Literatea is an interview series which brings together prominent and emerging voices in African writing, editing, publishing, translation, marketing, distribution, and retail to discuss the craft of bringing African storytelling to the continent and the rest of the world. From award-winning novelists and poets to literary agents and editors, from indie publishers and booksellers to prize juries—Literatea pours the first cup and stirs the conversation.
In this conversation about magical realism, becoming a writer and published author, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu discusses the importance of encountering, learning from, and disturbing history and its reach.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is an award-winning Zimbabwean author, literary scholar, and filmmaker. Her first two novels—The Theory of Flight (2018) and The History of Man (2020)—were the recipients of considerable critical acclaim. Fusing together a range of histories and registers, The Theory of Flight won the 2019 Barry Ronge Fiction Prize. Her third novel, The Quality of Mercy, was shortlisted for the South African Literary Award for Fiction in 2023. Siphiwe holds a doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, as well as a master’s degree in African Studies and Film from Ohio University. She has published research on Saartjie Baartman and wrote, directed, and edited the award-winning short film Graffiti. She is a recipient of a 2018 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship and was a 2020 Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS). In 2022, she was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize and judged the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2024.
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RÉMY NGAMIJE: One thing most authors are asked is how much of their work is autobiographical. It is not a question I enjoy, to be honest, because I think everything in writing is autobiographical in some way. And, I wager, there is nothing more autobiographical than one’s imagination. But, for some reason, I have seen so many writers of magical realism exempted from that onerous question.
Now, I am not interested in what aspects of your work are autobiographical, but I am interested in finding out which comes first: the imaginative framework of your stories or the historical and real aspects.
SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU: A very interesting question, or, rather, a series of questions. One of the first questions I remember being asked was whether or not my first novel, The Theory of Flight, was autobiographical. That novel is often classified and spoken of as a work of magical realism, even though I have often said it is not.
But… you are not interested in any of this.
To answer your question, this is very chicken and egg for me. Works of fiction are works of the imagination. Works of historical fiction are works of the imagination that may deal with real events. I love history and I enjoy thinking of our present by looking at it through a historical lens—we don’t just arrive at the current moments we inhabit, a series of events brings us there. My thinking process is shaped by my creativity, my love of history, and the various politics I ascribe to—therefore, my writing process is also shaped by my creativity, my love of history and those very politics.
As a result, I cannot say which comes first—the imaginative framework or the historical or real aspects. I just start writing and let things take me where they will.
RN: I am always delighted to find kindred writers whose works have been filed in what their authors think are the “wrong category.” In that respect, we share the same fate because my debut novel is grouped together with other books that do not speak to its truest character. Perhaps it is a result of marketing and the need to simplify its contents for potential readers. What, then, would be your preferred classification for The Theory of Flight?
SGN: On a recent trip, I watched the film American Fiction on the plane, and I remember the protagonist in that film asking a poor bookstore worker—whose job it clearly was not to reason why but simply to do and die—why his books were categorised the way they were in the bookstore. After not receiving a satisfactory answer, the protagonist then went around the bookstore putting his books where he thought they truly belonged. I absolutely could relate to that scene and I think many writers and artists can as well.
I understand why labels and categories are necessary—they help order a rather chaotic world. They help us manoeuvre through a world that would otherwise be extremely overwhelming. So they have that wonderful function. However, as with most things that are controlled by people who have some sort of power, they can also be used to limit, confine, trap and, in some cases, erase what it is they actually contain.
RN: Gospel and sermon.
SGN: Personally, I find the label “magical realism” very limiting and extremely anachronistic. “Magical realism” or, rather, magischer realismus is a term coined by Franz Roh in 1920s Germany to classify a way of storytelling that my people and other peoples around the world have been using since before Roh was born. When I wrote The Theory of Flight I was tapping into this way that stories are told where I come from. In this storytelling tradition, which I see myself being a part of and continuing, the imagination is allowed full reign and “anything” is made possible.
I know that where I come from, the people who tell stories this way don’t call the way they tell stories “magical realism”—they simply call it storytelling. That is why I always push back whenever that label is used.
RN: Pushing back is so important. Especially, I think, as African writers where our work is often lumped together without care.
SGN: However, I would be completely disingenuous if I pretended that I wasn’t aware beforehand that The Theory of Flight would be labelled a work of magical realism. I think what surprised me was that the other fiction genres that the novel belongs to—literary, historical, postcolonial, family saga, even romance—were subsumed into this one overarching genre, which seemed, in turn, to be defined in extremely narrow terms: people fly in the novel, therefore, it must be magical realism.
What about the other things that the characters do and experience?
I don’t have a preferred category for any of my works because I believe that works contain many different themes and topics and sometimes use multiple genres in the telling of the story.
However, I will say that the category I am most comfortable with for The Theory of Flight is literary fiction because it is all-encompassing and, therefore, allows itself to contain whatever the reader wants it to.
But all labels and categories end up being limiting, so ideally, if I could, I would walk into every bookstore that stocks my novels and move them around to all applicable categories like the protagonist in American Fiction does. A novel is always more than just one thing.
RN: You said you were in a chicken-egg conundrum, and you are. Let me ask this then: which force impacts your writing the most, history or the imagination?
Of course, these two will exert different pressures on the writing at various times in the writing process. But, which, if any, of them makes itself the most felt when you commence the process of putting your stories together?
SGN: The simple answer would be: for me stories are the work of the imagination. I have been telling stories to make sense of the world around me since I was a little girl, since long before I understood what history was. I started telling stories to an audience of one—
RN: Come through with the flattery, sis!
SGN: Hahaha.
Anyway, I started telling stories to an audience of one before I knew how to write. The beauty of storytelling is that it precedes literacy and the need to document things. In the beginning all we needed was a fire and an audience. And perhaps there is even a beginning before that.
But this is not a simple question and so here is my not so simple answer. As a species, we find ourselves existing in a world we don’t fully understand. We don’t really know how we got here; we don’t really know where we go from here. We have been gifted with enough sentience and intelligence—and hubris—to try to make sense of it all and so we have told stories, created religions, recorded histories, and so forth—all so that we don’t come to terms with how unknown this thing in which we find ourselves in truly is. I write from a place in which I am very aware that one of the ways we individually and collectively stave off existential crises is by thinking of the present through the lens of the past—like histories or genealogies. I write from a place of being very aware that there is a large expanse in my mind (since I have to locate it somewhere) in which things happen—visitations and visions—and that this place is called the imagination. The imagination is always already there but so too is this desire to connect to what came before, this thing we call history.
RN: Now, years later, what do you think about the writing process of The Theory Of Flight? I ask because you are three books into an award-winning oeuvre. But, looking back, what were your daily struggles in bringing the work out of the mind and onto the page? In this regard, I am most curious about the daily struggles of a black writer writing from the continent (if that is where you worked from at the time) and how you overcame them.
SGN: When I started writing The Theory of Flight I was many things: black, female, in graduate school and, most importantly, struggling to come to terms with a profound recent loss. It took me ten years to write the novel and for most of those years I was living and studying in the United States of America.
Yes, I was feeling my blackness and my femaleness—it is never really an easy time to be either one of those things—but what was really affecting me at the time was trying on a new identity: that of a writer.
I had a BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing so I knew I could write a little. What I wasn’t sure of was whether I could write a sustained piece of long-form fiction. I had spent most of my life consuming stories in all forms. I knew I loved written stories, I knew I particularly loved reading novels, but when I started trying to write my own I wasn’t sure I could do it.
I don’t think it is an easy identity, being a writer. I think you have to put a lot of work into becoming one. Some of that work is actively the work of writing: character development, world building, finding and listening to your voice, and some, if not a lot, of that work is coming to terms with yourself as a writer, with the fact that you may or may not succeed in your endeavour. When you have never written a sustained piece of writing, you don’t know that you can until you do.
Writing, I like to say, is doing; it is praxis. So I spent ten years writing in spurts, being plagued by writer’s block, and doing the other things that being a graduate student wanted me to do, like writing my dissertation.
Writing my PhD dissertation, which was another struggle, was a godsend because it proved to me that I could write a cohesive long-form piece of work and, looking back, I realise that that was the breakthrough for me.
I have heard other writers say they took ten years to write their first novel, so I know I am in good company. As writers we talk about many things, but we rarely talk about how difficult it is for some of us to become writers. Beyond the issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and many other factors, the identity of being a writer is not always easy for some of us to own. We find ourselves having long wanted to do something, but when the opportunity comes to do it, we wonder at our being able to do it. Some of us think that writing is a luxury that we, as black people, can ill afford given the other pressing social justice and political issues we can take part in in a more direct way. I think struggling with your identity as a writer is commendable and good because we should never take for granted what we have been entrusted with and what we are capable of.
RN: Bars. So many bars.
Writer—it is a great and weighty title, a mantle that is heavy to bear, both as the person doing the physical work of writing and actually living as a writer. I do not mean to be flippant when I say that after publishing my debut novel I found it easier to be a “published author” than it was a to be a “writer”, as someone to whom storytelling was a vocation, not a mere hobby, someone with a greater responsibility beyond simply putting work out in the world.
Have you managed to be more comfortable with the title? And did that happen after Theory of Flight was published or did it happen much later when your second or third book came out?
SGN: I have known that I wanted to be a “writer” since I was a little girl. Growing up I was surrounded by many forms of storytelling: my grandmother’s oral stories, Grimm’s fairy tales, books, television series, radio plays, and rarely, but occasionally, films. However, in the midst of all those ways of telling stories, I wanted to be a writer. I think I kept it a secret for some time, but I am not good at keeping secrets, so I didn’t keep the secret for long. Soon, my mother was buying me scrapbooks and notebooks and I was drawing stick figures in them—the stick figures spoke to each other in dialogue bubbles. The more literate I became, the more my vocabulary grew, the more I moved away from the stick figures and started concentrating on the words and worlds. There wasn’t much of an outlet for these stories except in writing compositions for class—I must have written some fantastical things on occasion because I remember some teachers (thankfully, a few) reining me in.
Stories, probably because they first came to me embodied in my grandmother’s voice, have always been my happy place, my safe place, my place of comfort. So, I love stories wherever and in whatever form I find them. But there is something about interacting with the written word, experiencing the interiority of a character, using your own imagination to get lost in the world created by the words that made me love reading enough to want to be a writer myself.
As I mentioned, I wanted to be a writer as a little girl, but I think you are right in creating the distinction between being a “writer” and being a “published author”. I think it was this idea of becoming a “published author” that made it difficult for me to embrace being a “writer”. I was lucky to have a family that understood that I could become an accountant but that I wanted to be a writer. I remember going off to college to study creative writing and thinking that in no time I would be a “published author”, as you say. The wonderful hubris of youth. I look back at my life and I am in awe that I, a girl from Zimbabwe, had such a dream in the first place. It took me quite a few decades, but I realised that dream eventually, and I often wonder where I got the tenacity, conviction, and strength to continue to hold on to the dream through life’s many ups and downs and twists and turns.
It may have taken me quite some time to realise the dream, to be a “published author”, but I was always writing—my imagination was always active, characters were always coming to life and doing things, I was always writing things down. Maybe not as often as I would have liked, but writing was always happening. Even when I didn’t know how the story—both my characters’ and mine—ended, I was always writing. Because for a long, long time I was so focused on the end result of writing—a published book—I found it difficult to embrace the fact that I was indeed a writer before I got published. These are all things that are occurring to me in retrospect. While being published is a great reward for writing, to be a “published author” seems to be the result of the “writer” doing their work.
Again, to write is to do something; it is an action. Praxis. To write is to dream and sometimes that dream is fulfilled. To write—to be a writer—is to continue to dream even when that dream is not fulfilled.
That is what makes being a writer so difficult; it is a constant doing and being.
RN: In the ten years it took to write your debut, did you come across other non-literary things that helped you to continue the work that was in progress? For me, I found that discipline, in any one thing, is discipline in all things. I found that through fitness. Then, from salsa dancing I found out that nothing—not even the most choreographed and oft-practiced dance pattern—goes according to the plan. There has to be some room for experimentation and in-the-moment discovery. Those are some of the lessons I carry to my writing to this day.
SGN: Very interesting. I think for me, beyond the dissertation and the discipline that came through that, I would have to say that something else that impacted my writing was the archive. The archive—this carefully curated (often by those with or in power) place that is meant to reflect our past back to us—is both a place of fascination and critical interrogation for me. I learned from the archive that things are rarely as we remember them to be, the past is a site of continuous struggle, and human beings will always surprise you. The archive with its need for order is actually a beautifully messy place. My experience with the archive and the way I critically engage with it shapes and informs how I write the historical fiction of my novels and this is something that I intentionally make apparent in my fourth novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People.
RN: The archive—it is an inevitable thing one comes across when they are writing, I think, more so when they are writing things that question history and our place and time in it. With my writing, I often run headlong into it when I am writing about migration and movement—there is what has been written about a place, and what has been said about moving to or around that place. But, sometimes, I find that my own writing will have a different take. This Archive—we have to capitalise it—always caters to a particular gaze, perspective, and place of power. I, too, enjoy finding interesting ways to either subtract from it (the bad, the ugly, or the untrue) or add to it (the messy confusion) through subversion (which, sometimes, is the only way).
As a “source of continuous struggle” what do you think you add to The Archive with The Creation of Half-Broken People, which is your latest novel and one that I truly enjoyed.
SGN: I am glad to hear that you enjoyed reading The Creation of Half-Broken People. Thank you for taking the time to read and engage with the novel.
I really like you bringing the idea of movement and migration into the discussion of The Archive—which, as you say, we have to capitalise—because it is often bounded by the imagined community that makes up the nation. The nation, in turn, imagines itself bounded by the borders of a country regardless of how problematic those borders are, and borders, even at the best of times, are problematic. All this is to say that movement and migration then inherently become a form of subversion when dealing with The Archive.
The Archive wants order, easy categorisation, and a dogged adherence to scientific taxonomy. In short, it wants uninterrupted settledness and movement and migration constantly disrupt that settledness and create what I call the beautiful messiness of The Archive. This is why I love the colonial archive so much; it is constantly trying to do the impossible—create order out of the chaos and unsettledness that is the colonial enterprise.
What I have added to The Archive by writing The Creation of Half-Broken People is an illumination of the very workings of movement and migration in the creation of The Archive. The Archive in a settler colony is created by the settlers and migrants—it is really about them trying (and often failing) to imagine this shared community that is the nation. The autochthonous people are woefully erased in the creation of The Archive, but that is a discussion for another novel and another day.
RN: If you look at where you are with your latest work, The Creation Of Half-Broken People, how do you think you have successfully disturbed The Archive since your first book? I think each work of yours has brought with it a different approach to making The Archive more restless, less settled—I wonder if you think of your works in this light, too.
Also: “autochthonous”. Okay, Professor Siphiwe. I see you are gunning for Prof. Mlambo’s “vicissitudes“. Hahahaha.”
SGN: “Vicissitudes” and “autochthonous”—we Zimbos are just out here trying to “show our working” as our Maths teachers used to say.
Now that you have (shamelessly) teased me about using the word “autochthonous” (which very well may be my most favourite word), I have to come clean and say that my creative work has been a way for me to explore the many issues I have been intellectually interrogating for many years and which I examined in my dissertation, “A Country with Land but no Habitat”: Travel and Belonging in Colonial Southern Rhodesia and Post-Colonial Zimbabwe—issues about the difficulties of delineating belonging, settledness, and “national” identity in a country that ties and attaches these things too unquestioningly to the land. The wonderful thing about writing that dissertation is that it revealed to me that unsettling The Archive in these ways has been something Rhodesian and Zimbabwean writers—from Doris Lessing, Dambudzo Marechera, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Yvonne Vera to my contemporaries, NoViolet Bulawayo, Brian Chikwava, Sue Nyathi and Novuyo Tshuma—have always done. So, I am in very good company.
I see my individual creative works doing many different things, but yes, definitely, I see them all unsettling “The Archive”. There is a lot of movement in my novels. That is all very intentional. As I mentioned earlier, nothing unsettles The Archive as much as movement does—migration (voluntary and involuntary, or rural to urban), displacement, emigration. As much as my novels have movement in common, they also, as you say, unsettle The Archive in other ways: for example, in the way The Theory of Flight revels in love and magic as it tells the often-difficult-and-sometimes-horrific stories of the civil war, the genocide and the HIV/AIDS crisis in Zimbabwe; in the way The History of Man is a story written by a black woman about a white man dealing with the intersection between his masculinity and the dictates of white supremacy—I know that one unsettled readers of various races as well—for very different reasons); in the way The Quality of Mercy gives a black man, who would be seen through a postcolonial lens as someone who was a colonial collaborator, the unequivocal qualities of a hero: bravery, integrity and intelligence. Through my work, I am always trying to get us to re-think and re-visit, and potentially revise, what we think we already know about ourselves, each other, and our shared histories. Re-thinking and re-visiting are also ways and means of unsettling The Archive.
In The Creation of Half-Broken People, I examine the good woman versus bad (mad) woman dichotomy. The good woman is faithfully-married, child-bearing, child-rearing, family-oriented, doek-wearing, church-going, and God-fearing. The bad, mad woman is unmarried, “promiscuous”, sexually self-aware, childless or has children by different fathers, independent, individualistic, self-employed, self-determined, enthusiastically partaking in the “informal” sector, and the head of a single-headed household. This dichotomy is at the heart of most patriarchal constructions of womanhood and is used to control women through oppression, violence, shame, or guilt. Zimbabwe is an extremely conservative country when it comes to gender norms and issues of sexuality, and so, if readers start questioning, or continue dismantling, these inherited constructions of womanhood after reading the novel, then it will have succeeded in disturbing The Archive in this light too.
RN: You know what? “Show your working” is exactly what we must start asking writers to do, especially the essayists. Because some of the essays aren’t essaying enough.
Also, two other things: flex on us with that dissertation Dokotela Ndlovu—and impeccable *chef’s kiss* dropping of “doek” in your answer. No one could ever!
SGN: Yes, that was a bit of a flex, wasn’t it, but sometimes needs must.
RN: But I think your answer did just that: it really does show how the different states of being you went through to produce each respective work. If you disturb The Archive, does it disturb you back?
SGN: To answer your question, The Archive definitely does disturb you back. You need a lot of resilience and fortitude when you enter it because it is a very powerful and formidable thing that has been made with a sense of permanence. The Archive is constructed to be able to withstand any disturbance and that is what, if you are not careful, can be very disturbing for you as someone who has entered it or engaged with it with the intention of, perhaps, changing it.
The past is the past is the past. It doesn’t change, what changes is how we remember it. What has been selected for curation hardly ever changes, the words written on a document many years ago will never change, the attitudes of those who wrote the documents and those who chose to select the documents will never change.
The past is the past is the past. What is always changing is the present. So, for example, when I come across the word “boy” on an archival document and realise that it is referring to a grown black man, I can never (nor should I want to) erase the use of the word “boy” because doing so is a form of violence and the “erasure” of the word does nothing to address or redress the initial violence of using the word “boy” in this way in the first place.
What I can do when I come across the word is to reveal the attitudes around the world, the violence that the word created and continues to create, and what all of that tells us about the actual time that produced that particular use of the word “boy”.
The Archive itself remains powerful, formidable and immutable, but the “readings” that are made possible within it and through it change and proliferate. It is disturbing to realise that the unsettledness and disruption different interpretations create do not materially change The Archive. However, this is not to say that The Archive renders us powerless, in fact, it does the opposite; it allows us to shift, grow, move (on), evolve. We cannot change The Archive but it can change us and that is a more beautiful and powerful thing than it at first appears to be.
RN: Given all we have talked about—the person you had to become in order to write your novels, the academic study, encountering, changing, and being changed by The Archive—what kind of writer do you see yourself becoming?
SGN: The idea of becoming something is always wonderful and full of promise. Had I been asked this question at any other time I would have had a fully formulated answer, but I find myself, at the end of 2024, aware that the world seems to be hurtling towards one of those moments that become History with a capital “H”—the unabashed greed of the wealthy class, the rampant rise of white supremacy, the unquestioning embrace of misogyny, the covert-but-not-really-so-covert empire building, the wars that seem to be spreading the zones of instability—the world has been here before many times over; this never ends well.
In such an uncertain time, I cannot say with any certainty what I will become, all I can say with certainty is that I will need to stay vigilant so that I hold on to the wonder and promise of becoming something of my own choosing.