Gillian Slovo

profile by Joe Wiebe
posted March 11, 2005

Gillian Slovo’s life has been profoundly affected by politics. She was born in South Africa in 1952, and her parents, Joe Slovo and Ruth First, were actively involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. As she put it while she was here for the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, “growing up in this incredibly racist and unequal society, [they] were two of the few white people who decided that they could not turn a blind eye to it.”

Gillian Slovo witnessed history up close. “In 1964, when Nelson Mandela and the whole leadership of the A.N.C. were arrested, my mother was put in solitary detention for a long while, and my father, who had been out of the country at the time this happened, couldn’t come back in.” When her mother was released, she immediately took her three daughters away to live in England.

Slovo’s parents continued to fight the Apartheid regime from outside. In 1982, her mother was “killed by a letter bomb that was sent to her by the South African police.” Up until then, Slovo said, “I felt that South Africa probably had caused me too much pain, and that I had been given a chance not to be burdened by this terrible country.” But her mother’s assassination opened her eyes. “When I went to her funeral, I realized I’d been completely foolish to think that I could walk away from South Africa.”

Around the same time, Slovo began her writing career, though she “started writing fiction as a joke.” For an author of ten novels and a family memoir, this is a surprising admission. “I was hanging out with a friend of mine who was on a sabbatical from his university, and we were discussing that we really liked the same kind of detectives — hard-boiled, macho, but of the Chandler-Hammett school — but that nobody had really modernized the genre. We decided that each of us would start a separate book, and we’d see how far we went. No thought of publishing, except I discovered I loved it.”

Though her first forays were mysteries, the epiphany she’d felt at her mother’s funeral never left her, and eventually she “wrote a family saga and a thriller” set in South Africa. Then, “in 1990, when Mandela was let out of prison and I was finally able to go back to South Africa, I began to think about writing a piece of non-fiction that was to do with my life and where it fitted in.”

Though the Apartheid regime had been defeated, “it was only after the first election in ’94 that I realized it was the time to actually do it because people who would not have told me anything before then were suddenly able to start talking about the past and their experiences.” By then, she also had another incentive to write the book — her father, a Cabinet Minister in Mandela’s first government, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She lived in South Africa for a year, and her father died in 1995, while she was there.

Her memoir, Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, was published in 1997. Her interest in South Africa was still not sated, however, and she returned to it in Red Dust (2000), a novel which explores the effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A film version starring Hilary Swank just played at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Earlier this year, Slovo’s tenth novel, Ice Road, was published. Set in Leningrad in the 1930s and ‘40s, it marks a significant departure for the author. “It is a more pure feat of the imagination. I think possibly because I didn’t know the country as well as I know South Africa and its history, it allowed my imagination to fly in a much freer way.” The result is an evocative story that follows several characters through the turmoil of Stalinist rule leading up to the Siege of Leningrad during World War Two. “I’m very interested in writing about big political landscapes and times of immense change and how they impact on individuals, possibly because my life has been very influenced by that same kind of thing.”

Critically acclaimed, Ice Road was shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize, which annually awards the best novel written in English by a woman (the winner was Andrea Levy’s Small Island).

Following Ice Road’s publication, Slovo was asked to write a play about Guantanamo, the U.S. military prison in Cuba that has been holding suspected terrorists without trial since the 9-11 attacks. The idea was to interview “people who either had relatives in Guantanamo or who’d actually been there and been released. And then I sat with all these transcripts of this enormous amount of material and out of it I structured a play that has three people’s experiences intercut with people talking about what Guantanamo means in the world.”

The result, called Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom, has become a huge hit, growing from a three-week run in a small theatre to the West End in London, and then Broadway in New York, where it is still playing. Just recently, Archbishop Desmond Tutu agreed to play the part of a British Law Lord in the play for two performances, garnering it even more publicity. Apparently, the play may be produced here in Vancouver, too. “There’s a rumour going on in my email somewhere that somebody in Vancouver is interested in putting it on here.”

Slovo is thrilled about the play’s success since she believes ardently in the cause. “What do you do when this happens to you? There’s no way out. None of your relatives can get hold of you. You can’t get a lawyer. You can’t protest your innocence because nobody can hear your voice.”

“If Guantanamo is allowed to continue, it means something very bad for the way we all live. It feels to me like it’s the opening shot in something that will be a reversal of things that have been very hard fought for in the countries that we live in: the right to know of what you’re accused, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. All these things that we take for granted are beginning to be changed by the existence of Guantanamo.”

It seems that Gillian Slovo has come full circle. Political struggles have influenced her life from an early age, and now she is fighting political battles herself. No doubt her parents would be proud.