The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter

The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter is the both the easiest book I've written, and the hardest because I was still physically so weak. I think it has become my most successful book because it's a bridge between the early part of my life – fighting and resisting apartheid – and the later part of my life as part of the new society with new values, and a new Constitution. It's an emotional connection between different phases of my life, but also an intellectual connection, a bridge head, in a way, for my story, but to some extent paralleling the story of South Africa. The occasion for writing it presented itself very neatly. Blown up on 7 April 1988, out of hospital several months later in London, and I have an invitation to lecture at the law school at the University of Columbia. It was a perfect setting, because I had no other obligations. I enjoyed the teaching. It was contained, and the rest of the time I could write. And now it's just me, my computer, my memory, and I got to produce a draft of the book.

The computer wasn't easy. I'd had lessons in London. I'm typing now with one finger – I used to type with two fingers, left hand and right hand – so it's slow, but I got up to a speed about equal to my handwriting speed. I know how I'm going to start: ‘Oh shit! Something terrible is happening…’, and I'm trying to bring myself back into those moments. How do you speak about unconsciousness in a meaningful way? About sliding in and sliding out of unconsciousness? I see it as a kind of technical issue. Your writing is in sentences, but experience isn't in sentences with full stops and capital letters. Experiences flow one into the other, and it's kind of broken up, but I have intuitions, half memories, little things that come back to me, emotions, sensations, feelings… and then I start telling that story: I don't know what's happening at first. I know I'm going to the beach. I know that something bad has happened. It reminded me of the sensation when I was very active mountain climber. I would bang my head on an overhang and have concussion. I'd just wait a moment, and the concussion would go away; but now the concussion was not going away. In fact, there's a further blow and further kind of shadow. I have a memory of people pulling me and feeling that I'm being kidnapped, to be thrown into jail in South Africa. And I remember vaguely that I'm saying in Portuguese and in English, ‘Leave me, leave me. I'd rather die here.’ I'm hearing voices, and I can't hear what they're saying. I'm cross with them. I'm not a thing to be moved, I'm Albie, bring me into the picture. It's half distant memories of that, and then fading into darkness, and then a very distinctive voice saying, ‘Albie, this is Iva Garrido speaking to you. You're in Maputo Central Hospital.’ I can hear very clearly, and he's speaking slowly. I know Iva – I used to play bridge and cards with him – and he says, ‘Your arm is in lamentable condition. You must face the future with courage.' I remember distinctly saying into the darkness, ‘What happened?’, and a woman's voice saying, ‘It was a car bomb.’ And then my sense of joy knowing I'm safe. I'm safe that moment you are waiting for as a freedom fighter every day, every night, it's there all the time, nonstop. You're not consciously thinking it's part of you. They’d tried to kill me, and they'd failed. I felt joyous with a total conviction that as I would get better, my country would get better. Now, all those themes and emotions are kind of coming to me. And then my next memory was of that sense of quiet happiness, of lightness, great lightness. I'm kind of floating on my back. I'm sure I was under very heavy sedation, but I'm feeling very light, and I tell myself the Himie Cohen joke, and I even have that feeling ‘I joke therefore I am'. I'm not sure if that phrase actually came to me then, or it only came when I was writing. It’s a self-consciousness of the process that I'm going through.

I remember vividly the bandages being taken off me, and they put them in boiling water, dry them, and put them on again. The needles used for injections were sterilized and used again. They had nothing in terms of equipment and materials in that hospital. Sadly, they had great experience in dealing with trauma, and the doctors in London were amazed, hopes and beat that everything correctly from beginning to end. They saved my life, there's no doubt about it, and the amputation of the arm was absolutely inevitable. The worst thing would have been to have a hanging arm that was neither a functioning arm, nor the absence of an arm. I write about I'm recovering, and I remember feeling very strong, and have a strange relationship with the journalists in that I'm comforting them; some of them knew me. And I'm feeling that joy and excitement of survival and recovery, and that the regime hadn't been able to kill me.

I write about Lucia, whom I'd been deeply in love with and had been totally shattered when she chose somebody else, and dumped me. I had been in a kind of depression, and had happily snapped out of it one or two weeks before. So, I lost my love and my arm together. I was now over the loss of love, and accepting of it. I remember taking her picture out of my wallet and throwing it into the drawer with pictures from my past. I described the quaintness of how she wants to hug me, but I'm covered in bandages. And where can she kiss me? I think she found some spot in the back of my head. And I'm loving these details, because I'm alive, and I'm able to notice these things and feel these things, and I'm going to get better.

I remember advice given to me by a South African writer, David Lytton, who had some success in London. He said, ‘Albie, I'm going to pass on one tip to you. One normally thinks that you've got to finish a session of work at the end of a chapter, or end of the theme. This is a big mistake. Rather leave your work hanging in the middle of a sentence, because when you start the next morning, all you have to do to get the juice flowing is finish the sentence; it loosens you up.' That was enormously helpful for me. I made quite sure that I ended every day in the middle of a sentence, a thought, a process, or an episode, so that would be easier to carry on the next day.

After about three days, I'm feeling very buoyant. I'm writing in present continuous tense, which seems to be working, and then something happens, and it's all lost. Now I'm feeling absolutely desperate. I've lost three days’ work on the computer. It turned out to be the luckiest mishap, because I'm starting from the beginning again, and something made it so easy. I'm not trying to remember what I said, I'm re-telling the narrative, but it had been through all the agonising, and the changes, and the variations, and now it's telling itself. A week passes, I've got up to so many pages in chapters, I'm seeing the natural breaks: the plane leaving Maputo, arriving in London, experiences there; I used to write down little episodes and events, not in any sequence or order, on a big sheet of paper so that I didn't forget them; things that stood out as landmark experiences and moments. Or I would prepare for the next chapter, and jot down things to put into that chapter, and then let my imagination and storytelling take over. I often tell myself that the story finds itself in the story, and it comes out in ways that are often quite unexpected. They're little conjunctures, bits of humour, surprises, or something you think is very big that turns out to be very small, something you thought was very small turns out to be very big. That's all in the nature of the narration of the storytelling within a strong regimen – that satisfaction you get out of having an orderly way of doing things, feeling on top of the process, and seeing results emerging.

As the weeks follow on, I'm making more progress. I'm enjoying the teaching. I'm enjoying the food. I'm going out maybe a little bit more, because I'm a little stronger than I was, but still sticking to my overall regime of working from Tuesday morning to Sunday night, one night off Monday night, maybe for a movie, and maybe sneaking in a movie when I'm very tired watching it whenever I want. I'm feeling fantastic and happy and joyous as a result of hard, productive work with my heart, my time, my energy, my imagination, my belief, my language, my skills, and my experience. I got such joy and pleasure out of writing it and even dealing with the sad moments. The writer in me was glad that I had moments of panic and despair, because they provided some shade in all the light.

It's become my most reproduced book. It had a second edition in University of California Press, and then years later, I speak about my books at the Bath Literary Festival, and there's a man there who comes up to me afterwards, and he said he's a publisher of Souvenir Press, and he's looking to reprint books that deserve to be reprinted. He wanted a different cover, and I suggested David Goldblatt, whom I'd known and who’s work I'd seen. And I remember, I got off the plane, I drove straight to his house. He sat me in a chair. I was very tired, a bit disheveled. I'm still wearing my plain jersey. It's the best picture has ever been taken of me, and now it's on the cover of the book. It captured me a little bit tired after the journey, but wanting to look kind of good inside myself, and it's a wonderful cover.

Soft vengeance is a positive vengeance. It's a victorious vengeance, because it's soft and it's creative and it's transcendent, and it's beautiful, and maybe that was now the epitome of all my writing which had been, in a way, a form of soft vengeance. It was picking up on pain, on distress, on hardship, on disadvantage, but turning it around into something beautiful because it's literary, because it's reaching imagination, because it's pro human beings. It's pro human love and affection and solidarity in the Jail Diary and now in the soft vengeance in that story as well. Then we come back to South Africa to write our new Constitution – soft vengeance. We get together and we draft the Constitution – soft vengeance. I'm put on the Court that's defending the values that we were fighting for – soft vengeance. And we build a wonderful building on the site of the Old Fort Prison, the site of oppression, and we now have the building that defends the rights you were fighting for – soft vengeance. So it that became the theme of my life, transforming, helping to transform negativity into positivity, despair into hope. Not through incantation, but through really picking up on the energies and finding the positive that can emerge from transforming those energies; the sword into plowshares and into positivities. And maybe that's the unifying theme of all the books I've written, that theme of immersing myself in the hardship, the disadvantage, the pain, the negativity, taking into my imagination and body, if you like, a lot of that hardship, but not with the view to self-immolation, but with the view of turning it upside down, and turning it into positivity and hope and something that reconnects and becomes a source of genuine optimism, not through simply saying, ‘Be optimistic’, but through the optimism shining through everything that I'm speaking about.