Mslexia

Mslexia, the magazine for women who write | www.mslexia.co.uk

Interview

Gillian Slovo

talks to Danuta Kean

Issue 52 ◊ Dec/Jan/Feb 2011/12

A year ago Gillian Slovo received a letter. It was from a friend of her African National Congress activist parents (the journalist Ruth First and Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party), who had been incensed at Slovo’s challenging portrayal of Ruth and Joe in her 1997 memoir Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. In it Slovo had sought to piece together the real people behind the heroic image, and to expose the cost paid by both parents and their three children in the struggle to end apartheid.

‘She was very angry with me about the book when it came out and it affected our relationship for quite a while,’ Slovo recalls in the sparse sitting room of her West Hampstead flat. ‘But in the letter she said that she had reread it and felt she had been quite wrong to condemn me. She thought her strong feelings were more about herself and her own life, and that now she felt the book was a wonderful piece of work.’

The story is told in Slovo’s quiet, unassuming way, without triumphant self-justification. Despite arriving in London in 1964 – her mother was exiled from South Africa after a spell in prison – she retains the accent of her motherland. But her roots in the UK are deep. Currently in the process of getting divorced, she has a 26-year-old daughter and a stepson. ‘I feel myself now to be increasingly English because I have been here almost all my adult life and South Africa has changed so much I don’t know it as intimately as I did,’ she says.

Slovo answers my questions at length, at times meandering, as if tussling with the words to ensure she answers truthfully. Even the way she tells the story of the letter illustrates the author-turned-journalist-cum-playwright’s dogged commitment to honesty. ‘I do not believe that the truth is so dangerous,’ she says later of criticism that her memoir pandered to rightwing propaganda against her parents. ‘I really believe that truth is important, even if it is painful.’

An unflinching quest for answers permeates all Slovo’s work, including the five hard-boiled crime novels about detective Kate Baeier that kick-started her career. Although writing featured strongly in Slovo’s background – her mother was a noted journalist and her two sisters, Robyn and Shawn, are respectively a film producer and screenwriter – Gillian had planned to be a scientist. As she recalls it, her move into fiction was more by accident than design: she and a friend challenged each other to write a crime novel: the friend gave up; Slovo became hooked.

That she chose a genre based on the quest for truth is, she sees now, not surprising given the mysteries she spent her childhood trying to unlock. ‘I actually think my childhood was a bit like a detective novel.’ She smooths the fabric of her navy skirt then snaps at a piece of lint. There is an economy in her movements. She is not stiff, but nor is she entirely relaxed.

While overheard adult gossip sowed the seeds of storytelling in other writers, it was the conspiratorial silences of Ruth, Joe and their friends that drove Slovo. ‘I spent my childhood trying to work out, for self-preservation reasons, what my parents were up to. I think that was about eavesdropping and plotting; and I continued with writing crime because I liked writing.’

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