The good, the true and the ugly in Lethokuhle Msimang's ‘The Frightened’

The Frightened ★★★★
Lethokuhle Msimang
Karavan Press

“I mourned you. I mourned like a screaming child. I wrapped myself in brown blankets and woke up drenched in sweat when it was not enough to cry; when I had to drink myself into a drunken stupor, until my eyes changed colour, that unfading yellow, as if my home was a dust bowl and I was too proud to leave. And then I went mad.”

From the first pages of her novella, Lethokuhle Msimang draws you in on a lyrical, often dark, emotionally charged journey of being lost and broken in search of healing and self. The Frightened is a beautifully written, if unusual read. The author calls it an “unconventional body of work”.

At its heart, it is a collection of thoughts, emotions and experiences Msimang has gathered. Weaving together narratives that draw on her experiences of traversing France, China, Spain and South Africa, she has crafted a story of one woman’s journey and the people she meets along the way, sometimes finding what could be love, other times disappointment, shame and unintended consequences, and through this, her battles with depression, including suicidal thoughts.

Msimang has published Hubris, a collection of poetry, but this is her first foray into writing a novella. “It wasn’t an easy process,” the author says. “I wanted to write poetry at first, but then found that the story I was telling needed more breath and moments that weren’t necessarily stunning or beautiful. It needed moments that were sort of mundane and strung out, and also kind of ugly. It was like a bridge between poetry and prose.”

Born in Durban to a diplomat mother, which saw Msimang travel extensively, the author says, in retrospect, she feels privileged, but as a youngster she struggled with a lack of community because she was constantly moving. “I definitely came to writing as a consequence of that,” she says.

Her time in Paris, where she completed her undergraduate studies, was particularly trying. “I felt a huge difficulty learning and absorbing [the French language] and I couldn’t communicate with people. I had a hard time making friends. I started reading extensively and started writing. It was a way to not just vanish, it was a way to stay in communication with something, even if I’m not in communication with a person.”

She holds a master's degree in creative writing from Rhodes University and The Frightened came from what she produced as part of this.

“I think the effect and power of trauma is the way it fractures your memory, so I found it difficult to write in a linear way, I could only think about things in pockets. I wanted to portray the story in the fractured state of mind that I’m actually in, give the reader the exact same experience of how I am experiencing my memories and how I’m trying to piece together what happened.”

The novella is partly autobiographical. She explains: “It’s true to my emotion, but it’s not very true to my experience. I had to ... create experiences for the reader to understand exactly what was happening in my emotional life and sometimes those things don’t translate.”

For now, she finds herself in a new chapter in the US, studying towards a master's in comparative literature at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and hoping to pursue a PhD thereafter. Having moved around so much as a child, Msimang wants to take this time to find a sense of community and set down roots.

She’s also concentrating on new work in which she’s detailing the journey between hubris, mania and nemesis, themes she feels she’s finally equipped to explore. I imagine it will be compelling and heaving with life — all the good, all the true and all the ugly this entails. If it’s anything like what has come before, it will, quite simply, be stunning.