Julie Nxadi

Julie Nxadi is a South African writer and artist. Quotes My relationship with writing is in its infancy compared to my relationship with storytelling It’s a medium that I have been fiddling with for a while, but it has never been the medium itself that is important to me, it is the story that is being told I hear and see things before I write them down I try to make sure that I stay as true as possible to those audio-visual interruptions from whence the stories come . I don’t believe in genre. A good story is tragic, funny, romantic, uncomfortable, good, bad, everything, and nothing at all Telling a story that nobody asked to hear is a pretty scary process There is this strange balance one has to strike whereby you are not precious about your work, but at the same time you need to be able to stand up for it I don’t need white characters in my stories for my characters to read as nuanced and deserving of anybody’s attention, Toni Morrison taught me that I write in English and my characters speak isiXhosa, so their dialogue is in isiXhosa and that comes with no apologies and shame, just like my English narration comes with no apologies or shame because I am a product of THIS South Africa and I would rather hold that conflict than hide it, Bessie Head and Duiker taught me that The refrain “if you are not bleeding you are not hurt” is really just a chant we say on our slow march to social death, because what are we asking when we suggest that “there are worse things” to a child whose heart is aching? Are we not asking that this child know what is worse, either via imagination or experience? Are we not insisting that their only currency is their flesh? who is better equipped than someone who is eloquent in the language of imagination? A child. we often forget that there is labour involved in making magic It’s amazing how a word appearing somewhere you may not have expected it to has the ability to slow one’s reading down or speed it up I was taught that the rain can cry with you and cleanse you My only real job now is to remember to listen in the face of English Julie Nxadi // Stories as sonic and visual interruptions by Bubblegumclub n.d Category:Living people