At the beginning of the 2000s Achmat was finishing his tenure as the CEO of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and was refining Bitter Fruit. In 2001, he and Audrey moved to New York. For Achmat, it was supposed to be a kind of sabbatical for him to focus on his writing though he also took up a voluntary position as a Senior Fellow at Synergos. By 2003 he had started working as a consultant to UNAIDS and the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative. As in previous decades, he made time to write. In a 2004 interview he explained: “I always write, everywhere, constantly taking notes on little pieces of paper. Later I transfer them to a computer.” Bitter Fruit was published by Kwela Books in August 2001 and in 2003 was shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Awards. After that it was published internationally. By the end of 2004, the couple had moved to Geneva so that Achmat could take up a position he had been offered by UNAIDS as Director of Advocacy. In that year, Bitter Fruit was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Achmat attended several literary events and gave readings in major cities across the globe. He was also working on Strange Pilgrimages and a childhood memoir and some short stories, some of which appeared in anthologies published internationally including “Afrika min borjan afrika mitt slut” (“Africa my beginning, Africa my end”), translated into Swedish and published in Emergencia in 2000; “Veneriske sygdomme” (“Venereal Disease”), translated into Dutch, published in Opbrud (2000) and edited by Chris van Wyk. “Skin Costs Extra” was published in Nobody Ever Said AIDS: Stories and Poems from Southern Africa (2004). Hein Willemse, Achmat’s colleague from the Writers’ Forum days, had been appointed as the new editor of the Tydskrif vir Letterkunde. In a 2020 tribute to Achmat, Hein wrote:

“When we relaunched Tydskrif vir Letterkunde as a multilingual literary journal I asked him to contribute a story to our launch edition … [he contributed] the short story “A Reason to Love”, in the first issue of 2004.

Achmat had started writing what would become Bitter Fruit in the mid 1990s around the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in South Africa. Visit era 5 for details.

Achmat talked about what had given him the “impetus” for writing Bitter Fruit in an interview with Elaine Young conducted shortly after its release:

“If there was any ideological starting point at all, it is probably my feeling that in wanting to forgive and forget so quickly, we swept a lot of things under the carpet — we didn’t deal with a lot of issues and they’ve festered there. One of them is the long history of the abuse of women. The activists — the ANC, the UDF and other people — talk about torture and abuse, but it’s always about the high-profile people and how they were abused. What they don’t talk about is the systematic rape of women in prison on a wide scale. Another element that’s never talked about is the abuse of women in the MK camps. Maybe I am interested in this because I grew up in a household that was so dominated by women, their suffering and the consequences of their suffering. I think that’s what created the impetus for Bitter Fruit.

The novel doesn’t represent any particular political viewpoint, just a whole series of things that I read or experienced. For example, I once asked [one of] the Truth Commissioners, what had happened to the testimonies of women’s abuse which had been given in a closed hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He said they had decided not to publish it because of the sensitivity of the material. Then I went onto the internet, and there they were — all of the testimonies, right there, complete with people’s names and the details of the incidents. The TRC hadn’t wanted to expose those people, whoever they are, and those people didn’t want to be exposed — but a simple bureaucratic error had put this thing up on the internet. Although the material was subsequently withdrawn, I felt that as a fictional writer I had to tell a story about it from my viewpoint … The sexual abuse of women in the struggle against apartheid was far more systematic and widespread than we want to believe or that the TRC has dealt with. It was in many ways on a par with what happened in Kosovo. To teach the community a lesson in a township north of Newcastle in KwaZulu Natal, for example, the police went there and raped every woman they could find. This happened in about 1986. You will not find this in any newspaper — it’s not recorded anywhere. Even within the ANC it is the one thing that they will not put in their documentation archives. So, all I did was try to [present] a viewpoint.

Achmat continued:

“The other fascination was purely an intellectual thought that came to me. What if a child discovers that his father is his mother’s rapist? What would he do? That for me was one of the more rewarding exercises for writing the book. I had to put myself into the mind of this young Michael, and work through with him just what will go on in his head and how he will deal with it. I hope I dealt with it sensitively and that his reactions are sensitive. It was the most difficult part of the whole book to try to keep Michael true to himself, to what he was and to his reaction to his mother.”

 In a 2004 interview conducted by Jean Meiring, Achmat talked about the basis for the Lydia character in Bitter Fruit: I realised…that these women’s stories would never be heard. In a sense, they are all personified – represented – by the character of Lydia.”

Achmat remained with Kwela Books and worked with Annari during the publication process. Ivan Vladislavić who edited the manuscript recalled what the editing process was like:

“When I first got involved as the editor, Annari already had a reader’s report from Mike Nicol (poet, novelist and non-fiction writer) in Cape Town, and she asked me to read the manuscript as well before looking at Nicol’s report. After doing that, I consolidated our views and put to Achmat what I thought needed to happen to the manuscript, the things that in my view needed to be rethought or revised.”

Ivan remembered that they had had to work to a tight deadline because Achmat needed to leave South Africa to join Audrey in New York City. They managed to get it done between January and July 2001, which Ivan considered to be “quite fast for a novel”. Nevertheless, he stressed that it was a relatively smooth process.

“Editing can be stressful. It’s demanding work in itself and tensions do arise with writers who resist editing or want to argue about every comma. But in my experience, Achmat was very open to editing. He enjoyed the process. By then, he would also have had a different sense of me from when we first met. I had published a few books and started to establish myself as a writer, and besides Kafka’s Curse, I’d also edited a few books that had drawn attention, like Krog’s Country of My Skull. So I think he trusted me. I don’t recall it being a difficult process.”

Ivan found that Bitter Fruit: “really engaged me. I found it fascinating then and still do. I think it’s a very remarkable novel”.

On 11 September 2001, when the twin towers of the World Trade Centre fell, Achmat was at Kinko’s, an internet café, corresponding with Annari about a launch date for Bitter Fruit. The next day he wrote a poem, “Just Yesterday – A Paean to New York”, lamenting the “horror” that had “crept up on” the City, and urging people not to become “bitter and angry”. Through the mention of the coming of the “harmattan”, he references the anticipated resurgence of Islamophobia and racism and begs New Yorkers to pursue a vision of the City in keeping with its recent past when it “had enough beauty to offer all of us”. 

A copy of Achmat’s 9/11 poem “Just Yesterday” was posted on Face Book by Miriam Bosky Wheeldon

Just Yesterday – A Paean to New York, (written 12 September 2001)

Just yesterday you were full of fun,

And you had enough beauty to offer all of us,

The long avenues of your limbs, veiled in rivers,

The naked shoulders of your streets.

Then horror crept up on you,

Mauled you with its clammy fingers,

Planes exploding, dark smoke filling the air,

Now, you are difficult to love,

You have become bitter and angry,

We hear again, those of us cursed with yesterday’s

Memory

The coming of an ancient and bitter harmattan,

Feet without rhythm, sound without harmony.

Listen dear one, sit up, colour your cheeks,

Let’s go dancing, one of us on either arm,

Get the horror, terrorists and all,

Out of your mind,

Don’t turn the whole world

Into a mortal enemy.

Perhaps the pleasure of life will come back.

Take it one rhythmical step at a time,

Learn how to be loved again.

Achmat’s dedication for Bitter Fruit, printed on the verso page in some editions, reads:

“To my mother Julie,

my wife Audrey

and my daughter Justine;

they taught me to ‘see’.”

In addition to a dedication, there is an epitaph followed by three more for each part of the book respectively. The opening epitaph from Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story reads: “It is an old story – ours. My father’s and mine.” Part One opens with a quote from André Gilder’s Fruits of the Earth: “I will teach you that there is nothing that is not divinely natural, … I will speak to you of everything.” The epitaph for Part Two is from Mevlana Celaleddin-I Rumi’s Mesnevi:

Since in order to speak, one must first listen,

Learn to speak by listening.”

Part Three’s epitaph comes from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

Though liv’st; report me and my case aright

           To the unsatisfied.”

It was officially launched later in the year. “Freshness and boldness and vividness are qualities of (Achmat’s) writing,” Nadine Gordimer wrote, “he has always delved beyond the surface of human relations, from the intimately personal to the societal and political.” In a 2020 tribute to Achmat, Isobel Dixon, wrote: “I read the text in awe and emailed [Annari] to say what a lacerating and powerful novel it was. This time, I was sure, a UK publisher would see the light too.” But it would be some time before it was published internationally.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York, Achmat continued to balance consultancy work in the HIV/AIDS field with working on his writing. He reflected on how living in New York allowed stories that had been in his “system” finally to surface:

“[New York] gave me the opportunity to get out of my system some of the stories that have been there for a long time: the untold stories of people who have been in exile, in the Underground. All you tend to hear are the black and white stories of the good guys and their enemies, and the ambiguities in between are never explored.”

Achmat also recalled “constantly” being asked questions about South Africa, which seemed to demand the kind of simple answers he was not prepared to give:

“Living in the U.S. I am constantly asked questions about South Africa: about our President’s view on HIV/AIDS, about why things haven’t changed for the majority of black people, and so on; and the questions come from different angles. African-Americans want to know why black people are still poor, while white Americans and some exiled South Africans lament the fact that white people have been marginalised — or so they believe. I keep telling them that in between these stark views of theirs is a different reality and greater ambiguity than they want to see. There is a bigger black middle class than there ever was before in South Africa, and that is a major change. And yes, there is poverty and the poverty is going to take a long time to eradicate, and yes there are many white people leaving, just as there are African people leaving, and Coloureds and Indians — everybody is leaving. So, the migration of exiled people from South Africa shouldn’t be seen simply as what they call a “chicken run”. This is such a global world: if I can live in New York and be a South African, what’s wrong with that? It doesn’t mean that because I live in New York I am not South African or I am anti-South African. Where we go from here, and where our government goes to from here, depends on how vigilant the citizens are, whether they make their vote count and whether or not people speak their mind, and I fully intend to speak my mind. Within that, in literary terms, I may upset people, though I don’t consciously set out to do that. I am not writing for the sake of creating controversy — by the way, controversy doesn’t necessary sell books, it generates publicity, but it doesn’t sell books.”

In March 2002, Achmat was invited to the “Time of the Writer Festival” in Durban. At the opening, according to Elaine Young, Achmat said he had “no intention of depicting South Africa as if it has no flaws”. In an interview shortly after the festival, Young asked him if he viewed his own writing as depicting “a sort of ‘truth ’about South Africa at present”. Achmat firmly rejected the idea that writing should “be a tool or instrument for anything”:

“I’ve learned a lesson from the anti-apartheid struggle when writing was seen as an instrument of freedom: writing cannot be a tool or instrument for anything. When it is, it begins to lose its independence and imagination and becomes diminished and shackled to something else. I think the phrase I used at the opening of the Writers’ Festival was that my imagination no longer wants to climb up flagpoles — in fact my imagination is forcing me to climb down flagpoles. I’m not in search of different flagpoles, either — I just ignore them. Writing about South Africa’s flaws is not going to be something deliberate — l am not going to look for a sore and scratch it. I see the country as a very complex totality and I see many different kinds of people in it. I see individuals, primarily, and I respond to individuals — not to groups and not to representations. The notion that writers can change the world is a bit arrogant and vain anyway. What we can do is record it in a way that is imaginative and different. I am going to write South Africa as I see it. Undoubtedly flaws will emerge — both in my writing, I guess, and in South Africa. We all have flaws that we need to address. Some of them are inherited, some of them are of our own making, some are unavoidable and others can be avoided.”

In the same interview, Elaine asked Achmat if he felt it possible “or desirable — to speak about the emergence of a ‘common South African story’ in recent years”. He replied:

“I don’t think that there need necessarily be what we call a ‘South African Literature’ almost as if it’s an ideology. Writing is not like tourism that you can package and put a label on, or a flag that you can use as a gimmick to sell things and to bring tourists here. Writing is far more dynamic and sensitive and it engages human beings in different responses; the reader and the writer relate to each other in different ways. So, we can’t package our literature and that’s why I am really hesitant to talk about a sudden ‘South African literature’. There will obviously be some commonality in what people write because we live in the same country and we have similar experiences, although we see them from different perspectives. I would hate to see the day when what we call South African literature is nothing but a kind of national stricture or framework — a strait jacket, as it were, within which you have to operate …. There is a distinction between South African writers and their writing and South African writing. South Africans have a terrible habit: when we don’t know how to deal with complexity, we want to reduce it to the simple and lowest common denominator. So, let’s all have one national literature — that way we accommodate everybody. There is an old cliché — ‘Some writers are more equal than others.’ So, to expect Nadine Gordimer or Zakes Mda or anybody else to conform to some mythical, difficult-to-define South African literature is for me completely unnecessary and quite frankly I ignore it.”

Achmat revealed an important part of his writing process and the importance he attached to really listening to people and “to history”:

“[I]t’s listening to people around you, it’s listening to the past, it’s listening to history, it’s just watching people speak and interact. Very often South Africans listen with a filter: we hear what we want to hear and not what the person is saying. That’s why dialogue in this country is so often difficult. While I’m listening to you speak, I’m trying to make up my mind: ‘do I want to listen to this or don’t I want to listen to this?’ I really believe that in the context of Bitter Fruit there was a need, a crying need, for those characters to listen to each other. The only person who really listened there was Michael. He listened to each one of the others and even himself. But then he interpreted it in his own way. When he went on his journey through Soweto, he kept saying to himself, ‘what the hell am I doing here, looking for history in the dusty streets of Soweto?’ Even he was trying to listen to his own voice telling him the past is not something that you dwell in all the time — you have to move on into the future.”

In 2003, Achmat’s Bitter Fruit was short-listed for the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award (established in 1994 as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a joint initiative of Dublin City Council and the American productivity company IMPAC). James Irwin, president of IMPAC, established the prize money at €100 000 and a trust fund was established to maintain and administer it. Books written in any language by authors from any country are eligible, as long as the English original or an English translation of the book has been released. The award is made two years after publication.

The longlist is composed of nominations made by invited public libraries in cities around the world. A panel of judges chooses from these titles to draw up a shortlist of no more than ten titles from which a winner is selected. The announcement is made in a ceremony during the International Literature Festival Dublin.

In the year that Bitter Fruit made the shortlist, Allen Weinstein who had served in that position since 1996 was the panel’s non-voting chair.

The other books on the short-list were: My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Erdag Göknar) The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock; The Royal Physician’s Visit by Per Olov Enquist; The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen; The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lídia Jorge; That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern; and Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red was that year’s winner.

When Isobel Dixon read Bitter Fruit soon after its publication, she believed that UK publishers would not hesitate to take it. But as she writes it took some time:

“Bitter Fruit was bought in France, Spain and Canada first, and turned down by more than twenty English editors before Toby Mundy of Atlantic and I had a long conversation over lunch and he decided to take a second look, having passed earlier. The novel—as it does—had continued to haunt him. Atlantic was publishing Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor … Morgan Entrekin and Amy Hundley came on board for Grove Atlantic in the US and other translation deals followed.”

Amy Hundley’s acquisition press release, cited by Dixon, read: “Achmat Dangor’s portrayal of multicultural South Africa is incredibly fresh, and this new novel is accomplished and beautiful, with a tense and complex awareness of the way history continues to refract into our contemporary lives.”

Giles Newington, Irish Times: “Meticulously written and perfectly paced.”

Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday: “The unremitting intensity of Dangor’s focus is just as notable as its depth.”

Barbara Trapido, The Independent: “A haunting story of a family disintegrating, wonderfully authentic … its progress like slow dancing.”

Publishers Weekly: “In the vein of J.M. Coetzee’s novels, but from the perspective of black South Africans Bitter Fruit is a harrowing story of a brittle family on the crossroads of history and a fearless skewering of the pieties of revolutionary movements.”

Hazel Rochman, Booklist: “Dangor writes from the inside and yet with distance, challenging some sacred platitudes of the heroic struggle and the new elite but never settling for the easy ambiguity that dismisses all values as being the same. Told from many characters’ viewpoints—anguished, angry, tender, ironic—the searing narratives reveal the wounds of betrayal and no reconciliation. The people and their stories are unforgettable”.

The Guardian: “Bitter Fruit has a shocking ability to surprise the reader with the persistence of racial feeling in South Africa.”

Achmat recalled, however that “a certain Dutch reviewer said I was obsessed with sex in both these books [Kafka’s Curse and Bitter Fruit], but I don’t think that’s true.” In an interview with Jos van Eck, he explains why it may have appeared to have been the case that he was obsessed with sex:

“This is a novel about sexuality and power (or powerlessness). I tried to balance the two, but inevitably, there was a contest between the two. Are all sexual relationships also power relationships, with one part strong and the other weak? I hope that in the end sensuality is a greater force than power. In Lydia’s case, it becomes an instrument of her freedom.”

Bitter Fruit also sparked discussion on Achmat’s exploration of transformation, hybridity and “transgressive sexuality”, themes initially raised in Kafka’s Curse. Ivan elaborated on Achmat’s particular representation of “transformation”, coming from “a very complex perspective”:

“Transformation is such an important idea in South Africa and Achmat is interested in it before the political transition. He comes into his own with a book like Kafka’s Curse and then with Bitter Fruit because he’s already steeped in these ideas, in the possibilities of change. One of the striking things is that he doesn’t have a purely romantic notion of transformation. There’s an unease in many of his characters, they are unsettled, and sometimes they change in a positive way and sometimes they don’t. He doesn’t have the rose-tinted view that all transformation or hybridisation is good. Sometimes people undo themselves by trying to change who they are and sometimes they manage to transform into something beautiful, something better, if you like. It’s a very complex perspective.” Bitter Fruit is in another category. He is concerned with some of the same ideas. There’s hardly a character in the novel who’s the same at the end. They all change their relationships to one another, they shift their gender identifications, they shift their political positions. Mikey, who I see as the central character, goes from being a quiet child to being a very hostile, cold-hearted adult at the end of the book, and a similar sort of transformation happens to almost every character. This movement is often transgressive, the changes are not comfortable.”

Achmat himself explained his exploration of “transgressive sexuality” and metamorphosis in the interview with Elaine Young:

“Maybe there was a subconscious desire in my heart to provoke South Africans out of their hypocritical silence about sex. One of the real reasons why there is an AIDS epidemic today is because people don’t want to talk about sex — not just traditional communities, but educated people too … Think about South Africans and how hypocritical we are about sex. We make bawdy jokes about it … The literature in South Africa shrinks away from sexuality as well. I think J.M. Coetzee handles it well and Nadine Gordimer always deals with it very subtly — her last book was a very sensual book for me. I don’t like the way André Brink deals with sex: in his novels the women are reduced to fantasies, male fantasies. Perhaps in both my books, but more particularly in Bitter Fruit, I tried to provoke discussion, and maybe I did. In Afrikaans communities and in urban areas incest has been an unspoken and hugely suppressed problem. It has been like that in some Coloured communities as well, and even in Indian communities — it is never spoken about, especially when incest is also abuse, which it is most of the time. It is very rare when an incestuous relationship between a young person and an older person is consensual. And that is an element of abuse, as well as a reason why people never want to speak about it…. South Africans treat their bodies as things that you hide or exhibit for the wrong reasons. So yes, I hope that what I do is lead to some transformation, even if it is only to get people to talk about it.”

In another interview Achmat explained that he was trying to “counter…(a) very macho view of sexuality”:

“Sexuality is the most complex and deep-rooted of all human behaviour. It turns saints into sinners (and vice versa), artist into voyeur and has influenced history as much as ideology.  At its benign level it is a positive force – Agamemnon went to war to reclaim Helen, a noble act of love that launched not only a thousand ships but an enduring literary legacy. Conversely, Hitler and Stalin, it is said felt belittled by their inability to love as devoutly as the Greek king, and confused sex with sensuality. Lastly, in all conflicts, it seems that men use women as weapons of war: defiling an ‘opponent’s woman’ is seen as way of striking at the very heart of that opponent. What I try to do is counter that very macho view of sexuality.”

In 2004, Bitter Fruit made the short list for the Man Booker Prize. The winner receives £50 000 as well as the £2 500 awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors. According to the Booker Prize website, “shortlisted authors are guaranteed a global readership and can expect a dramatic increase in book sales.”

Achmat recalled that when the call from Audrey came through (to tell him he had been shortlisted) he had been “in the middle of a somewhat gloomy UNAIDS meeting. I told her I’d call her back, and switched my phone off. My colleagues soon noticed I was distracted, though. I told them.” A senior official, Achmat remembered “quietly said to me: I hope you don’t win. It would mean starting all over (finding someone appropriate as global anti-AIDS prophet-bureaucrat). On the 19^th of October, the couple headed to London for the announcement ceremony. The other shortlisted novels were: The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst; The Electric Michaelangelo by Sarah Hall; Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell; The Master by Colm Tóibín; and I’ll Go to Bed at Noon by Gerard Woodward. The panel of judges, Chris Smith, Tibor Fischer, Robert Macfarlane, Rowan Pelling, and Fiammetta Rocco, chose The Line of Beauty by English writer Alan Hollinghurst. Nevertheless, there was much celebration. Isobel recalled: “Though Achmat didn’t win the big prize, it was an extraordinary night, though my favourite parts were away from the big hall and the television cameras, in a quieter space, with Achmat and his wife Audrey dancing at our late Booker afterparty in Soho.”

Each of the shortlisted authors were presented with a unique, hand-bound edition of their nominated works, created by Fellows from the Designer Bookbinders society. Achmat’s was designed by Steven Conway. Private Collection Audrey Elster

Achmat also reflected on what he might have done had he been the winner: “Well, Bitter Fruit didn’t win, but I am not so sure I would have left UNAIDS. There was something compelling about ‘helping to save millions of lives.’” Audrey described Achmat’s work at UNAIDS as “intense” and “hectic”, with a lot of politics and a lot of travel and yet he continued to produce new stories, one of which was directly related to his work in the AIDS field. In 2004 Achmat’s “Skin Costs Extra” was published in Nobody Ever Said AIDS: Stories and Poems from Southern Africa, edited by Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson and Kylie Thomas and published by Kwela Books. It is an anthology of stories and poems about the impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa by writers such as Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona, and Phaswane Mpe. In the foreword, Njabulo Ndebele maintained that the contributions were from writers who have “begun to forge new and imaginative responses to the pandemic. Their words open the space for us as readers to understand, to mourn, and to grieve for the collective losses facing us in southern Africa today”.

Academic and creative writer Tim Woods described the anthology as follows:

“Covering a variety of styles that reflect the range of cultural and class perspectives represented in the anthology, oral songs, poems, fiction, non-fiction describe subjective experiences, present images to convey the denial and resulting despair of the early years of the epidemic, and also the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission with its careful attention to detail in describing an AIDS hospital. The works demonstrate the multiplicity of definitions of what constitutes the disease and the taboos regarding “saying out loud the name of the disease”. Eddie Vulani Maluleke’s eponymous poem ‘Nobody Ever Said AIDS’ describes the ways in which a carefree lifestyle in the early 1990s gradually led to pervasive illness and death from numerous diseases like cancer, TB, and pneumonia; and yet in the face of this overwhelming evidence, ‘That was us / Whispering it at funerals / Because nobody ever said AIDS’.”

In 2005, PEN’s “World Voices Festival” was founded under the direction of former PEN President Salman Rushdie, and Esther Allen, and Michael Roberts. According to writer Matt Grant, the festival (like PEN itself 84 years earlier), was created to counteract the rise of aggressive nationalism, this time triggered by 9/11. Chip Rolley, 2018 Senior Director of Literary Programs and the World Voices Festival at PEN America told Grant:

“I think that Salman, Michael, Esther, and others felt that the United States at that time was descending into a kind of neo-isolationism …There was concern that those very reasons PEN came to be in the first place felt under threat… [and] there was again that strong sense that we needed to make sure that writers in the United States were talking to writers around the world, and that readers in the United States were getting exposed to ideas that were not American.”

In a 2015 interview Rushdie himself talked about filling “an obvious hole in the cultural calendar”:

“[I]t came out of a general conversation at PEN on wanting to do more to highlight the international nature of literature and the way in which it crosses frontiers. Another imperative: It’s ridiculous that New York doesn’t have an international literary festival. The city has international festivals for every other area of the arts: dance, film, music. It was an obvious hole in the cultural calendar we wanted to fill. Our hope was that we could demonstrate there was such a large audience for something like this that it could become annual. The response of the first two days has been so colossal that there’s no question we’ll try to make it yearly.”

About 125 writers from 45 countries were invited to attend the launch followed by a weeklong series of readings and discussions showcasing literature and ideas from around the globe. Achmat was invited to take part in a session titled “Africa and the World: The Writer’s Role” with a panel comprising Elizabeth Alexander, Breyten Breytenbach, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Zakes Mda, Pedro Rosa Mendes, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Uwe Timm. To listen to the presentations, visit: https://soundcloud.com/penamerican/sets/africa-and-the-world-the

Achmat’s presentation was called: “History. We all have our stories” and included a reading from Bitter Fruit. Before reading, Achmat spoke about identity and shared with the audience how he was classified as coloured when he was a teenager. He referred to how his complicated heritage had confused the “race-classification” officials. At the end, he claimed a multiple identity but asserted that he was “[un]equivocally African”.

“Forty years ago, at the eager age of sixteen, I had to appear before a race-classification board in Pretoria, South Africa, because of my mixed heritage. Let me describe that: One ancestor, great-grandmother or great-grandfather, was brought to South Africa as a slave from Java or Malaysia; we’re not sure. Another came as a merchant from India. I have a great-grandmother who came as something else, from the Netherlands. And I was speaking Afrikaans as my mother tongue and, because I grew up in a mixed township, my second language was Isizulu. So, can you imagine the confusion of those race-classification people? In the end, they classified me as coloured. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being classified, but in a race-obsessed society, everyone had to have an identity. Now, we have a new kind of identity.

In the past few weeks and months, I’ve been reading from my book Bitter Fruit in various parts of the world—in London, in Antwerp, in Amsterdam, in New York, in Toronto—and I get the same question every time: Are you a Muslim writer? So here I am, with a new identity: I am a wine-drinking, Muslim-born writer who writes in English. I’m [un]equivocally African.”

After the World Voices Festival, Bitter Fruit was translated into more European languages. Achmat continued to present readings and was interviewed several times about the book even a decade after it was first published. A recurring question was whether or not there would be a sequel. In 2001, Elaine Young had framed her enquiry about a sequel in the context of 9/11:

“Reading your last novel Bitter Fruit, which was published just before September 11, was quite an uncanny experience in terms of the way it deals with issues of Muslim identity and fundamentalist groups within Islam. What were the implications of the coincidence of the release of your book and the events of September 11?”

Achmat responded:

“It makes my sequel to the book very difficult because, in it, Michael, who now becomes Noor, goes to India to find his mythical grandfather’s roots and ends up in Afghanistan in a school — not the Al-Qaeda, but an Islamic school — where the disenchantment within him grows. But this disenchantment has nothing to do with ideology — this disenchantment is with himself. In a sense it is difficult to write this book because everybody is going to measure it against September 11.”

Another interviewer asked about Bitter Fruit’s ending in relation to the Michael character:

“The end of your novel is an open one related to Mickey’s destiny, would he go to prison, would he escape for all his life? We don’t know and is not the matter, but we ask ourselves, Mickey revenged what De Boise did to his mother, this act would made him a prisoner once again, prisoner in his mind and soul for the crime he did. Would he be able to feel really compensated?

In Achmat’s reply, he hesitated about whether he would write a sequel, stressing that Bitter Fruit had been published just before the 9/11 attacks. In terms of what 9/11 revealed, Achmat seems to be imagining that his Michael character would not have been able to adhere to the “narrow view of the world” that he saw as being “held by “Muslim extremists”.

“No, Mikey feels neither ‘compensated’ nor fulfilled by his act of vengeance. And yes, his is a story that demands to be told.  Remember that the South African edition of ‘Bitter Fruit’ was first published in August 2001, one month before “9/11” and one month before I moved to New York. Mikey’s story – does he go to jail, does he end up as a (reluctant) jihadi bombing civilians or does he escape the trap, both mental and physical that his expedient alliance with Muslim extremists lead him into? If I had to write the story he would probably end up dead, killed by the extremists whose narrow view of the world he would have spurned, rather than by US soldiers say in Iraq. Mikey was too rational – he lived mostly within his mind – to be seduced by blind belief. Maybe I will write a sequel.”

Aghogho Akpome enquired again, in September 2013, about a sequel in relation to Michael. Achmat replied, referring to the dangers of following a “self-created path of righteousness”:

“In a sense, I finished the draft. Bitter Fruit was published in 2001. After the Man Booker prize short-listing in 2004, a lot of attention was drawn into what it meant. But whether fortunately or unfortunately the trajectory that the character had chosen for himself was to go into Muslim radicalism. One of the critics said it’s prophetic. But I said no, I don’t think it is prophetic so much as taking this young person and flinging him into an easy way out of a dilemma.  What do I do with my conscience, with my past? It is so easy to block it out and say this is the right path, follow your self-created path of righteousness.  I probably will re-write that to show the flaws in that global movement of radicalism. And how he becomes disillusioned with it and what are the consequences for him. It is a dilemma – a creative dilemma rather than a political one: How do you create a character that is in my own mind seen to be riding a kind of trajectory that will make him controversial for the sake of it.”

In the end there was no sequel, but Achmat did write a “treatment for a film” for Bitter Fruit, dated 2004, which is housed in the Achmat Dangor Papers at Historical Papers and Research Archives at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was also working on a stage adaptation of Happy Endings, which Achmat co-wrote with his good friend, Junaid Ahmed. The adaptation became the popular Bollywood musical, Bombay Crush and according to ESAT was South Africa’s first ever locally-produced major West End-styled Bollywood stage musical. It was Produced by Sibaya Casino and Entertainment Kingdom in association with Anant Singh and Videovision and was performed at the iZulu Theatre, Durban in 2006.

In the meantime, Bitter Fruit was translated into several more languages and in 2007 the first Kindle Edition was produced by Black Cat.

From the early 2000s, Achmat’s earlier works were also translated. First came Waiting for Leila translated into French by Valérie Morlot-Duhoux and published as En attendant Leila. Then Kafka’s Curse translated into Italian and published under the title La Maledizione Di Kafka and launched in early May 2006, in Undine Italy. The Z-town Trilogy followed in 2009 and was translated into Spanish by Juanjo Estrella and published under the title Trilogía de Z Town. It was also the first title inaugurated into the Casa África Collection, which the institution publishes in collaboration with publishers Ediciones El Cobre.

Looking back on “trends” in South African literature and the challenges for his generation of writers as it moved into the post-apartheid phase, Achmat recalled:

“The younger generation of South Africans who are not so hung up as it were on our struggle – what I will call our revolutionary past, our resistance past – have become more concerned with contemporary issues. So, there is one trend that in many ways I find very exciting but in another, disturbing. It is the amount of people who focus on crime writing.  And then you find a number of other young writers like Siphiwo Mahala, whose book When A Man Cries focuses on the dilemmas that previously oppressed people grapple with. Remember it’s very rare for an African man to cry. But he learns to cry as a way of expressing himself and lamenting the sorrows of his community, his family, and also his own mistakes. For me, those are the kind of things we are actually grappling with – our humanity now; where it is and where we are going to. It is very complex. My generation was so focused on the struggle that it took me some time to think about what does post-apartheid mean. When I wrote my novel Bitter Fruit, it was my first experiment in looking at reconciliation, its path and its consequences.

He said that a major challenge was the expectations of publishers and their version of what contemporary post-Apartheid novels should express. In his words:

“The problem, for writers, is compounded by what publishers, here and abroad, expect of ‘contemporary’ South African literature: every book must be a post-modernist expression of the new South Africa, characterised by violent crime, racial tension, blacks gazing inwardly at their flawed nirvana, whites peering hopefully outwards towards Australian, American and European refuges. I simply find it impossible to conform to this ahistoric approach; there is greater continuity between pre- and post-Apartheid South Africa than we care to admit. Ultimately, for me, there are greater, personalised nuances to be explored.”

Moving forward Achmat stressed the importance of human psyche and his belief that human memory is the greatest ally for writers of fiction:

“[H]uman memory – and human nature – is the fiction writer’s greatest ally, and our greatest curse. The historian, or the journalist, can easily deny that sublime reality that resides within the human psyche, but I, as novelist cannot.”