It brings me immense joy to know that The Soft Life, Love, choice and modern dating (Tafelberg 2022) has been longlisted in the non-fiction category of The Sunday Times Literary Awards 2023. I knew that writing a Social Anthropology-based book on topics such as women’s agency, the socio-political and economic precarity in South Africa and how both intersect and interact with young Black women’s romantic choices was going to be somewhat novel as far as the South African literary landscape goes. There was a lot of self-doubt and postponing of submitting my drafts because the anxiety often felt so insurmountable. Will they buy it? Will they read it? Will they care like I care? Will they understand the urgency?! I was nervous about how it would be received or if people would understand my objectives or even care that the book exists at all. I am grateful that the book has been received well as shown by interview requests on television, radio and podcasts, social media reviews and the wonderful bookclubs that invite me to occasionally discuss the book in-person at pretty places.
I first knew about The Sunday Times Literary Awards when I was asked to perform the opening poem for the inaugural ceremony in 2016, which also became one of my favourite moments of that year. The non-fiction category is about “the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power”, according to the newspaper, and I still remember that as part of my brief for the poem. I have reworked it over the years but this is still one of my favourite parts:
And we have always been a story people:
we carry the praise poetry of our surnames
like ancient geography
a composite map of our present selves
charting ancestral triumphs.
It is through our daily breath and deeds
that we remix and remaster this mythology.
This inheritance reminds us that
though we may be found wanting and weak,
along with every god and genius that has ever been,
we too are capable of the greatness that we seek.
john 1:1 and me by Lebohang Masango
It’s my favourite part because it speaks volumes about my relationship with The Word, the word and words as powerful and divine tools of affirmation and becoming. Since that night, it has been a big part of my daydreams to eventually be recognised for writing a book. At that time, writing a book was the furthest thing possible in my mind because I was just a Master’s student and sometimes poet, struggling to juggle all the words that I was conjuring into endless and torturous essay submissions for my degree. The idea of Mpumi’s Magic Beads hadn’t even formed yet.
So, in 2022 as I was struggling through writing The Soft Life after having written eight children’s books, countless essays, poems and one major thesis (that actually received a distinction), I was horrified by the re-confirmation of what I’ve always known: being a writer does not make writing any easier and writing for children is hard but writing for adults is harder. Throughout these realisations, whenever I was working on my drafts and had just made an argument that I was particularly proud of and felt a little clever and relaxed enough to actually enjoy my process, my daydreams would take me to the one thing that would make me feel like The Soft Life is a good book and that the worrying, fretting and avoidance had all been worth it – this longlist. Nothing more and nothing less. Back in 2016, when I was reflecting on the performance and how nervous I was, I wrote: “The room was full of my dreams in the form of the people looking at me on stage.” I had imagined that I too would one day be brave enough to put my passions and convictions to paper in a new way. So, this simple recognition really means the world to me because as I always say, essay means try. And all I ever have to do is try my best and with this moment I am confident, once more, that this book and my larger academic project and intellectual path are necessary. Just this. Just this longlisting. That’s all I needed. Ke leboha ho menahane.
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Thank you, Mbali and Helené and Tafelberg/NB and the Sunday Times Literary Awards team!
Lebohang Masango 