Naledi Mashishi

Naledi Mashishi is an author from South Africa and masters student based in London, UK. Quotes When I got the idea for the book, I had read several stories in the news about pastors who were convincing their congregants to do degrading, dangerous things like spray Doom in their faces or drink household cleaning products. Those stories disturbed me, and I wanted to write about it. I was also always interested in the idea of intergenerational trauma. Especially since apartheid had been such a traumatic period for so many people and outside of the TRC that was not really dealt with in any widescale, meaningful way. I became concerned with what we do with that trauma and how people really move on from it. I have always been interested in speculative fiction and a lot of my earliest writing was already in the science fiction and fantasy vein. I have read fantasy pretty consistently since I was young, and I knew quite early on that I wanted to write it. But what inspired this book in particular was being introduced to magical realism through reading The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. I decided to try to write it, so I wrote down a number of short story ideas and the idea of a little girl whose powers get used by a pastor was one of them. I realised the idea was too big to fit into a short story format, so I expanded it into a full-length novel. In retrospect, the end result is probably more fantasy than magical realism. I did not want to provide any firm answers here but what I wanted to do was contrast the way religion has traditionally been practised versus how more contemporary churches and forms of Christianity practise it. I drew a lot from my experience. If you look at your older denominations like Catholicism and Anglicanism, they tend to be a lot more rooted in fixed routines and traditions, which I suppose stems from when the Roman Catholic Church started integrating pagan practices into Christianity hundreds of years ago. Whereas a lot of new age churches tend to be less about rigid routines and have a less structured vibe with a lot more singing and dancing. Growing up I tended to find the more rigid traditional approach very boring and harder to connect with. Especially with prayers like the Lord’s Prayer, it never felt like I was actually talking to anyone. Just reciting a bunch of words. Less traditional churches were more appealing to me because they in my mind focused more on the personal connection aspect of religion. But I think that the lack of structure can also make them easier to bend and exploit for people like Solomon because there are no higher ups like the Vatican or the Naledi Mashishi on her first novel Invisible Strings Archbishop who can reign people like him in. I use a lot of characters in the book to vent the various frustrations I have had with Christianity (I am now an atheist). I have always hated the way that the church treats the LGBT+ community and Molefi was how I wanted to show that the belief that being gay is an abomination impacts real people. I also have issues with the way women are treated at various points in the Bible and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the clearest examples for me of women being mistreated. I could never understand how Lot as the hero of the story offered up his own virgin daughters to be raped by a crowd of men in order to save the angels from being raped. And the part of the story that everyone tends to focus on [is] that it’s that the city was filled with sinful people and one of the clearest signs of this was all the gay sex they were having. At least, that’s how the story was taught at my church. I felt it was important to include Molefi and to include that story as a way of showing that the church’s homophobia is harming people. But also, in a sad twist of irony, the focus on demonising homosexuality can lead people to ignore really horrific things that are happening and that are worth paying attention to, like a father offering up his own kids to be raped. That was also pulled from my own experiences. When I was a child, I had similar questions about where God comes from, why he does things, and how people know that something is actually his will. I also wanted to capture how religious people can sometimes discourage asking these questions like Solomon’s mother and eventually Solomon do and how frustrating these experiences are. Through Thato’s questioning of God, I wanted to explore how people interpret God rather than provide any answers. [S]omeone like Solomon believes in God deeply but is also able to manipulate the concept of God’s will in order to silence dissent and gain power. With the Straw-Hat Lady, I wanted to highlight how historically God has been used as a weapon during colonial rule in order to exert soft power over black people. Naledi Mashishi on her first novel Invisible Strings, June 19 2021 External Links Category:Authors Category:People from South Africa Category:Living people