Karen Jennings interviewed by Katy Wimhurst.
3:AM: When did you start telling stories and why do you think they are important?
Karen Jennings: I am not sure that I can pinpoint a specific time when that started. I was certainly young, and it was always something that was encouraged at home and at school. I have also always had trouble sleeping, and I remember as a child telling myself stories at night when I couldn’t sleep. I believe that stories matter because they are how we make sense of the world. They allow us to understand behaviours, emotions, events, politics, culture, but mostly they give us a means of translating our lived experiences, which contributes to how we engage with one another and how we see our own place in the world.
3:AM: Congratulations on your most recent novel, An Island (2020), being long-listed for the Booker Prize. Has being long-listed for such a prestigious award changed things for you as a writer? What did the extra attention feel like?
KJ: Thank you. The longlisting came out of the blue. Prior to the announcement, I think hardly any copies of the book had been sold. I am not someone who is driven by fame and fortune, but I am a writer, and writers would like to be read. What has been so extraordinary is that now I am being read all over the world and people are writing to me from different countries to tell me how much they enjoyed An Island and what it meant to them. That always amazes me – firstly, that people have taken the time to write to me, and secondly, that this manuscript that I wrote, basically in isolation, has been able to touch the lives of people in places I have never even been to.
3:AM: Previous to An Island, you published three novels and a book of short stories. The subject of your earlier work was South Africa, your fiction drawing on the tradition of social realism long established in South African literature as a form of protest writing. How is An Island an extension of or a departure from your previous work?
KJ: I don’t know that it is possible to write about South Africa and Africa without introducing socio-political issues in one way or another – no matter how subtle or understated. I am concerned with these issues, but specifically in the way that they impact the lives of ordinary individuals – and that has remained the case in An Island. I am not interested in heroes and big, bold stories. I really want to examine ordinary lives and how those lives are affected by the past, by politics, by the ways we interact with and understand one another. That is where the realism comes into it – examining the ordinary, the small, the fine detail, the true.
3:AM: The novel is realistic but set in an imaginary or unnamed country in Africa. Can you say something about the choice of setting it somewhere ‘real but not real/specific’. It seemed to make the story into a kind of concentrated allegory for modern African history and experience, although I gather you have made up fictional places before, including in your debut novel, Finding Soutbek (2012).
KJ: Yes, as I have said, I want to explore certain issues, and through my writing try to understand them. Part of what I hoped to do with An Island was to look at various influences that have been shared across the continent of Africa, going back to the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, and then the various fights for independence, the rise of dictators, the failure of democracy, and the increasing rise of xenophobia. I wanted to take something very complex – the history of an entire continent – and try to understand it. That required simplifying it. For that reason, I chose to limit the narrative to a small fictional island and two characters, which allowed me to gain a certain degree of focus and universality that would not have been possible otherwise.
3:AM: The novel takes place over a mere four days on a tiny island and there’s not a huge amount of action, yet through the story we see the history of Africa – of colonialism, independence movements and dictatorship – and the traumatic impact this has had on an individual, Samuel. Can you say something about how difficult it was to marry those things, the huge historical sweep and the microcosm of lives lived over a few days with their necessarily mundane details – eating, cooking, looking after the vegetable patch, tending to the job of lighthouse keeper.
KJ: In a novel with little action and little dialogue (Samuel and the man who washes up on the island don’t speak the same language), it can be a challenge to keep the story moving in such a way that readers are actually engaged. I woke up every day and didn’t know if I could do it. Yet I have had people who do not normally read literary fiction and who normally prefer genre fiction, tell me that they couldn’t put the book down. That is more than comforting to hear because I really did struggle with trying to relate the reality of this quiet, silent life and also to build tension between the two. The small, mundane details matter – they are life – and I believe that it is through the mundane and the small that we are able to see the extraordinary and large.
3:AM: The book explores the issues of xenophobia and refugees. The story is told through the viewpoint of Samuel, who has himself lived a painful, precarious life. Through his backstory, we see him take part as a young lad in xenophobic riots in the slums (helping drive out a migrant family that his father befriended) and later witness his shame over this. We see his conflicting emotions over the refugee who has washed ashore on the tiny island, trying to care for the newcomer yet fearful of and antipathetic towards him too. Does a novel like this allow you to explore the subjects of xenophobia and refugees in a nuanced way?
KJ: I am not sure about nuance – that will be up to the reader to determine. But for me, part of what I was doing was looking at what drives a person to violence. What drives a person to hate someone different to themselves? I didn’t want this to be about any specific country hating people from another specific country – then I would be in danger of perpetuating stereotypes and prejudice. Again, this is where the unnamed island and country have been helpful. It means that anyone from anywhere in the world can read this book and recognise something of their own prejudices, whether that is against neighbours who dress a certain way, or religion, or race or culture, etc.
3:AM: The two central characters, Samuel and the refugee, don’t speak the same language, so you have a novel where a lot of dialogue isn’t possible and where the two struggle to understand one another. In an interview, you described that as an incredibly challenging aspect of writing the book, as you couldn’t have ‘intense interactions or dialogue to hide away in’. Can you say something about the choice to have this basic barrier to interpersonal understanding at the heart of a novel?
KJ: Firstly, there are stories that have been written from the perspective of refugees, excellent stories, often told from first-hand experience. But mine was not a novel about refugees or the refugee experience. An Island is the other side of the story – the story of the person who views outsiders with suspicion and considers them a threat. Had the refugee been able to communicate properly with Samuel, I would have been forced to tell his story, thus changing the entire point of the novel. Secondly, this barrier between them reinforces the distance that Samuel feels from the man and adds to his inability to trust him. This contributes to the building up of tension that occurs.
3:AM: The novel is set over four days, but via flashbacks and reminiscences it jumps around in time, so we get to know Samuel’s backstory, including the trauma of his childhood dislocation and his many years as a political prisoner. There are paragraphs that start in present time, Samuel on the island, and then move quickly to, say, an interrogation room in the brutal prison or riots in the slums. Can you say a bit about the structure of the book? Is it intended to evoke something of the PTSD that Samuel has suffered?
KJ: I didn’t want the flashbacks to feel like clear-cut flashbacks. I wanted them to be a seamless part of Samuel’s character and the way he lives and experiences life. The past is always with him. These moments also show that he is not in full possession of his senses, is not wholly reliable as a narrator, and this is certainly associated with trauma from his earlier life.
3:AM: The novel meditates on land, identity and power/powerlessness. A phrase that recurs in various forms is ‘the land is mine’. Samuel says something like this about his island; a similar phrase is used by the People’s Faction revolutionary group he was part of (‘for the land is mine and I am the land’); a member of the Independence Movement says, ‘We’ve lost our land and ourselves’; and at the time Samuel’s family were evicted violently from their subsistence farm by the colonialists, when he was a child, they were told, ‘The land is no longer yours. Glory to the King and to the great Empire.’ Can you talk a bit about this theme and why you wanted to explore it?
KJ: This is something that I have been thinking about ever since I was a little girl. We had elderly neighbours and I used to visit them and listen to the stories and old wives tales they told. One of these – my absolute favourite – was about how farmers, in order to see if the soil was ready for planting, used to dig a shallow hole, pull down their pants and put their bums in the earth to feel the temperature of the soil and get a sense of how it felt. I thought this was hilarious (I was a child after all), but I also thought it was wonderful. To have such an intimate connection with the land, to be able to know it in such a way that it is almost an extension of one’s body. Then of course there is the fact that I am South African and I grew up hearing about forced removals that occurred in this country. I never had that happen to me, but I always thought about it and it stayed with me. To be taken away from what you know, to have to go somewhere new and have to relearn it… that seemed terrible to me. So, yes, I think about land, and I think about who connects with it and how, and who is given permission to have those connections.
3:AM: What are you working on at the moment? Any book in the pipeline that you would like to tell our readers about?
KJ: I have a completed novel, Crooked Seeds, that was meant to be coming out in 2023, but it is looking like that might be delayed until early 2024. I am currently working on a novel that is set in Cape Town in 1838. I am fortunate enough to be doing that as part of my role as a postdoctoral fellow through the LEAP Research Institute at Stellenbosch University.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen Jennings was born in Cape Town in 1982. She has published five works of fiction (Finding Soutbek, Away from the Dead, Travels with my Father, Upturned Earth and An Island – which was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize) as well as a collection of poetry, Space Inhabited by Echoes. In 2022 she commenced a postdoctoral fellowship affiliated with the Biography of an Uncharted People project at LEAP research institute at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Katy Wimhurst’s first collection of short stories, Snapshots of the Apocalypse, is published by Fly on the Wall Press. Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, and ShooterLit. Her visual poems have appeared in magazines like 3:AM, Ric Journal, Steel Incisors, AngelHouse Press and The Babel Tower. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, is to be published by Trickhouse Press. She is housebound with the illness M.E.
