Keridwyn Dovey

She was doing her PhD on his books when I was a little girl and was reading them when I was a newborn.

So Waiting for the Barbarians came out in 1980, the year I was born.

And that's when she first absolutely fell in love with his work and what it could represent.

So, yeah, I start off this book with that scene of her breastfeeding me at night while reading this incredibly violent and traumatic book.

I mean, it's just filled with rape and murder and the most horrific things happening and

And when I was writing the essay, I said to her, you know, did that not bother you when I was at your breast?

And she said, no, I was so engaged at an intellectual level.

My mind was on fire and I was making all these connections between the theory that he was drawing on and the symbols that he was using in his work to speak about the difficulties of writing as a white South African that I didn't even notice the violence.

Yeah, and I think for all of us as lovers of literature and books, we know what that feels like.

It's a kind of, yeah, it's a sort of erotic intellectual experience of losing yourself by diving into somebody else's mind.

Mm-hmm.

And it was a tricky thing in the book to write about the theory, the French theory that she was using.

So Roland Barthes' idea of the jouissance of reading, the bliss that is experienced when a reader is reading something in an active rather than a passive fashion.

Because I didn't want to sound like, you know, an idiot and poncy and speaking about theory.

But it was also really important to me to show that women in that time, in the 80s,

who were often left out of those conversations.

You know, it was French theory was the most sort of male dominated kind of, you know, these academics sparring with these, you know, really, you know, mostly totally not understandable to anybody else.

But a few women found their way to a place at that table.

And my mum was one of them.

And she'd had no background in theory.