HomeThe Booklist Interview Beverley Naidoo

The Booklist Interview

Beverley Naidoo

everley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth is Booklist’s 2001 Top of the List Winner for Youth Fiction (see p.766). Like all Naidoo’s books, it’s a powerful story that humanizes contemporary politics through the eyes of a child. On the first page, Sade Solaja, 12, sees her mother shot dead outside their home. The soldiers really wanted to kill Sade’s papa, an outspoken journalist. The next day she and her younger brother board a plane and flee to London. The arrangements fall through, and the children find themselves refugees, alone on London’s cold, unknown streets.

Naidoo spoke with Booklist by phone from her home in England, where she has lived since she left her native South Africa in 1965, where she had been imprisoned without trial. In England, she married another South African ex-prisoner and exile, Nandha Naidoo, whose parents had come to South Africa from India. For many years she taught elementary and high-school classes in England, focusing on literacy. In the week after September 11, she was on a tour reading and talking about her novel with Palestinian refugees in Amman, Jordan.

BKL: How did the young refugee students respond to Sade’s story?
NAIDOO: It was extraordinary. They were so engaged with the story and the issues. A boy came up to me and said, “You took me into Sade’s head. I really liked that.” One girl asked me: “Writing is just like a gun. What do you think?”

BKL: Sade and Femi are from a rich, highly educated family, but the violence comes right into their home.
NAIDOO: Yes, Sade has to do a flip here. She never thought this was going to happen to her. And a wide range of readers identify with her. Readers who feel discriminated against connect with Sade and see themselves in the book. Boys as well as girls identify with her. There isn’t a gender divide when you’re opening up these big issues of survival.

BKL: What do they like about her?
NAIDOO: They like that she’s not cowed, that she and Femi don’t give in. There’s no magic wand. Young people know the world is still a nasty, messy, brutal place. But there are people who’ve made a difference, despite the odds, despite everything, and that’s really affirming. That’s all we have at the end of the day.

BKL: How do you stay true to the child’s viewpoint?
NAIDOO: I think that’s the transformation process. I spend a lot of time doing research. But then I dump most of the documentary stuff, get away from it, and imagine one child’s story. I’m very interested in the experience of the child of political parents. I wasn’t exploring the father’s story here. I was interested in the implications for his children. The child’s view is politics without the big P. Yes, the adults have courage and integrity, but what is the cost to their children?

BKL: Is that why Sade is so angry?
NAIDOO: She’s suppressing that anger, taking on the mother’s role. She almost has a nervous breakdown rather than allow her feelings out. At least she has the language that can help her through, but her little brother is like a pressure cooker waiting to explode. He doesn’t have the words to deal with what’s happening. He’s really caught up in the grief and anger and disconnection. I’m now working on a sequel that’s about Femi a few years later. He’s in danger, and he can be dangerous. It’s very hard for him living in a place like London.

BKL: The hostility in the classroom, the bullying in the schoolyard, those are universals. You do a great job of connecting that with the big political issues.
NAIDOO: Politics can be so blinkin’ boring, the way the big “politicians” have colonized it. But actually, politics is our lives. It affects all of us. I came into this wondering how I could explore the politics and then I realized that there’s even politics at school. Ultimately, the school bullying is the same kind of power dynamics on a different scale. When I came to London for the Smarties Award ceremony, everywhere I looked I saw the face of a Nigerian child, Damilola Taylor, 11. He wasn’t actually a refugee. He had come with his mother and older sister, who needed medical treatment. One day he was murdered as he walked home. His death appeared to be bullying that had gone seriously wrong: kids threatening, taking a knife to a child. They got an artery, and Damilola bled to death not far from where he was living on one of those awful, awful South London estates. His dad then came from Nigeria and made a powerful statement. One thing he said was, “My son’s last act was to be seen coming out of a library.” After that incident, I changed the dedication in The Other Side of Truth. Now it reads: “In memory of Damilola Taylor and to other young people and their families who seek new lives in new countries.”

BKL: Was your story inspired by what happened to Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian political activist who was imprisoned and then hanged?
NAIDOO: It was a combination of things. I knew I wanted to do a story that was set in London. I was getting a little tired of readers pointing fingers at South Africa. Yes, of course apartheid was shocking, and I’m glad they read my books about it. But I picked up some complacency. I wanted to look at things right here, including the increasing racism, and it became clear that the story had to be about refugee children. I also wanted to talk about the power of words; the story is also about that. Write it down. Get it out. Let people hear. I am skeptical about any version of the truth told from a single angle. I am also suspicious of silence.

BKL: Yet your story doesn’t preach. You leave the uncertainty. Sade’s father is a brave journalist who tells the truth, but that’s why her mother is dead.
NAIDOO: That’s the great thing about fiction. There is no one answer. There are no blueprints. If only there were.

—Interview conducted by Hazel Rochman

(Booklist/January 1 & 15, 2002)