Mother/Land Q&A ____________

Book description:

An apparition of his deceased mother appears to law professor Salim Rahmat in New York on the day that violent protests erupt in Cape Town. Salim’s mother Sawligha comes to foretell of a revelation, an “invisible stain” for him to clean.

The news itself—that Salim’s birth was the product of his mother’s illicit affair with a white politician in 1960s South Africa—comes from a newly found half-sister, Bertha. Yet more disorder follows when Bertha reveals that their brother is dying of cancer, and that Salim’s bone marrow may be the only hope of saving

him.

How can one secret alter—or even redeem—a life? How strong are familial bonds across distances and generations? And how do the struggles of another era echo those of today? As Salim, now a husband and father, wrestles with these questions in the present, Sawligha’s forbidden love story unfolds in the past.

Set between New York and Cape Town—across eras spanning apartheid’s forced removals and the rise of Black Lives Matter—and moving through lives, deaths, and the liminal spaces between, Mother/Land is the story of family, and of the world we inherit from those that came before us.

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Author Bio: Faraaz Mahomed is a researcher in the field of mental health and human rights, based between New York and his native South Africa. His short stories and travel writing have appeared in Granta, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, the Sunday Times, and other publications. In 2016, he won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the African region with his story “The Pigeon”.

What is the meaning behind the title Mother/Land? Why separate “Mother” and “Land”?

I like the forward slash because it’s kind of an incision point as well as a signifier of the ways in which the same story could be told. There were some other titles I played with, but this sits nicely with me.

The story is told through three different narrators: Salim, Sawligha, and Aa’isha. What was your reasoning behind telling the story from these three very different perspectives?

Well, they have three very different viewpoints of the same events. We aren’t talking about slightly different perspectives, but radically alternative ways of engaging with reality. I think by the end I wanted Salim and Sawligha to be the storytellers and Aa’isha to be a provocateur, but that wasn’t the intention from the beginning.

The novel is mostly realist, but you bring in ghosts throughout. Why was the haunting element so important?

The novel is inherently about what it means to be ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ or ‘near’ or ‘far’. And it is inherently metaphysical in its nature. The ghosts are a bit of a device, but they’re also just ways of making things less planar and ruminative.

You draw a clear line between Rhodes Must Fall in Cape Town and Black Lives Matter in New York. For example, the novel opens with a bucket of feces thrown at the Rhodes statue, and Salim feels it from New York: “even thousands of miles away, I could feel the furrowed anger tossed at minted metal" (p. 9). What made you choose to put the American and South African experience side by side like this? 

I think me. Myself. I went to undergrad in South Africa and postgrad in the US. I was writing from the experience of how relevant Rhodes Must Fall is to the US and vice versa.

I’m curious about Nawaz, a minor character from Afghanistan who sells hot dogs near Columbia, but who sparks a profound thought for Salim. Salim reflects that in South Africa he's "Coloured," at Columbia he's a professor, but with Nawaz, "it didn't matter that I was a law professor and he a hot-dog/knish/pretzel-stand owner... In America, we were the same agglomerated brown man" (p. 14). What does Nawaz's character let you say about race? 

Nawaz is interesting. He’s a one-line character - but he says so much about the immigrant experience in America and the weirdness of identitarianism. I found his story mostly funny, to be honest, but I understand the fascination - I myself had a Nawaz when I lived in the US, and I still use the Starbucks name because racial agglomeration and fatigue are sometimes easier to just accept.

Salim is conceived from an affair between his mother, Sawligha, and Carl Lamprecht, a white apartheid politician. That affair sits at the heart of the novel, and blurs the line between personal and political, intimacy and violence. Why did you choose to center the novel on a secret act like this? 

It was a combination of things. To be honest, there was a lot of ‘market reading’ to see what would make a novel like this sell. But there was also a recognition that I needed to unpack enormous amounts of violence and intergenerational intrigue in a way that still captured itself in a story. I don’t think that’s unique.

The City Hall protest (p. 73-76), is told entirely through Aa’isha’s voice and syntax as a child. We also read “suss-pishus” instead of "suspicious” (p. 73), for example. What did that register let you do that an adult narrator couldn’t?

Mostly what I like about Aa’isha’s character is how nonsensical she finds the adults around her. She speaks of fear and of confusion, which are natural instincts, but she’s also just aghast at the absurdity she witnesses - I agree with her viewpoint.

Sulaiman calls Salim "My boy" (p. 111) despite knowing he isn't his biological son. What did you want that moment to do to the idea of fatherhood in the book?

It was not intended to land so heavily, but yes, there is a sense that Sulaiman’s devotion is authentic and paternal. I thought it would be just a paragraph that states this, but something about Sulaiman’s character has resonated - and has offered an avenue to a conversation about the idea of fatherhood, which is an intriguing path to follow. 

Why does Sawligha finally tell Carl the child is his (p. 120–123) in the middle of a heated argument about the Group Areas Act?

To hurt him, to make the final cut, to also state plainly that the apartheid plan (of complete separation) will ultimately fail. It serves multiple purposes, but we’ve all been in situations where we are acting out of hurt and out of passion in the final moments of a relationship - this combined all of those intentions

How much of your own family history shaped this novel?

My great-grandfather was forcibly removed from his property due to Group Areas. It actually, literally, killed him. He had a heart attack and passed. Since then, the children and the grandchildren have scattered around the world - it’s definitely been on my mind for a long time - what the remainder of that story is because, truthfully, I don’t know all of it. And I sense that while we have thrived in our own way, we carry some intergenerational identity formation from it. 

Nahya has her own history, separate from South Africa and America: her parents survived the Eritrea-Ethiopia border war. It's why Salim falls for her (p. 83). "it was when I saw that part of her—the part of her that had lost something and then learned to live with the loss... that I knew we'd crossed over to a lifetime together" (p. 83). What drew you to building their romance around that kind of recognition? 

It wasn’t really about the war. It was about something that Salim sees - which is more than just Nahya’s beauty. When we fall in love, I find it difficult to believe that we fall in love with the outer contents of a rather banal person. In fact, what’s really intriguing is the part that feels real, authentic. I think Salim is the type of character who sees that in trauma (which is its own problem), but that’s what's being expressed here.

Bertha and Jacques, Carl Lamprecht's two children, respond to their father's legacy in almost opposite ways. What did you want that contrast to reveal about the histories we inherit?

I didn’t experience their responses as ‘opposite’. But they are about as distant from their histories as I am from my great-grandfather. They are people with pasts and privileges that they seem to experience convoluted guilt and complex detachment. It does not feel to me at least that this is a preoccupation for them.

Salim confronts Carl Lamprecht's ghost near the end and asks Jacques, "How do we get rid of him?" (p. 198). Why does Salim reject his biological father even after death? 

I like the line that Carl appeared ‘as apart as apartheid had willed’. I like the sense that Salim has released himself from the responsibility of reconciliation and transcendence. I think it’s perfectly valid to simply ask whether Carl is deserving of more, and to accept that he is not.

The novel ends with Aa'isha revealing a secret she kept from her own mother: she can see ghosts too (p. 226–227). Why close the book on that note? 

Aa’isha, like her cohort of similarly aged young people, is really much wiser than she’s given credit for. I think she’s growing up: into family and magic and surrealism, but also into mendacity and prejudice. It’s not about the secret at all - it’s about how the experience of growing up lacerates, and what she’s seeing as it happens. I ended on that note because I really think it is the next ‘big’ question.

You’re a researcher in mental health and human rights, based between New York and South Africa. Did your work and travels inform this story at all?

My travels certainly. I travel between South Africa and New York often, and there’s much to reflect on in these excursions. In my work, I spend a great deal of time with academics (like Salim is) and academia, and that has informed the story significantly. In the human rights world, there is continuous and rabid frustration about how the world is not changing, and I think we can see that in the experiences of all the characters. And in my mental health work, my aim is often to engage with subjects of self-compassion, reflection, ideation and narrative work. I experience Salim’s and Sawligha’s stories as narratively-heavy, and I experience Aa’isha’s as a kind of antidote, because she has had limited exposure to the artifice that all these frameworks and ways of thinking are ingrained into us. As I said before, she really is the wisest character. 

What do you hope stays with readers – South African, American, and everyone else – after they finish the book?