Day # 8 on the blog tour–a review of This Thing Called the Future on Books Complete Me.
In today’s blog tour over at Once Upon a Twilight, I talk South Africa, writing psycho-thrillers and music to match my books.
This Thing Called the Future by J.L. Powers
Set in an impoverished South African shantytown where post-Apartheid freedom is overshadowed by rampant AIDS and intractable poverty, this novel takes a loving, clear-eyed look at the clash of old and new through the experience of one appealing teenager. Khosi, 14, lives in an all-female household with her sister, Zi, and frail grandmother, Gogo, subsisting on Gogo’s pension and Mama’s salary as a teacher in the city (she comes home on weekends). Everyone in Khosi’s world is poor. Where the struggle to survive is all-consuming, family loyalty trumps community. Clashes between Zulu customs and contemporary values further erode cultural ties and divide families. A scholarship student, Khosi loves science, but getting to school means dodging gangs and rapists hunting AIDS-free virgins. After a witch curses Khosi’s family and Mama falls ill, Khosi and Gogo seek aid from a traditional Zulu healer, which Mama dismisses as superstition while fear and poverty keep her from accessing modern medicine. As stresses mount, Khosi’s ancestors speak, offering her guidance. Supported by them, her family and classmate Little Man, Khosi vows to create a better future by synthesizing old and new ways, yet the obstacles she faces—some inherited, others newly acquired—are staggering. A compassionate and moving window on a harsh world. (glossary of Zulu words) (Paranormal fiction. 12 & up)
Read an interview with J.L. Powers at Through the Tollbooth!
Q: What about this novel makes you most proud?
There is absolutely nothing on the market like it! It is young adult magical realism, set in a poverty-stricken township of South Africa. It is a love story but it also deals with the clash between science and traditional medicine in Africa, and it highlights and focuses on the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the part of the world with the highest rate of HIV infections—the heart of the epidemic.
I feed my dogs first thing each morning, otherwise, life would be miserable for all of us. Then I try–*try* being the operative word here—to make them wait until 4:30 before I feed them again.
Around 3:30, they start pushing their noses into my hands to interrupt my typing. “C’mon, we’re hungry!” Petting doesn’t satiate their voracious appetite. Telling them, “It’s not time yet,” doesn’t work either (no matter how exasperated I feel!). Their noses get ever more insistent. “C’mon, Jessica, we are not playin’ around!”
That’s a little bit how I feel as I wait for my second novel, This Thing Called the Future, to be released on May 1. I feel like I’ve been waiting a looooooooong time for this one to come out!
I started writing This Thing Called the Future in the summer of 2007, just after my first y.a. novel, The Confessional, was released. I’d taken a leave of absence from my Ph.D. program in African History at Stanford to promote the book and I was already thinking I wouldn’t go back. The scariest thing about leaving the Ph.D. program was the realization that it meant saying goodbye to my easy access to South Africa. Stanford was paying for my Zulu language study…summer travel…etc. But I was miserable trying to be both an academic and a writer and I knew I had to make a choice.
So I left the Ph.D. program and I started writing this book. It was a way of feeding my voracious appetite for all things South African. And it was one of those books you feel like you *have* to write, anyway. I’d felt that way ever since the day my two Zulu sisters—thirteen and fourteen years old—crawled onto my bed one night before I went to sleep and giggled out stories of sugar daddies and secret boyfriends, men in their thirties.
“How do you meet these men?” I asked. All I’d ever seen was two very responsible young women, largely in charge of the household because Mama worked in another city as a teacher and only came home on the weekends. Gogo, the grandmother, was the adult in charge but she was tired and slow, with weak knees and swollen ankles.
They eyed each other. Then the13-year-old volunteered, “We sneak out to go to parities sometimes.”
“We are the V.I.P.’s at those parties,” my 14-year-old sister said.
“Does Gogo know?”
“No! Well…She caught me kissing my boyfriend at church last Sunday,” the 13-year-old said. “So I’m not allowed to go to church by myself anymore.”
“Are you guys, like, protecting yourselves?” This was my vague question, unsure how, exactly, to broach the topic of condoms or abstinence with girls so young, possibly having sex with men so old. And I was a guest in their home. I was pretty sure Gogo wouldn’t be pleased if I took the liberty to provide sex education, American-style.
Yet I was worried. The official HIV-positive rate is 30% among Zulu women ages 15-35. (Not to mention, it’s never good when a 13-year-old is dating a man in his 30s, certainly a case for the police in the U.S.)
So that sparked the novel I started to write in the summer of 2007. What would it be like, I asked myself, to be 14 and to start liking the opposite sex when HIV is running rampant in the community and people you know—close people, members of your family—are dying? Would you become afraid of love? What would your attitude towards sex be? What would you think of the older men seeking your attention? Would you find it flattering or scary?
Meanwhile, I was following this sexy little thread of research I’d uncovered—news reports about the killings of suspected witches all over South Africa in the late 90s and early 2000s. Why were so many people killing witches? Were these so-called witches actually practicing witchcraft or were they entirely innocent? And what did witchcraft mean in South Africa anyway, especially to this imagined young woman of 14 years old? Scholar Adam Ashforth described modern South Africans as experiencing a great deal of “spiritual insecurity” and the killings of suspected witches is only one example of it.
I soon discovered that practicing witchcraft in an African context looks only a little different than the western concept of a woman chanting hexes over a cauldron at midnight in a deserted forest. A Zulu who practices witchcraft is actually trying to send illness or death to a neighbor or family member. Usually, they purchase a poison or potion, which they then sprinkle in somebody’s yard or give to them in their food. The curse can bring all sorts of bad luck and/or illness. People told me that many of these illnesses mimic Western diseases—hypertension, for example, or arthritis, or some kind of STD—but they can’t be cured with Western medicine. That is how you know it is witchcraft.
In the context of HIV-AIDS, when enormous numbers of young people are dropping dead from terrible diseases, the temptation to attribute it to witchcraft is enormous. But most South Africans understand HIV as a virus, communicated through the transmission of blood or bodily fluids. Writer Jonny Steinberg has suggested that Africans have readily accepted the biological explanation; to believe it is caused by witchcraft is too terrible for most people to contemplate. The epidemic is so widespread that if it was witchcraft, it would mean possibly hundreds of thousands of neighbors and family members engaging in wholesale murder—and the insecurity that would engender would be too terrible to imagine.
I was curious to explore all these threads—the young woman falling in love, surrounded by people dying of AIDS, living in a community experiencing great spiritual insecurity. And it took me years to layer it all into one cohesive novel, one that depicts the realistic and magical and loving and scary world that a young urban Zulu girl occupies in 2011.
Here it is….3 ½ years later, on the cusp of being released to the reading public and my friends and my family. It’s a nerve-racking and exciting business.
I can’t wait until May 1 when it’s available. Which is why I’ll be releasing an excerpt next month on my website, a little snack of what’s to come.
Back to the dogs: Yesterday, I fed them at 3:45. When they started bugging me, I thought, “What the hell? Why make ‘em wait when they don’t have to?”
Advance review copies of This Thing Called the Future went out today and my publisher sent me a link to a YouTube video of Urban Dance Squad singing “Prayer for my Demo” at a 1990 concert….
Here it is: Urban Dance Squad-\”Prayer for my Demo\”
Finally (!), Robert Mugabe’s massacre of tens of thousands of innocent Ndebeles in the early 1980s has been named a genocide. It angers me that it took 30 years to do it, while the murders of a couple dozen white farmers in Zimbabwe have horrified the world and been plastered all over the news for the past decade. Think Euopean and American racism didn’t play a role in the discrepancy? Think again. I’m grateful, of course, that people cared enough about those 20+ white farmers to pay attention, at last, to what was going on in Zimbabwe, but extremely frustrated that the world turned its back at the open pits of thousands of rotting bodies outside Bulawayo for three decades. I hope this means that somebody, somewhere, can move forward and prosecute the perpetrators (including Mubage) but….time will tell.
But everytime I think about what’s going on in Zimbabwe, and I get frustrated, I remember a conversation I had with an environmental planner, Simon, who lives in Zimbabwe and works there, and in Mozambique, and in South Africa. When I mentioned how afraid South Africans were of “going the way of Zimbabwe,” he said, “They would be so lucky.” I asked him what he meant. He said that Zimbabweans have figured out they can’t rely on the government (or, for that matter, the world) for anything. And so they are relying on each other, on common, everyday citizens. The average Zimbabwean isn’t languishing by the roadside, waiting for the government to right itself and fix everything. No. They’re taking matters into their own hands, he said, and building community with the people around them.
And in another depressing news article, Bill Gates–who is, according to the article, the world’s largest single donor for combating HIV-AIDS in Africa–has pointed out that funding dollars are insufficient to provide ARVs for all the HIV-positive folks in southern African. South Africa now has close to a million people on ARVs, but needs funding for up to three times that–and that money simply doesn’t exist. ““We have to be honest with ourselves,” says Gates. “We don’t have the money to treat our way out of this epidemic. Even as we continue to advocate for more funding, we need to make sure we’re getting the most benefit from each dollar of funding and every ounce of effort.”
The catalog copy from my forthcoming book, This Thing Called the Future by J.L. Powers
South Africa & AIDS. Fourteen-year-old Khosi yearns for this thing called the future. Does she want too much?
Khosi lives with her beloved grandmother—Gogo—her little sister Zi and her weekend mother in a matchbox house on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. In that shantytown, it seems like somebody is dying all the time. Billboards everywhere warn of the disease of the day. Her Gogo goes to a traditional healer when there is trouble, but her mother, who works in another city and is wasting away before their eyes, refuses to go even to the doctor. She is afraid and Khosi doesn’t know what it is that makes the blood come up from her choking lungs. Witchcraft? A curse? AIDS? Can Khosi take her to the doctor? Gogo asks. No, says Mama, Khosi must stay in school. Only education will save Khosi and Zi from the poverty and ignorance of the old Zulu ways.
School, though, is not bad. There is a boy her own age there, Little Man Ncobo, and she loves the color of his skin, so much darker than her own, and his blue-black lips, but he mocks her when a witches’ curse, her mother’s wasting sorrow and a neighbor’s accusations send her and Gogo scrambling off to the sangoma’s hut in search of a healing potion.
J.L. Powers holds master’s degrees in African History from State University of New York-Albany and Stanford. She won a Fulbright-Hayes to study Zulu in South Africa, and served as a visiting scholar in Stanford’s African Studies Department. This is her second novel for young adults.
Black women in Atlanta are up in arms over controversial 
billboards pointing out that black women have abortions in disproportionate numbers. There’s an interesting newsvideo by ABC that talked to people from both sides of the debate, both sides bringing up salient points. The group behind the billboards is an organization called The Endangered Species Project.
