Jo-Anne Richards

Jo-Anne Richards Jo-Anne Richards Jo-Anne Richards

Jo-Anne Richards is a journalist and novelist who lives and works in Johannesburg. Her first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken, was written in the early 1990s, and published in the UK in November 1996. It became an instant bestseller in South Africa, where it topped the bestseller list for fifteen weeks, and was subsequently short-listed for the prestigious M-Net Awards. It also sold very well in the UK and elsewhere (and is in the process of turning into a film). The Innocence of Roast Chicken deals with growing up under apartheid. Her second novel, Touching the Lighthouse, launched in November 1997, is about the radical politics of the 1980s. Her new novel, Sad at the Edges, launched in April 2003, is about a South African woman's return to vibrant Johannesburg after a sojourn in London.

Jo-Anne spent her childhood in Port Elizabeth, and was educated at Collegiate Girls' High School. She maintains that "an Eastern Cape upbringing does give you that sense of texture because it's a barefoot, dusty childhood, running wild. You got a feel of the smells and the feel of growing up in South Africa."

Her father was a dentist and her mother a social worker who became a potter. Her brother, Graham, was an attorney and an ANC councillor in Port Elizabeth (when it was unbanned). He was responsible for opening the beaches to all races during the '80s, when he sued the Administrator of the Cape in his personal capacity for a declaratory order. He is now town clerk of Port Elizabeth and has just been appointed as responsible for organising the elections in Port Elizabeth next year. Her other brother, Guy, is a professor of medicine, a respiratory physician who is head of the Intensive Care Unit at the Johannesburg Hospital.

Jo-Anne spent four years at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. She graduated with a B.Journ. degree in 1979, followed by Honours in Journalism and Linguistics, and has been a practising journalist all her working life: first for Evening Post in Port Elizabeth, The Cape Times, then the Sunday Express in Johannesburg, until it and its sister newspaper the Rand Daily Mail were closed down in 1985. Then, after spending much of the rest of the year wandering about Europe on her retrenchment pay (with a boyfriend in a kombi), she joined The Star where she worked till the day her daughter Emma was born on 28 February 1988. She had Joshua on 1 January 1991, and then began freelancing. At the moment she is working for the Mail and Guardian.

"At first Jo'burg was very scary for me, it was very much the big city, it was a wild place for me. It wasn't an easy city at first to learn and to grow into. Even Cape Town has the sense of a smaller town, compared to a big city. Slowly, over time, I've really grown to love Johannesburg, and I love it. I mean, I love the Eastern Cape but I wouldn't go and live there now because I've really grown into Jo'burg."

In 1987, Jo-Anne married Ross Hutton, a prominent Johannesburg advocate. They were divorced in 2001.

She now lives in Parkwood, Johannesburg with her children, Emma (15) and Joshua (12). Emma has Turner's Syndrome, and Jo-Anne is National Chair of the South Africa Turner's Syndrome Support Group. In between writing and motherhood, Jo-Anne is also the convenor of the honours journalism programme at Wits University. She admits to a passion for teaching and enjoys working with students, whom she finds "a source of hope".

Her house is old (by Joburg standards) and beautiful with big wooden windows, pressed steel ceilings, wooden floors, lead work in sliding doors, big wooden bookshelves with lead pane doors. Big sweeping garden with two big camphor trees, plum tree, and enormous oak.

E-mail: josie@pixie.co.za

http://home.iprimus.com.au/selliot/jrichards/
http://www.weasel.cwc.net/Josie.htm


The Innocence of Roast Chicken, by Jo-Anne Richards

The Innocence of Roast Chicken

Chapter One

Everyone should have a farm like that in their childhood - too idyllic to be real outside the tangible world of a child's imagining. And it really was like that, the perfect background for a charmed and untouched childhood. The farm itself was untouched: by ugliness, unpleasantness, poverty, politics. Or so it seemed to me. Until that particular year, when it was spoiled. Everything was spoiled.

As an intense teenager, years later, filled with angst and misplaced sensitivity, I wrote a poem about my childhood. I wrote of a white sheet hanging on the line on a summer day, rippling and flapping in a gentle breeze, warmed and dried by the cloudless heat of the day. Then I showed it fallen, a graceless heap on the grassless ground, soiled by filthy footprints which could have been mud, but which looked a bit like blood.

Don't think badly of me. Everyone is filled with self-pity at 14. And for many years I carried the full guilt of that year. I lugged the intense, silent burden of having caused everything that happened, by doing something very bad, or not standing in the way of the bad things - to field and divert them from us, and my farm. I had too much faith in the way things would continue, in the beauty of before.

When I was older, I realised that, after all, I had been just a child, powerless to deflect the horror, not strong enough to be chosen as the cosmic goalie. Then I felt sorry for myself, until I was older still, and the guilt - more collective this time - settled again. That was when I locked my life away, from all the perplexing ugliness of life, and from any taint of hurt or violence.

But I didn't set out to tell about 1966. I don't want to talk about it. I want to describe how it really was, how it was before - before the ugliness. I want to tell you about the soft, lilting nature of my holidays there.

This is how it really was. Each morning at five we awoke, my two brothers and I, to the same sounds. The drowsy sounds of hundreds of chickens, interspersed with the sharp crow of awakened roosters. Lying very still in my bed, I could hear the grating beat of the belt-driven generator. From the bedroom next door, the early news on the Afrikaans service, and then my grandmother's soft-toned, Afrikaans-accented reading from the English bible, before my grandfather's deep English voice joined hers in the Lord's prayer.

The skree-bang of the fly-screen door into the kitchen, and the cleaning noises in the lounge - invisible cleaning, for we never saw it being done. When the smells of bacon and Jungle Oats finally reached us, we catapulted noisily from our three beds, just in time to join my father heading for his unfailing early-morning swim.

Before the full sun of the morning heated the dusty path through the orchard, I trotted barefoot alongside my father, while my brothers raced for the pool. We joined them only after my father and I had stood to eat still-cool figs from the tree. And he invariably said: "The only way to eat figs - straight off the tree before the sun's properly up."

The swimming place was huge and old-fashioned - a reservoir built in the war years, now used only for swimming. Moving hand-over-hand along the sides in the morning, one could be sure of finding a bullfrog or two, wallowing in the small square holes just above water level.

Shivering and chilled, we would make for the warmth of the kitchen, where we dried off before the huge coal stove, pinching cinnamon-flavoured soetkoekies from the china jar on the dresser. The admonishments this would draw from enormously fat Dora, who ruled the kitchen, never managed to outlast her chest-quivering, almost toothless laugh.

Breakfasts were huge, lunches merely a welcome interruption to an otherwise totally unfettered day, in which the grownups remained satisfyingly remote from our adventuring, but comfortingly near-at-hand for my little-girl needs. Ouma, solid and practical, had a face which brooked no nonsense and truly softened and sweetened only when she looked at us kids. To my kind, literary Oupa - so civilised and impractical - she spoke always in a hectoring tone, which he answered meekly, but with a wink at me. Once, while I sat on his knee being read to - A Child's Garden of Verses, I think it was, though I can't be sure - he told me it was Ouma's way of showing her love for us, the dreamy impractical ones, her way of chivvying us into coping with the harder side of life.

But it never worked. She always called me pieperig, and Oupa always sat reading or writing in his library, his soft, persistent cough and constant wisp of pipe smoke betraying his presence. Ouma, whom I never saw with a book other than the bible, was out on the farm, supervising the feeding of the new chicks, the nailing of sacking over the chicken hoks before a threatened hail storm and, of course, the killing - which I was never aware of, and never went curiously in search of, as my brothers did. And when the crunch finally came, when the hardness of life finally came home to me, I wasn't strong enough to deal with it, and my grandmother's attempts to toughen me were no defence against the events which caused the collapse of my life and the devastation of my childhood - or so it seemed to me at the time. Even if in retrospect, and with adult consciousness, you smile cynically and think me melodramatic, I can describe it no other way. Anyway, I wasn't going to talk about that time.

I was going to talk about Ouma's boys - William, her right-hand man, and Petrus, and the others who smiled at us, and loved us and carried me over the dusty ground when the sun heated it too much for my small feet to bear. They let me plunge my hands into the barrels of feathers, and gently hold the tiny, yellow chicks among the deafening chitter of the new arrivals. And each morning after breakfast, I would sit with William and Petrus in the boys' room, drinking forbidden coffee from a tin mug, poured from a large can boiling on a brazier, and sweetened with their ration of condensed milk.

And I haven't yet described the glory of the long lawn rolling from the front of the house, the wonder of Ouma's pride: the flowers that caused travellers to stop and ask if they could buy an armful. Ouma would generously fill their arms for free, and when she had done so, the plentiful garden looked no different, no emptier. The enormous spreading Wild Fig tree, at the bottom of the garden, provided the shade for the long summer evenings when my father would carve up a watermelon, and we would gorge ourselves, the sweet, sticky flesh causing rivulets of juice from our chins, and down our arms to our elbows.

This is where I should stop, leaving the impression of long, adventure-filled, dusty days, of swimming, exploring, climbing trees. Of lying full-length on the library floor with a fluttery, exciting feeling of reading some never-before discovered book. Of the wildness of the veld and the magic of the people there. I shouldn't go on to tell you about that holiday, the one I have clutched silently to myself for all these years. What good will it do to bring it out now?

http://home.iprimus.com.au/selliot/jrichards/innocence.htm



Touching the Lighthouse, by Jo-Anne Richards

Touching the Lighthouse

Touching The Lighthouse, Jo-Anne's second novel, set in Cape Town, was published in 1996.

Reviews
Jo-Anne Richards' second novel, Touching The Lighthouse, is, on one level, the story of two young women in search of their adult selves. But the fact that they are living in the South Africa of recent history electrifies this story with the tension of conflicting perspectives. Their youthful recklessness and passion find a disturbing foil in the presence of their char, Maud. Perhaps she is the oracle of their future, a future which will judge their individual struggle for maturity against the wider struggle for the liberation of South Africa itself.

Caught up in the tide of history, Susan and Jennifer find their friendship and all their relationships affected by the ferocity building around them, and their desire to be part of the process of change, at a time when justice itself is on trial.

Through Jennifer's eyes is evoked the city of Cape Town, paradoxically a place of shining vibrancy which in many ways managed to hold itself aloof from the harsh contrasts, the struggle for survival, of Africa.

It is the tale of how Cape Town failed her - and how she in turn failed it - with its lights and its shadows, its humour and all its tragedy. Through the flow of its days and nights, we are transported past the people that moved her and ultimately changed them both from the young girls that they were.

Touching the Lighthouse considers the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and how human nature reacts to abnormal times.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/selliot/jrichards/lighthouse.htm


Richards is a white South African, and the events of the book - chiefly featuring two white South African women becoming aware of the inadequacies of the governing regime - intelligently capture her own insights. The work is inevitably political, but in a way which is human and wisely avoids simplifying such an involved setting.

The problems of apartheid - being governed by an alien culture refusing to assimilate most of the population - are combined with the difficulties of the characters to good effect. Touching the Lighthouse owes much of its impact to the grim reality of South Africa. The resentment felt towards even enlightened whites such as the book's Eastern Cape aristocrats indicates the levels of frustration and rage inside this most volatile of countries. Richards' sense of language is illustrative, but at times overly sentimental and serves to remind the reader thousands of miles away of the real people within real tragedies.


Sad at the Edges, by Jo-Anne Richards

Sad at the Edges

Jo-Anne's latest novel, Sad at the Edges, took four years to research and write, and was launched on 15 April 2003. The book is about two women in Johannesburg, a city caught in transition and teetering on disenchantment in post-Apartheid 1996. It is a disturbing story filled with rich characters and edgy prose that captures the feeling and texture of the difference between the two women ... separated by age, geography, and experience. This poignant novel has some of the scenes set in the Eastern Cape and some in Johannesburg.

She said the novel set out to capture the "intensity surrounding political transition in South Africa in relation to its past political history". "In Touching the Lighthouse I was looking at friendship - that sort of close, close friendship between two women, and at that time in the 80s it just rang true for me to have two white women struggling to deal with the Left. In Sad at the Edges I was looking at younger and older because for me, Jo'burg is different if you're younger. It's different. It's the Melvillites and the Yeovillites. That's why I had the cousin, and the cousin that was too young, and she's damaged because she was too young to get into the Struggle and the others are damaged because they were a part of it. So I was looking at those different aspects. So I made Francesca and Megan cousins but I suppose for me, writing a main character, a white woman main character is easier for me. I can do it with more reality and texture, because I understand it better. There are other black characters, but you see those from the outside, but the main characters you see closer."


Paperback - 209pp (April 2003)
Stephen Phillips; ISBN: 1-9199-4709-4

Along the shores of the Eastern Cape, a disturbing story builds, which will have ravaging effects on a settled life in Johannesburg.

A city in transition, Johannesburg is still gripped by a slightly faded euphoria, yet teeters on the edge of disenchantment. Megan returns from a sojourn in London to find her cousin Francesca using the normality of her life to obscure the dark imprint left by her past. Megan has little time for that, though. She has discovered Johannesburg, in all its larger-than-life aspects.

Her life, and that of Francesca, seem to absorb some of the wild extremes of this vivid city. Megan meets it all head-on, while Francesca struggles to deal with a difficult marriage that cannot quite transcend the fears and freneticism of a new society, and a slightly impaired child.

In a time when people party to forget, and yet never quite let go, both Megan and Francesca will be dragged headlong into remembering before they are able to understand forgiveness.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/selliot/jrichards/sad.htm


SAD AT THE EDGES
by Jo-Anne Richards
Stephan Phillips
R174

IN HER third novel, Eastern Cape-born author Jo-Anne Richards takes readers to Johannesburg, set in the edgy uncertainty of 1996.

It's been two years since the miraculous democratic transformation of South Africa -- two years that have seen the hopes and idealism of its people begin to fray and pessimism creeping in.

It is into this atmosphere that Megan flies from London to stay with her older cousin Francesca, who is in a tense marriage with a slightly impaired child.

Francesca was detained in the struggle period and, as Megan falls in with her group, she begins to struggle with her identity.

Too young to have taken part herself, she romanticises and envies her experiences, and simultaneously throws herself headfirst into Jo'burg's new society.

In doing so she fails to see the darkness that Francesca is battling and the cracks appearing in her cousin.

The story jumps, sometimes jerks, between the two cousins and the voice of an unknown man which proves rather intriguing for the reader. Within the greater story, the two women are caught up in their own crises and it is here that Richards excels by making mundane, ordinary lives come across as personal and relevant. The themes of fear, love and unanswered questions are common, everyday realities for South Africans and make the story accessible.

Look out for the descriptions of the white ex-lefties who now drive BMWs -- they are brilliant.

Poignant with flashes of humour, Sad at the Edges is an interesting look at how the effects of apartheid lingered even among those whom it did not directly harm. But more than that, it's a warm story about anyone.

Justine Gerardy

http://www.dispatch.co.za/2003/06/28/features/BOOKS.HTM


Jo-Anne Richards was once married to Russ Hutton, who is part of the:
Germiston High School - Class of 1976
Copyright © 2003 Rodney Jones, rtjones@global.co.za.
30 July 2003