ISKANCHI CONVERSATION SERIES - UNATHI SLASHA

We talked to Unathi Slasha about his award-winning novel The Hollow Sound of Lightweight Bodies and hisradical approach to genre, form, and storytelling. The conversation explored his ideas on “the anecdotale,” tradition and experimentation, and how humour, gossip, and failure shape his literary practice.

Iskanchi Press: Congratulations on winning the 2025 Iskanchi Book Prize for your novel The Hollow Sound of Lightweight Bodies. How are you feeling in this moment?

Unathi Slasha: Thank you good people of Iskanchi (a term whose definition I think captures what I’mt rying to do with and in my work). Quite thrilled to be the literary trickster this year.

Iskanchi Press: Your writing moves between poetry, polemic, and literary scholarship, often challenging the limits of language and form. How do these different modes of expression interact and inform each other in your experimental fiction? What possibilities emerge from this convergence that wouldn't be possible otherwise?

Unathi Slasha: The great thing about moving between genres, of course, is the freedom this seamless movement offers, something one wouldn’t easily achieve if stuck in one category of literary expression. Most of the time, the style is never really chosen by the author; rather, the subject matter selects its own form: all one needs todo is to bend with what the work-in-progress demands. Was it not our grandmaster, Taban Lo Liyong, who preached literary boldness, and went on to do exactly that? Was it not our literary granddaddy Lo Liyong who also said that he writes essays to explain things, poems to hide things, and stories just to laugh and have fun? To mix things up is fun, really. All the thinkers and writers and philosophers and even musicians I admire are practitioners of this poetics of moving away from the genre-prison, which is another name for sedentariness.

Finally, genre bending, genre blending, genre fluidity (or whatever other name critics and readers alike have given this process and practice) is needed to respond to the confused state of political and cultural affairs. We are, of course, living in a world where it is ridiculously stupid to think of anything as “pure;” rather, everything is everything else; things are somehow weirdly entangled. I’m of the belief that if a writer has the capacity to radicalise certain genres to the point where the genres give off the verisimilitude of newness, then let them do it. As for me, I shall continue dodging being confined within limits inherited from a faraway past.

Iskanchi Press: You've described your writing style as the "anecdotale," a fusion of anecdote and fantastical elements that allows you to tackle themes like violence and grief without conforming to political correctness or simple moralizing. How does this form function in your storytelling, and what freedoms does it provide when confronting sensitive social and political issues?

Unathi Slasha: Well, the anecdotale does not encompass my writing “style,” or my work in its entirety. Rather, this description speaks particularly to this specific work, The Hollow Sound of Lightweight Bodies. For me, each and every literary undertaking has to have its own mode of storytelling, its own universe of rules and roles to play. For example, when I was writing my first novel, Jah Hills, the guiding principle was what I called the Unlanguaged World, a world full of contradictions, a world I thought Njabulo Ndebele couldn’t theorise in his literary essays, couldn’t actualise in his own fiction, even though the material was simply staring at him. Are folktales not repositories of the ordinary turned fantastic and the fantastic turned ordinary? In my article “The Unlanguaged World: Reflections on Contemporary South African Fiction” (New Orleans Review, 2017), I shunned mentioning Ndebele’s name intentionally, because I was playing and moving within an allusive style. This article, which explains what I mean by “unlanguaged world,” is not a fixed model for my future writing experiments. That would be wrong and against Black Music, whose poetics and aesthetics I try to emulate and transmute into my own literary expression. There is no static or stable voice in Black Music: one has to strive to always find a new voice, sound, syntax—only to abandon it for another. That’s how I see my literary attempts, because that is what they are: attempts. That’s why we must take Samuel Beckett’s short statements seriously: Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. We must learn to fail better at carrying out our literary experiments. We should strive to fail better than we have in the past.

Hence, both the concepts of an unlanguaged world and the anecdotale are very specific provocations. Of course, in an intellectually poverty-stricken country like South Africa lazy academics can easily take these terms and talk about them as if they were general theories of fiction. For me, it has never been about seeking approval or agreement; it was always about posing a challenge to the hegemony of naturalism mixed with crude and uncritical realism that has long dominated Black South African writing. It was both a response and a challenge not only cast to others but to myself as well. Especially to myself writing in a country that prefers popularity as opposed to substance and thought. Nonetheless, I have learned that there will always be readers and writers who want to be on the side of the alter-narrative, who are the alternative, whether we like it or not, whether they get accepted or dismissed.

After crafting the Unlanguaged as a poetics, my novel Jah Hills was composed as a way to complement the critical lamentation of what I thought was missing in contemporary South African fiction. When you mention, “anecdotale,” take it as a thought experiment, not as systematic or general theory. Take it as a poetics that can be used to interpret the specific work at hand. Sometimes the proposition or theory or poetics may exist long before the idea is realized. This is something I learnt from scientists and physicists. Einstein’s proposition of Gravitational Waves, or “Ripples,” existed as a prediction for a century before it got proven – realized: this is recent as September 2015.  Imagine! And the funny thing about it is that it took different physics and scientific institutes and research groups working under the banner of LSC to prove this proposition. If one thinks this can’t happen in philosophy, literature, and literary theory, they are lethally mistaken. I can’t embark on an experiment without a preceding thought or theory. In science or physics we refer to this as a hypothesis, a proposition, a theory; in literature we call it poetics. What this means is that if there is no proposition or poetics that comes before the experiment then it’s safe to presume one doesn’t know what they are doing. There are some writers who are not involved in poetics, yet are fond of arguing that their work is “experimental.” What they are actually saying is: I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it anyway.

The idea of the personal anecdote, the episodic prose, interacting with the fantastic tale or fusing elements of the fantastic, the absurd, is nothing new. It’s been there for a long time, often showing itself in different forms. François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) is one classic example. Without listing a long line of precursors, let me simply share two books that for me are examples of the anecdotale: Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967) and Lesego Rampolokeng’s Bird-Monk Seding (2017). These are fearless and astounding literary undertakings.

Iskanchi Press: How do you intentionally blend realism and folklore to reshape contemporary township narratives, and in what ways do these blurred boundaries challenge readers' expectations about what South African narratives can be?

Unathi Slasha: There’s no miracle in all this. I suppose, when one is interested in literature it means they have to engage all facets of the discipline. I’m no exception. I’m more of a reader than a writer. I read more than I enjoy writing unless there are some things I need to address urgently! So, naturally, when one is exposed to all the literary genres, when one has given oneself enough time and intelligence to study the forms, in all their possible manifestations, it is easier to navigate their structures, break them apart, only to assemble and mobilize and transform them into one narrative. You strive to avoid creating what I can only call genre-hierarchy, the genre-bias, the rigid predilection for one genre over the other, you see this happening a lot, especially in South African literature. It appears that people forget that there are certain realities that are almost impossible to be captured in a single genre without the latter creaking and cracking and crushing. The point is awareness – to always be aware of what works and what does not. This awareness is a certain acute sensitivity that allows one to easily see from the very first pages where a book is trying to go, what it is trying to do, without finishing it: that’s a great skill.

Iskanchi Press: You engage with oral traditions and folklore but rewrite their archetypes to expose dissonances, violence, and epistemic cruelty in modern South African life. How do you negotiate respect for tradition while also critiquing and reshaping it? What tensions arise from this process, and how do you navigate them creatively?

Unathi Slasha:  Again, the issue of awareness returns. It is a great thing to be aware of tradition, but that doesn’t mean being imprisoned by it to the point where you feel frightened and ashamed of going against it. Traditions are not prisons and shouldn’t be treated as such. Some people would die defending deadly traditions because they have made those inheritances part of their identities. That’s a big problem. I think contemporary authors whose writing is characterized by the aspiration towards something new should avoid thinking that it’s enough to simply borrow and re-tell without any change intone, style, politics, aesthetic or voice. The one cultural convention I like the most is the one of folktale-telling sessions in which an old woman or man narrates a certain story, often to a group of children. When they are done, we are dismissed; no questions asked. In a couple of days, even years, that very group of children is summoned to a session. The public gathers to hear the one who tells that very same story best. Of course, the storyteller-listener is the superior judge, the one who says: this young woman or man here tells this story best. Why? Because of their originality, invention, embellishment, imagination, language facility, and so forth.

When I talk of tradition, I’m speaking about tradition in the literary realm and broadly in all other manifestations. Paraphrasing Fanon, the only tradition we need is that of self-criticism. Just because a practice, a way of seeing, saying, and doing something, is traditional, inherited, doesn’t mean that it’s sacred, that it’s a good thing to be used right now, used as it in the past, without any improvisation and improvement on the inherited and heard. People want to cling onto the achievements of the past, a deadly thing to do. Yes, we learn from past traditions, but they are not untouchable. The past shouldn’t be an autocrat lording over our present.

The late poet Mzi Mahola once lamented the dry and cliché usage of isiXhosa idioms, in isiXhosa prose and poems. Here’s someone, an unnamed writer, who’s never lived or visited the rural area, who has never seen the animals, plants, social organization, etc. of the space being referred to in one proverb or another. Yet, he would find it easy to use that age-old proverbial phrase in attempts to speak about an urban situation right here in the township. That’s hell-hilarious; why not attempt at a new idiom that speaks to the space you occupy, where’s the gift of observation? So, Mister Mzi was saying, no, no guys, we need to think, we need to invent new idioms, we are tired of platitudes. Lots of junk in our traditions needs to be discarded. Maybe not even replaced but eradicated, so that we may be pushed to the limit: the limit is the precipice of what philosophers’ term “leap.” The limit is a space from which we have no choice but to “invent” something entirely new so as to fill up the lacuna left by a particularly treasured yet terrible tradition.

I always tell this story. Several years ago, I was doing a reading at Rhodes University. Jah Hills was still a working script. I wanted feedback. It was a full house filled with so-called traditionalists. I was reading certain sections that I knew were going to be provocative. It was intentional. I wanted to prove that people are easily fooled by what’s inherited instead of questioning its place in their lives and in the community at large. Well, some of those guys proved to me that they were cowards by walking out of the room, instead of staying and debating the issues they thought I was disrespecting. Face tradition is often perceived as a troublesome conduct in this country, as people approach things with pre-respect and preconceived value systems; systems that, when scrutinized or interrogated, reveal themselves as being destructive to them and the whole society. My supposed respect for tradition or the inherited past comes in the form of awareness. Being aware means that you have the right to rubbish whatever you think goes against the individuals’ whim. Stick your hand into the pot, grab and run off with whatever is useful. Hortense Spillers uses the term “usable past” when writing about the modernist work of Ralph Ellison. I dig the idea. We all need to make the past useful, usable, not hurtful.

Iskanchi Press: Can you discuss how humor, rumor, and gossip function in your narratives as mechanisms for social commentary or resistance?

Unathi Slasha: I don’t wish to give a long lecture on the convergence of the three in my latest novel or in novels of thinkers whose work I regard with respect. Let me say a few things about rumor and gossip, since in my case – in the shebeen, salon, the streets – humor is often preceded by the emergence of these two. What attracts me to rumor and gossip (which always go together) is this: I like to go to the shebeen, for the music and, most importantly, for rumor and gossip. How inventive people can get! It’s always humorous when one person is sharing a rumor and then another within the gathering group opposes that rumor by providing a hearsay or a bit of gossip as a counterpoint. So on, it goes. I think that is the point of fiction: invention, embellishment. Why? Because you want people to laugh at your entertaining half-truths but also to laugh with you regarding your own hurt, misfortune, tragedy, while they learn a thing or two from you. You learn something because, after the life-slaughter experience and the shared laughter, you have allowed yourself to open up. More lessons. Rumor and gossip comprise moving away from the credible, the established, the authorized. I hate authority. And humor is great. I like dark humor, deadpan type, the saying-it-with-a-straight-face kind of humor more than anything, because it grants you a chance to clearly see pretenders and hypocrites. Obviously, a joke is never just a joke. Freud has already addressed this issue: jokes are always masks for the stuff that goes on in the unconscious, for repressed thoughts and feelings. I keep wondering if this is the reason some of us are obsessed with self-loathing and self-deprecation as a literary mode of concealment in fiction.

But can one really conceal the infamous “I” even if it takes a different guise such as “we” or “they”? I always thought that any serious reader has the capacity to find the face beneath the self-belittling “I.” Well, for me, dark humor is an invitation to active readers and serious critics to do exactly that: finding the hiding face, for the fun of it. This open call is an informal  invitation, like sticking your dirty tongue out and wiggling it while winking at the reader to come hither!

What does it denote, the convergence of rumor, gossip, and humor? It all depends on who is reading and how they are reading. We must remember nothing in literature is inherently and automatically positively “political” or “valuable;” it’s the duty of every serious reader and critic to read in a certain way that makes the politics and aesthetics emerge. Every one of us approaches a text with their own political baggage and biases.

Iskanchi Press: What advice do you have for African writers interested in blurring genres and experimenting with form?

Unathi Slasha: Study the ones who’ve already done it. Study those who succeeded, but, more importantly, pay attention to the ones who failed. Failure is a great teacher in literature, because it gives you an opportunity to see what not to do in your own attempts.

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