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Franschoek Festival
| Date: |
31 May 2009 07:00 |
| Producer: |
Diana Lucas
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| Presenter: |
Jenny Crwys-Williams
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Jenny Crwys-Williams (Carte Blanche presenter): "Autumn has come to Franschhoek and so has the weather. The reason I'm here and the reason so many tourists have filled this little town to the gills is because this little town is celebrating it's 3rd annual literary festival. We're celebrating not just books, not just authors but gorgeous foods and some of the best wine in the country. Let's come to the point - this place, this weekend, is a complete blast!"
The festival was the brainchild of author Christopher Hope.
Christopher Hope (Author): "its wine and words mixed up - it's lines amongst the wines. So it is, actually, I do think, a really good literary street party."
But the festival is not just about being a great street party. It's about promoting a new generation of writers telling African stories.
Christopher: "We see young writers coming forward, and that perhaps is the beginning of what I hope - and it's an over-used word - but I hope is a sort of literary renaissance. Because I don't think it is a luxury - I think it is an indispensable necessity for any country which in a sense wishes to take itself seriously and to see itself completely."
Talk of the town, Zimbabwean born, author Petina Gappah is one of those brilliant new writers...
Petina Gappah (Author): "I never really thought I could actually be a writer, in part because there were no writers who looked like me, there were no Zimbabwean writers in the time I was growing up. So it never seemed like a sound career choice."
And so Petina built a very sound career in International Law in Geneva where she now lives. But there was no stopping her love of the written word. Her first published book is a collection of short stories based in and around Zimbabwe.
Jenny: "Elegy for Easterley' has been received around the world with huge acclaim."
Petina: "It's just been incredible, not only for a first-time writer, but for a first-time writer from Africa."
Jenny: "You've been writing short stories up until now - a notoriously difficult form of writing. And you are also writing a novel. Which of the two is the most difficult, do you think?"
Patina: "The first thing I actually tried to write was a novel. I did what every writer does - the coming of age novel, the death of innocence and so on... I just didn't finish it. And then I wrote what I thought was my perfect novel which was Persuasion' by Jane Austen done Zimbabwe style. And I lost it when my computer crashed - and that taught me a lesson about external hard-drives. But then I started writing short stories. I wanted to tackle the big themes about Zimbabwe. But it proved to be incredibly difficult to do that in the space of a novel - the death of justice, the death of agriculture, the death of hope, the death of our dream and so on. So I thought, why not try to do this looking at it through the short-story form? Looking at it from different aspects and focussing on ordinary lives and ordinary people and see how they have negotiated the crisis - that is the Zimbabwean political and economic crisis. And that seems to work somehow."
Jenny: "I notice when reading your stories there are two themes: one is an underlying anger and the other is just this profound sense of longing you have for Zimbabwe."
Patina: "I wrote many of the stories out of a sense of helpless anger because I couldn't be in Zimbabwe and also there is a tremendous sense of guilt that I felt as an expatriate Zimbabwean - not there in the trenches with the people fighting it out, you know. So I think it is more a longing for a Zimbabwe that could have been."
From municipal chambers to church halls, book sales to book signings, the town is transformed with the power of books. This festival has become the place where publishers and some of their best international authors gather and new, un-established authors are showcased.
Patina: "I'm getting the sensation that my bookshelf is coming to life and walking down the street and talking to me, because there are all these writers that I absolutely love, whom I'm meeting. And they are actually turning out to be just as wonderful as their books."
Lebogang Mashile (Poet): "We are story tellers - that's how we make sense of everything. That's how we make sense of politics and science. That's how we reason."
The wonderful Lebo Mashile - poet and performer - is on stage talking on love or the writing of it.
Lebogang: "I struggle with detachment. I struggle to detach from anything - I'd be a bad Buddhist."
Mega-selling author Vikus Swarup whose book "Q and A" was made into the eight times Oscar winning movie, "Slumdog Millionaire" is stopped in his tracks countless times. There's one question on all our lips.
Jenny: "What is life like for Vikus Swarup after the Oscars?"
Vikas Swarup (Author): "Well, it's been crazy Jenny, very hectic."
Jenny: "It must have calmed down by now?"
Vikus: "No, it has. Because the good thing is, Slumdog Millionaire' is almost off the circuit and I think once the film goes of the circuit then the stress does come down a little bit. So I'm a much relieved man."
Jenny: "When you were actually sitting there, and it was announced Best Movie' - what happened?"
Vikus: "It still seems like a surreal moment. I mean, come on, I am a professional diplomat, the Oscar stage is the last place you would expect me to be. But I was there!"
Jenny: "Did you see me waving? Vikus, hello!'"
Vikus: "I saw Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt waving."
With storms and gale force winds predicted it's best to take cover in the warmest place on a day like this.
Reuben Riffel (Chef): "One of my favourite things is risotto."
Jenny: "You make it very light ... how do you do that?"
Reuben: "My stock is very light and I try not to add cream and all those things to it."
Chef of the Year, owner of Reuben's restaurant and now author, 34-year-old Reben Riffel has produced a delectable award-winning cookbook.
Reuben was inspired by the food cooked by his mother, his grandmother and even his grandfather. And then he tweaked the recipes - yum yum!
Reuben: "If you have a perfect day - like today for example - and you walk into a restaurant and you smell something that somewhere back you know your mom or your grandmother used to cook - some of those types of dishes. Having something, eating it, where it transports you back to those days when you were sitting in your mom's kitchen and having those types of dishes."
Jenny: "One of the things that Jamie Oliver did is that he managed to take complicated things and he made them simple. And what you've done is taken country food - coloured food even - and you've made coloured food seriously sexy."
Reuben: "It's just really stuff that I like to eat."
Jenny: "So it's very humble?"
Reuben: "The most simplest dish, just prepared how we know it... like how it is supposed to be done."
Jenny: "Talk about seriously steaming, Pippa Green's biography on South Africa's longest running finance minister is rumoured to be vying for one of the top spots in the Alan Paton Awards."
Jenny: "You did over a 100 interviews, you interviewed Trevor Manuel's friends, maybe sometimes his enemies - but what was it like dealing with Trevor himself?"
Pippa Green (Author): "I was blessed because he has an extraordinary memory, such as remembering dates and times and who said what. He doesn't talk like a politician after a while - he became more reflective. I think that he has a real sense of examining his own life and his own beliefs and decisions he's taken over the past 30 or 40 years."
Another political biography, one that couldn't have come out at a more fortuitous time, is Jeremy Gordin's "Zuma". Jeremy started his book when Jacob Zuma was not even a member of parliament.
Jeremy Gordin (Author): "I couldn't foresee that he was going to be Mr Big, no. I thought something was going to happen, but I actually thought we were going to be fiddling around with a trial this year."
Jenny: "Jacob Zuma has been extraordinarily discreet about his private life - did you manage to dig a bit deeper?"
Jeremy: "No, I wasn't. I mean, he was quite clear when I first started talking to him. He said, I'm not going to talk about my wives.' And I'm not going to talk about the romantic' side of his life."
Jenny: "He's an immensely powerful figure - but he's an enigmatic figure. Did you end up liking him?"
Jeremy: "I liked him very, very much. I worry about this word, enigmatic'. I don't know - if you put your mind back a couple of years, everyone was saying that Thabo Mbeki was enigmatic. And one of the things some of the reviewers said about my book was, Well, we don't really know about this man Zuma, even though we've looked at the book.' But maybe what you see is what you get."
Jenny: "What's been the response to this book - because you are, after all, the first biographer of Jacob Zuma?"
Jeremy: "The reviewers and fellow journalists have been a bit lukewarm-ish about it, but that might be expected. Zuma liked it very much himself. He said there were a few details we had to fix."
Well, while Zuma might have liked Jeremy's biography, he has made no secret of not liking the work of satirist and cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro.
Jonathan Shapiro (Satirist & cartoonist): "I think cartoons live in a parallel universe and that parallel universe can accommodate taking something to the n-th degree. That's the wonder of the cartoon medium - it really is a special thing to have that blank space where anything can happen."
"The Sharp End of the Pen" was subject under this discussion - and why did Zapiro suspend the shower?
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Zapiro: "I've been under incredible pressure to lift the shower off Zuma's head. It's as crazy and as trivial as that. Yet it has come to represent a kind of irreverence towards somebody who is an incredibly powerful politician. And it has come to symbolise some of the stupid things that he has said. But I've been thinking about it a lot - I've been wanting him to succeed, I want his cabinet to succeed and we will be watching with a lot of critical eyes. The point is, I can now, with the thing suspended - although Manto calls it patronising - I can, if I want to, bring it smashing back down again. Or I can have it just hover around... or I can have it do other things too. So in a way it gives me more options."
Whether it's the future of the showerhead, the poetry of love, a chef's best, the telling or re-telling of our stories or simply getting published, the Franschhoek Literary Festival's third year in business was a party of words. It was a gluttonous feast of the best.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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