By Rasvanth Chunylall
Lewis Nkosi lived a remarkable life as a journalist, writer, literary critic and apartheid exile. Tragically, he passed away before completing what would have been an incredible account of his life experiences. His close friend, Lindy Stiebel, and Therese Steffen have pieced together a memoir on Nkosi using the most unlikeliest of sources – various email correspondences (spanning nearly a decade) that were exchanged between Stiebel and Nkosi, and her former PhD student, Litzi Lombardozzi, and Nkosi. Last year, Letters to my Native Soil: Lewis Nkosi writes home (Berlin: Lit Verlag), was launched at Ike’s Books and Collectables on Florida Road; incidentally a bookstore that Nkosi was fond of frequenting.
To find out more, I spoke to Lindy Stiebel. In the spirit of the book, the interview was conducted through email correspondence.
In a nutshell, how would you describe Letters to my Native Soil?
The book is a record of the 10 year long email correspondence between myself and Lewis and between Lewis and my then PhD student Litzi. It’s the closest one will get to a memoir of his life now that he is gone – he talks about his life and work in the emails.
As a close friend of Nkosi, how did you decide on what content to include or leave out of the book?
I included all the emails I had printed out over the years as hard copy – then had to get them re-digitised in a format I could edit. Section 2 which includes the emails between Litzi Lombardozzi and Lewis I also received in hard copy and had re-scanned etc. The Introduction was written by myself and the 5 Appendices at the end are the attachments Lewis sent with his emails. These were usually bits of work-in-progress for my interest. His literary executor Astrid Starck, his partner, had the final say about which attachments we could/couldn’t include.
Nkosi often spoke frankly and critically in his emails. Was there content that made you feel uncomfortable including?
Not really as, though Lewis was very frank in his emails, he was not a gossip so there was very little that could be regarded as sensitive in a libellous sense. He was however very frank about his disagreement with Andre Brink’s interpretation of Mating Birds on academic grounds – that email makes for lively reading!
Yes, I was surprised by how open he was about his feelings towards Brink. This book was very much about you too. You act as both biographer and “character”. In putting together the fragments of Nkosi’s life, what did you learn about yourself in the process?
Hmm, I learned that I really valued the part Lewis played in my life and in the lives of my family members. He was a very generous friend and I really appreciated how kind he was. I was touched that he told me he loved me as a friend too.
I particularly enjoyed your humorous account of the time he took care of your children. It was a highlight. The structure of the book has led to some contrasting views on its genre. How has your book been classified?
As Creative Writing by my university annual academic outputs committee (as it includes ‘letters’ in the title!) and also as an academic publication given its scholarly Introduction and Appendices.
How would you classify it?
As an academic memoir – and first collection that I know of of email correspondence
The most striking element of Letters to my Native Soil is arguably the use of email correspondence. What advice would you give to future biographers and writers who wish to create a book in a similar manner?
My advice would be to pay great attention to digital storage! And, strangely enough, keep hard copy of especially valuable correspondence: that’s the only way this project happened at all – when you consider the number of times one changes computers, has hard drive crashes, viruses etc., emails will inevitably get lost. My hard copies were the only record I had kept of the correspondence.
Besides Letters, you have been involved in the construction of a literary tourism guide of KwaZulu-Natal with Niall McNulty. Are there any other future projects in the works?
Professor Michael Chapman and myself are working on another book on Lewis Nkosi: this book will include a selection of essays by Nkosi on SA writers and literature mostly drawn from his out-of-print texts: Tasks and Masks; Home and Exile and The Transplanted Heart. The title is provisionally ‘Writing Home: Lewis Nkosi on SA Literature’ and the potential publisher is UKZNPress.
