The surreal and subtle intrigue South African writer Mary Watson.
In exploring those qualities in her fiction, she gives a fresh perspective on the brutality of apartheid.
Watson, who this week was named the latest winner of the Caine Prize for African writing, tries not to write about politics in an obvious way.
“I think there’s a danger of being false, to talk about it (apartheid) overtly,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press.
In her prize-winning short story, “Jungfrau,” politics are woven into the story of a complicated family: a distant father, a mother who becomes involved in the lives of the underprivileged children she teaches, an aunt who throws everyone off balance, mesmerizing the young narrator with a sexuality the child only half understands – and half fears.
The aunt, in the eyes of the schoolgirl narrator, “would smile her skew smile, pretending to love you with her slitted eyes, and the charm would ooze out like fog from a sewer and grab you and sink into your heart and lungs,” Watson writes.
Celebrated South African writer Andre Brink, who advised Watson when she was a student, called her Caine Prize victory “just the beginning of a very brilliant career.”
Watson said she has learned much from Brink, author of “A Dry White Season,” and other South African writers, including Nobelists Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. And she said her nation’s growing self-assurance in the post-apartheid era has been accompanied by a flowering of new writing talent.
“You really get the feeling there’s a new generation of writers emerging,” she said.
The quiet-spoken, dark-eyed Watson was the seventh winner of the prestigious $18,000 Caine Prize. Four other writers had been shortlisted for this year’s Caine Prize: U.S.-based Nigerian Sefi Atta, South African Darrel Bristow-Bovey, Kenyan Muthoni Garland and Moroccan Laila Lalami.
Watson’s winning story “does what a short story should do, by leaving spaces around the narrative in which readers can enter again and again,” Nana Wilson-Tagoe, an expert on African literature at the University of London and chair of the Caine judges panel, said in announcing the award Monday at a ceremony in nearby Oxford.
The seeming innocence of the young narrator helps draw in the reader.
Watson said when she chose to write from a child’s point of view, she initially wanted to parody other work in which she thought authors were using children as narrators “as an excuse to be lazy.” But as she wrote, she realized she had stumbled on something that was more than an exercise.
