Arianna Dagnino’s cultural and professional experience crosses many borders
and five continents. (Quoted from website)
The
Scribbler is most fortunate to have Arianna as our guest this week, certainly
one of our most interesting invitees. I discovered her novel – The Afrikaner –
on Twitter and was immediately drawn to the story and the author. She has
kindly agreed to a 4Q Interview and to share an excerpt from her novel.
In her career as an international reporter, literary translator
and academic researcher, Arianna Dagnino has lived in many countries,
including a five-year stint in South Africa. The author of several books on the
impact of global mobility, science and digital technologies, she holds a PhD
from the University of South Australia and currently teaches at the University
of British Columbia. Her novel The
Afrikaner has just been published by Guernica Editions in Toronto.
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| Arianna Dagnino in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, 1998 |
4Q:
Let’s start by talking about your novel. Please tell us about it and what
inspired this story.
AD: In
a nutshell, the Afrikaner is an on-the-road adventure story that
blends history, scientific research and politics in a plot set between
Johannesburg, Cape Town, the Kalahari Desert and Zanzibar. Set in newly
post-apartheid South Africa, the book is inspired by the five years (1996-2000)
I spent there as a foreign correspondent for the Italian press. The main
character, Zoe du Plessis (33), is a young female scientist (paleontologist) of
Afrikaner descent. A conflicted woman struggling with group guilt and a dark
family secret, Zoe embarks on a field expedition into the hot plains of the
Kalahari Desert in search of early human fossils. Her journey of atonement and
self-discovery will lead her to memorable encounters with a troubled writer, a
Bushman shaman, and a Border War veteran.
The conclusion spirals the
reader into a new perspective, where atonement seems to be inextricably linked
to an act of creative imagination.
4Q:
You have an impressive CV, world traveler having lived and studied in many
countries, a doctorate degree in Comparative Literature, a published author, a
lecturer at the University of British Columbia, translator & interpreter
and citizenship in three countries. How does writing fiction
novels fit into all this?
AD: I
have always thought that a writer needs to live intensely, harshly, wildly
before s/he can put anything on paper. Combine this with an unquenched love for
hard travelling and deep immersion in other cultures/languages and here I am.
My fiction writing emanates from my multifarious experiences across the
globe. I re-entered academia later in
life and this allowed me to further explore my use of the English language within
a literary context. For this reason, my book Transcultural Writers and
Novels in the Age of Global Mobility (Purdue UP, 2015) starts with a
creative non-fiction piece. In it, I recount my encounters with five
internationally-renown authors (intercutting them with my own diary entries)
using the harbour city of Istanbul as a fictionalized setting.
4Q:
Please share a childhood memory or anecdote.
AD:
If you allow me, I would like to share an anecdote of my youth (I was 21, then) – rather than of my childhood – that happened
to me in 1985 while I was living in former Soviet Union at Moscow’s Pushkin
Institute as a student of Russian language. The passage is an
excerpt from my travel diaries:
“In Moscow in 1984 I
read Dostoyevsky, I read about the miseries of the Russian people, then as much
as ever. I sent letters to my family, writing with a pencil on the coarse paper
that they used as table- cloth in unauthorized basement taverns. For six months
I was almost cut off from the outer world. To phone abroad from a public place
was an enterprise that demanded long hours of waiting among hundreds of ethnic
proletarians assimilated by the empire: Turkmens, Kazaks, Georgians, Kyrgyzs.
The news from abroad was metered out with a dropper. Dimitri was my guide to the Russian underground. He kissed me and sang Vysotsky to me—the songs of this anti-establishment singer-songwriter ostracized by Soviet authorities spoke truth in their own oblique way. One night, he led me where no foreigner—least of all a fortuitous tourist—would ever get to: a street, a nineteenth-century building, a front door, a cold entrance hall, one landing. In the silent darkness that smelled of bygone affluence, my poet lit his cigarette lighter and brought it closer to the wall. Then, through our condensed breaths, I saw, at first indistinctly, then more and more clearly: tens, hundreds of writings running up those walls encrusted by time and memory. Dimitri read out loud some of them, interpreting them with his warm actor's voice. They were all passages from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. He told me that the authorities regularly covered those writings under a layer of whitewash but—relentlessly—those surreptitious traces kept reappearing. The magic of the initiated. The words that lived on, at all costs. ‘Manuscripts don't burn’ (Bulgakov, The Master, p. 287). It was an exemplary lesson.
4Q:
Is there a special time or place where you sneak off to write?
AD: I
like getting up very early in the morning, around 5.00 am, have my cup of
rooibos tea and sit at my desk while everyone else in the house is still
asleep. Possibly, while I write I love being able to peek at the sea (any sea).
As a woman of the sea, born by the sea, I am always inspired by the line of
distant horizons.
4Q:
In the world of fiction, what’s next for Arianna, the author?
AD: With
my husband Stefano Gulmanelli we are exploring the idea of writing together a fiction set
between Vancouver, Canada and Genoa, Italy in two different time frames: the
now (21st century) and the year 1796 (at the aftermath of the
French Revolution). The two main characters are a modern Vancouverite woman
doing research on an 18th century Genoese painter, and Carlo
Rivarola, a fallen Genoese nobleman living in contemporary Italy.
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| Carlo Rivarola |
We would obviously capitalize on
the thorough understanding we have developed of both countries and their
related societies. Through engaging story-telling we would use the
intersection of these different cultural spaces and time frames to explore
issues of national identity, cultural prejudice, and the quest for
self-determination (both at the individual and collective level). We think this
would make the work both timely and topical.
An
Excerpt from The Afrikaner
(Copyright
is held by the author. Used with permission)
Kurt
moves to the kitchen to prepare their drinks.
As
she looks around, Zoe notices another window-door, slightly ajar, leading into
a studio. She peers inside. Three of the walls are covered with books; in a
corner facing the window is a sturdy desk of what looks like reclaimed wood; a
computer and a stack of black leather notebooks are the only objects on it. She
enters, walks over to the closest shelf and runs a finger over the spines of
the books: they’re arranged in alphabetical order. She pauses at the V and
reads the titles of his works.
“Here,
Zoe,” Kurt says, handing her a tumbler. She jumps slightly: He has come from
behind, catching her by surprise.
“I’m
sorry, I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Not
to worry,” he says perching himself on a stool by the window: “A fossil hunter
can’t help being snoopy.”
“I
guess so,” she says, listening to the ice tinkle against her glass. “Most of
the time with few rewards, though. I mean, Mary Leakey found her first hominid
footprints after she had wandered in the desert like a mad woman for thirty
years.”
He
seems to wait for more. She can’t suppress a smile. “Is something funny?”
“I’m sorry. With your high-neck fisherman’s sweater, whiskey in hand and unshaven stubble you look like a real writer. I mean, the way anyone would imagine, say, Hemingway in his study.”
“I’m sorry. With your high-neck fisherman’s sweater, whiskey in hand and unshaven stubble you look like a real writer. I mean, the way anyone would imagine, say, Hemingway in his study.”
“Putting
on weight, with greying hair and ready to shoot himself in the head. Too much
like the old man, right?”
“I
see you have most of his books.”
“We
never stop imitating our models, for better or for worse.”
Out
there, the sky has suddenly turned blood red. Below them, the Atlantic waves
keep beating on the shore with dogged insistence.
As
she turns again toward the shelf, Zoe makes eye contact with a young woman
framed within a picture. She is of unusual beauty, with shiny black hair
wrapping her shoulders like a silk shawl, slightly almond-shaped eyes and the
golden-brown skin of the Cape Coloured.
Kurt
stands up rather abruptly.
“You’re
going to miss the sunset,” he says laying a hand on her hip, leading her gently
through the window doors onto the terrace.
They
reach the others in time to pick up what Cyril is saying: “He built this house
with his own hands, soon after he came back to South Africa three years ago.”
Zoe
looks sideways to check Kurt’s reaction, but he seems lost in his thoughts,
perhaps in his memories. He keeps his eyes not on the fireball in the sky but
down, at the relentless surf under their feet. Once again, he has retreated
behind a curtain of cold detachment. Even his dwelling, so apparently open to
the sun and the sea breeze, is standing within invisible walls – the ones he
has erected between himself and the rest of the world.
Thank
you for being our guest this week Arianna. I’ve recently purchased your novel
and am anxious to “dig in”.
For
you readers that would like to discover more about Arianna and her writing,
please follow these links:
Book website: https://blogs.ubc.ca/afrikaner/
