SPOTLIGHT: An Interview with Alistair Mackay about His Debut Novel, “It Doesn’t Have to be This Way”.

May 13

In his debut novel, It Doesn’t Have to be This Way, Alistair Mackay tells the story of three queer friends trying to navigate an increasingly fractured, violent and unstable world ravaged by climate collapse and rampant inequality.

Our editor-in-chief, Gary Hartley, had a chat with the author about the thematic underpinnings of his work; crafting complex queer characters; and how he’d respond to criticism of being a white author writing about Black queer characters.

GH: Incidentally, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on queer ecology and intersectional environmentalism, and a lot of it highlights the shared injustices of queer people and the environment under capitalistic and patriarchal systems. Was this part of your thinking while crafting your novel?

Alistair Mackay: Absolutely, although not in the neat way that your question implies. I didn’t start out with research or a grand unifying theory, and then find ways to animate it. Maybe it would have been a lot easier if I had! It definitely would have saved me several rewrites. But that isn’t the way I work. I started with a feeling. I had this strong urge to write this story, and I couldn’t shake the urge or move on with my life until I had done it, but I also couldn’t really understand it. Why was I trying to write a queer climate change dystopia? Those seemed like disparate things when I started, and I think some people still think it’s a bit of a strange mash-up of themes and genres. But the more I inhabited the world of the novel, and the more I got to know my characters and their experiences, the more obvious it seemed to me that there is one thing at the heart of all this suffering. It’s systemic and structural, as you say. It’s a very particular paradigm, this late-stage capitalism that we live under. It’s not the only way of seeing the world, but it is by far the dominant one now, and it’s pushing us to the brink of collapse.

Patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism are all interconnected and they prop each other up - and they are all premised on violence. Capitalism is dehumanising because it sees people (especially marginalised people), and the environment, as resources to be exploited. Things only have value if they have economic value. If we produce or consume. If forests absorb carbon or slow warming. It does away with the idea (still alive, thankfully, in many indigenous cultures) that each of us, and the animals and ecosystems around us, have value purely because we are alive. There’s an example I give in the book of how early colonial courts in the United States settled ownership disputes based on who was using the land. Someone who wanted to turn a forest into a plantation had a stronger claim to the land than someone who wanted to preserve it in its natural state.

Patriarchy is also violent and profoundly dehumanising. It sets up a hierarchy of worth, with a kind of toxic, alpha-male ideal at the top. All the softer qualities that we need for society and cohabitation and our planet - such as nurture, caregiving, compassion - are denigrated. They are seen as “womanly” and nothing is as low as being feminine in the patriarchy. It’s usually unpaid work, invisibilised under capitalism. And what is more nurturing than the natural world? We literally call her Mother Nature. This patriarchal misogyny plays out very explicitly with how queer people are policed and abused. Many queer men, myself included, are bullied at school for being “not manly enough.” We infuriate conservatives because we upset the expected gender norms and the status quo. But we’ve absorbed and internalised a lot of this violence too. Many of us still struggle with a sense of deep shame. There’s often prejudice against femmes versus masc boys. But queerness also provides a beautiful opportunity to imagine alternative ways of being. Precisely because we’re outside of traditional power structures, we see them more clearly and can reimagine them.

These systems all revolve around domination - the idea that we must dominate nature, and dominate each other. In the book, I really try to explore this, and I suppose I’m putting forward the idea that these systems produce a kind of sickness in the soul. We feel disconnected from one another, and from our place in nature. We feel like we aren’t good enough, we don’t have worth, unless we are dominating others, proving ourselves right, “winning” at capitalism. It’s taking a serious toll on our collective mental health, and it’s literally destroying the natural systems that support and sustain us.

We need massive and urgent structural changes to the global economy if we want to survive the next hundred years - things like de-growth, reduced consumption, a more equitable distribution of wealth, human and environmental rights ahead of profits etc - and maybe it’s a bit hippie-ish to say this so bluntly, but I think in order to achieve that we need to do a lot of work on ourselves. If we can feel our inherent worth, then perhaps we won’t destroy everything in our path trying to prove ourselves.

There was that meme that went around after Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch about how men would rather fire penis-shaped rockets into space than go to therapy. That’s something else I wanted to look at in the book. This idea that capitalism can save us from itself. That we will invent some new tech that will mean we don’t need to introspect, or question our values. We can just keep growing, spreading, colonising, behaving as we’ve always behaved, and we never need to think about the fact that the planet is finite. So much sci-fi replicates this colonial idea that our future lies in settling on other planets, outrunning our problems, never taking responsibility. I want us to imagine that we may never leave this planet. There might simply not be enough energy to fuel that kind of ambition, and is that kind of ambition healthy anyway? Rockets over healthcare? Can’t we learn how to live here and now, to tamper our more destructive impulses, to reintegrate ourselves into the natural world?

GH: When we think of ‘dystopian’, we usually think of a post-apocalyptic setting in the distant future, but one could easily argue that we’re already seeing dystopian levels of poverty and inequality in South Africa. What were some of the challenges in creating a work of fiction in a setting that’s a reality for many people in our country?

AM: That’s exactly right and it was part of what sparked the story in my mind - returning to South Africa after a few years living overseas and being struck by the dystopia all around me. I could see it with fresh eyes. Most people live in conditions that would be considered dystopian by the middle class, but there’s that thing that it’s only a dystopia when it’s happening to “us” rather than “them.”

There is a great divide in my novel - most residents of Cape Town live in a burnt-out wasteland that is all that is left of the city. It’s unbearably hot, there is widespread famine and disease, the ocean has flooded the Cape Flats and parts of the city centre. People live in slums in abandoned buildings, and in shacks. The wealthy residents have retreated into The Citadel, which is a private city-state on Signal Hill. It’s in a climate-controlled dome, a comfortable 25º Celsius, and protected by an impenetrable wall, and private security forces. All of it is a kind of metaphor for the divide that already exists in Cape Town, and in most South African cities. The middle classes mostly choose to deal with the dystopian conditions of the poor by avoiding it - out of sight, out of mind. It really damages our humanity and our empathy to shut down like that. To roll up the window at traffic lights, turn a blind eye from beggars, and think of the homeless as a nuisance. I created a literal bubble and a literal wall, but there is a metaphorical one already, and I hope the novel makes it easier to see - and helps to get people thinking about what it’s like to have been born without the luck and privilege they were randomly assigned. I’ve also tried to show how avoidance and distraction leads people to total isolation and meaninglessness. They have numbed themselves out of any possible sense of connection or community.

I wanted to reignite empathy and to ask people not to look away from what’s going on around us. My approach was to tell the story of the descent. The novel isn’t post-apocalyptic in the sense that many dystopias are: it takes place from the present day into the near-future. The “collapse” of society isn’t a once-off event that takes place before the action of the book. It is during this process of things falling apart around them where most of the characters’ lives take place. Things are quite ordinary and recognisable in the beginning. I wanted readers to feel what it’s like to live through this erosion of comfort and familiarity and hope. This isn’t an issue in “the future” - it’s right now. And most of the book takes place on the “wrong” side of the divide, so that readers get to experience it and fall in love with the characters who have to live in these conditions - and I hope they think, huh, this isn’t so different from how many people live right now.

But I also didn’t want the novel to be poverty-porn and maybe this is another challenge in writing about these kinds of conditions, and maybe why speculative fiction was the lens that worked for me. We can all pretend we’re talking about something a bit different. The veneer of the future makes it easier to engage with what’s happening without triggering the kinds of defences that make people close up. It works a bit like a metaphor like that, to pierce the wall. It’s unexpected, and it’s less threatening and it allows the message to slip in by stealth. I was also careful not just to show suffering either. Even in these terrible conditions, there is love. There is friendship. People look out for each other and they hurt each other. They have frustrations and quirks and hopes. I wanted my characters to be full, rounded, real people - not placeholders for people living in dystopian conditions.GH: Complex queer characters are few and far between. Can you shed light on how you went about creating these characters and ensuring they’re not flat and one-dimensional?

AM: I suppose the starting point is that it really irritates me when I see one-dimensional queer characters in books and film, so I wasn’t going to let myself contribute to the problem. It’s maybe less likely that I would, as a queer person myself, so I don’t see the queer character as a gimmick or a box to tick for diversity. But I think writing complex characters probably all comes down to empathy and observation. Really feeling what someone would feel in a situation you’ve created, and watching how people respond in life. I think it’s part of my personality to be always thinking about how everyone feels. On the Enneagram personality test, I’m type 9, which is the peacemaker - always aware of how people are perceiving a situation, and trying to make sure everyone feels heard and respected. It’s a trait that gets in the way of making decisions a lot of the time, but I think it’s useful for writing fiction. I take notes on my phone all the time, so I’m always amassing little details about mannerisms or ways of speaking or demeanour.

The initial spark of each of the characters in my novel comes from myself, and my own inner life. I started out by going into an almost meditative state and thinking about how I’d feel if the world was collapsing around me, and there were, I guess, a few key feelings and I split them out into different people. Then once I had a basic outline of the kind of character I wanted to create, it was like method-acting but in my imagination: Okay, I’m feeling resilient and hopeful, how do I act in this kind of situation? Or I’m feeling despair, how do I act? How would I interpret what just happened?

Of the three main characters, I think Luthando is probably closest to an ideal version of myself. He’s the person I wish I could be, or aspire to be. He’s idealistic and hopeful and resilient. He goes through moments of hopelessness and grief, but he manages to find a way to keep going, to keep fighting. He dusts himself off and starts again. And he has a really beautiful journey, in the book, towards accepting everything about himself - towards authenticity. Malcolm and Viwe were also initially inspired by some of my less positive traits. I have an anxiety disorder, and I channelled a lot of that into Viwe. He’s often overwhelmed by dread and fear. He becomes paralysed by it. And Malcolm copes with difficulty by distracting himself. He gets lost in his phone, on apps. He’s always searching for connection in the wrong places.

I poured so much of myself into the characters, and so I hope that gives them a grounding in something real and universally human. From there, they took on lives of their own. Like little queer Frankenstein’s monsters. There’s the part that comes from me, then there’s the context and history of the characters as I’ve written them - family background, race, job etc - and that is a combination of my imagination and years of observations about friends and people I’ve met, people in similar situations, stories I’ve read about people like that. It’s a difficult process to describe because it’s not very scientific. I don’t think I can put together a step-by-step guide. It takes on a life of its own. The characters are changing as I’m writing them and there comes a point when it feels like they start telling me what to do. I believe Barbara Kingsolver wrote for over a year in the voices of her four protagonists in The Poisonwood Bible before she even started writing the novel. She wanted to get to know them first, and I understand that. My writing only came alive when I relinquished control, and stopped trying to force the characters to do what I had planned for them. They were in charge.

On the issue of one-dimensional queerness in particular, it was important to me that I didn’t only write queer suffering. I wanted moments of tenderness and love, queer joy. I wanted to show sex and not have the kind of desexualised, “palatable” version of queer people that is so common in the arts. But I also didn’t want to overly sexualise them, because that’s also a cliché. I think it’s a question of balance and feeling it out.

GH: In the book, privileged people live in a climate-controlled dome on Signal Hill. In one of your interviews you touched on the idea of privilege being isolating- can you expand on that?

AM: Malcolm, the most privileged of my main characters, is profoundly lonely. He tries to keep busy, through work, through streaming services and dating apps. He’s desperately in search of meaning, so that his life doesn’t just feel like a series of experiences. He’s always plugged in and “connected”, but he feels more disconnected than any of the others. His life is perfectly comfortable, and maybe because of that, he is stuck. He can be a coward sometimes. He can opt in and opt out of the struggles that Luthando and Viwe and Noxolo face every day. They can’t opt out. They are fighting for survival in many ways. His privilege protects him from that, but it means he doesn’t show up for his friends in the ways they need. There is a barrier between them. They can’t rely on him in the way that they need to, and he feels that distance.

If you think about privilege in South Africa, it’s a very isolating thing. Hiding in cars rather than walking among other people. Hiding in security estates, behind electric fences. A lot of wealthy people live like expats, with minimal interaction with those who aren’t exactly like themselves. It’s a narrow existence. And it blunts our humanity. It makes it harder to relate to people from different backgrounds, and makes people fearful and defensive. There’s a kind of callousness that often accompanies this. I’ve seen people get angry and shoo car guards away, for example. That’s obviously very shit for the car guard, but it also shows the person doing it is not happy. I think anger is easier to bear than guilt. But either way, it’s an isolated way to interact with the world.

Privilege allows people to isolate themselves from the suffering going on around them, and there’s maybe also something isolating about how capitalism works. Eco-consumerism, for example, seems like such a good thing. Buying green. But it makes it seem like the only thing we can do for the planet is a solitary thing. It’s our purchase. It’s an individual, isolated action. Consumption is solitary. When actually we need collective action to bring about real change. Maybe capitalism requires us to feel isolated to perpetuate itself. And just comfortable enough not to rock the boat.

GH: There is very valid criticism of white authors writing about characters who are people of colour. Did you have any reservations about this, and what would you say to anyone who says it’s not your place to write about the experiences of Black queer people?

AM: I was very worried about this. Not to go too deep into very personal stuff, but for whatever reason with things that happened to me as a kid, I have really struggled to take up space and feel like I have a right to exist and a right to say anything. I think it’s maybe quite common for queer people. I’ve been working on it in therapy, and learning to give myself permission to speak, and then I release a book at a time when there are increasing calls for white authors to take a back seat. I totally get it. I understand. There’s a terrible history of white people speaking for Black people, and white writers who have done a poor job with Black characters. One dimensional, problematic, clichéd. I think writers need to proceed with extreme caution.

There’s no easy solution to this. I understand the anger, and I understand the call for own voices. It’s not right if most stories being told about people of colour are written by white people. There is so much room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and subtle racism. Maybe this is just shifting the blame, but I don’t think that’s all on writers. It’s also on the publishing industry. Who gets published? Who gets access to audiences, and what do readers choose to buy? Part of the solution is just for writers of colour to be better supported, and I’m so happy to see the book market supporting more and more writers of colour. No one author can be all things to all people. I certainly can’t - and don’t want to - be the only person writing stories about queer Black people. I strongly encourage readers to support Black writers. Buy their books and stories. Attend their events. My husband has a whole complicated Excel spreadsheet that he uses to make sure he’s buying books from a diverse set of authors - it pops out a little pie chart that he can use to assess if he’s reading too many white perspectives, or male perspectives, or Western perspectives. This is maybe a little too much for most people, but I’d urge readers to be conscious of their choices in the voices they support. And please support emerging authors of colour.

But I also don’t think the solution is for certain areas to be “off limits” for authors. The whole enterprise of fiction is about imagining someone else’s life, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. If we’re all just writing about people exactly like us, then it’s not really fiction - it’s memoir. And it’s myopic. I think fiction is important - not just as escapism but it’s deeply enriching. The ability to empathise and imagine someone else’s life makes us feel connected to one another. It’s one of the best tools we have for building social cohesion and understanding - and an emotionally rich life.

My novel required having Black queer perspectives. It’s largely about social issues. It’s about inequality and the different experiences brought about by, partly, race, and so I couldn’t leave the Black perspective out. It would be a very strange, and very problematic book if it only looked at one side of that divide. South Africa is not a white country. Only writing about white people feels like a much more dubious choice to me than the opposite. But I do think it’s important that authors have a reason to write the characters they write - and not just to do it because it’s trendy or cool to have a Black character, for example. There is something icky and exploitative about that.

I think it’s not a question of who has permission to do what, but how well people do it. Some of my favourite books about queer men were not written by queer men - like A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. By all means, if a white writer writes Black characters badly, then that is the crime. But attempting to write at all can’t be the crime. Writers should be open to criticism, they should accept feedback, and they should be called out if they produce something racist. But they should be allowed to try. I tried to make all of my characters rounded, full people. They are not “representative” of anything. They are people, trying to figure out their shit, subject to unique pressures. I am not using anyone’s race as a weapon or as a shorthand for any kind of characteristics. They are as complex and contradictory and full of hope and flaws as I am. I tried to breathe life into them and I love them and I hope readers love them too. I can’t change that I’m a white writer, but I can change whether I do justice to my characters.

I was fortunate enough to be able to share my work with people of colour along the way - with friends in early drafts, and with sensitivity readers later on in the process. I think it’s important that authors do this when they are writing about people from different backgrounds as their own, and that they are open to feedback and pushback. I am immensely grateful for the feedback I received. I also think it’s important that writers read a lot, and in the case of writing Black voices, read a lot of Black authors. Not to try and mimic anything, but just so that the consciousness and experiences of people of colour exist in the mind of the author.

GH: What’s your advice for aspiring queer writers in South Africa who are trying to get published?

AM: Persevere. Writing is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes ages to write a novel, then you realise once you’ve written the first draft that you’re less than halfway there, and then it takes ages to get published. Rejections are part of the process. Don’t let them wear you down. It’s so difficult but you have to believe you have something worth saying. I have a writer friend in the United States whose goal is to get a hundred rejections a year. She says she’s not submitting enough stories if she hasn’t reached that goal.

That’s maybe another thing. Start small. I found it incredibly helpful to write short stories - as a way to practice my craft, and play with different themes and characters and voices - but also for the little dopamine hit of getting them published along the way. A bit of affirmation while slogging away at the novel.

Write about the things that are important to you. Don’t worry about the audience at the beginning. Write the difficult stuff. The shame and the grief and the heartbreak. It takes courage, but it’s what makes your perspective interesting. I also found writing groups very helpful. I was in a writers’ workshop during my MFA and since then I’ve been in a group that meets every two weeks on Zoom to share stories or essays, give each other feedback, and just provide a sounding board and some company because writing can be quite lonely. It can be hard on mental health, especially if you are writing heavy stuff, so friends and support networks are very important.

I think it’s an exciting time to be a queer writer, though. There’s such an appetite for queer narratives now. It’s no longer a hindrance or a niche subject. It has mainstream appeal. And I’ve found the queer media to be very supportive - both in giving me opportunities to explore my writing, and in supporting the work that I’ve done.

Extract:

The room is dark. Black smoke drifts across the windows.

‘We should get out of here before we burn alive.’

‘Would that be so bad?’

Viwe rolls his eyes. ‘Yes, Luthando. Yes, it would be so bad.’

Luthando looks at the floor and laughs. He’s still in there, the old Luthando, despite what they did to him in prison. He pulls Viwe into the bedroom and lies on his back on the bed. ‘Kiss me,’ he says.

‘Are you kidding?’

The smoke is thick outside the window. The air smells of burning grass, wood, and plastic. ‘We’ll be fine,’ Luthando says. He pulls off his T-shirt. 'The wind’s changed direction. It’s blowing the flames away from us. And it won’t take you very long.’ He gives Viwe an exaggerated lewd wink. ‘Come on, I’ve been in prison for years. Mama needs some action.’

’There’s no action in prison?' Viwe says and immediately he regrets it. Luthando winces, then he forces a laugh and pats the bed beside him.

‘Fuck it,’ Viwe says. ‘I've missed you.’ He pulls Luthando’s jeans and briefs off, then strips down to nothing. He falls on top of Luthando and kisses him on his neck, his shoulders. When their lips touch, Viwe’s whole body comes alive. His skin tingles, hypersensitive to Luthando’s hands on his back, his ass. He edges down over Luthando’s scrawny body towards his dick, but Luthando stops him. ‘There’s no time for that,’ he says.

The lube is still where they left it in the bedside drawer. Unused in two years. Viwe pushes himself slowly into Luthando and Luthando gasps, digs his fingers into Viwe’s neck. It’s warm and soft and feels so good. He is so happy to have Luthando home. When he opens his eyes, he finds Luthando’s eyes screwed tightly shut, tears running silently down his temples. He isn’t sure if it’s relief or happiness or despair Luthando feels, but he kisses him and he holds his face with his hands and he whispers, over and over again, ‘I love you’.

-This is an excerpt from It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way (pages 116-117) by Alistair Mackay (Kwela, 2022).