Nadia Davids: Cape Fever

We sat down with Nadia Davis, author of Cape Fever, to honour the quiet strength and resilience that hidden stories bring to our lives. 

In a beautifully tender conversation, we explored themes of silent resistance, personal empowerment, and the power of internal archives. 
We explored narratives that challenge conventional tales of survival and authentic connection. 

Nadia reflected on her journey—from a storyteller navigating silencing systems to an author embracing her agency and unique voice. 

Much of the conversation was an excavation of hidden knowledge, unspoken histories, and the ongoing process of reclaiming agency. 
We discussed why personal narratives remain incomplete without meaningful introspection and genuine growth. 

This powerful episode, is an invitation to you, our listener, to reconsider what personal empowerment means in a world marked by silence, erasure, and resilience. 

Join us as we invoke the journey into stories of hidden strength and the ways we reclaim our narratives in 2026. Because sometimes, the most powerful stories are those where people choose their agency—and each other—on their own terms.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Hello, hello, cheeky nadas! Hey Dr. Slay, how are you doing? I'm a little bit shook by the book. I did not see so much of this book coming, so kudos to the author. But I am excited for the conversation. How are you? How's your week been?

SPEAKER_00 0:29

First of all, adulting is a scam. Let me just tell you. You know, like just being an adult is a scam. But I'm I'm really grateful for like these little moments of reprieve because adulting is a scam. So the week was just like, you know, one blow after another blow after another blow.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

I'm giving you the honors of introducing our guests today. Welcome to the Cheeky Natives, Nadia Damon. Yay! Thank you so much. Hello, it is so wonderful to be here.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

Longtime listener.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Hey, I am still grateful that I have the longtime fancy.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

I want you guys to know that we are in such a really good redeemed company. We are an eminent company as well. And so I will just read a very succinct version of Nadia's bio. But about the author, Nadia David is a South African playwright and novelist and winner of the Kane Prize for African writing. Cape Fever is her debut novel in the United States, and she lives in California. We are excited to welcome you on to the Cheeky Natives as we discuss Cape Fever. Welcome to the Cheeky Natives, Nadia. Woohoo!

SPEAKER_00 1:37

We gave me fever. Thank you so much. It is what you're doing to be here. Nadia, I mean, what a book, okay? What a book. Do you know those books where you see how little they are, so you're like, it's going to be one of those where you just like go in and then I I just want to tell you, don't judge a book by its cover literally.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

Deeper than rap.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Nadia went deep. Okay, went deep. Went deep. Nadia, I wanted us to start the conversation talking about the archive of intentionality and just this idea of like silent witnesses, right? It seems that in Cape Fever, Surreya's secret literacy is like a private archive. And I wanted to know how does this hidden knowledge become her greatest weapon in a world that intends to erase her existence.

SPEAKER_03 2:33

I mean, I feel like you've just summoned the heart of the novel, right? And a few succinct, beautiful, alert sentences that are graceful and also powerfully intuitive about what the novel is trying to do. So Capever opens with a deception, right? Where Soraya says, I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hassing through sentences I tell her I cannot read. So it opens with the narrator who is confessing to a deceit, but crucially, she's confessing to a deceit to her employer. She's taking us into her confidence. And so I wanted to set up in the first sentence that she would be honest with us and that there was a necessary fiction that she was spinning with this woman. Because she doesn't know if she's trustworthy or not. And God knows that her instincts are proven correct, right? What I wanted for Saraya was for her to have this incredibly feverish, imaginative, wild inner life that was hers and hers alone. And her imagination is a place of retreat and agency and survival and witnessing and storytelling. So she has this voice that is internal, that is all these things, and fiercely intelligent and very, very canny. Like she knows what's up. She's watching all the time. She's observing, she's absorbing information, she's telling us what's going on. She has a very different voice for her employer. The voice for the employer is, you know, it's um, it's very demure. She uses very simple sentences, you know, she's placating her a lot, she's managing her. Even the voice she uses when she goes home is very different, right? Like she, the language that she's using with her parents, with her family, it's love fold, it's quotidian, it's about like the everyday, it's working through things. But behind these two kind of public personas, the one of course is a very honest one with her family, there's another one inside. And I, a lot of it was also me just wondering, you know, I think a lot about that incredible Alice Walker essay in Search of Our Mother's Gardens, and the idea of what is the rich internal life in a space of subjugation? And how does it sustain and how does it nurture? And my paternal grandmother had been um the personal maid to the wife of a foreign diplomat in the 40s in Cape Town, Cape Malay Muslim woman. And, you know, by her own account, it was a it was a very fair employment for the time, you know, it was all right, it was fine. But I often wondered, you know, here was my grandmother who was incredibly clever and very creative in how she managed the world. And what what was going on in some way? So it wasn't, it's not a biographical piece of work or memorized piece of work by any stretch of the imagination, but there was a kernel there, right? Of like, what what happens to women of our grandmother's generation? What were they thinking? What was going on? How were they managing? How were they negotiating all of this? That is a very long response, but it was such a good question. I was like, it got me thinking.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

Something about the silent witness. I think about hair and place, and I'm always interested in the geography of memory because that is the intersection of the spatial, but the memory and the political and the physical. And I think of hair and place as a silent witness. So I wanted to speak about or I was interested in how places bear witness. So not just hair and place, but thinking of the Cape, thinking of the district, what geographical memory does to bear a silent witness.

SPEAKER_03 6:05

Well, look, I mean I'm a child of of Cape Town, and I'm a child from a family that endured forced removals from district six. And so that geography of loss is etched into my psyche. And I, you know, I wrote a lot about this when I was doing my my thesis, where I talked about this idea of kind of an inheritance of loss and what that means and how that shapes us and how we move through the world. Um, because remember, you know, as a kid as well, I was growing up in Walmart States, I was growing up right next to the district, which was emptied by the time I kind of entered into any sort of consciousness at whatever, four, five, six, seven. But I was aware of emptiness, and I was aware that there was this huge psychic and physical wound that I would drive past every day, walk past every day. And this, like, what does it mean to live next to a landscape of emptiness and for that mass removal to have happened, which in many ways can, you know, I think Siraj Rasul talks about how it can be described as a war crime. And then having to understand that, think about it, and understand that the world when I was little was characterized both by what was seen and unseen. So here's the space of emptiness, but there is memory layered into that space. And once there were homes there, and once there was this kind of web of community that had been spun. So I don't think that anybody who lives in Cape Town, who grows up in Cape Town, which is a very fraught city, a very vexed, very troubled, very, very difficult city. I don't think anybody who grows up there doesn't understand maybe they're, of course, not there are many who don't, but who pass lightly over them. But you have to have a sense of alertness, right, to the geographies of loss of that place and exclusion and the way in which the landscape itself, the beauty of the landscape, has been turned on its own people. And I think that that is a very particular kind of violence. There's there are geographies of exclusion that can be kind of mapped along the urban, but when the actual beauty of the landscape is turned on people, this is not yours. You won't have access to it. These beautiful spaces will not belong to you. And then things are codified around that. I mean, it's a very, it's a it's a very specific psyche to be born into, I think. So, yes, I wanted to write in the book. I I mean it's both is and isn't Cape Town, if that makes sense. So of course, anybody who knows the city knows that it's like deeply connected to the landscape of the city, and I I draw on that history and sediment and geography freely. But I did also want to kind of imagine my own way around it. But yeah, I mean, the course of course is the Boer Cup. It's based deeply on the Boer Cup. The district, of course, is District Six, where Mrs. Hassing lives in Heron Place. I was thinking a lot about Iranizucht, right? So I wanted to think about like how all these spaces are, even then, kind of within an hour's walking distance from each other. They're very tight together, but they're different worlds. You're kind of mapping into these different worlds constantly all the time. But with the district, especially, I had a lot of joy writing that section because I had not kind of lived and imaginatively lived inside a time of it which was completely pre-removal and that didn't have the shadow of removal hanging over it. And I want to say, what it what did it feel like to be there then? What was this place like in 1920? What was the hub of it? What did it feel like? Because a lot of the work, undoubtedly, is always about like either the moment of removal or the empty landscape or the removal is coming. So I was like, what let's move back kind of 60 years.

unknown 9:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:32

I mean 50 years, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

By the time this podcast is over, you'll be like, oh my gosh, Little Honor is talking about archiving, archiving, archiving. Why? But I was really interested in this idea of archiving the mundane, right? So I feel that literature has for black people been a tool, right? To just archive into the everyday. And I was really interested in this kind of art of letter writing in Cape Fever and how it became a profound like kind of act of resistance. And I wanted to speak a little bit about that, right? Because we see Surreya in this letter writing, kind of really talking about the mundane, right? Like it feels like messages in the 90s, like you're just walking someone through your day. And I wanted to speak about that, kind of this letter writing as a profound act of resistance.

SPEAKER_03 10:26

Well, I mean, she's writing in code, right? I think that I think she at one point she she talks about that, where she's incredibly careful about what she gives Alice Hassing to write. So just to set it up quickly, to say that, you know, her employer offers to write letters on her behalf to her fiance. And I mean, I was really thinking a lot during that offer and that dynamic, which is so, you know, it's it's given with this air of this is a benefactress who's now making this wonderful, extremely generous offer. And in Alice Hassing's mind, it is generous, right? I mean, she is the progressive figure in her circle, right? And in her time. But I wanted to really think about like this is the offer of, for me, it was on a continuum of missionary education, right? It's on a continuum of I'm going to do this for you. And you're not going to necessarily, I'm not even going to fully understand the extraction that I'm performing. But Saraya knows. Of course she knows. She's aware, she's lived through precisely all of these currents already. So when she sits down to write, she's like, I've got to do this very carefully, and I've got to do this in code. And I'm not going to reveal everything because there's no reason for this person to have everything and have access to everything. And so when she says things like, you know, she's oh, we picked Lokwoods or we're going to go to visit this Kramut or whatever it is, she knows that her fiance is going to understand precisely what she's saying, even if this woman who's taking the dictation doesn't. But I I mean I wanted to also just think about, you know, the technology of writing has also been weaponized and instrumentalized for grave violation historically. Um and so that was something I wanted to think about. But also that Suraya's father is a calligrapher, an Islamic calligrapher, and that that is another part of this piece of literacy, right, that she hides too, that she too comes from a heritage of writing and recitation and yeah, those kind of things.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

In the book, uh, you know, there is a conversation that takes place between Suraya and her father, where her father references the act of proclamation, reading, and recitation, and he references the act of recitation and ultimately memory as a tool for resistance. And I think about their individual crafts, because as you've said, her father, you know, makes these racam, so he does the Islamic calligraphy. Later on, Suray is revealed to be an artist herself. But there is their individual craft, there is the grief, and there is loss. And I'm so struck about, and I guess I wanted to speak about why you wanted the conversation about recitation, memory as a tool for resistance, and then of course the reclamation to take place between these two artists, these two relatives, these two people who experienced this profound loss of each other.

SPEAKER_03 13:17

Well, and I I think that whole that whole section where, you know, Mrs. Hassing is offering education at the same time as she is writing the letters in her estimation, this is what she's doing. And Saraya, in fact, has an extremely complex, extremely rich understanding of the relationship between recitation and memory and literacy because she's learned how to ri do Quranic recitation as a child. And her father's is apparently fluent in at least two languages, right, that we we can kind of gauge in that moment. And I I wanted to think about this kind of like weird dichosomy that still exists about like what is superior, oral testimony and memory for the text. And I think we've been put, you know, obviously we've been trained to think about literature and text as being superior. I mean, that's an old colonial trope. And yet those two things exist within an Islamic paradigm, within an Africanist paradigm, as being one and the same, and that they're interchangeable, and that there are some, there are some forms of recitation that are more meaningful than having something written in a text. There are some moments when a text is important as a suppository of memory and archive and of sharing. And so I wanted to kind of explode that idea a little. Well, not explor just um explore that idea a little bit. But also, I mean, I was also thinking about like what survives, right? And I think that's the section as well where Surah's father says to her, you know, even if every one of our people is slaughtered by one, even if every house is burned, every house of the beloved is burned to the ground, if there is one person who remembers, and if there's one person who can recite, it survives. So, you know, we're in an era of apocalyptic violence. We're also thinking about that. How do these things survive? How does memory survive?

SPEAKER_02 15:08

I think it's also interesting what you do because you've spoken about how the West wants us to believe that the text is infallible, right? And yet in Soraya's context, the text is not infallible. The text is where a great lie occurs. The text is where there is a manipulation of history, there is a manipulation of truth, there is a way in which someone exerts a particular kind of violence that would not be possible if it were not for the power of the text, right? And so I am so struck by the way in which you write against the the infallibility of text, that what you can, what you do write can actually not be true, that it may not always be the golden standard by which we hold people's histories and their reckoning.

SPEAKER_03 15:56

I mean, look, you know, we're South Africans, you know, we also understand what text can do, and we understand the the censorship and you know, like part censorship weaked havoc on reality. You know, we can we understand how like those distortions occur and how they would occur, and they would occur at a state-sunction level. And that was the entire point that you rewrite history in real time. And so we've all kind of witnessed the distortive effects of this on our own communities and our own histories. But crucially as well, I always feel very strongly about this, and you know, I think it's like a wider question of like canonical text and that kind of thing. I don't want anybody to take anything away from me. So I want to be able to read what I like and draw on what I like and think about what I like. And I don't want to feel separated from those things by anybody, which is why by the end, you know, Zorea is able to reclaim the idea of text on her own terms. And that for me was very important. You know, she doesn't become an Islamic calligrapher, it's something very different. You know, she's she's thinking about art and how to use it and how to kind of resuscitate her own, yeah, her own life. I'm always, for me, I'm always in the business of claiming. I always want to lay claim. I want to lay claim to whatever text I want to read. Um, I want to lay claim to whatever art form. And yeah. And I want that for my characters. I want that for everybody, though.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

It's interesting that you say that, because I think one thing that makes your novel so wonderful, I think, is your background as a playwright. Because you really like, I felt like I was also on stage, right? Um and I think particularly about the haunted histories, right? Uh I think about the ghost of Fatima as kind of an unresolved archive. And I was really interested in kind of what does the presence of ghost in the story reveal about the spirits, right, and histories still embedded in modern South African architect.

SPEAKER_03 17:50

I mean, South Africa, a Cape Town is a haunted city, you know. I I will stand on that. Even as someone who, yes, I think about it as political hauntings. And I th so there are two ways in which I think about the way in which I use hauntings and hauntology in in different texts, specifically in Cape Fever. For Saraya, the ghosts are real. Jinn are real, the ghosts are real. I wouldn't dare argue with her. It is absolutely what she is seeing and what she's knowing. For myself, as the writer, I understand those things in part as they're um they're psychic manifestations of unresolved violences and histories, right? And they're Saraya's way of kind of metabolizing the profound cruelties of colonialism and of her situation. What are ghosts, if not the dead, with unfinished business? You know, I mean, Caitan is replete with unfinished business and unresolved historical business. And so there's always a moment of rupture where I feel as if history thins and comes hurtling into the present. It has to. How could it not? So that's how I think about the kind of psychic landscape of um the work. The grey women in the novel are an invention. People have asked me if they are actually these real things. No, they're not, they're not a real myth. They get on there. They're an invention. All of all of Sarah's stories are inventions. But I wanted the the grey woman, which is what Fasima, that sort of category that she belongs to, which is that they're also kind of, it's it's uh female rage, right? These are figures of of anger and powerful figures, I think quite magnetic figures who are here to take stock and demand some kind of reckoning. But Sarah's, you know, Sarah's experience with the ghosts or with the grey women is lifelong, you know, that happens before she comes to her own place. It's part and parcel of the way she moves to the world. She sees things, she knows things, she understands things about the city that she lives in that are not apparent to everybody, certainly not to Alice Hassing. And she's able to access what a friend of mine called it the thin spaces. Um so she has a certain degree of clairvoyance, I think, that comes from being a very creative person, but also comes out of her own spiritual tradition. Um and yeah, I mean those the grey women, I say, you know, I think the book there's they're described as scoresetters. They're debt collectors and scoresetters, and they're there to they're they're there to watch and observe and sometimes to guide as well.

SPEAKER_02 20:16

This is hatting. I want to speak about power and the and the white gaze, but particularly the performance of of benevolence, right? So we see in this novel particularly how white women's fragility, how their kindness is then used as an architectural framework for a particular kind of violence that they inflict on on black people, on other people of colour, right? So I think about benevolence as a tool of the master. And so I wanted to speak a little bit about Mrs. about Alice's, and it feels so strange to call her Mrs. Hattane, right? Because I'm like, ugh, this woman. But I want to speak a little bit about Alice's kindness and her benevolence as a tool of colonial mastery. Because there is a very particular kind of way in which she moves that that I think is just so shocking. At every turn, you're shocked by the ways in which even she has managed to convince herself that this benevolence is not violent.

SPEAKER_03 21:17

Yeah. I mean, I feel like in some ways, never mind Fatima, you know, I think in some ways Alice Hassing is the ultimate hungry ghost in the novel.

unknown 21:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:27

Her appetite is insatiable. She's, you know, she has tremendous need. She's desperately lonely. She's using Sarah to soothe her loneliness and to fill a void that is unfillable because she too lives under the spell of extractive empire. And, you know, this is the thing I said to a friend, like, I couldn't have written her and spent all that time with her if I didn't have some form of empathy for her. Like it was important to be that she wasn't just kind of a caricature, you know, like she's a she's a human being with a range of difficult feelings and griefs and complications. But empathy is not absolution. I mean, I think that needs to be a very kind of clear distinction that's made. But she lives under a system herself that she's a beneficiary of, but also makes certain Demands of her. And one of those demands is that she must give up her child for empire, right? And be happy about it. And I think this is something that I wanted to evoke in the seance scene with all of those women gathered, is that they're all locked in this, they're grief-soaked and they've lost their children to war and they have to be celebratory about it at some level, right? And then it was important for me to have the figure of the Irish woman who's kind of, is she fake? Kind of she knows. She probably has some gifts that, you know, are a little bit they come in and out. But it was also, it was important for me to have that figure because I wanted to complicate the idea of race and how it operated in the 20s as well. And that here is a figure who is European, but she's also coming from a colonized country. So this is how these kind of moments of solidarity happen. But yeah, I mean, Alice Hassing's way about her is it's a profound kind of unknowingness that also takes and takes and takes. And so Suraya finds herself consumed by this even as she's trying to fight it. Um, so much so that there are even moments where she's protective and defensive over her. But that's also before she understands the full scale of what's being done. But I think I also just wanted to, you know, in many ways, this relationship is probably the most benign version, right? It's psychically insane, but it's also terrifyingly probably one of the more benign versions of what that dynamic could have been in that era. And I didn't want to put Sarah through violence, and I didn't want to put her through physical or physical violence, right? I wanted to explore just like the corrosive quality of these endless microaggressions and these endless comments, and then this like wide, crazy apparatus of what was actually happening in the background. And I like I mean they're like Sarah. I also I don't want to make portray Sarah as like some kind of hapless because I mean she's she's waving her own. Like there are she's she's got her own moments, like even if they're very small, like they're deliberate and they're cussing, like when she, you know, doesn't stuff the windows, or she uses all Mrs. Hassing's good to Alice Hassing's good paper to stuff the windows, or yeah, there are, you know, she's very, yeah, she's got her own skills.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

I must say to you, one of my favorite scenes is her making food and Alice says something untoward, and she's just she starts dishing herself up for today and tomorrow, and she's like, I'm gonna take a good snot. And I just like, yes, Surreya, you know, like take your power, my girl. Take your power. I was thinking about when you're talking about corrosive, I I think about Alice as like a hot mess. I just I think I struggle with like with this type of whiteness because I feel that she uses control and this kind of idea of paternalism disguised under care and benevolence and the idea of knowing what is best, right? You know, Surreya, let me write it in this words. It's far too simple, you know. And I wanted to know how does the expectation of gratitude from the oppressed reinforce kind of this existing power hierarchies? Because this control and this kind of care, as like I know what's best, reinforces the idea that Soraya was supposed to be grateful, that she was doing her this great service, right? Taking time out of her busy life to teach her how to read and to write to her beloved. And so I wanted to speak a little bit about that, right? How does this expectation of gratitude from the oppressed reinforce the existing power hierarchies?

SPEAKER_03 25:58

I mean, I think with someone like Alice Hassing, she's she is also very bright. And she must also know at some level, even if it's unadmissed, that that what she's doing is for herself. Otherwise, why would she keep explaining that it's not for her? So, you know, there's the lie she's telling, but perhaps it's also the lie she's telling herself. Like what is the emptiness that is being filled? I mean, we know she's terribly busy. She's terribly, terribly busy. She's got, you know, she's got dozens of projects on. You know, when she's not trying to stock the working, the white working men's library, she's trying to deal with sanitation in the course. When she's not doing that, she's worried about, I don't know, the fallen girl's home. And when she's not doing that, she's advocating for women to get into university. So, you know, I think we all know that like busyness is also a form of hiding from deep grief. And it's also the way in which she, as a woman from that particular age, has been trained to manage her grief. So she perhaps differently from some of her peers, doesn't want to abscond herself from the world and lie in bed all day. And so, I mean, there's something commendable about FICE against what that expectation would be. But her relationship with Syrya is extractive and she instrumentalizes her in order to fulfill what that to fill what that emptiness is, to fill that void. And I mean, I don't think there's a resolution really around. Well, there is in the novel in some ways, but for me it's not really about resolving the idea of the power dynamic, it's more about exploring it. By the end, she has to return home. So she does have to face a reckoning. And her life at home is very different from the life that she has spun for herself. And as Sarayas has spun out of gold, dust, and spite. So I named her Alice Hassing because I wanted to um it's an invocation of Alice in Wonderland. It's going down the rabbit hole. And um, mad is a Husser, Hassing. And so, you know, there's Sarah steps into this. Right. Well, I mean, you have to have fun with the names. But there's a Saraya steps into this world of Alice Hassings, which is also, you know, it's a world of mirrors in some ways. It's smoke and mirrors, and it's deception, and it's hiding the fact that she is impoverished by kind of ruling class standards. She there's a great deception around how her child has fared in this terrible catastrophic war. There's a deception about what she's had to sell. She's demanding that Saraya collude with her in all of these deceptions. So by the end, when she has to go back and she has to see what's happened to her child and what's been done to her child. I mean, it's it's devastating in many ways, right? She has to reckon with what this thing that she's a part of has done to the child, ultimately. But it's a it's a life outside of the fantasy. And I think that was important too. And yet she still makes a demand of Soraya at the end.

SPEAKER_02 28:51

Audacity, we will go so far, we will achieve such big things. Like speaking of language, right? The letters are essential to the story in many ways. But it's not just the letters, right? It's the fact that Soraya's words are now rewritten by another. So there is a particular part of betrayal that Soraya experiences because not only is there a rewriting, there is a re-imagining of Soraya and her experiences lived and imagined, that then allows Alice almost the luxury to enact the violence that she does. It feels like this reimagining is the first step in this cascade of her then lessening Soraya and her experiences. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about this as a reflection on how the narratives of black writers and black narratives and and people's lived experiences are still edited and curated. So not just by traditional publishing houses, but even by the ways in which we choose to remember or observe or see the things that happen to these people. And so I think that that is such an interesting way in which the past and the present collide in this book because you see in the book, it's it's at it's Soraya's letters being rewritten, but in 2026, it's actual lived experiences, it's actual narratives being edited and rewritten and curated for palatability, I suppose. And so maybe we could speak a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_03 30:21

Yeah, no, I mean, all of that, I mean, I I think you're so right. Look, for me as well, I I thought a lot about how you know Alice Hassing is is not just cannibalizing Saraya in a sense. I mean, she's also taking her, she's inserting herself into Sarah's relationship with with Noor, with her fiance. And she is developing her own relationship with Noor. Because when she's sending these letters, I mean, Sarah realizes when she reads Noor's responses, it's like, well, you're you're talking about such intimate things between us. That Sarah definitely did not speak to Alice Hassing about or offer up as narration. So there are two lives that are being taken in this in this process. For me, in terms of the way in which our lives are framed, I did think a lot about, I was thinking a lot about Muslimness, identity, Islam, and the ways in which, I mean, a lot of my work is concerned about this, but particularly in this, I wanted to say, you know, what if there is a Muslim woman at the center of a Gothic style novel, which is not a genre that usually places those two together. I'm just a historical genre, right? And what if she's not always likable? And what if she's actually kind of, you know, she can she will also play a game in return? And what if she's difficult in her own way? And what if she has clashes with her mother? And what if instead of the usual kind of terrifying figure of a Muslim father, she has a deeply loving father who is uh uh an academic, an artist, a spiritual person who understands her and they have a sympathico relationship? What if the person that she's destined to marry is not an arranged marriage, right? Which is the usual kind of Western trope? And what if he too is loving and sees her as a whole person and understands her entire interior world and creative life? And what if it by the end of it we begin to recognize that her mother, who she has not fully understood, and who she too has confined to a certain domestic arena as the washerwoman and the person who keeps the house going, in fact has had this radical and important role in her father's artistry and spiritual practice. And so, in that way, I also wanted it to be, I mean, there's the external way in which people of colour, black people, Muslim people are perceived and arranged by the world. But then there's also the way inside the novel in which we all miss each other, and that even Suraya could miss her mother. Like even Suraya had had this conflict with her mother throughout the book, and her mother is frustrated by this girl who doesn't understand her luck or doesn't understand what's going well. And only at the end does she grasp this is the role, my this is what my mother has done. And still her mother's like, don't let people know. She's still like, it's better, it's better.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Keep it under wraps. Keep it under wraps, please.

SPEAKER_03 33:23

Yeah. It's a very difficult thing to, I think, as a writer of colour, black writer, African writer, Muslim writer, you have, you know, you have an eye on your own work and an eye on how it's perceived, and an eye on how your people are perceived, and an eye on how you want to be able to write. And that's a can sometimes be a very productive tension, and it can be very generative, and it can be, you know, I always feel like I am rich beyond measure in subject matter. Sometimes it is a burden, and sometimes I think it is the the the privilege of my life to be able to write these stories. But it is, we are working in different paradigms to the white vices or European vices in the West, certainly.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

I wanted to speak about what I think is also a gift of the book is kind of the cost of rebellion. Um, particularly in the context with which you write, like the 1920s, you know, we've just seen the First World War, there's still empire, it's still colonialism, it's the mother city. And I wanted to speak about kind of Surreya's limited agency and quiet resistance, right? And I'm really interested in what you wanted to explore, or what does the book teach us about the subtle everyday ways that us as marginalized people fight for self-determination when open rebellion isn't possible?

SPEAKER_03 34:49

Yeah. I mean, what I wanted for Surrea towards the end is to the, or just for myself, and I I mean, I also think I needed this reassurance because I was doing the final, the final draft between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2025. And I needed to remind myself that there's a long durae for resistance and that there are epochs and moments for different forms of resistance. And so when we get to the end of the book, Surrea has prevailed, but she understands, as do we, that this is a long game, and that what she has in that moment is a temporary reprieve. And so she says, this is the moment in which the table is full, and we are all sitting together, and my door is open to whoever needs to come in. But we're getting strong for the long vice ahead, right? You know, the the timeline is a little bit fuzzy, but we have Mrs. Hassing and her friends, Alice Hassing and her friends, and this panic about this person is going to be elected, right? Because this is like now the beginning of like the head sarcastic. But also, I mean it's it's it's the fictional version, but I wanted that like liberal panic about like what was gonna come. And that Sereya and Noor understand that they are settling into something that's going to be a generational, a multi-generational fight. And so I think about that, I think about that a lot because I think that those epochs of resistance, especially as a South African, like you always understand that there there are people who are behind you who made these extraordinary stands and sacrifices, who did those things knowing that it was never, it might never be for them. Right. So it's a really interesting way to grow up because you grow up understanding time as being this continuum between generations, that there's this struggle behind you, and that at a certain point you age into being somebody who is struggling for what is to come. So I think about, yeah, I think about that's resistance is a is a complex long game.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

I want to speak about Noah and Soraya, because that is a love, that is a love story. Before we even get to that, right? So because I think about love and relationships, and there's a particular kind of commentary in the book. On page 80, there's a there's a story because our girl Saraya is also such an esteemed storyteller. So she tells the story about the visitor in blue and the soap woman. And there is a I even highlighted this like because I thought, God, if I was someone who were to get a tattoo, if I was not so afraid of pain, that that line where she extols the miracle of love is so striking for me in a book filled with so much pain and grief, right? Because there is the grief of there's a geography of loss, there is a geography of grief, there is a communal loss, there's a physical, there's so much loss in this book. And yet, one of the standout stories is Soraya speaking about ending a story with the line that extols the miracle of love. And I think of her and how Noah are almost deprived of this, and yet their love endures. And so I wanted to talk about what the miracle of love in these kind of violent, traumatic, painful histories looks like and why it was so important for you to write about that in in the book and to write against against almost the the violence of forgetting that we have always loved, that love has always been a miracle, even in those kind of of histories and traumas.

SPEAKER_03 38:28

Yeah. I mean, I think that that soap woman story, it was so strange. It was like dreamlike almost in the rising of it. It felt like it came from some strange archetype that I'd never met, but felt instantly familiar. And I realized in the rising of it, of course, it was Soraya's way of metabolizing her grief about her lost sister. And it was it was her feeling her mother's pain. Um, because of course she remembers she the baby sister, whose name we never find out. And she says, I will never give Alice Hassing the name, but we also don't know. In fact, we also don't ever find out what Soraya's mother's name is, which I also only realized when I got to the end of the book. I was like, oh, that's an interesting thing. But it's her way of processing creatively the loss of her sibling and her mother's inconsolable loss at this child. And that was a form of love I wanted to explore because I think very often we have this idea when we think about things that happened in the past or things that happen to those who are impoverished or marginalized or experience continuous loss, that somehow the grief is not as great. That somehow people learn to become used to devastation, right? And that somehow the violence, if it's continual, it kind of inuars one, inure the soul against the horror. And I wanted to say, no, like this is a grief that the mother will mourn for all time, just because it is at that point normative for children to die young of a disease that sweeps through. Yeah, I was I really wanted to think about what does that feel like, right? And how does that never go away? And I think with the end of that story, Surya's like the miracle of life, the miracle of like the miracle of I say so. So it's also like it's her defiance, you know, like she has a great spark inside of her that is continuously defied, but she's like, I like it's almost for me that moment. She's like declaring I'm going to write this narrative of my life as on my own terms and somehow. Um and I also wanted to just in that, you know, there's so much space is is given to this idea of grieving these lost soldiers, these lost boys and soldiers. Like, okay, they're being told to grieve in a particular way and on particular terms, but there's a lot of valorizing of that, and that the valorization of those soldiers' deaths is not extended to anybody else in the colony, anybody else of colour, anybody else subjugated. But I feel like there were two parts to your question, and the other one, remind me, was about the love between these two. Yeah, once it had to have a love story, but also he's known her since her beginning. So he knows her as this child that is deeply imaginative and has also terrorized the other neighborhood children.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

But he loves it, right?

SPEAKER_03 41:24

He loves it. But I mean, you know, she gets into terrible trouble the first time she really dips into the story. She scares the children, she scares the neighbors. Yeah. So she's not, um, she's not governable, Svair, you know. She's not a governable figure, not by Alice Hassing, and not even by her own parents. I mean, I wanted Noah to love that about her. I thought that was very important. That her parents defend her as much as they possibly can, and her fiance adores that about her.

SPEAKER_02 41:57

And that she's not a woman who's understood, right? In contrast to her mother, who is a wonderful woman, who is creative, who's all of these things, but in many ways also knows to fall into step in ways that don't come naturally to Soraya. And despite that, they both have beautiful love stories. And so there is love, even when you are a woman misunderstood by society or misunderstood by.

SPEAKER_03 42:23

I mean, her mother is you're so right. I mean, I also think that her mother is not at all understood, but nobody knows. Because as you say, she's just very effective at at hiding it. Remember as well, I mean, for me, it was also interesting the dynamic that we glimpse up between the mother and father. Is like, you know, the father has this whole intellectual life that he could pursue, and his wife is like working her fingers to the bone doing all this, you know, intensive washing. So she's really keeping that house going. Um yeah, it's I didn't want perfect relationships. I wanted relationships that are flawed and difficult.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

I wanted to speak a little bit about the geography of grief. I mean, you you do speak of Cape Town as kind of this haunting place, right? But I was really interested in Cape Fever as a metaphor, right? For a society that refuses to heal because it refuses to confront its own ghosts. So, in a way, I want to say Cape Fever kind of reminded me of many parts of the world, but knowing that we're in the context of South Africa, that in many ways Cape Fever is this metaphor that, like, if we refuse to heal, it's because we refuse to confront our own ghosts.

SPEAKER_03 43:40

I mean, I think this is a very powerful idea. And I've been thinking a lot lately about how I think how older than you. Uh by at least I think we're slightly different. But I remember in the kind of immediate aftermath of apartheid, the injunction at a cultural level, political level, you know, by the democratically elected government. And so and I understand why and I understand the impulse behind it, but so much of it was oriented towards the idea of resurrection. Not mourning. And I've been thinking a lot about this, about how the idea and the emphasis was on rebuilding and celebration. And I don't think that there was enough space to grieve at all or to truly mourn. Because if you truly mourn and you have to really sit in the grief of the kind of apocalyptic violence, the centuries-long disenfranchisement and degradation, you have to grapple with extreme discomfort. And there are very, very difficult conversations, processes, repair work. And I wonder if that discomfort with mourning and sitting with mourning plays a very particular way in how the politics of remembering are shaped today. Because I feel like there was a kind of a huge leap taken. And anybody who has even kind of a passing acquaintance with the arc of grief knows that there's no way to jump over that. So there's something there. And I'm it's it's still quite an embryonic idea, and I need to think through it more. But I think that the, for example, the kind of violent expulsion of Gabrielle Goliath's work on grief and mourning and the editing of that from the Venus Bienale, there's some kind of connection there around what has been allowed to be publicly grieved and the demands made about silencing grief. Like yes, there are the politics around it. Of course, there's there's all of that. I mean, that's crucial, and you know, it's kind of there's a very terrifying racist agenda attached to that. But there's something there as well. Sure. Around the the injunction, the injunction to not mourn.

SPEAKER_01 45:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 45:56

To move swiftly to resurrection and rebuilding and celebration. Because grief is messy. Grief is messy and it's time consuming. It's untidy, it doesn't fit into a neat bracket, it deviates, it unhinges, it debilitates, it demands rest. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:15

I think it's so interesting that that you've spoken to that because the most problematic characters in this book who are the madams, for want of a better word, right? They are the example of this, right? So Mrs. Lockhead is not allowed to mourn her children or mourn her child or to speak about the horrors of war because there is a discomfort with the remembering of what this actually means, what empire demands, what it extracts from people and their children. So the discomfort with even seeing what happens to these young men, right? And and how it's only revealed much towards the end, you know, that they that even that is an example in many ways of what you speak of, this desire to move past and to move quickly past particular kind of atrocities because they make they make us uncomfortable as a society because we have to gaze a little bit deeper, right? Why do we allow those things to happen? Why do we allow the empire to extract? Why do we allow our children to be used as vessels for the empire?

SPEAKER_03 47:19

No, exactly. And or the grief must take place within certain parameters, right? It's a military parade, it's a flowers, or it's a candle, it's you know, it's it's about valor and bravery and it's designated. I'm in her room, kneeling in front of the fireplace, about to polish the floral tiles and scrape the ash from the grate, when I feel a pair of eyes on me. I look up, and sure enough, someone is right there, right there on the wall above the mantelpiece. My throat closes, my eyes flare, my head snaps to the side because I think it can't be what it seems to be. I drop the brass shovel and jump to my feet, not minding how the ash flies out before me. My tongue goes from moist to bone dry, and with the quickness of a fire, a feeling of being drawn out of my body, floating up, takes me over. The eyes belong to the girl in a painting, hanging above the fireplace. Long necked, her skin the colour of roasted coriander seeds, eyes dark, mouth parted just a little as I do before I ask a question, a scarf draped lightly over her head, and her glance cool, just off to the side, mocking, staring at me from underneath her lashes. It's me, I think. A painting of me. Bald as you please, hanging in the old woman's room. How did I come to be here? And why didn't I I step back, the firebrush still in my hand, my skirt awash with ash, my mind a scramble. But the longer I look, the more I realise that it is not quite me. Not really. More as though the painter once saw me, then painted what he remembered. I see you admiring my rosa. Mrs. Hassing is standing in the doorway. I don't think she was up when you interviewed. I shake my head. No, you're right. She was in my dressing room. She's terribly heavy, but I do like to move her around. I think she enjoys it too. Change of scenery. Would you look at the dust on that frame? Devilishly difficult these old gilt things. Thank goodness you're here to help me with that now. She's lovely, isn't she, my Rosa? A gift from the previous owners of Heron Place, so she's been here for donkeys years. Came with the house. Worth a small fortune now, apparently, and from your neighbourhood, I'm told, but ever so long ago. You know, the moment I saw you, I was struck by your likeness to her. I reply that I thought she looked familiar, even as I fight a sudden wildness to reach up, snatch Rosa off the wall, and run, run, taking us both home.

SPEAKER_00 49:53

Nadia, your playwriting can you see it? Like just the playwrighting and this moment. It feels like on stage, right? And I was really interested. This scene was really interesting for me because it I think it does a lot. And I wanted you to speak about kind of this painting of Rosa, right? The name, the ways in which Alice stands to profit from this like of an unnamed, unacknowledged woman of colour. And she's so proud of it.

SPEAKER_03 50:26

Yeah, yeah. Um, I thought a lot, not only, but a lot about the Irma Stern paintings when I was thinking about Rosa and Kabeba Badarun's kind of extraordinary work around these paintings and what they meant and what they told us, and how, as was often the way with paintings by white painters of people of colour, very, very often these portraits would be done of people from the Malay Corsa, Cape Malay people, people of colour, and it would just sort of have the title Cape Malay woman or Malay psychic, or you know, it would never be the name of the person. We wouldn't have a sense of the history at all. But I'd also often look at these portraits and think that there was something mysterious and extraordinary happening despite these histories, that there was there was a great sense of the person in the painting, regardless, and that something had transcended uh the historical frame, that there was some kind of psychic interface, right, between portraitist and subject regardless. But also that there was there was something both knowable and unknowable about these figures. And I wanted to think about what does it mean? I mean, it's also about ownership through art, right? So Mrs. Hassing takes ownership of Saraya's story through the rest of the less arising. Whoever painted this portrait of Rosa took ownership of her through the painting of her. So, you know, we often think about art as something that's done for the good, but of course it can often be.

SPEAKER_00 51:51

I mean, Nadia, I watching her all the time and kind of the end is a reclamation for all of them, right? So in some ways are um ultimately reclaimed, right? Um so and and I love that. Um Nadia, we've really had such a wonderful conversation, but more importantly, as you can tell, we really, really loved Pape Fever, you know, Gothic history, it just worked, you know, it just worked. And I can't wait to see how amazing this book does and what it does in the world, because I think it's a really fantastic debut. But more importantly, the kind of questions it asks of us. As you say, it's not necessarily about answers, but it's really just for us to begin to think. So thank you so much for being so generous with us throughout this conversation, but also for writing an incredible novel, so poetic, like the prose Chevsky's. So thank you so much for that. Until next time, Chicken Natives, please grab yourself a copy of Tape Fever by Nadia Davis. You will not regret it. I tell you, you will not regret it. So until next time, Chicken Natives, we'll be.