Thinking things

There was a time when I wrote diligently and copiously at this space, this blog. Social media demands, life and bookish stuff have made for a rather divided year in terms of time and loyalties. From June and the short story challenge to now, much has happened to bring me to the near end of this year. Gratitude fills the pockets of air around me. Belly of Fire launched in Polokwane on the 21 September to a packed media event and sparked off fabulous energy for our book tour. Love Books hosted WordFire for the Johannesburg launch on October 5th, by far the most delightful of the launches yet, and Exclusive Books launched the book for us in Durban this past weekend, Sunday 23rd.
It's onward to Cape Town now, soon after Eid. My heart overflows with the engaged responses. The love and support has been tremendous. And 2011 has delivered Beauty in oh so many ways, at my door.

All booklaunch pics at Facebook and flickr

Love Books

And so we have results this morning.
After a fabulous, fun day of writing, stories were put to the vote. The Book Lounge team won! Congrats to a powerful team of writers!
And our Love Books team came a rocking second with just one less vote! Superb, methinks, especially with having to collaborate with such awesome writers from varied genres, crime fiction, literary and chic lit, to non-fiction.
Written in six parts, our stories went live in the order that we wrote as follows:

Fiona Snyckers, David Chislett, Jassy Mackenzie, Kate White, myself, and then Isabella Morris to round off a wonderfully surreal, incredulous tale.

Find my excerpt below, and read the full story at http://chainssds5.wordpress.com



*** ***


You can't just bomb Randburg," Peter spluttered, sending shrapnel of saliva into the tray of hors d' oevres.
The words were out of his mouth before he had a chance to think of what he was saying. His mind clicked into gear. "What I meant was, there will be no reason to bomb any place, you already have a war on your hands, Flotus!"
"And what is that supposed to mean?!" Juju bellowed. "There are no wars in Africa!"
Peter's cellphone shrieked a polyphonic rendering of 'The Final Countdown', startling everyone around him. He balanced the tray in one hand while he fumbled his track pants for the offending device.
Once retrieved, he swung around in what he thought was a polite fashion, to take the call away from his mixed bag of spectators. It made no sense to think of protocol standing between Obama's wife, his stepdaughter and the nations beloved Juju bear, when he was about to take a call from his mistress, Clarissa. She had been avoiding him all week, and he wanted to know why.
"Babe! Where have you..."
The tray caught on a basket of flowers that decorated the table in the foyer, sending flowers, pebbles and glass marbles all across the porcelain tiled floor.   Everything happened at once. What sounded like Mrs First Lady shrieking in super high pitch turned out to be Juju in obvious trauma at the wasted food now lying amidst the flowery debris. Adding to the sight that met poor old Peter's eyes was Corenza looking like she was about to faint. Security and bodyguards were ushered into the scene, looking every bit like one of those FBI secret agent shows on the television. Mrs Obama was ushered out by what seemed a dozen men in black suits. Juju was gone. He might have vanished into thin air for all you knew! Or he'd been raised in some apocalyptic stunt through the roof. It was difficult to look towards the raised glass skylight at this time of the afternoon, a bright golden hue swept into the atrium space and lit up the entire hallway.
"Clear the area, we're coming in!" More of these toy soldier types filled the area.
Corenza seemed to be in some sort of daze. One of the bodyguards grabbed the satchel at her feet. A blade poked out of it, a spark of sunlight glinting off it alerted the guard that he had found something potentially menacing. He glared at Corenza, but she seemed unfazed still, rooted to the spot like some disheveled Barbie doll. Only when the man reached inside the bag and pulled out the knife that she had hidden inside it, did she finally look up.
Peter reached her just as her knees gave way under her.
He lifted her into his arms, and made his way to the exit.
"Hold it, right there! Where do you think you're going, Mister?" the man with the satchel said. 
"She's ill. She needs a doctor," Peter said.
"She wasn't supposed to carry weapons," the man said. "We're taking her in for questioning. She may have tried to assassinate Mrs Obama! And you're coming with us, too!"
Peter looked towards the lift door that had just opened invitingly beside him. Using Corenza's limp body as he swung around, he managed to knock the guard off his feet. Once inside the lift he pressed the button for the top floor. He also pressed a few floor digits into the keypad so that they wouldnt know where he had gotten out. And then he dialed his house number. His son Sam would be home alone, Sulenza was only due back home later in the evening.
"I'm in big trouble. Come over to the Sandton Towers. Will send you a text. Just come get me. And don't tell your mother!" He got off at one of the floors and made his way down the hallway. He tried a few doors. Using a trick he had learned in the army, he managed to pick a lock and quickly made his way into room 1452. He tried to put Corenza down, but she clung to him. He reached for his phone and typed Sandton Towers, Room 1452, and then pressed the send button. 
Twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the door, and before he could get to it, the door was broken down. As expected, black suits clambered alongside army suits for a piece of him. And at the front of this mean looking gang, was non other than his wife, Sulenza. 
"What do you think you're doing with my daughter, you sick bastard!" she glared.

**** ****

Chain Gang Challenge

Aaah, fascinating Monday it is out in Johannesburg... I've just arrived off a flight from Durban, after a weekend of family fun in the sun, and I'm sitting with a team of writers out in Mellville, on a chain gang writers challenge for Short Story Day South. So check out the website as our stories go live!

www.shortstorydaysouth.co.za

Xxx

Islamic Relief's Book Day 2011

Dear Islamic Relief South Africa

Thanks again for the opportunity to be a part of the IR Book Day. I am passionate about reading and loved the opportunity to witness the great efforts that IRSA is making to engage a love for reading with young learners especially in an organisation such as Osizweni place of help, where it seems that primary care givers are not parents necessarily and resources are stretched. Your aid and support to such courses as a team, highlight the methods taught to us as in the prophetic model.

I can only commend you and your team for the immense inspiration that I received by being present there. Bright faces filled with expectation are nothing less than looking at the glory of a clear blue sky. I feel glad that the work that is being done will fulfill these expectations and ignite the love for both reading and storytelling in children. Children have a natural capacity to dream, to wish and to fantasize. If reading helps to stretch their fresh imaginations to new limits, and then also if we are able to encourage them to write and tell their stories, I believe that we will give birth to a whole new generation of writers, storytellers from the colourful blend of cultures that we have in SA. And the idea is also to write and orate these stories from different languages other than just English.

The way I see it, IRSA's Book Day efforts have struck a match, and that spark that has been fired up in the kids hearts and minds is exactly what we need to give rise to a whole generation of new thinkers and dreamers!

With appreciation,
SH

Home Away: Book Review

Never have I been so vividly held captive by the intricate balance of metaphor and narrative as I have with this new work-of-art compilation of travel writing that is Home Away. This spectacle of South African writing is anything but isolated lekker local stuff; rather it reveals the truly global flavour of being South African at home in the world at large.
Edited by Louis Greenberg of ‘The Beggar’s Signwriters’ fame, twenty-four writers have been handpicked, each to envisage an hour in a day in a particular city in the world. It is as Greenberg suggests, a collection of ‘…stories (that) blur fact and fiction; they contain a dozen languages and two dozen versions of the truth. Together, they write a South Africa for tomorrow that yesterday would not allow.’
At the very beginning, the anthology kicks off with the excitement of this whirlwind tour around the world in just one text. Vikas Swarup sets the scene as your conductor to begin this journey; be prepared. In addition you will meet an alter ego in each writer as you move along. You will be whisked through Nairobi at midnight, with a plot to kill a politician, and then taken briskly through Mauritius, Amsterdam, Sydney and Mainz before you can think of drinking sunrise. Havana is the last of the poetic night rendezvous; you wake up in the warm arms of Kampala. Not white. Not black. Purely African.
Through the morning you are swiftly guided through Lagos, Maun, Ushuaia, then onward to Oxford, Tokyo and the City of Angels, Los Angeles. After lunching in British Columbia you will commit the perfect crime in Moscow before being shown how to juggle odds in Dakar. It’s mid-afternoon in Patmos and Peru before you know it and you’re treated to glimpses of London and Austria. Ivan Vladislavic enlikens Oklahoma City to the Free State. A flavour of being South African lingers through the mind of each writer, each voice displayed here. The evening is rounding up. But it’s not over yet. Fairbanks greets you before you rush off to Paris.
Finally, a happy ending awaits in Hong Kong. The clock strikes midnight.
You may raise a glass of the finest. You’ve earned your wings!

And so at once, the reader is made aware upon opening these pages, that it’s a good idea to keep your seatbelt fastened until the aircraft has come to a complete stop. This is only going to happen when you have finally reached the last page.
Home Away occurs as a series of freeze frames. Rather, it feels as though you’re watching twenty four short films through the eyes of twenty four actors; each on cue waiting their turn to play their part on this wordy stage until the hour hand on the clock has made not one, but two complete circles. A day slips through the sands of time.
I had the pleasure of attending the Johannesburg launch of this new masterpiece on May 13. About ten of the 24 authors were present, including Greenberg, the editor and creative genius behind this work. While it’s true that these 24 hour segments occur as flashes from 24 different cities around the world, it also bears mentioning that these 24 writers capture very different temperaments, flavours and energies linked to their respective stories.


In this gem of a collection is to be found more than varied armchair travel, and much more than you bargained for if you were looking for entertainment. These narratives also tell much about the sense of place and displacement that comes of traversing geographical boundaries, sometimes out of choice, often because of some extenuating circumstance. A war, a heartbreak, a recession, an escape. Something might happen that causes a land of promise to turn hostile. And so you leave.
Our love affairs with land and country can be quite fickle. This love-hate relationship with our environment is vividly shown to mirror our ways of relating to people in Home Away’s string of motion picture type stories. We learn that how we create our identity is strongly linked to where we imagine we belong in the world.
And that the fluidity of both our identity and where we might be situated in the world, is a fuel to each other. Sometimes we want to stay where we are. Sometimes we just have to leave. We have to move on. And yet other times, we know that we will inevitably find our way back to the place we always called home.

The twenty-four resounding voices in Home Away echo one thing: that our sense of place and feeling at home in the world will always be foreshadowed by the ability to feel at home with ourselves. These ideas resonate throughout the book and its chain of narratives.

It’s impossible to choose favourites in such a harmonious treasure of writing, but I would like to share just three sips from the ocean of Home Away. The reader has to read the entire collection to be truly quenched:

‘In Kampala there are moments when I forget that I am white. The woman who is here doesn’t feel like a middle-aged, white South African woman. The light is muted. The air is warm. She imagines she is black, that she has lived here all her life, that she is truly African.’ The warm arms of Kampala by Colleen Higgs


‘In this perfect stillness, noise is obscene. I know this because a loud thump has jolted me out of my slumber. Even before I am fully awake, my Palaeolithic self is in full panic, flight-ready: adrenaline surging, heart thumping, muscles rigid, ears pricked for the slightest clue as to the source of the sound. I wait.
… I haven’t been back in Sydney for long. Evidently, this is my Joburg self reacting: naked feral fear, fear so habitual that you no longer notice it’s there. It takes a while to learn to let go of the unceasing anxiety… Here, in the dark of the middle of the night, I must learn to be an expat again. Remind myself that I have nothing to be afraid of, congratulate myself on my escape.’ Redundant by Sarah Britten

‘With or without electricity, my favourite city in the entire world is not dissimilar to a series of quick, sharp slaps to the cheek… My first slap comes at 7:01. I wake up suddenly to the sound of a street fight brewing outside my open bedroom window. I listen intently; the fog of sleep quickly lifts and my mind and body are alert, ready for a day in Lagos.’ The Generator Man by Moky Makura

Note: Royalties from the sale of Home Away are being shared between the Adonis Musati Project and Kids Haven. Both organisations deal with the needs of refugee children and families.

"We are the leaders we've been waiting for" -WLC 2010

I attended a conference of diva hotseaters late last week. If there is any reason to re-awaken the potential we all know that we have lurking inside us, then the best way to go about it is to surround yourself with women who challenge themselves everyday, women who break with regulatory myths, women who trample unsavoury stereotypes; yes, women who change the world, one day at a time.

The Women's Leadership Conference convened at the Sunnyside Park Hotel in Johannesburg on 11-12 March 2010. As luck would have it, traffic into Johannesburg was reduced to a mere crawl thanks to a truck having exploded near the Atterbury exit into Pretoria and traffic was rerouted around nearby cities rather than over and through them. I was on my way into the mega-city having been out of town for the wedding festivities of a friend. It turned out to be a rather testy welcome into Gauteng, if you take into account that losing your cool is not the greatest show of survival of the fittest in a city that collides with the shortness of time and has to digest a population of feisty beings intent on making a corporate killing rather than just surviving on a daily basis. Those below the breadline are a mere mirage, an invisible fringe for the most part. A fantastical media report or two at the most. Such is the plight of the rainbow nation governed by the most TENDER-hearted of statesmen.

Time is money and tangents are costly. So where was I?
Aah. And so it came to pass that I was invited to join this gregarious bunch of divas in this neatly carved space for dialogue in Parktown.
I missed Debora Patta's talk but heard snippets for the length of the conference; she being of South Africa's more outspoken, daring media personalities and unsurprisingly Vodacom's Media Woman of the Year for 2009.
Kristine Pearson envisages a world of 'Women Lighting-up Africa'. She is CEO of the Freeplay Foundation based in the UK, US and SA. Noble cause indeed. And much to be made of the impressive vastness of her not-for-profit international organisation and its intent to more than create awareness of the devil of parafin usage in rural Africa and its insistence on gobbling up unsuspecting children in the impending darkness. She lobbys for clean and renewable energy, lighting and job creation for rural women in Africa.
Day 1's workshop was run by Philipa Namutebi Kabali-Kagwa: The Art of Telling Your Story. A powerful orator, Philipa held the audience in a trance of sorts as she went about her talented renderings and interactive sharings.
I sat on a panel that rounded up day one, along with Nicole Wills, founding partner and MD of award-winning advertising and communications agency Stick Communications SA; and Dr Sonia Joubert, academic and consultant in Creativity and Organisational Intelligence. A beautiful thread of conversation ranged from ways in which we might galvanise our own creativity on a regular basis to how to mentor and be mentored in an environment that encourages and unleashes creativity in others. I was happy to work to the theme of the THINK DIFFERENT ad, thanks to a friendly reminder from a brainstormy friend. Crazy works for me!
This theme pretty much carried forth throughout to the end of the two day-conference. It was more than imagination that confirmed the sparkle in people's eyes by the end of it all...

Day 2 began with an inspiring presentation on the mastery of organisational politics by Mardia Van Der Walt-Korsten, Businesswoman of the Year 2009 who is also the CEO of a German multi-national called T-Systems. Mardia cites her key to success simply as her love for life, and her intention to create an environment that puts soul into IT. Her value for humanity in her workplace is infectious as the direct interaction with a woman whose eyes sparkle when she speaks about her life and her work.

Tali Nates from the Johannesburg Holocaust Centre spoke about building bridges and learning tolerance. She spoke about the awareness of being: are we perpetrators, upstanders, bystanders or victims? Choice and repentance were strong themes in her talk.
There could not be a more fabulous way to end the conference than to welcome Prof Edna Van Harte, Dean of the Faculty of Military Science at the Military Academy in Saldanha at Stellenbosch University.
If it is about challenging stereotypes, and if its about a question of whether or not there is a place for women leaders in the military, then I think that she awakened that potential in more than one way.

The conference rounded up with the message of social movement; believe in something strongly and passionately enough, and get something going! Remember this? The MTN Clap :P

Enjoy. And stay with the magic. Its inside of you. Let it Live!

Good News and Bad News...

Good news is always welcome.

I believe that.

Especially since a lot of negative words get thrown about and rages flying from people you probably won't remember in two years time can cause unnecessary grief. And then there were those 'venom-spitting turds' who called themselves anon. Aaaarghhhh. I mean...who needs someone else's hot potato in their laps, right? Especially when things you say get twisted by ego's only ready for a jol.

What happens when their thirsts are quenched? Will they see the light, or will they continue to delude themselves for a lifetime? I guess everyone gets what they deserve, me included :) Alhamdulillah.

Ok.. First the bad news. I am in an excruciating amount of pain today. This all due to some painkillers wearing off and an hour of dental drilling into the recesses of my one measly tooth. It used to live quite peacefully at the back of my mouth until that dreaded day. A cavity. My dentist says its due to those braces I had when I was 13. Today's braces don't do that, she says. Right. Back then it was the coolest thing to sort out twisty teeth; accept for the fact that I couldn't chew gum or eat 'jawbreakers' (remember those hot spicey red ones??!!) or that I couldn't eat those lollypops with the gooey centre.

Back to the present; this all a load of drama to bring me to my proverbial knees. Actually, I am sitting on my knees as I type this! (I use one of these posture accurate typist chairs that has a rest for knees and butt. It's kinda funky. And it has wheels :P I love it. But Boi am I in pAiN!. Sigh.

So, to put away the bad news, I'm going to sleep. Writing is not happening today. Not like this, any way. Hmm... now for the good news...

I have just been appointed as a trustee (the youngest, I might add :P) on the corporate board of WIPHOLD. I know, its just a word. Or an acronym. I know. But it's a feather in my cap, whichever way. We are a total of five board trustees. The CEO of WIPHOLD, the CEO of WipCapital and the Chairperson (a Founder Member with great Merit in her field - legal and corporate). And then theres another two of us, newly appointed. This piece of news comes at a rather opportune time, seeing as I am at the threshold of many choices. It is a culmination of the many coats that I wear in the corporate and social sectors and I really hope to be able to make the most of it.

Read the Corporate Profile Mission Statement HERE.

The reasons that I have become hugely interested in this organisation is their immense social responsibility programmes in place. In some cases, companies like these are able to do more than the state. Read more about the extensive Social Development Commitment HERE.

I have a feeling that 2009 is going to be one heck of an exciting year!

ramadaan kareem

Its that time of year again. Pre-Ramadaan. Johannesburg is abuzz with activity, shoppers are filling up on sweets and savouries and the hype of all things spiritual. Relatives are holding dinners and lunches and teenyboppers are making their way to the bowling alleys and movies for last minute stocking up on entertainment they might not get to partake in over the next month or so. I wont get into the discussion regards that whole abstenance thing. Theres lines in the sand in every game of make belief that life is made up of.. and we all draw them and even draw upon them when it best suites us. But, undoubtedly, theres an essence about the mental and menial preparation for this upcoming few weeks that I look forward to. Theres something to be said about the spirit of unity, the glint of a yearning for redemption perhaps, and the fortitude that awaits in a notion of having our demons chained someplace in the oceans darkest depths. Aah, the promise of free spiritedness. The promise of freedom to do and be soul content and fulfilled as such. The promise within the choice to abstain from the desires of ego. The licence to fly light. The reason we need to be seated with the joy of our souls. Maybe, just maybe.. Thats all it takes.

Heres wishing you and yours beauty in the search for spirit..

Ramadaan Kareem..

With love..