WITH STUDENTS OF MRS BERTHOLLE
AT LYCÉE J.B. DE LA SALLE, ROUEN, FRANCE - 14 April 2009 -
AFTER THEY HAD READ THE OTHER SIDE OF TRUTH
Noemie
First of all we would like to ask you a few questions about your life because we understand it has influenced your writing. You were brought up in South Africa under Apartheid and how did you find the courage to go against everything you were taught and what did you personally do?
BN: Well, that’s an interesting question. I would say that once I realized what was really happening in South Africa and began to see in a new way everything around me, there was only one of two choices. It’s like suddenly realizing that bullying is going on. You realize that somebody is abusing their power over somebody else. What do you do? If you do nothing, you become part of the problem because you are then part of the context that allows that bullying to continue. I think for me it was a gradual process of beginning to see things differently. My brother had begun to change before me, and I remember very big arguments that I had with him at first, saying he must be a communist and I defended my parents’ conservative views.
But in time I began to have experiences that completely opened my eyes. Those experiences happened when I was at university, not inside the classroom but outside. There were still a few black students at our university although the white government had passed a law to close what they called a ‘white university’ to black students but there were still a few black students remaining there when I arrived. My mother never gave me much pocket money and I am very grateful to her for that because it meant that I had to take sandwiches every day to eat - and that wasn’t very cool. It also meant that I didn’t go into the canteen where most of the white students were, just chatting about this and that, music and parties, whatever. But I went to look for students who were eating sandwiches and I found a group of students on the lawn outside the library. They were white and black students and they were having conversations that blew my mind, conversations about what was happening in the country.
There were contradictions in how I was brought up. I went to a Catholic school where the nuns would tell us how to be good people and to love your neighbour but actually the way ‘neighbour’ was defined didn’t include black South Africans. My father was Church of England and he would sometimes take me to a service on a Sunday. Again, in the pulpit, the priest would talk about loving your neighbour but he never challenged what was happening under Apartheid. And my mother was Jewish – I cried over what had happened to Anne Frank but I never saw what was happening around me! I never made any connections when I was still at school, but within my upbringing there were values that spoke to me about how one should treat other human beings with respect. The problem was how that society defined who was your community - and in South Africa at that time community was being defined for me as a white community. But there were those other values being spoken about, so it was full of contradictions. Once I realized what was happening, it was no use just me saying, “Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t Apartheid terrible?” and doing nothing about it because I knew then that I would continue to be part of the problem. So I had to choose: either I had to be part of it or try to resist it. I’m very glad that I chose the latter.
Gueric
I learned that you were in jail for a couple of weeks and I want to ask you what it was like in jail and, when you were released, if you were scared?
BN: Okay, I was in jail for a short while, it was eight weeks, fifty six days. It was under very bad legislation which we called the ‘Ninety-Days Law’, where you could be locked up without any charge and kept for the ninety days and those ninety days could be renewed. It was solitary confinement. It was an extraordinary learning experience for me. I was locked up just after people like Nelson Mandela, and Walter Sisulu and Denis Goldberg and Ahmed Kathrada – the people we call the Rivonia trialists - had been sent to jail. Jails were segregated in South Africa, so Nelson Mandela and six others went to Robben Island and one man went to the white section of the jail in Pretoria; that was Denis Goldberg. After that the state was then looking to round up people who were lower down [in supporting the resistance]; I was in that group. I was arrested at the same time as a number of other white women and we were first taken into the white women’s section of Pretoria prison. Jail is not, was not, pleasant. It’s not meant to be pleasant, but there was segregation and layers in jail in South Africa, so as a white woman prisoner I didn’t have the experience of a black woman prisoner. I had a bed for instance; it was a hard bed but I had a bed, whereas black women prisoners were given mats on the floor, and very dirty mats at that. The food that was given to white prisoners was different to the food given to black prisoners. In our section I was one of the youngest. There was one younger person than me, Sheila Weinberg. In our section we came to a decision that we would go on a hunger strike until they charged us. We said, ‘If you’ve got something against us, charge us, put us in front of a court - that’s an important principle - but don’t just lock us up without any charges.’ And that, again, was a great learning experience for me because I was learning from the more experienced women.
We couldn’t talk to each other openly, but at night-time, when the warders went away, we would try and speak over the wired netting above our cells. So there was a certain amount of communication, secret communication, but after ten days they separated us to break the hunger strike and I was then sent to a prison in a place called Krugersdorp and, as far as I know, I was the only white, woman prisoner there at the time. I was on the ground floor and I could look out of my window and see the many black women prisoners. Some were very, very young and they had babies on their backs and I could see the way the warders would scream at them. I wasn’t allowed to clean my cell; a black, woman prisoner was made to come in and clean that cell. So you can see that even in prisons the whole system of discrimination was built into it. When I was released, most of the others were charged. The youngest detainee, Sheila Weinberg, was also released. They had something on us, but we were like little fish so they let us go while they charged the others, including my brother.
Although my mother didn’t accept the way I saw things, she was very good, because on that first day out I was very disoriented and she said, “You’re coming to see a play with me.” I said, “I don’t feel like it”. She said, “No, it’s very important that you come.” She was really telling me, “Don’t let them get you down, don’t let this break you,” even though she didn’t agree with our views. I went to the play with her and I remember sitting at this play by Shakespeare in an outdoor theatre - with the stage on a small island in the middle of the Zoo Lake in Johannesburg - and I remember the tears streaming down my face because I was thinking about the people I had left behind while I was watching this play outside. It was bizarre.
Was I scared? Yes, it was scary but while I was inside, I think I was more scared that I might break down and that I would then begin to talk. I wanted to stay very strong, and just say, “Well, if you’ve got something against me, charge me.” I did not want to co-operate with them, the Special Branch police. And they used torture on some of the others. They started using torture on white political prisoners around that time. I mean they used torture all the time on black prisoners and when the interrogators came and showed me a statement my brother had made mentioning me, I knew that they must have tortured him. I knew that he would have been like a rock and that to get him to speak it would have involved torture. It turned out they had used the standing torture. They had made him stand on one place, without moving; I think it was something like 69 or 70 hours and then they had given him a break, and then he’d stood again and after about 44 hours he then cracked and had written this statement. My husband too who was in jail - although I didn’t know him then - he also experienced the standing torture at that time. They also had many other terrible methods. So it was a test, I suppose, for me about what’s really important. I can only say that I was very grateful that they didn’t put physical pressure on me because I don’t know how I would have stood up to it. I don’t know. But what I took from this experience was that South Africa was a prison for most of its people and being put in prison gave me a little bit of insight into what it was like to have your freedom taken away. It still happens in our world that the choices some people have are so limited. So I think that prison must have helped stir my imagination into trying to understand what it was like not to have the freedoms that I had so easily taken for granted.
Agathe
My name is Agathe, it’s nice to meet you. We read Journey to Jo’burg and there was a white doctor, in the story, who worked night and day to look after black people. So, is this character based on someone you know, and were there many people like him?
BN: Well, writers of fiction generally don’t base characters directly on people they know. It’s quite dangerous to do that because people might not like how you have shown them and sue you. But I’m observing people all the time and I want my work to be credible and my characters believable. And so yes, there were not many, but there were some white doctors who were very dedicated. And, as it happened, I had a young cousin - who I never met - who was a doctor but who also worked as an unpaid trade unionist in South Africa. In fact, he ended up in jail as a political detainee and had his life taken away by his police interrogators. His name was Neil Aggett and if you look at the end of my book Burn My Heart, there is a short interview in which I mention him. (He’s not ‘Mathew’ in the novel but he was born into that world of 1950s colonial Kenya, during the Mau Mau resistance to the white settlers.)
But you know, that doctor in Journey to Jo’burg , we get a glimpse of him - just a glimpse - because I was looking at that story from the viewpoint of Naledi and Tiro. For most young black South Africans, if they came into contact with white people they were generally very negative experiences. But I wanted those children just to have that glimpse of that doctor (and I don’t even say he’s white – you picked up he is white - I speak about him looking very pale) just to show that there were people like that. In another novel, Chain of Fire (a sequel to Journey to Jo’burg) again there’s one young white person who is with the Resistance Committee. Most of them were black but there was one white person and I wanted, again, just to show that let’s not forget that it was possible for white people to make that choice. You know, there will be white people who will say that ‘I couldn’t do anything else [except to go along with apartheid]. It wasn’t possible.’ But it was possible. It’s important to remember that choice is always possible. I don’t know whether I went through all these thought processes when I wrote the doctor but it reflects that. There are people who want to try and change a situation and to make a contribution, and that’s good. Even if they can’t change it, it’s good to try.
Elliot
We would like to know if your decision to write a book is always based on a message you want to transmit; that you want children to know what is happening in a certain place?
BN: I would say that I do not set out to send you a message because that is the kind of schooling that I had as a child. I was told what to think. The people who were my teachers were kind and they thought they were doing it all for my good to tell me what was in the books that I was studying. I would write down in my notes: this is what the author means, this is the message here. Now writing fiction is much more creative than that. As a writer, I have to go on a journey. When I start I writing, I don’t necessarily know what is going to be the end. There is something I want to explore. I put my characters in situations that are dangerous. There are choices and I want to see what they will do, what’s possible for them and what’s not possible for them. I hope my reader will also go on this journey and, in the process, that my reader will begin exploring what it is like to be those young people who are my main characters. That for me is important, it’s important that my readers ask questions like you are doing. That to me is the most important thing; that my readers read creatively and respond creatively and begin to use their imaginations to enter the lives of my characters and go beyond those lives with their own questions for their own journeys. That’s what I think I really hope to achieve when I write for young people.
Lucille
Hello my name is Lucille nice to meet you. Now we would like to ask you some of the questions we have asked ourselves about The Other Side of Truth. We have tried to interpret the cover and we would like to know the meaning you wanted to convey.
BN: Well, I don’t actually design the covers. This edition is published by Penguin and they have in their young readers’ section a design department. The designers may ask me what I might like to see but they don’t always follow it because they are the designers. If I show you this book here - my novel Burn my Heart - can you see the similarity in the design?
Yes.
AFTER THEY HAD READ THE OTHER SIDE OF TRUTH
Noemie
First of all we would like to ask you a few questions about your life because we understand it has influenced your writing. You were brought up in South Africa under Apartheid and how did you find the courage to go against everything you were taught and what did you personally do?
BN: Well, that’s an interesting question. I would say that once I realized what was really happening in South Africa and began to see in a new way everything around me, there was only one of two choices. It’s like suddenly realizing that bullying is going on. You realize that somebody is abusing their power over somebody else. What do you do? If you do nothing, you become part of the problem because you are then part of the context that allows that bullying to continue. I think for me it was a gradual process of beginning to see things differently. My brother had begun to change before me, and I remember very big arguments that I had with him at first, saying he must be a communist and I defended my parents’ conservative views.
But in time I began to have experiences that completely opened my eyes. Those experiences happened when I was at university, not inside the classroom but outside. There were still a few black students at our university although the white government had passed a law to close what they called a ‘white university’ to black students but there were still a few black students remaining there when I arrived. My mother never gave me much pocket money and I am very grateful to her for that because it meant that I had to take sandwiches every day to eat - and that wasn’t very cool. It also meant that I didn’t go into the canteen where most of the white students were, just chatting about this and that, music and parties, whatever. But I went to look for students who were eating sandwiches and I found a group of students on the lawn outside the library. They were white and black students and they were having conversations that blew my mind, conversations about what was happening in the country.
There were contradictions in how I was brought up. I went to a Catholic school where the nuns would tell us how to be good people and to love your neighbour but actually the way ‘neighbour’ was defined didn’t include black South Africans. My father was Church of England and he would sometimes take me to a service on a Sunday. Again, in the pulpit, the priest would talk about loving your neighbour but he never challenged what was happening under Apartheid. And my mother was Jewish – I cried over what had happened to Anne Frank but I never saw what was happening around me! I never made any connections when I was still at school, but within my upbringing there were values that spoke to me about how one should treat other human beings with respect. The problem was how that society defined who was your community - and in South Africa at that time community was being defined for me as a white community. But there were those other values being spoken about, so it was full of contradictions. Once I realized what was happening, it was no use just me saying, “Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t Apartheid terrible?” and doing nothing about it because I knew then that I would continue to be part of the problem. So I had to choose: either I had to be part of it or try to resist it. I’m very glad that I chose the latter.
Gueric
I learned that you were in jail for a couple of weeks and I want to ask you what it was like in jail and, when you were released, if you were scared?
BN: Okay, I was in jail for a short while, it was eight weeks, fifty six days. It was under very bad legislation which we called the ‘Ninety-Days Law’, where you could be locked up without any charge and kept for the ninety days and those ninety days could be renewed. It was solitary confinement. It was an extraordinary learning experience for me. I was locked up just after people like Nelson Mandela, and Walter Sisulu and Denis Goldberg and Ahmed Kathrada – the people we call the Rivonia trialists - had been sent to jail. Jails were segregated in South Africa, so Nelson Mandela and six others went to Robben Island and one man went to the white section of the jail in Pretoria; that was Denis Goldberg. After that the state was then looking to round up people who were lower down [in supporting the resistance]; I was in that group. I was arrested at the same time as a number of other white women and we were first taken into the white women’s section of Pretoria prison. Jail is not, was not, pleasant. It’s not meant to be pleasant, but there was segregation and layers in jail in South Africa, so as a white woman prisoner I didn’t have the experience of a black woman prisoner. I had a bed for instance; it was a hard bed but I had a bed, whereas black women prisoners were given mats on the floor, and very dirty mats at that. The food that was given to white prisoners was different to the food given to black prisoners. In our section I was one of the youngest. There was one younger person than me, Sheila Weinberg. In our section we came to a decision that we would go on a hunger strike until they charged us. We said, ‘If you’ve got something against us, charge us, put us in front of a court - that’s an important principle - but don’t just lock us up without any charges.’ And that, again, was a great learning experience for me because I was learning from the more experienced women.
We couldn’t talk to each other openly, but at night-time, when the warders went away, we would try and speak over the wired netting above our cells. So there was a certain amount of communication, secret communication, but after ten days they separated us to break the hunger strike and I was then sent to a prison in a place called Krugersdorp and, as far as I know, I was the only white, woman prisoner there at the time. I was on the ground floor and I could look out of my window and see the many black women prisoners. Some were very, very young and they had babies on their backs and I could see the way the warders would scream at them. I wasn’t allowed to clean my cell; a black, woman prisoner was made to come in and clean that cell. So you can see that even in prisons the whole system of discrimination was built into it. When I was released, most of the others were charged. The youngest detainee, Sheila Weinberg, was also released. They had something on us, but we were like little fish so they let us go while they charged the others, including my brother.
Although my mother didn’t accept the way I saw things, she was very good, because on that first day out I was very disoriented and she said, “You’re coming to see a play with me.” I said, “I don’t feel like it”. She said, “No, it’s very important that you come.” She was really telling me, “Don’t let them get you down, don’t let this break you,” even though she didn’t agree with our views. I went to the play with her and I remember sitting at this play by Shakespeare in an outdoor theatre - with the stage on a small island in the middle of the Zoo Lake in Johannesburg - and I remember the tears streaming down my face because I was thinking about the people I had left behind while I was watching this play outside. It was bizarre.
Was I scared? Yes, it was scary but while I was inside, I think I was more scared that I might break down and that I would then begin to talk. I wanted to stay very strong, and just say, “Well, if you’ve got something against me, charge me.” I did not want to co-operate with them, the Special Branch police. And they used torture on some of the others. They started using torture on white political prisoners around that time. I mean they used torture all the time on black prisoners and when the interrogators came and showed me a statement my brother had made mentioning me, I knew that they must have tortured him. I knew that he would have been like a rock and that to get him to speak it would have involved torture. It turned out they had used the standing torture. They had made him stand on one place, without moving; I think it was something like 69 or 70 hours and then they had given him a break, and then he’d stood again and after about 44 hours he then cracked and had written this statement. My husband too who was in jail - although I didn’t know him then - he also experienced the standing torture at that time. They also had many other terrible methods. So it was a test, I suppose, for me about what’s really important. I can only say that I was very grateful that they didn’t put physical pressure on me because I don’t know how I would have stood up to it. I don’t know. But what I took from this experience was that South Africa was a prison for most of its people and being put in prison gave me a little bit of insight into what it was like to have your freedom taken away. It still happens in our world that the choices some people have are so limited. So I think that prison must have helped stir my imagination into trying to understand what it was like not to have the freedoms that I had so easily taken for granted.
Agathe
My name is Agathe, it’s nice to meet you. We read Journey to Jo’burg and there was a white doctor, in the story, who worked night and day to look after black people. So, is this character based on someone you know, and were there many people like him?
BN: Well, writers of fiction generally don’t base characters directly on people they know. It’s quite dangerous to do that because people might not like how you have shown them and sue you. But I’m observing people all the time and I want my work to be credible and my characters believable. And so yes, there were not many, but there were some white doctors who were very dedicated. And, as it happened, I had a young cousin - who I never met - who was a doctor but who also worked as an unpaid trade unionist in South Africa. In fact, he ended up in jail as a political detainee and had his life taken away by his police interrogators. His name was Neil Aggett and if you look at the end of my book Burn My Heart, there is a short interview in which I mention him. (He’s not ‘Mathew’ in the novel but he was born into that world of 1950s colonial Kenya, during the Mau Mau resistance to the white settlers.)
But you know, that doctor in Journey to Jo’burg , we get a glimpse of him - just a glimpse - because I was looking at that story from the viewpoint of Naledi and Tiro. For most young black South Africans, if they came into contact with white people they were generally very negative experiences. But I wanted those children just to have that glimpse of that doctor (and I don’t even say he’s white – you picked up he is white - I speak about him looking very pale) just to show that there were people like that. In another novel, Chain of Fire (a sequel to Journey to Jo’burg) again there’s one young white person who is with the Resistance Committee. Most of them were black but there was one white person and I wanted, again, just to show that let’s not forget that it was possible for white people to make that choice. You know, there will be white people who will say that ‘I couldn’t do anything else [except to go along with apartheid]. It wasn’t possible.’ But it was possible. It’s important to remember that choice is always possible. I don’t know whether I went through all these thought processes when I wrote the doctor but it reflects that. There are people who want to try and change a situation and to make a contribution, and that’s good. Even if they can’t change it, it’s good to try.
Elliot
We would like to know if your decision to write a book is always based on a message you want to transmit; that you want children to know what is happening in a certain place?
BN: I would say that I do not set out to send you a message because that is the kind of schooling that I had as a child. I was told what to think. The people who were my teachers were kind and they thought they were doing it all for my good to tell me what was in the books that I was studying. I would write down in my notes: this is what the author means, this is the message here. Now writing fiction is much more creative than that. As a writer, I have to go on a journey. When I start I writing, I don’t necessarily know what is going to be the end. There is something I want to explore. I put my characters in situations that are dangerous. There are choices and I want to see what they will do, what’s possible for them and what’s not possible for them. I hope my reader will also go on this journey and, in the process, that my reader will begin exploring what it is like to be those young people who are my main characters. That for me is important, it’s important that my readers ask questions like you are doing. That to me is the most important thing; that my readers read creatively and respond creatively and begin to use their imaginations to enter the lives of my characters and go beyond those lives with their own questions for their own journeys. That’s what I think I really hope to achieve when I write for young people.
Lucille
Hello my name is Lucille nice to meet you. Now we would like to ask you some of the questions we have asked ourselves about The Other Side of Truth. We have tried to interpret the cover and we would like to know the meaning you wanted to convey.
BN: Well, I don’t actually design the covers. This edition is published by Penguin and they have in their young readers’ section a design department. The designers may ask me what I might like to see but they don’t always follow it because they are the designers. If I show you this book here - my novel Burn my Heart - can you see the similarity in the design?
Yes.
But this is the original cover of The Other Side of Truth in the UK.
I love this face although I don’t know who the person is. It came from a photographic library and the designers fiddled around with her hair in order to get it the way that I thought would be right, and there behind her is a picture of the Tower of London and a London bus. But when they were bringing out Burn my Heart in 2007, they said ‘Let’s redesign the cover for The Other Side of Truth and decided to have something more abstract. So here they came up with the idea of a hand… the mother’s hand, perhaps? It is an imaginative cover and I like it because it leaves room for imagination.
There are different covers for the various translations. This is the cover in Taiwan in a Chinese edition.
There are different covers for the various translations. This is the cover in Taiwan in a Chinese edition.
On the title page there is an amazing image, a line drawing in black and white. It shows three figures in the palm of a giant hand. The people are together carrying a great pencil and they seem to be running as the fingers of the hand threaten to crush them at any moment. These are American editions. This was the very first American cover, a very elegant cover. 
Some of these covers, they’ve asked me about, some they haven’t, or I’m shown it when it is almost ready. If I really don’t like it, it can be too late. But you know, the attitude is sometimes that I’m only the author. It has happened where an edition has been made in another country and they haven’t bothered to ask and there’s little or nothing I can do. Fortunately, most of the covers I think are interesting and if they are imaginative then I’m very happy with them.
Laure…
Hello
Hello
My name is Laure, nice to meet you.
Thank you.
Are you feelings or your experiences of being an exile reflected in this book The Other Side of Truth?
BN: I think they are. But when I was writing the novel, I wasn't thinking about my own experience at all. I think it came very subconsciously. You see when I left into exile, I was 21 going on 22. I had chosen a path. I was much older than Sade and Femi and I also didn't have the same frightening experiences of racism to deal with as they do. I was white, and when I arrived in Britain, some people would be very interested. When I opened my mouth, they heard I spoke with a South African accent, and nobody said "What you doing here? Are you coming to take our jobs? Why are you here? Why don't you go back where you came from?" No one said that to me. But I still had a very deep sense of disconnection. I came to study at the University of York. I remember having to write an essay - I think it was about T S Eliot- and wandering around, thinking, "I must think about the essay." But my head was back in South Africa. I was thinking about my brother and his friends in prison. That's where my head was. So very often my body was in England, but my head was back in South Africa. But I was also fortunate because I met people who, I felt, had some kind of understanding of what I might have gone through.
One of those people has a connection with France. He was my professor of education. His name was Harry Rée and he had been in the SOE – Special Operations Executive – working ‘underground’ with the French Resistance during the Second World War. He was a fluent French speaker and had actually helped to blow up the Peugeot factory with the help of the French Resistance. Although he never spoke about his experiences of being in the resistance at that time, I knew that had been his experience and I knew he would have some kind of understanding of where I was coming from. Sade and Femi don't have that until perhaps the social worker, Jenny Iyawo. She's kind to them and she says – oh no, it’s Mama Appiah who says she can tell that something bad and terrible has happened to them. Sade can feel the emotion welling up in her but has to suppress it.
So I think I have had some of that, but in a very different way, and that's what writers do. We have to transform experience. We have to look into ourselves: to see, to think, to imagine, to draw on our own experience, and imagine… And you see I am also obliged to imagine when I write younger characters because I’m no longer that age. So I’m imagining someone much younger than myself who has come from a very different background to myself and I always say, to write the kind of fiction that I do, I need the flour to make the bread, but I need the yeast. And the yeast is imagination. To make it believable.
There’s one other thing I want to add on to that, just one other point to add on. It’s about the way in which Sade remembers her mother, through the words that her mother has said. That is another important way she has of holding on to the past. I too would remember things that my brother, and friends had told me in South Africa. And that was another aspect that probably emerged in the novel.
Guillaume
My name is Guillaume, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you!
So, my question is, what do you understand by the title The Other Side of Truth?
BN: Right, well, I think for that that I need to point you to a little quotation in the frontpiece of the book, a little extract from a poem by John Donne “On a huge hill,/ Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will/ / Reach her, about must, and about must go.” I read that that poem many many years ago and I probably didn’t understand it when I read it first. But somehow that image of Truth on top of a mountain somewhere remained with me. Have you had an experience of climbing a mountain and you think you’re heading for the summit and suddenly you’ve lost it? You can’t see where it is any more and then you go another little distance and you see it again but that peak you looked at now seems different from this perspective, from this view point. You go on some more and it’s different again - and yet that peak is the same peak. My title “The Other Side of Truth” has a certain enigmatic quality. Your truth may not be someone else’s truth. You can be convinced of something but I might see it from another angle so what we may argue about our truths. Sade’s Mama had sayings like “A lie has seven winding paths, the truth one straight road” and another is “Truth keeps the hands cleaner than soap”. The children’s father’s believes in the importance of telling the truth - and I’m glad he believed in telling the truth - but it led to terrible consequences for his children. So I wanted a title that gave some of the complexity around truth.
Okay thank you very much.
Aha!!! If it’s left you puzzled don’t worry, I too am puzzled!!!
Okay thank you very much.
Can I say something just before we go on. I want to add one more thing about truth. Some of the most dangerous people are those who are convinced that only their truth and their way of seeing the world is the right way. So that’s another aspect to it. Thank you, sorry, it is your turn!!
Margaux
Hello, my name is Margaux, nice to meet you. We know that you actually stood in the queue in front of the ‘Immigration and Nationality building’, to imagine what it must be like to be a refugee and asylum seeker. Did you do this for any other situations in the book?
BN: Well, you know, you are really asking me about how I do my research, and I did a lot of research. I was fortunate, I have very, very close Nigerian friends, and I had the good fortune to be in Ghana in January 1998 and I came back to England through Lagos. It was just a weekend and still the time when General Sani Abacha, the brutal military dictator, was in power. My friends met me at the airport and they took me to Ife and to Ibadan. They knew I wanted to see those places. During the weekend I took a number of photographs with a little plastic disposable camera. I was worried that the police might take it. Soldiers also constantly stopped us on the road at roadblocks. So that experience then helped me. I’d never been to Lagos before and my mind was absorbing everything very quickly, very deeply. It was an extraordinary experience - just one weekend. It was like my mind was a camera, my mind was a recording instrument. I came back with those photographs in my disposable camera, and of course, deeply in my mind, that experience. So that was one small part of my research.
I spent a lot of time on London streets and going to places to find out about the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers. I also went into schools in London and Bristol where I did workshops with young people. I asked them, “What is the first thing you need when you are new to the school?” and every time they said, “Get a friend.” So I knew how important friendship was. I remember going and standing outside the television centre in Gray’s Inn Road. I thought, “Where could my children, Sade and Femi, hang out?” It was near where my daughter was a student in London at the time. So one night - it was wet and drizzly - I hung out around there, looking to see where would be a good place to shelter.It helped me to imagine their experience. But I also allow myself the freedom to change aspects. That’s what writers do. You want to be credible but you mustn’t just feel that you have got to limit yourself to how this was and how that was. Emotional, imaginative truth is the most important.
Thank you!
Marie
We would like to know why you use nicknames.
BN: Sade loves giving people names. Do you ever give anybody nicknames? You do? It can be done in friendship. But I think there is a difference between giving a nickname to somebody who has got no power and to people who are more powerful. Sade’s nicknames are not nicknames that put people down in the way that Marcia deliberately mispronounces ‘Sade’ and calls her ‘Miss Sha-day-aday’. There is a strong bullying element to this. It’s different with Sade. When Sade gives a nickname, it has an element of empowering her. These are people who are more powerful and they are older. She loves language. She loves playing with words and, in a way, giving a nickname gives her a grasp of the situation. ‘OK, this person hasn’t told me what their name is but I’ll call them Hawk Man and Hawk Lady.’ She doesn’t think about it, she does it quite naturally. Language is empowering and fortunately Sade has this love of language and uses it to help her grasp a situation. She has probably always done this, but now it comes in very useful to her psychologically. Thank you for that question.
Raphaelle
Hello, my name is Raphaelle. In your book Sade is bullied by Marcia and her gang and are you trying to make children aware of the cruelty of this act?
BN: Well, you know, bullying is cruel and they are being cruel. But I think I was reflecting not only on how young people can be cruel, but we are all capable of cruelty. However, Sade cannot understand why Marcia is using racism as part of this cruelty because part of Marcia’s family comes from Jamaica. Sade understands the connection between Jamaica and Africa and so she asks herself ‘what it is that they have against Africans?’ To me there is an echo of what has happened to her father. Look at how the military government at that time was abusing its power. Here Sade is experiencing this bullying by another young person whom she might have hoped would be an ally. Instead Marcia abuses that power over her.
Guillaume
Do you think that when Sade contacts the newsreader this could happen in real life? Has this ever happened?
BN: I think what is important for me is that what I write is credible, not that it has actually happened - but that it could. Now, we have to remember that Sade is the daughter of a journalist - an outspoken journalist - and she has always had this bond with her father. So she has an idea of the power of words, the power of communication. At the time I was writing this novel, I came across a television programme for young people in the UK. I think it was called “Children’s Express”. It was a programme about journalism, about reporting the news, and that actively included young people. The journalist who worked with the young people on this programme was a man called Jon Snow. We have a TV channel here called ‘Channel 4’ where he is the main news presenter at 7pm and, by the way, he always seems to wear different coloured ties! He was the adult presenter working with the children on ‘Children’s Express’. I saw it one day, by chance, and I loved the respect he gave to the young children journalists. There was a twelve- year-old sitting next to him and the way he asked his questions - and the way they spoke to each other – it was as if he was working with another adult journalist. It made an impression on me. I began to think what if Sade happened to see this programme? Her school could be using this programme. She would see this journalist; would know that he worked on a live TV channel; and she might begin to think that maybe this was their one big hope. That is why I felt this was credible. Of course, Femi thinks the idea is crazy. But then she is his older sister and quite bossy at times, so he goes along with it. By the way, the real Jon Snow has done the foreword to this book. I didn’t ask his permission when I created my Mr Seven o’Clock News. Of course, it isn’t actually him and, in a way, it’s my little joke and I was delighted when he kindly agreed to do the foreword to this book. Yes, I hope it’s credible, I hope you believed it.
Rodolphe
What do you want to write about next?
BN: I spoke earlier about a young second cousin of mine, Neil Aggett, who was a medical doctor in South Africa. He would work a couple of nights a week in the casualty department of a very busy hospital in Soweto in order to earn the money to work for the rest of the week as an unpaid trade-union organiser. It was important that workers gained rights as part of a strong workers’ movement to resist the tremendous exploitation that went unchecked in South Africa for so long. I never met my cousin. He had been born in Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau rebellion against the white settlers to regain their land. Soon after Neil’s family came to live in South Africa, I left the country for England and what became exile. Later, when Neil became a university student, he began to see things very differently from his parents and, breaking away, especially from his father, he now dedicated himself to resisting apartheid through the union movement. Some years later, he was arrested with a whole number of people, including other young white activists working with black comrades. Neil never came out of jail alive. His father and the family were shattered but, at the time, they didn’t really understand the wider significance of Neil’s death. There was an extraordinary funeral in which thousands of workers, black workers, came out on the streets of Johannesburg to follow his coffin and to lay him into the grave. Very many black detainees had died while in the hands of the police. Many of their deaths didn’t even make the news. Internationally, only Steve Biko’s name was well known. But now, for the first time, a young white detainee had died while being interrogated by the police - and, suddenly, there was huge media interest. There was an inquest and Neil’s father, who had been estranged from his son, spared no expense in appointing top lawyers to represent the family. In the inquest, the evidence came out of torture - the terrible torture to which Neil and others had been subjected. Nevertheless, the magistrate gave the verdict that no one was to blame. The police said that he had committed suicide and refused to accept that if he had committed suicide it was because a healthy young man had been broken to the point where he might take his life. So, to come back to your question, I’ve wanted to find out more about what lies behind this story of a young man who had transformed himself. I met Neil’s parents for the first time in 1991, after I was able to go back freely to South Africa, and I was very moved. His parents were clearly haunted by this terrible thing. What a terrible way to begin to know and understand more about your son. I was also curious that in our family, here in a younger generation was someone else who had chosen the path of resisting apartheid. Of course there was also a terrible injustice. However Neil died, the police were responsible and I wanted to find out more about Neil, about who he became and why his interrogators had it in for him. So I’ve been investigating. Behind his story lies a bigger story too. It will be a biography, partly memoir, for adult readers. I’ve done lots of interviews and it is tough because I am not writing fiction and have to double check, treble check everything. It’s another journey for me.
Laure…
Hello
Hello
My name is Laure, nice to meet you.
Thank you.
Are you feelings or your experiences of being an exile reflected in this book The Other Side of Truth?
BN: I think they are. But when I was writing the novel, I wasn't thinking about my own experience at all. I think it came very subconsciously. You see when I left into exile, I was 21 going on 22. I had chosen a path. I was much older than Sade and Femi and I also didn't have the same frightening experiences of racism to deal with as they do. I was white, and when I arrived in Britain, some people would be very interested. When I opened my mouth, they heard I spoke with a South African accent, and nobody said "What you doing here? Are you coming to take our jobs? Why are you here? Why don't you go back where you came from?" No one said that to me. But I still had a very deep sense of disconnection. I came to study at the University of York. I remember having to write an essay - I think it was about T S Eliot- and wandering around, thinking, "I must think about the essay." But my head was back in South Africa. I was thinking about my brother and his friends in prison. That's where my head was. So very often my body was in England, but my head was back in South Africa. But I was also fortunate because I met people who, I felt, had some kind of understanding of what I might have gone through.
One of those people has a connection with France. He was my professor of education. His name was Harry Rée and he had been in the SOE – Special Operations Executive – working ‘underground’ with the French Resistance during the Second World War. He was a fluent French speaker and had actually helped to blow up the Peugeot factory with the help of the French Resistance. Although he never spoke about his experiences of being in the resistance at that time, I knew that had been his experience and I knew he would have some kind of understanding of where I was coming from. Sade and Femi don't have that until perhaps the social worker, Jenny Iyawo. She's kind to them and she says – oh no, it’s Mama Appiah who says she can tell that something bad and terrible has happened to them. Sade can feel the emotion welling up in her but has to suppress it.
So I think I have had some of that, but in a very different way, and that's what writers do. We have to transform experience. We have to look into ourselves: to see, to think, to imagine, to draw on our own experience, and imagine… And you see I am also obliged to imagine when I write younger characters because I’m no longer that age. So I’m imagining someone much younger than myself who has come from a very different background to myself and I always say, to write the kind of fiction that I do, I need the flour to make the bread, but I need the yeast. And the yeast is imagination. To make it believable.
There’s one other thing I want to add on to that, just one other point to add on. It’s about the way in which Sade remembers her mother, through the words that her mother has said. That is another important way she has of holding on to the past. I too would remember things that my brother, and friends had told me in South Africa. And that was another aspect that probably emerged in the novel.
Guillaume
My name is Guillaume, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you!
So, my question is, what do you understand by the title The Other Side of Truth?
BN: Right, well, I think for that that I need to point you to a little quotation in the frontpiece of the book, a little extract from a poem by John Donne “On a huge hill,/ Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will/ / Reach her, about must, and about must go.” I read that that poem many many years ago and I probably didn’t understand it when I read it first. But somehow that image of Truth on top of a mountain somewhere remained with me. Have you had an experience of climbing a mountain and you think you’re heading for the summit and suddenly you’ve lost it? You can’t see where it is any more and then you go another little distance and you see it again but that peak you looked at now seems different from this perspective, from this view point. You go on some more and it’s different again - and yet that peak is the same peak. My title “The Other Side of Truth” has a certain enigmatic quality. Your truth may not be someone else’s truth. You can be convinced of something but I might see it from another angle so what we may argue about our truths. Sade’s Mama had sayings like “A lie has seven winding paths, the truth one straight road” and another is “Truth keeps the hands cleaner than soap”. The children’s father’s believes in the importance of telling the truth - and I’m glad he believed in telling the truth - but it led to terrible consequences for his children. So I wanted a title that gave some of the complexity around truth.
Okay thank you very much.
Aha!!! If it’s left you puzzled don’t worry, I too am puzzled!!!
Okay thank you very much.
Can I say something just before we go on. I want to add one more thing about truth. Some of the most dangerous people are those who are convinced that only their truth and their way of seeing the world is the right way. So that’s another aspect to it. Thank you, sorry, it is your turn!!
Margaux
Hello, my name is Margaux, nice to meet you. We know that you actually stood in the queue in front of the ‘Immigration and Nationality building’, to imagine what it must be like to be a refugee and asylum seeker. Did you do this for any other situations in the book?
BN: Well, you know, you are really asking me about how I do my research, and I did a lot of research. I was fortunate, I have very, very close Nigerian friends, and I had the good fortune to be in Ghana in January 1998 and I came back to England through Lagos. It was just a weekend and still the time when General Sani Abacha, the brutal military dictator, was in power. My friends met me at the airport and they took me to Ife and to Ibadan. They knew I wanted to see those places. During the weekend I took a number of photographs with a little plastic disposable camera. I was worried that the police might take it. Soldiers also constantly stopped us on the road at roadblocks. So that experience then helped me. I’d never been to Lagos before and my mind was absorbing everything very quickly, very deeply. It was an extraordinary experience - just one weekend. It was like my mind was a camera, my mind was a recording instrument. I came back with those photographs in my disposable camera, and of course, deeply in my mind, that experience. So that was one small part of my research.
I spent a lot of time on London streets and going to places to find out about the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers. I also went into schools in London and Bristol where I did workshops with young people. I asked them, “What is the first thing you need when you are new to the school?” and every time they said, “Get a friend.” So I knew how important friendship was. I remember going and standing outside the television centre in Gray’s Inn Road. I thought, “Where could my children, Sade and Femi, hang out?” It was near where my daughter was a student in London at the time. So one night - it was wet and drizzly - I hung out around there, looking to see where would be a good place to shelter.It helped me to imagine their experience. But I also allow myself the freedom to change aspects. That’s what writers do. You want to be credible but you mustn’t just feel that you have got to limit yourself to how this was and how that was. Emotional, imaginative truth is the most important.
Thank you!
Marie
We would like to know why you use nicknames.
BN: Sade loves giving people names. Do you ever give anybody nicknames? You do? It can be done in friendship. But I think there is a difference between giving a nickname to somebody who has got no power and to people who are more powerful. Sade’s nicknames are not nicknames that put people down in the way that Marcia deliberately mispronounces ‘Sade’ and calls her ‘Miss Sha-day-aday’. There is a strong bullying element to this. It’s different with Sade. When Sade gives a nickname, it has an element of empowering her. These are people who are more powerful and they are older. She loves language. She loves playing with words and, in a way, giving a nickname gives her a grasp of the situation. ‘OK, this person hasn’t told me what their name is but I’ll call them Hawk Man and Hawk Lady.’ She doesn’t think about it, she does it quite naturally. Language is empowering and fortunately Sade has this love of language and uses it to help her grasp a situation. She has probably always done this, but now it comes in very useful to her psychologically. Thank you for that question.
Raphaelle
Hello, my name is Raphaelle. In your book Sade is bullied by Marcia and her gang and are you trying to make children aware of the cruelty of this act?
BN: Well, you know, bullying is cruel and they are being cruel. But I think I was reflecting not only on how young people can be cruel, but we are all capable of cruelty. However, Sade cannot understand why Marcia is using racism as part of this cruelty because part of Marcia’s family comes from Jamaica. Sade understands the connection between Jamaica and Africa and so she asks herself ‘what it is that they have against Africans?’ To me there is an echo of what has happened to her father. Look at how the military government at that time was abusing its power. Here Sade is experiencing this bullying by another young person whom she might have hoped would be an ally. Instead Marcia abuses that power over her.
Guillaume
Do you think that when Sade contacts the newsreader this could happen in real life? Has this ever happened?
BN: I think what is important for me is that what I write is credible, not that it has actually happened - but that it could. Now, we have to remember that Sade is the daughter of a journalist - an outspoken journalist - and she has always had this bond with her father. So she has an idea of the power of words, the power of communication. At the time I was writing this novel, I came across a television programme for young people in the UK. I think it was called “Children’s Express”. It was a programme about journalism, about reporting the news, and that actively included young people. The journalist who worked with the young people on this programme was a man called Jon Snow. We have a TV channel here called ‘Channel 4’ where he is the main news presenter at 7pm and, by the way, he always seems to wear different coloured ties! He was the adult presenter working with the children on ‘Children’s Express’. I saw it one day, by chance, and I loved the respect he gave to the young children journalists. There was a twelve- year-old sitting next to him and the way he asked his questions - and the way they spoke to each other – it was as if he was working with another adult journalist. It made an impression on me. I began to think what if Sade happened to see this programme? Her school could be using this programme. She would see this journalist; would know that he worked on a live TV channel; and she might begin to think that maybe this was their one big hope. That is why I felt this was credible. Of course, Femi thinks the idea is crazy. But then she is his older sister and quite bossy at times, so he goes along with it. By the way, the real Jon Snow has done the foreword to this book. I didn’t ask his permission when I created my Mr Seven o’Clock News. Of course, it isn’t actually him and, in a way, it’s my little joke and I was delighted when he kindly agreed to do the foreword to this book. Yes, I hope it’s credible, I hope you believed it.
Rodolphe
What do you want to write about next?
BN: I spoke earlier about a young second cousin of mine, Neil Aggett, who was a medical doctor in South Africa. He would work a couple of nights a week in the casualty department of a very busy hospital in Soweto in order to earn the money to work for the rest of the week as an unpaid trade-union organiser. It was important that workers gained rights as part of a strong workers’ movement to resist the tremendous exploitation that went unchecked in South Africa for so long. I never met my cousin. He had been born in Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau rebellion against the white settlers to regain their land. Soon after Neil’s family came to live in South Africa, I left the country for England and what became exile. Later, when Neil became a university student, he began to see things very differently from his parents and, breaking away, especially from his father, he now dedicated himself to resisting apartheid through the union movement. Some years later, he was arrested with a whole number of people, including other young white activists working with black comrades. Neil never came out of jail alive. His father and the family were shattered but, at the time, they didn’t really understand the wider significance of Neil’s death. There was an extraordinary funeral in which thousands of workers, black workers, came out on the streets of Johannesburg to follow his coffin and to lay him into the grave. Very many black detainees had died while in the hands of the police. Many of their deaths didn’t even make the news. Internationally, only Steve Biko’s name was well known. But now, for the first time, a young white detainee had died while being interrogated by the police - and, suddenly, there was huge media interest. There was an inquest and Neil’s father, who had been estranged from his son, spared no expense in appointing top lawyers to represent the family. In the inquest, the evidence came out of torture - the terrible torture to which Neil and others had been subjected. Nevertheless, the magistrate gave the verdict that no one was to blame. The police said that he had committed suicide and refused to accept that if he had committed suicide it was because a healthy young man had been broken to the point where he might take his life. So, to come back to your question, I’ve wanted to find out more about what lies behind this story of a young man who had transformed himself. I met Neil’s parents for the first time in 1991, after I was able to go back freely to South Africa, and I was very moved. His parents were clearly haunted by this terrible thing. What a terrible way to begin to know and understand more about your son. I was also curious that in our family, here in a younger generation was someone else who had chosen the path of resisting apartheid. Of course there was also a terrible injustice. However Neil died, the police were responsible and I wanted to find out more about Neil, about who he became and why his interrogators had it in for him. So I’ve been investigating. Behind his story lies a bigger story too. It will be a biography, partly memoir, for adult readers. I’ve done lots of interviews and it is tough because I am not writing fiction and have to double check, treble check everything. It’s another journey for me.
