In Conversation

We spoke to Magogodi oaMphela Makhene about Innards, her stunning debut short story collection that explores the intimate details of everyday life in Soweto.

Interviewed by Zulaikhah Agoro.

ZA: I would love to start from the very beginning. How did you get interested in the world of languages and literature? When was the seed planted for you? What captured your interest at that stage?

MoM: The stories people carry —especially the stories that only come out in hushed tones and long pauses, if at all—have always fascinated me. I’d listen to adults speaking and pick up clues about our burning country and strange words that came up again and again: rape, exile, detention. This nosy business started very young. Writing and being good at it also came early. But I didn’t understand it as a gift until much, much later. I got serious about writing at 30.

ZA: I appreciate how this proves that there really isn’t a timeline to follow and everybody can find their own path. This also segues nicely into my next question, when did you go from writer to aspiring author? From being nominated for the Caine Prize in 2017 to releasing your debut collection, what did that journey look like for you?

MoM: I’m not sure there’s much of a distinction between writer and author, apart from the weight of a bound book in hand or what the ego craves to validate a sacred practice — which is its own reward. Sure, I went to writing school and got Innards published, but I didn’t think of myself as an aspiring anything. Always, always, I am first a writer— I’m most nourished by the practice of my craft.

Practically speaking, my personal recipe for publication included a nice and healthy heaping of depression, a daily dose of sentences that didn’t start with much ambition beyond self-medication and eventually, a small but strong serving of stories which I submitted, without much expectation, to grad schools. When Samantha Lan Chang called to invite me to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I thought it was a lousy prank. And then, the gift: two years stuck between America’s cornstalks, focusing my mind on the craft, community and devotion writing takes. I learned that every sentence can be a prayer. That every word can be its own song.

ZA: It seems you have always been enamored by the short story form. What does the short story mean to you? Who are some of your personal favorite short story writers?

MoM: I’m very interested in how the oral tradition continues, as literature, in the modern African experience. To me, listening to my late uncle animatedly describe what it was like to experience television for the first time—as a caddy for elite white golfers during apartheid, before TVs became widely available to black South Africa—that is a powerful form of short story. These are the inner lives I wanted to explore through writing Innards.

In Western tradition, I’m drawn to writers who make you feel you’ve just dropped into someone’s unfiltered mess, midstream. George Saunders comes to mind. Or the singular and angular drive in a story like A Good Man Is Hard to Find/Flanery O’Conor. Sidik Fofana’s The Tenants Downstairs is just stupid it’s so sublime. I fan girl HARD for that book. Junot Diaz’ Drown was seminal. He made me see myself as a writer. I could eat every sentence and feel full and fueled enough to imagine my own inner writing world. Always, always, his work STAYS with me.

ZA: I am updating my reading list right now! Now, let’s talk about the stories in Innards. They are beautiful, nuanced and poetic. What was the inspiration behind this collection? How did you choose the topics to write about? How did the stories come together?

MoM: Thank you—appreciate your reading the book!

Soweto, my world as a girl coming into life during apartheid South Africa, is the center spine of Innards. I wanted to make sense of the mind fuckery of what we’d lived through as a collective—at the granular level of body and being. And I wanted to explore that through our innermost thoughts, prayers and sins. Innards gets under the skin of human experience, outside the white gaze. I wanted to know who and what we are and were and may become, on our own terms, when we aren’t performing blackness.

ZA: That is so beautiful. You also run an advocacy organization called Love As A Kind of Cure. Can you talk a bit about your work there and how it relates to your fiction writing? How do you use art for activism?

MoM: The throughline between Love As A Kind of Cure and my writing life is a devotion to humanity. Yes, there’s the catalytic question of white supremacy, how do you untangle yourself from its tentacles when it’s endemic in the very air we breathe? When, as in my particular case, you’re born into a crime against your very humanity; which by the way, is how the UN categorized apartheid. Beyond that, there’s imagining and then being bold enough to embody liberation. A dangerous and audacious ambition that demands every fiber of soft muscle inside skin.

My company is about creating experiences that help people imagine and embody freedom. Through a talk, a workshop, an immersive experience or training course infused with art. My writing life, at its best, is practicing how to touch and taste freedom—because writing truth requires so much courage, compassion and humility that you become freer by becoming its disciple. There is no ego in creating a perfectly true sentence. Just as there can be no ego in creating and nurturing a culture where we’re all wildly and fully free.

ZA: That’s a beautiful answer, thank you. In your 2017 interview with Wasafiri, you mentioned some of your unconventional writing habits; writing on old receipts, penciling notes on walls. Has your writing routine changed since then? What does it look like now, and how do you balance it with your other work?

MoM: Lol! I’m laughing because I remember that woman and her midnight scratches on walls, holding onto an idea/dream/thought. I’m not that person today. Midnights are interrupted by baby scratches, from a child with his own unconventional (to us know-all grown ups, lol) habits. So yes, my practice has changed. I’ve slowed down.

Everyone told me that parenting, mothering specifically, would encroach on my writing. That it would compete in a winner takes all game of thrones against my child and I’d be forced to choose between the two. It’s important to be honest about what writing while living a full and demanding life in this black woman body requires.

Here’s the truth: Childcare in America is shit. That’s what’s killing women’s art. Mothering itself is a boon for writing. Especially if you’re daring enough to think outside the capitalist dictates of productivity; if you understand that slowing down can itself yield a miracle. Just think how pregnancy morphs time into a centuries-slow melting glacier. And then, BOOM, life!

ZA: Indeed, there is a pace for everything. Speaking of writing, what does the future look like for you as it relates to further books down the line? What are you working on now, if you can talk about it?

MoM: I’m writing. That’s the win for me—returning to a daily devotion, no matter how far I stray. And also, hitting the stacks like a fiend, studying my craft. More than that, expect a damn good book when I’m done. Yup! I’m woman enough to claim my superpowers.

ZA: Yes, love to hear it! I have one last question before I let you get back to work. If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring authors, what would it be? 

MoM: To write, write. People always wanna know if it’s long hand or word processor, if it’s early mornings or midnight oil. The truth is all that really doesn’t matter because it won’t get you a working manuscript. Only writing can do that. Writing is getting up, sitting down and doing the work. So simple yet so hard till you train your brain into habit, like any other muscle.

It’s easier than many people think to become an author. Thousands of books are published every year that don’t make a single tree proud. To publish, write something worthy of the precious life that became pulp to print your pomp and circumstance. I know, I know, I know…I sound all extra, but that’s the dead-ass truth. Stop wasting paper with lame ego-strokes just to see your name on a spine. Make art. I dare you.

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene is known for reaching into your heart cavity and expanding that space within the span of a single sentence—both on the stage and on the page.

An Iowa Writers’ Workshop trained writer, Magogodi’s fancy pants writing awards include the Caine Africa Prize, Hedgebrook & McDowell Fellowships; as well as the Rona Jaffe Writing Award & Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics.

Magogodi is a noted speaker, featured in The BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She’s spoken as a keynote at Georgetown University, Hedgebrook and Creative Mornings.

As Founder & CEO of Love As A Kind of Cure, Magogodi helps folks grow from comfort to courage in their everyday activism.

A proudly Soweto made soul, Magogodi speaks powerfully to themes of belonging and otherness; creativity, craft and writing from the margins; as well as reclaiming our worth beyond our work lives. She’s spoken at the United Nations, MercyCorp, The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and at companies like Unilever, Mastercard and MetLife.

You can read an excerpt from Innards here