Hauntings

Lindiwe Nkutha

In March of 2021 I was invited to the Time of the Writer’s Literary Festival, one of the biggest literary festivals in South Africa. The invitation was to join a panel of writers who would speak about the concept of hauntings. Niq Mhlongo, one of South Africa’s renowned authors had recently released an anthology of short stories titled ‘Hauntings.’ Some of the writers in the panel were contributors to the anthology, so I felt they were best placed to talk not just about the concept in generalized terms, but also about how the stories they had contributed to the anthology directly addressed the concept of hauntings. Being an outlier in the panel, in that I wasn’t a contributor, and now finding myself in the company of these contributors, and as such had an intimate relationship with the book and the experience of its making, I wasn’t sure if I had much to contribute to the conversation. At this thought I wondered if there were ways in which I could speak about hauntings outside the experience of the anthology. Finding myself wanting in terms of the experience with the anthology I knew I would have to find more universal ways to effectively participate in the conversation, without sidetracking the other writer’s experiences and integrate, in my thinking, ways in which hauntings also appeared in my own writing. It was then I began to think about my own process as a short story writer and some of the ways I thought about hauntings. This invitation and my participation with the panel would prove seminal in the ways in which I explore the relationship between hauntings and the short story in this essay.

My initial thought, and my impression when reading the anthology ‘Hauntings’ was that when most people think about hauntings, they usually think of the idea in the negative sense. As in one haunted by ghouls, or evil spirits, or sadness or a malady. The lesser explored form of hauntings, it occurred to me, was the idea of hauntings as positive sensation. As in one haunted by a melody, or the memory of a beautiful image that one cannot shake off, or a sudden rupture in memory that throws up such positive feelings.  It’s almost as if the person was living them all over again. This has resonances with a concept in literature that has been described as the madeleine moment, or the Proust effect, concerning the ability of memory to be invoked involuntarily when it had been previously blocked. This is possibly, in literature the most pleasurable way to think about hauntings. In this regard for instance a person can be haunted, in their own mind, by an upsurge of pleasure that refuses to leave their mind. Examples of this can include for instance if you have been having a long text conversation with a friend or a lover, and you go back to those texts again and again and relive the moments of shared intimacies in what they said, that you found deeply poignant and evocative, so much so that it lifts your mood throughout the day, as if the conversation just happened.

Although the concept of haunting in the way it is understood by the ordinary person is very compelling, it is the latter understanding of hauntings that I find myself drawn to in my own writing. I, of course, like most writers, am fascinated by the various ways in which characters can be haunted. I’m interested in the big, or public hauntings that besiege people, such as effects of war or catastrophic loss that is experienced by groups of people. In South Africa in particular, the aftereffects of Apartheid, which although officially ‘over,’ on paper, continues, in the form of poverty, unemployment, collapsing infrastructure that was not designed for most of the population. These phenomena preoccupy the minds of most ‘post-apartheid’ writers. Then there are the small or what I like to think of as private hauntings. The kinds of hauntings that affect individuals. The Zulu people of South Africa, have a word for these – umzwangedwa. A word that loosely translates to a kind of melancholy so visceral that only the person experiencing it and no one else can truly and really make any meaning out of it. Amongst some of the feelings that can be fit into the category of umzwangedwa relate to heartbreak, betrayal, sadness, loneliness, feelings of inadequacy or blind rage, to aging and death. It is to the nexus of the positive hauntings and these private haunting that I am wont to turn my attention when I write. When I write I am gripped by the workings of the interior worlds of the characters I bring to life. I am immensely interested in the states of minds that my characters inhabit when these two forces brush up against each other.

In my story ‘Rock’ the narrator, a young girl who is wheelchair bound, paints vivid and rich pictures of her interior world, that she can access because she has limited access to the exterior world due to her immobility. She makes commentary not only of her ‘condition’ but also the sudden change in her mother’s disposition when her long lost lover, whose absence had long haunted her mother, suddenly reappears to change not only her mother’s mood, but also, in a manner of speaking, shift the energies in their household.  In yet another story of mine ‘The Black Widow’, we encounter OudiePinkies: a man in the late stages of his life, who had spent most his life haunted by a breakup with a lover during his midlife. It is when he receives a letter from his lover’s current lover that OudiePinkies experiences his own madeleine moment. When he reads the letter he experiences a rupture of memory, which though old, feels as though he is experiencing something that has just happened.

There are also what I like to think of as permanent hauntings, the kind that, once they have taken hold of a person, forever remain with them and alter the course of their lives. This is motivated by the experience of my mother’s passing on in 2020 after a long illness.  I felt rapt by a sense of having been uprooted from the world. It felt like everything I knew and understood suddenly did not make sense anymore. All the structures that held up my life – my family my, my friends, my work, and everything that I held dear did not seem to make sense any longer. It felt as if the ‘falling of the tree’ that she was, left this gaping hole in my being that could only repair itself over time. For a while there it felt like no amount of therapy, no amount of sleep, or exercise, or walking, or meditation, or journaling could help. Until I remembered the words of a wise friend who, during another crisis moment in my life opined, ‘don’t worry too much, one day what you are going through will make for great literature.’ And she was right, because with some distance from the passing of my mother, I find that I am in a position now, to harvest some of the experiences I went through to develop a series of short stories that examine the haunting of loss more closely.

Although I have experimented with long form writing, I am convinced that the short story is possibly the best vehicle to succinctly explore the idea of hauntings. The briefness of the form, and the pithiness of the distance between the beginning and the end to my mind makes it safe enough to take a deep dive and then come out before it drags one into a kind of morass. This is in a sense the heeding of Nietzsche’s admonition about ‘staring into the abyss’ for too long. The short story writer when they sit down to write has several challenges set before them. First, they must begin in a way that captures the reader’s attention. Then they must develop a captivating and plausible middle that is enthralling, that transports the reader to a place – big or small, internal, or external, that leads them to an end that allows them to exit the story with a level of satisfaction. In ways that does not leave the reader feeling shortchanged. This writer must be dexterous in how they hold on to the reigns of the story they are telling. They must let it gallop at the right moments and call it to restraint at the correct ones. They must be terse, and ensure that every word, every phrase, every sentence is in the service of the story. The short story writer has very little time to wander aimlessly before they get to where they need to get to. They are not in a rush to get there either. They are just aware of the limited amount of time they have to tell the story, so they are constantly aware of how wisely they must use it.

Also historically, specifically during the ninetieth and early twentieth 19th century, the short story was seen as the preserve of writers who did not have a lot of time on their hands to write.  Some of Kafka’s best writings, for instance, written during this time were either short stories or novellas, because he spent his time juggling a full-time job as a lawyer in an insurance company, and wrote only when he could. Over time of course he commuted his working hours to half a day, so he could commit more time to writing, thus opening himself up to the ability to write more longer form texts.

In South Africa too, we see that the proliferation of literature in the 1950’s and 1960’s come to us in the medium of the short story. The Drum era particularly, does not only afford its journalists the space to write and publish current affairs, and lifestyle pieces but begins to provide them space to publish their literary works. There is an emergency there. To write the present, as it unfolds, but also to capture it from a place of imagination. This era gives leading authors such as Lewis Nkosi, Bessie Head, Bloke Modisane, Nadine Gordimer and others, the opportunity to capture the zeitgeist. We have in this era writers who are also working people, writers who daily face the challenge of balancing their day jobs and their passion for writing – very much like I do, as a person with a day job. This challenge is also a kind of haunting in its own way. How this relates to me for example is that during my day job I would find myself suddenly visited by a character, a potential to fill a plot hole, or an idea for a rewrite which I might perhaps have been struggling with, that is rapidly coming into view. This happens mostly at times when I am least able to attend to the urge to be with my writing, which results (if I do not immediately have a notebook at hand) in the loss of all if not most of the ideas I could have seized had I had the time. In this case the process of writing itself if one does not live just as a writer, can become a kind of haunting.

The short story, because of its immediacy, because of its brevity, because of its lesser demands on plot development presents for me as the most the most expedient outlet to express the things that haunt me as a writer and lets me leave the exposition of hauntings in the hands of my characters.