Interview with Barbara Adair

Interview by Rolland Simpi Motaung for Mail & Guardian

To describe Barbara Adair’s 6h00 somewhere and many hours later somewhere else, is unconventional is an understatement. Just under one hundred pages, the book is slim but rich with words- both simple and complex, and places far and beyond. The plentiful illustrations by Mark Kannemeyer compliment the book’s eclectic tapestry of words.

It’s more than just a book chronicling Adair’s travel experience to Namibia; it’s a challenge to structure and narrative. Non-linear and indulgent. It is a relentless pursuit of how language and storytelling can be bent into new shapes.

It reads like a traveller’s journal who keeps dozing off floating on celestial planes and as they awake, words rise like the dancing African sun on the page for all to indulge. 

Adair is a novelist and a travel writer of note. Her previous titles include In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw; WILL, the Passenger Delaying flight… and Tangier we Killed the Blue Parrot– which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award in 2004.

Her travel writing, has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria received in 2022.

Taking a break from her travels and writing, Adair sat down with Mail & Guardian to reflect on the inspiration and writing process of her enthralling yet idiosyncratic book.

M&G: The writing style in your book is unconventional and exciting in challenging language and form, what inspired this route?

BA: The book was inspired by the writing of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a road trip through America from New York to San Francisco. His book was about the journey, the experiences on the journey, not the places themselves, but what the writer felt as he travelled through the vast and sometimes empty, sometimes full, land.

I wanted to explore what spaces mean to different people, the hidden and secret aspects of spaces that we don’t notice or consider, or that we may even avoid. I travel to question rather than to find an answer.

M&G: Beyond just your own words, you also use many other writers’ words to capture the travelling experience, why was that?

BA: For me countries are not property, and words are not property.  Art is not property. So included in the book are the words of Binyavanga Wainaina, Jack Kerouac, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Patti Smith and more. I don’t believe that anyone owns words, and so I have freely used the words of others, not to pass them off as my own, but rather to honour those writers, to acknowledge them and show how I admire them.

But also, for me nothing is original; we are all made up of everything and everyone else. Writers have raided others for a long time; our stories are tapestries with threads taken from everywhere. Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time, and, to extend the metaphor, so have countries.

M&G: Some readers may find the style an acquired taste, were there any worries that the book may not appeal to a wider range of readers?

BA: I believe that people read; some read romance, others read history or politics, others read crime, and others will read a book that challenges their conventional and socially constructed opinions on how a book must be written.

So, I was not worried. The range of readers may not be wide, but there will be readers who want to read about how we tell stories, what we observe, readers who do not need a beginning, middle, and end.

M&G: You have travelled to many countries including Namibia, how important is it for writers to travel?

BA: I believe it is important to travel, but we can also travel by reading. So a writer, and all who can and are able, should travel, and so read, or read to travel; a writer must write so that there can be a reader who can travel.

Travel inspires a reader and a writer to question; our cultural perceptions, how we tell stories, how we experience things, what we remember.

M&G: Speaking of perception, there is an assumption that most South Africans and its artists don’t travel enough, how true is this?

BA: I am not sure. I think people travel, whether they are artists or other, but clearly this is if they are able to do so. There is a stereotype that South Africans, artists or other, are arrogant and believe there is nothing outside South Africa, but I don’t know if this stereotype is true. I believe a lot of artists travel, and if they don’t, they read.

M&G: Besides Namibia, which other countries have you enjoyed visiting?

BA: I travel to a lot of African countries as I believe that the continent has a lot, more than a lot. Yes, Europe is interesting and fascinating, but so are many, if not all, countries in Africa. 

Countries that I have been to and love: Kenya (I am writing a book about Nairobi Art Deco buildings and the history of the Asian community there), Gabon (I watched hippos surfing), Ethiopia (churches hewn into the rocks and realised that Christianity is an indigenous religion), Morocco, Tunisia, Tanzania, Mali (I celebrated a birthday in Timbuktu).

M&G: Lastly, which authors or books, accompany you in your travels?

BA: I travel with any book that I have on me at the time, or I buy books when I am in the different countries. Often the books are not about that place, but seeking books.

To Mali I took Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, to Gabon – Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, to Ethiopia – Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning and to Kenya – Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise.

The list goes on for to travel is to read, or to read is to travel.