Four Questions with Author Bianca Marais

We talk about writing from multiple perspectives, her new novel and more

I first met Bianca Marais years ago when she was kind enough to video chat with my book club during our discussion of her debut, Hum if You Don’t Know the Words. It’s a searing novel that draws on her experience growing up in apartheid South Africa. She was so kind, smart and generous with her time that I’ve eagerly followed her career since then.

Both Hum if You Don’t Know the Words and If You Want to Make God Laugh are moving, captivating stories. They make great companion reads to Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a Crime.

Bianca is a professor of creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She’s also the co-host of the popular podcast The Sh*t No One Tells You About Writing (a must-listen for emerging authors) and runs the Eunice Ngogodo Own Voices Initiative, which empowers young Black women in Africa to write and publish their own stories.

Bianca and I chatted about her new book, writing process and more. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What was your path to writing and publishing?

I think I wrote and illustrated my first book when I was seven. I was lucky to have amazing English teachers at school and they really encouraged me to write. When I was 16, I wrote a play for a big university competition. We won best original script and best comedy for it. My English teacher at the time encouraged me to keep writing but, in South Africa at that time, you couldn’t do a writing degree, so I studied English literature.

Then I stopped writing for a time and started again, just before my 30th birthday. I wrote two novels that were widely rejected because they were awful. When we moved to Toronto in 2012, I said to myself ‘I’m going to take this seriously. I’m going to study writing for the first time in my life.’ So, I did the creative writing certificate program with the University of Toronto.

A year later, I got an agent. That book, what became Hum If You Don’t Know the Words, was rejected more than 100 times by publishers. I wrote and rewrote it. I took out 16,000 words and started again but I wasn’t willing to give up on that story because it was so important to me. Then we finally landed with Putnam and the rest, as they say, is history. I have to pinch myself every day that this is something I still get to do.

Tell us a little about the Eunice Ngogodo Initiative.

Eunice Ngogodo was my childhood caregiver and someone who was hugely influential in my life. I was raised during apartheid, a time when children were pretty much brainwashed to be racist by their entire society. It was through Eunice’s love that I realized very early on that there was something very broken about the world in which I was living because I saw her treated in awful ways by the South African police and by white people in general. It made me question everything.

I wrote both my novels from multiple perspectives, one of which was a Black character’s perspective. I was very aware when I wrote the novel that I didn’t want to appropriate a voice that wasn’t mine. So I was respectful about the way I approached it. I had sensitivity readers and consulted cultural experts.

But at the same time, after I published it, I had a lot of conversations with Black South Africans, who were extremely frustrated that they were seeing white people writing these stories and being published internationally, but Black writers were only being published in South Africa.

I decided I didn’t want to be part of the problem — even though I had really good intentions. I wanted to become part of the solution. So I started the initiatives to empower young Black women in South Africa to write and publish their own stories.

You mentioned writing from multiple perspectives. One of your fans on Twitter suggested I ask you how you make each character’s voice so unique?

I approach characterizations pretty much the same way I think actors approach a role. I don’t see a character from the outside. I pretty much climb into them and then I see the world through their eyes.

When I first begin writing, I write every character’s story from multiple POVs and tenses. It’s trial and error and multiple drafts.

So, in If You Want to Make God Laugh, Ruth is such a classic narcissist. She’s a delightful character write in the first person because she gives so much away without even realizing her own narcissism. Deliah is a very damaged secret keeper, so her voice was very particular, very formal. With Zodwa, I couldn’t writer her in the first person because there was so much context about her living situation that I needed a North American audience to understand that, of course, she wouldn’t feel the need to explain.

You have a new book coming out, The Witches of Moonshyne Manor, that sounds like a pretty big departure from your first two books. It’s about witches who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments. What can you tell us about it?

I get so much feedback from readers saying, ‘I really put off reading your book because I thought it would be depressing. But once I read it, I absolutely loved it.’

I thought ‘I don’t want to be writing books that people feel like they’re forced to read’ and during COVID, I needed some escape.

A story came to me about these witches, so it’s a completely different genre. It’s contemporary fantasy. I really leaned into the humor, which I only got to touch on in my other two books. This is just a madcap romp. It was such a joy to write.

My other two books, I viewed as a form of therapy. It was a way for me to work through my own conflicted feelings about my upbringing and the fact that, in my whole life, every opportunity I had came at the expense of someone else. Whereas this book didn’t have me in tears as I was grappling with my own personal feelings. It was just super fun and I’m hoping that my readers will enjoy the levity of it.

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Thanks again to Bianca for talking with me. You can follow Bianca on Instagram and Twitter, and pre-order The Witches of Moonshyre Manor.

The Eunice Ngogodo Own Voices Initiative partnered with BlackBird Books in South Africa and Rising Action Publishing Collective to publish No Be From Hia by Natasha Omokhodion-Kalulu Banda in Canada. Hopefully more BlackBird books are on the way!

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