Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlist | Jarred Thompson on the genesis of ‘The Institute for Creative Dying’

FICTION

Criteria: The winner should be a novel of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.

The Institute for Creative Dying by Jarred Thompson (Picador Africa)

Thompson’s debut novel is a vivid and fearless exploration of mortality and the interconnectedness of all life forms.

Judges said: In this debut novel, the author takes readers by the scruff of the neck and thrusts them into an engagement with five intriguing characters. Through their exposure to the tumultuous lives of these literary creations, readers are compelled to become one with them and imagine the ephemeral nature of their own existence. A beautiful narrative with arresting descriptions, Thompson’s exquisite prose invites you to marvel even at death scenes. The story is perceptive, highly imaginative and captivating. 

The genesis of The Institute for Creative Dying

When The Institute for Creative Dying was published, I had just turned 30, and while promoting the book, a question kept popping up. You’re young — why are you writing about dying? I was surprised by the frequency of the question. Does youth offer a buffer against death’s provocations? My experience told me no, and history showed me it was often young people who had faced down life-denying systems with the length and breadth of their vitality. Think of the 1976 Soweto Uprising or the #FeesMustFall movement, or even of the recent Gen Z-led protests in Kenya. There is, to my mind, a sense of radical possibility inherent in youth that demands expression and leads young people to ask difficult questions of their elders.

The Institute for Creative Dying arrived at a time when I had grown weary of the stories told about dying and was seeking other ways of relating to mortality. This restlessness, this need to hold the world at different angles, is what drove me to conceive of the institute and all the practices and rituals contained in it. But this wasn’t to be a treatise on “creative dying”. No, it had to be a narrative set in the tense textures of Johannesburg, one that jived with the exuberant decay of insect, animal and human life. Only such a story could ask that most childlike of questions — “What if?” — turning on its head assumptions about how the world came to be what it is.

Every story begins with “What if?”, setting a space apart in which the reader might give themselves over to being metabolised, which is not the same as being destroyed. This novel arose from that subtle difference, as I sought to weave the characters’ lives into some imagined and abiding whole — a whole that, in its ever-evolving incompleteness, asks that we meet it halfway.

EXTRACT

She locked the treehouse and walked back down the aerial walkway to the deck of the third floor.

Imagine all of it is you. This was what Mustafa had advised on her first day at Bridge Builders Hospice. This was soon after she’d cleaned up the mess Frank Ledwaba had made in his bed. She didn’t know it then, but Mustafa’s equanimity at the soiled sheets was a sign that they both shared similar experiences of being squeezed and spread, like paint from a tube, by a cosmic child who spoke no language, who was all play. It was also an indubitable sign of Mustafa’s love for Frank, the man who’d offered Mustafa his first job as a caretaker at the hospice and who, growing fond of the young Mustafa, roped him in to take over its running.

Back on the third-floor deck, the Mortician entered a carpeted corridor. African masks were hung all the way down the passage walls. Some ochre-coloured and oblong, with pointy chins and diamond-shaped eyes, and others fashioned with horns that curved like praying hands or delicate arcs of water. She noted the contours of each: the places where what was carved out had allowed something more-than-human to surface.

The masks drew a memory from her. She had invited Mustafa to watch a rare Liberian Dan Ge performer. They stood together in an open field late one afternoon, a sizeable crowd having gathered in a circle, awaiting the performer’s arrival. Anticipation grew. The world outside the gathering took on a bronze hue, thanks to the sun setting in the distance. There was, for the Mortician, the distinct feeling of being extracted from a sepia photograph and inserted among a band of technicoloured enthusiasts.

When the Dan Ge performer entered, everyone went quiet. The performer — dressed in red, black, orange and white raffia feathers, ankled in bells of different shapes and sizes, and wearing a ridged black mask — swayed to drums and stringed instruments, played by musicians who stood to one side. At first, she was aware that a person was beneath the lustrous black mask and its foreboding presence. As the performance deepened and the crowd clapped and whistled, the performer’s legs moved at an incendiary pace: feet kicked up dust, arms thrashed fine earth into transient whorls. Her mind slipped, and she forgot the person beneath the bells and feathers.

Here was a different intelligence. An intelligence that did not speak, formulate or define. It listened, touched, opened up unreservedly to the Malleable, the Mutable, the Manifest.

At the end of the corridor was a spacious bathroom filled with candlelight. In its centre was a large bath of an unusual depth; it was so deep one had to step up to the rim and then descend, step by careful step.

The bath had been drawn. Mustafa must have made it for her before the ceremony. The Mortician slipped off her clothes, the fabric sticky from the day’s heat, and got in. Castles of crinkling bubbles surrounded her.

A surgical scar ran down the centre of her chest; she didn’t take note of it anymore. It used to bother her, stirring up a dry, bitter taste at the back of her throat. It was now a signature of the doctors and nurses who had kept her in one piece.

One piece. One peace. She ebbed water over the scar.

Sometimes, the memory of what had happened rustled in the underbrush of her body (flocks of sparrows taking off in unison, knowing in an instant which way to turn). The trip away to the Magaliesberg with her parents, the solo hike that she took, the fall. The fall so fast she had no time to catch up to her body being bent over trunks, slamming against rock.

Half of what had happened was couched in imagination, the other in gut feeling: the two interpenetrating so that no amount of recall came close to the real thing. The bare facts. It was some time into their friendship before she told Mustafa about the fall. About the vision that she had had and the purpose it gave her.

The water bordered on scorching. With a coarse sponge, she lathered herself, scrubbing along the furrows, folds and steppes of flesh. When the soap washed off, it tingled. She thought about Frank Ledwaba and his loose bowels. The face he wore when she woke him earlier than usual because of the mess he had made. She tried to be as gentle as possible, repeating that it was OK, that he had nothing to be ashamed of. But mentioning shame woke Ledwaba up to it. By that time, Frank’s body was emaciated, his eyes carrying what little energy was left for shame. Though she smiled her way through the tender process of turning him over and cleaning his backside, she sensed that he wished someone else was doing it. A child? A sibling? A lover? A relative? Mustafa? She wondered what had become of his family, if he had any, and why he had taken such a liking to Mustafa, so much so that he’d trained Mustafa as his successor.

The following day, laughter emanated from Frank’s bedroom. Upon closer inspection, she found him chatting to Mustafa, who was serving chicken soup and weak tea for lunch. Standing by the door, she noticed Frank had a diaper on, a diaper Mustafa must have helped him with. Mustafa gestured for her to come inside. I was just telling Frank how you’ve come full circle. Nothing fuller than wiping a grown man’s bum. At the time, she couldn’t decide if the men were laughing with her or at her. It was the first time she’d encountered Mustafa’s brand of humour, his ability to provoke laughter out of the most sensitive situations. Of course, not everyone at the hospice was a fan of it, but there were patients who yearned for it, requesting Mustafa for nothing else but a good laugh.

Some people just get it, Mustafa said later, passing her soapy lunch dishes to rinse and dry. There’s a difference between seriousness and sincerity.

Though the Mortician had scrubbed every inch of skin, biomes of bacteria remained. The microbiota had learnt, over generations, to survive on the scraps human skin provides: sweat, sebum, organic matter clinging to the upper epidermis. The upper layer, the stratum corneum, had dead cells for microbiota to feast on. A layer of death acting as fodder and a protective barrier, preventing water loss, prohibiting too much of the world from getting in.

The Mortician got out of the bath and dried herself in front of a full-length mirror, applying lotion to her skin, combing her hair back. She clothed herself in satin pyjamas from a cupboard next to the mirror and let the water out.

There was no way she could see the squirming bacteria that she was displacing down the warbling drain. She hadn’t noticed the pruning of her fingers either, the way cells took on water, swelled and turned flaccid once more. Already, bacterial communities on her skin were back at work, breaking down secretions from her pores, turning oils into acidic coatings for greater adherence. Skin was an unforgiving place: desiccated and nutrient-starved, like the fringes of outer space, or the ocean floor. A war zone. Still, colonies had been finding ways to live in the striations of the Mortician’s elbows, the crease of her knees, and the nape of her neck since she was born. The landscape was diverse here — humidity, dryness, oiliness — and the bacteria that were most successful were the ones who knew how best to work together, metabolising sweat into nitrogen, producing enzymes that alchemised decay.