black Africans. There was only one thing to do: leave my comfortable nineteenth-century house in Scotland and go live in the rural Eastern Cape. WLT: What is a typical day there like for you? RM: Nowadays, my day at Lulutho begins on a red pullout chair. I wake in a tent with a mud floor and a desk made at Lulutho itself by Lubaballo and Landu, the two young men who trained as carpenters during the project ’s early phases. In my tent is a piano on a wooden pallet to protect it from dampness, bought for 150 euros and transported on a lorry from Cape Town. It is a wonderful piano, though very out of tune because I have not yet had the energy to entice a tuner all the way from East London, which is the nearest large town. Interestingly, the highest note in one of my favorite Chopin waltzes is still in tune—which makes me feel like the instrument is meant to be here, and forgives my ill treatment of him. If it’s cold, I put on an extra two layers. If it’s hot, shorts and boots. (You don’t wear flip-flops because of the snakes.) Up to the shoddily built wooden hut that serves as our kitchen, where Sibusiso (one of Cape Town’s best chefs, tempted by me to join us on an adventure and give up his Michelin-starred kitchen for a wooden hut) makes breakfast. He is used to a twelve-burner stove. At Lulutho, he has two gas burners and three feet of counter space to cook for as many as thirty people three times a day. Twice a week or so, I fill a black bag with hot water, leave it in the sun, and take it down to a tree-shower for A Brief Conversation with Richard Mason City Profile: Marrakech, page 06 What to Read Now: Migration Narratives, page 07 New Books: Writers and Their Cities, page 08 july – august 2012 5 6 World Literature Today photo : michael camilleri notebook H istory and modernity meet in Marrakech. Ancient mosques loom over new museums, and twisted alleyways lead to vibrant souks in this city whose names include “the Ochre City” and “Land of God.” And with its snowcapped Atlas Mountains, and foothills, and its proximity to the Sahara Desert, Marrakech is an example of striking topological variation. The city’s history dates back to the Roman era, when Roman legions clashed with the Kingdom of Mauretania in 40 bce. The kingdom grew with the fall of the Roman Empire, and by the Middle Ages, various dynasties built edifices that still stand today in this city whittled by holy wars, colonization, and imperialism. With a population nearing one million, Marrakech is now a cultural center and microcosm for Morocco itself. Cultural variation is most apparent at Djemaa el Fna, one of the busiest market squares in Africa and...