Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu chats to JRB Editor Jennifer Malec about her new novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People.
The Creation of Half-Broken People
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Picador Africa, 2024
Jennifer Malec for The JRB: The Creation of Half-Broken People is your fourth novel, after the trilogy The Theory of Flight, The History of Man and The Quality of Mercy, although the setting and the Highlanders biscuits and some hints at characters we’ve met before make it feel part of the world of that trilogy. And you mentioned before that it’s a kind of trilogy in four parts. How did you feel writing this novel? Did you feel more free, as it’s a standalone work?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: I definitely felt that all of them stand alone, but I hope everything that I’m going to write is going to be interconnected. So it was great to find moments of interconnection with the other three novels that came before. In terms of chronology, I think this particular novel, the genesis was before even The Theory of Flight. When I was in grad school, doing my PhD, I had what ended up being the characters in this novel, Elizabeth and Ezekiel. And I thought it was their story for many years,and I was having a very difficult time fleshing it out, until 2020 when I went to JIAS [the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study] and was working on the manuscript, and then a lot of things came together, but still the novel itself wasn’t coming together until I think two years later, 2022, when I created this unnamed heroine and so she was the gel that brought the whole thing together.
So it’s been many, many years of thinking about this. I think the joy and the freedom came in suddenly having everything fall into place after so many years. Because I think at some point I was thinking it’s one of those manuscripts that you have that just never see the light of day. So I’m glad it actually came together.
The JRB: In a previous conversation you told me that The Quality of Mercy grew out of a tale your grandmother, a wonderful storyteller, told you. What was the spark for this novel?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: During my PhD I got very obsessed with history, and especially social history and histories of women. A lot had been written by other historians about how women in colonial cities were not supposed to be there and usually when they were found walking alone or wandering around they’d be diagnosed as mad and put in an asylum. And that’s the reason why we were able to read about them in the archive. So I was fascinated by this idea of women who are existing beyond the confines of what both patriarchy and the colonial systems have set for them. And I wanted to explore that. And the character that came to mind was Elizabeth, who because she walks around in a place that she’s not supposed to be at, and her race is misread, she’s seen as perhaps being mad, so I wanted to explore that. So it was that kind of thinking, taking it from a very intellectual academic space and trying to do something creative with that idea.
The JRB: I’d like to ask about the Gothic or feminist literary inspirations for this book: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea are referenced throughout The Creation of Half-Broken People. How do you see it situated among these ancestors? The Creation of Half-Broken People is described as an African Gothic novel. How do you feel about that categorisation?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: For me I think it begins with Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and the character of Bertha Mason as the mad woman in the attic and the woman that we’re all supposed to be afraid of. Then Jean Rhys comes along with Wide Sargasso Sea and asks us to look at that character through a very different lens, and to see how that colonial language and the things that the colonial era was trying to hide actually trapped that woman and made her seem mad. For me that kind of critique was very interesting, and I thought you know, where we are right now geographically is another colonial space that was the Other in the imagination of people like Charlotte Brontë. So what does it mean to have been that Other? And how does our own history fit into that narrative?
So it was important to me to have those antecedents and engage with them, but also be thinking specifically about this particular setting. Bearing in mind that it’s wonderful that we already have this critique, because in many ways Jane Eyre is a critique of the Gothic, right? And then you have Jean Rhys critiquing her, or critiquing that novel, so there’s this wonderful genealogy now. So I just wanted to say, yes, this is what happened in the Caribbean, but this was also happening on the African continent, you know? And what does that look like for us?
And what does it look like when you’re hiding things in your histories? I think the Gothic plays around with those things that are dangerous to know. So the women who are trapped in castles, there’s a truth or something out there that they’re not supposed to know, whatever it is. In Jane Eyre it was very clear that it was slavery and the economy that created colonial Britain. So she’s writing having bought into that narrative, but what is that narrative for us? And for me, that narrative starts with novels like H Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines that normalise a particular way of thinking about the creation of white wealth. But also the way that the quote unquote natives are portrayed. The character of Gagool is very animalistic. She’s a witch. She’s cruel. She’s evil. I remember reading that as a child, and being so frightened by this character, and then growing up and realising that actually he’s describing my foremothers.
The JRB: You’re being frightened of the wrong character.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yes. But he has made her so animalistic and so not human. And then I thought, that’s how black women are still seen. There’s many ways that that still persists. So if I’m going to be critiquing this, on some level yes, with the Gothic I want to go back to Jane Eyre, but if it’s also this representation of womanhood, I need to go back to things like King Solomon’s Mines.
The JRB: The way these books are referenced in the text, with words appearing in italics as the narrator is laying out her thoughts, makes it seem as if these books are speaking to her, through time. Did you feel these books were speaking to you, as you were writing?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Inspiration is a huge part of the novel. One of the biggest inspirations within the novel and for me is a wonderful poem by Lucille Clifton called ‘won’t you celebrate with me’.
The JRB: Which appears in the back of the book.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yeah, I love that poem. I remember for some years when I was working as a teacher, that poem hung above where I used to sit. I’d see it every day, and in so many ways, I think I was thinking through it without even realising it. So I had this idea that I wanted these things that inspire you, that start shaping the way you think, to be very much a part of the book. A lot of the phrases Lucille Clifton uses, she was telling a story that I think a lot of us connect to, especially as women, especially as black women, and a lot of that stayed with me. I wanted to show those kinds of influences. I mean, it’s a very intertextual novel, and it was important for me to show where those things come from. I think when things are that intertextual, what you think and what the other person thinks, it sort of melds together. So I wanted to show the coming together of different ideas.
The JRB: Did you reread the books?
Yeah. I mean I had to. [laughs] I mean, my honours thesis was on Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and the juxtaposition of the idea of the good woman and the bad woman, but I honestly wasn’t thinking about this novel as a continuation of that thought until I was way into writing, when I was like, oh yes, I’m still thinking along those lines. Many, many years later.
The JRB: Apart from the analytical side and the theoretical side, did you feel that you absorbed that voice, almost, in rereading them?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Hmm. Um, that’s interesting. I think maybe what I was most careful of was to have the narrator have her own voice, because that’s not my voice, and I wanted her voice to be clear. But I think when I was intertextualising, maybe that did come through. But I also wanted to be very true to the stories, and to the very particular historical moments I was writing about.
So, of course, there’s a lot of very colonial type language and thinking, and that’s definitely reflected in some of the things I was reading, but that also has to be there because it is how people expressed themselves in those times.
The JRB: The idea of running is sort of a central theme to this book, I think: running away from something, running towards something, and running with no direction. Can you talk a little bit about this idea of movement, as it relates to both escape and aspiration?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: The idea of forward movement as progress has become something that I find very problematic. And I think it’s because I bought into it for a very long time in my own life, in my own thinking. That as long as things are forward moving, this is progressive. So I liked the idea of having these people thinking that they were coming here or coming together as a form of progressing, right? The very narrative of progress is so built into the whole colonial narrative that it can’t make sense of itself without that. But I actually liked the idea of realising, maybe, that that forward movement is not necessarily leading anyway. This is something that I think the protagonist of the novel realises by examining her father’s life closely, because he is someone who’s constantly on the move but also very lost and directionless. There are moments in our own histories, both collectively and personally, where, you know, it looked like we were doing this, but actually, we were not moving forward. Maybe, you know, we were stuck or we were moving back, but we were not doing that forward progression.
The JRB: And the narrator’s mother, when she finds her calling it’s categorisation in the library, and she just becomes passionate about categorising, categorising. Getting everything into smaller and smaller categories, and more and more organised. But then you ask, what is the end result, what’s the point? It’s almost like a distraction.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yes, against the real stuff that’s happening. But in many ways, I love that character.
The JRB: She really cut me to the heart. Just because, you know, I don’t want to say you identify with her, because that’s really boring, but you end up really understanding her by the end.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: [laughs] Yeah. And I, you know, I love the archives. And it is a place where things get categorised in very particular ways. It’s the grey stuff that we bring into the archive that makes it do certain things, but the archive itself is very much about selection and categorising things in very particular ways. And so I think people who like the neatness of that, same with the people who like the gridded city, everything makes sense, everything leads to something, are missing out on the messiness of life. Because life is just that, and that’s what history is. And so you can’t make it neat. And yet we always try, and colonial history was very much about trying to make sure these things don’t meet, and yet that’s all it is, is these things that are not supposed to meet, meeting.
The JRB: When the narrator returns ‘home’, to the ‘Old Country’, she’s overwhelmed by the sense of decaying former glory, the bustling crowds, the mayhem. I loved your description of the City of Kings as ‘a city full of deadly splendour’. I feel the same way about Joburg. Was this sense of the city, this sense of place, important in contributing to the atmosphere you wanted to create?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yes. My understanding of the novel is that in many ways it’s the history of the City of Kings. It’s how it began and where it is now, and we’re using these characters to map it out. I wanted you to get a sense of all those moments, from the very beginning when the king is burning down the capital, when the colonial people come and build on the remains, when there are these locations, when this idea of very straight roads or streets make the heart of the city. I wanted all those things to be part of how you experience the city. And then also how the city is today—those grids are still there, but there’s chaos everywhere and it’s not containable, and people are making a space for themselves and in many ways are finding other reasons for the city to exist. I think when we think of the city it’s where people go to work. But in a country that has such little employment, why is the city so busy? Well, it’s because people are employing themselves. So it’s a whole other way of relating to that space.
The JRB: What’s also interesting is the idea of leaving the buildings up, and reusing them in a different way. Reclaiming those spaces.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yes. I’m happy that some of that is happening. But I also worry sometimes, because of my love of history, that some of that history is not known, and I think there’s a lot of pride to be had in that history. For me, Bulawayo is a city of people coming together to build the city. So it’s a very cosmopolitan space. Because we received the city for a very long time as a white people’s place, there’s a way people feel disconnected from it. But your great grandfathers were the ones building the various buildings that you’re looking at. They were the labour. And there’s pride to be had in that. So maybe when you’re there, have that connection to it. Realise that this is actually something that was actively created by people who then also actively created you. I think that connection is missing sometimes because we were not allowed to have that sense of ownership as black people, or people who are not white, of the city. Indian and Coloured people had to live in a very particular place in the city, for example. That segregation led to a very interesting connection to the city, but this is our city, and we should have that sense of communal pride.
The JRB: The book plays with the idea of racial classification, with characters at times having areas of their bodies turning lighter, or darker. And through her encounter with a sustaining new acquaintance, Daisy, the narrator realises ‘where once Everything was brightness, or dark now I understand that there’s light in the darkness and darkness in the light.’ It seems to me that what this book is railing against is order, patriarchal order, racial classification, hegemony—what you describe as ‘something invisible’ invented by men from ‘over the land and across the waters’—and that humans are more messy, more fluid, and it is through that changeability that we can find happiness, and a home. Would you agree?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: That’s what I love about looking at the history we’ve created, it is messy, it is chaotic. With all the attempts to make it otherwise actually what made the past the past was that it was just people not following the rules that had been put in place. I mean, if the rules had been followed, there wouldn’t have been women in the city, there would not have been the creation of the Coloured races, as it came to be known, there would not have been the creation of a middle class, there’s a lot of things that just were not supposed to happen. It’s people saying, oh, I see you’ve created this law, but I’m still going to do what I want. And I think when we look only at the laws that were in place, we miss the people’s reaction to that. This is why governments and power are afraid of people, because people are very contradictory and very difficult to confine and very difficult to define and they can do anything. I think the reason why, in this part of the world, apartheid and segregation became so violent is because people were told to stay within their boxes and they didn’t necessarily want to.
But really, we can talk about the violence of apartheid, but what actually made the history was the messiness, was the chaos. Was people. That’s what creates the reality. Not necessarily following the rules, but most definitely breaking them.
The JRB: An idea I think related to that is the idea of building things. As Evan shows, when he tells the narrator about how his great-grandfather built the National Gallery, in a city he was not allowed to live in or take his grandson into, and even as they were being told to leave the ‘White Man’s Town’ the fact of that building showed that ‘the city belonged to him as much as it belonged to anyone else … As much as it belongs to me.’ It is through what we build, and I think this book shows that this does not have to be made of concrete, that we make a space for ourselves to belong in the world.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: In many ways the novel is also talking about how certain moments in history tend to write people out of history. And it’s important for us to understand that we’re all contributing, we’re all building towards something. One of the things that makes me particularly unhappy with the way Zimbabwe has dealt with its race issue is that it has invisibilized—we still call them Coloured people—Coloured people. They’re silenced, they don’t have any political agency. And I think people would rather pretend that they don’t exist, because they don’t want to have to face the history of how they came to exist. In many ways I see parallels with the United States, and a lot of that violence, for me, stems from knowing that when someone has your last name and is black, and you’re white, you might share an ancestor. And the reason why you have that last name is something violent. So you’re going to continue that violence to make sure that that kind of relation is erased. But it’s there, and I think we now need to start facing those uncomfortable sides of our histories.
The JRB: I think the narrator, and perhaps Elizabeth and Sethekeli, illustrate how what is built doesn’t have to be physical, or concrete. They can be imaginative or visionary ways of being. They’re such great characters, Sethekeli especially.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: I came across a lot of Sethekelis when I was reading archival sources. And I think a lot of us women who exist in the country don’t know that such women existed. Or if we know that they existed, we receive them with a very negative narrative that says, oh, they were loose women or they were prostitutes. That power that they had is totally taken away from them. And I think that is, well, more than problematic, and it’s something we need to revisit. We need to be very critical about how certain women were portrayed and continue to be thought about. Because again, we know that powerful women and women who are challenging anything are always considered very threatening, so history doesn’t want to remember them at all.
The JRB: Especially when they’re operating outside of the neat grid.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yeah. That’s also the beauty of it. You know, some people say the wonderful thing about the British colonials is that they wrote down everything. So when you’re in the archives, this is where you meet Sethekeli, because she’s broken some kind of law. And the colonial writer is like, oh, this is just wrong. But you, as a person reading today, you’re like, oh my gosh, she did what? It makes history so much more interesting, because obviously, it’s not just this force that was landed on people. People constantly were fighting it and negotiating with it from the very beginning. So that’s where you see that, and that’s where the Sethekelis come alive.
The JRB: That’s fascinating. In the book, there is a character called HR Haggard—and here you preempted my question earlier—but King Solomon’s Mines is an interesting, or even shocking, inspirational novel to draw from. Your Haggard decides to write a novel, to avenge the deaths of his friends ‘by recording what he had not witnessed, but could re-imagine’. ‘Fiction became fact. Fact became fiction. The line was forever blurred.’ Do you feel this is part of what you do, as an African historical novelist? A kind of vengeance?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: [laughs] That’s lovely. Um, yes. I’ll just say yes, because I like the idea that what I’m doing is a kind of vengeance. Yeah, we have to be confrontational about the past. We have to learn from it, but also challenge some of what we’ve received as knowledge and truth. I’m not comfortable with just letting the past be the past, because I think there’s so much to learn from it. The adage is that if you don’t learn from it, you’re just going to repeat it, and I think unfortunately we’re living through a period where we’re repeating it, we’re repeating a lot of things. For instance, I think if a lot of women who work at the market in Zimbabwe right now understood that they were continuing a tradition of defiance that started at the very beginning of the colonial era, they would have a very different sense of what they were doing.
The JRB: And a different sense of themselves.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yes. So it’s knowing those things. Instead of saying, oh, every generation creates these problematic women, well, maybe the system itself is problematic and that’s why these women are always there and why they have this long history of always challenging the situation.
The JRB: At one point George asks Ezekiel ‘How did you find the world?’, and he replies ‘Not the same as it is in books’. And Maria says ‘Very little out there is like how it is in books.’ As a writer interested in postcolonial, or post-postcolonial, places and stories, does this resonate with what you see as your literary project? For me, your books show a reflected reality, but also a different imagined existence.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: In some ways, living in Bulawayo I’m always aware of what could have been. So I’m always writing both what is and what could have been, or what was and what could have been. Because the potential for something better has always been there. We just never realised it. And I don’t know that we ever will, because we’ve never created the idea of a nation, so maybe we just never will. But I think it’s something to think about. When we read, there’s so much possibility, and then the reality of things is always a bit of a disappointment. But I think if we can imagine it, then we can achieve it. We seem to be able to do that with horrible things, so we should be able to do that with things that are good too.
The JRB: So, ultimately, The Creation of Half-Broken People is about creating new kinds of families, new ways of being, it’s about cutting oneself off from the poison of the past while honouring and remembering those who came before us. Do you think that is possible?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: I think it is possible to reimagine or imagine something better for ourselves. I think it’s important. And it’s possible to use the past to do that. For me, the tragic thing is that history has always been owned by those in power. So what we receive as history—and this happens everywhere in the world—is already a narrative that is very curated. And I think our true empowerment comes from engaging with that history on our own terms ourselves, and taking what we want from it. And I think that’s a journey that, like you were saying, is just not built into our education systems, for obvious reasons. But it is something that I think if we did, could help people heal, in many different ways, traumas that some of them are not even aware that they have had, you know, historically or even up to today. And part of this bigger project is to show that this moment is very much like this other moment, is very much like this other moment. If we focus too myopically on a particular moment in our history, we lose sight of the fact that these things repeat. So maybe it’s not to question the person in power but to question the type of power itself, or to question the very systems that we have put in place. There’s a way in which we reduce things to people to make it easier, but a person is a person, a system is a whole other thing. And we ourselves are so imbricated in systems that we don’t know how to disentangle them. But we have to start trying to do some of that work.
The JRB: It’s interesting to undertake that as a writing project because you still want people to enjoy your books. And despite the sense of unease and generational trauma, I found this to be an immensely hopeful book. Would you agree with that, and was that important to you?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: I think, like I said, because I’m always thinking about what could have been and what could be, I don’t want to use my imagination to be like, oh, that was horrible, I don’t want us to think about that. I wanted to use my imagination to say, yeah, it was horrible, but look what could also have been possible, right? And that doesn’t mean we can’t achieve it now. I think that’s where most of the hope in my novels comes from. I mean, there’s no denying that what happened in this part of the world was just terrible and horrible and horrific. It doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. It doesn’t mean we always have to relate to each other that way. And I know this sounds idealistic and too optimistic, but I think if we do even a little bit of this work, we will be much better. And leave a better legacy for those who come after. Because there’s no untangling what has already happened, it’s already happened. So what we need to do is figure out how to move on with it.
The JRB: Fiction is a really interesting way to tackle these ideas, because you can have the history, especially with historical fiction, but then you also imagine a new way of being, which is a really cool juxtaposition.
This was one of my extra questions that I wasn’t going to ask, but at one point in the novel, Elizabeth is baking, or believes herself to be baking, a birthday cake. I found this brief interlude very funny, as we’re informed that ‘As usual, she followed the recipe religiously’, before she proceeds to do exactly as she pleases, and her ineptitude and headstrong attitude towards instructions are very amusing. Was this a knowing commentary on a woman’s place being in the kitchen? Or simply a bit of fun? Is it important for you to have fun?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yeah, I think I like having fun. I think I’m always finding moments to do that. But also there’s this notion that in this particular moment in history, women just knew how to do this, they were so domesticated and they just followed recipes and cakes came out and they were all fluffy and wonderful. I don’t think that was every woman. I had the very anti-domestication thing going on in the novel because I think that’s also a way of narrowing our own narratives about ourselves, you know, you’re mothers and wives and this is why you were happy and this is how we know you. But what if you were not good at being a mother or wife, what does that mean?
The JRB: Or what if you didn’t find it interesting?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yeah. What if you didn’t want to do it? And there were so many women who were like that. There’s a lot of work for women to do for themselves, I think, through history and connecting to the people who came before them, beyond certain narratives that were given of them.
The JRB: Finally, I’d like to ask what you’re working on next. Will this turn out to be a trilogy in five parts? Have you finally said goodbye to Emil Coetzee? He pops up in the most unexpected places. The world you’ve created must be continuing in your new work …
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: I’ll say this. I’m not really sure what the fifth book is at the moment.
The JRB: Oh, interesting.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: I am very sure, though, that it’s all still part of an interconnected series, because that’s what I really want to explore. I want to explore a lot about the world from this ‘small place’, which is the City of Kings. I know that in my mind, when I started, Vida de Villiers was a character that was going to appear in every novel in some way. Even in this one, he appears—for a very brief moment he’s there. I like when characters come in and out. I don’t know that we’ve seen the last of Emil, I don’t think so. I mean, I have no idea what the next novel is going to be, but I do want it to definitely connect and I want it to bring back some of the characters that have come before.
The JRB: That’s very interesting to me. Because a question that I skipped over was about how when we spoke about The Theory of Flight back in 2019, you said writing it had taken ‘a long time’ several years in fact, but at the time you revealed that it had just taken you six weeks to get the first draft of The History of Man on paper. So are you writing different things, or have you plotted out the next novel?
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: I was advised, very wisely, before I started trying to complete this, to take a break.
The JRB; You’ve been quite prolific.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yeah. The Theory of Flight came out in 2018, six years later I have four books, you know. So it’s been a lot. And I do want to take a moment to think about what direction I want to go in. I know that genre wise it’s going to be something totally different. I know that. I know it’s still going to be City of Kings. I know that. But I’m not really sure. I mean, I have some ideas, but they’re just ideas at the moment, and there’s quite a few of them.
The JRB: Well, you’ve won all the awards in that time. So, there’s nothing left to do.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: [laughs] I can retire and go and live on a farm.
The JRB: It’s been so wonderful to watch your career climb, from meeting you when you’d just written the first book.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Yeah. It’s been an amazing six years. A lot of it totally unexpected. I remember when Theory came out, you know, your first book comes out, you’re just like, will anyone read it? And then it’s gone on to do some very amazing things.
- Jennifer Malec is the Editor. Follow her on X or Instagram.
