11/14/2023 0 Comments My first storiesMOENG: And then, you're expected to, like, drop what you're doing and make them tea and do all of that. But when I was home, I was noticing so many of my mother's friends would just, like, drop in. And, you know, when I'm not in Serowe, I do feel kind of nostalgic and homesick for all of these ideas of - that I've just been saying, of being in a village. It was kind of a humbling time just because (laughter) - it was interesting that I was back home. And I went - actually went back home to Serowe to the village to live there with my mother. ![]() I've read that you went back to Botswana during a part of the pandemic. So for sure, I would say that, yes, I do know women like this and girls like this. All of these seem very similar to women within my own family - you know, my cousins, my sisters, my aunties. MOENG: So the stories, so many of them, I stayed in my home village of Serowe - and that said, specifically, in the "Botalaote" - which is where I'm from. SIMON: Have you known these characters in these stories, more or less, one way or another? But then, she realizes, oh, there was so much death pressing against me all the time. It was - there were so many other people that were dying at the same time. It's only when she's much older and she has been able to travel herself, then she's able to kind of look back and reassess her treatment of her aunt and just see it wasn't just her aunt. I think that is a subject that most of the people within the household understand, but they don't really talk to each other about it because at the time - the story is set in the mid-'90s in Botswana - there was so much stigma about people dying from AIDS. And so when her aunt falls sick and is essentially sent back home to die and she sees her as this sort of pitiful figure who has not lived up to the ideals that she had, she's ashamed of that.Īlso, I think that she knows what her aunt is dying from. She had these ideas of her aunt as this kind of glamorous figure in her life who kind of, like, sweeps in once in a while, tells her all of these stories about life outside of the village, you know, encourages her and gives her these ideas of the world as a bigger place. MOENG: I think when she is at that age, it's more that she's, like, really ashamed of her aunt dying. I wonder, does she feel that death is kind of being rubbed into her face? And in one story, there's a 12-year-old girl who tires of taking care of her sick aunt. And so you are kind of curious about what those things are. MOENG: 'Cause, like, you want to know what your parents are keeping you away from or what - you know, in this case, the brother is telling you, like, guys only want women for certain things. MOENG: But also, I think they make those romantic encounters much more attractive and alluring, right? MOENG: I think depending on the kind of person the young person is, the warnings can keep them away from pursuing those kind of romantic encounters. A bright, burning flame, it would lick us alive. SIMON: In the story, which I loved, which you just read the introduction, "A Good Girl" the central character is, but says - I wrote this down - (reading) we wanted to love, but we'd been warned love was dangerous. And I lived there for 14 years or so before I moved to Mississippi, actually, to Oxford, Miss., for graduate school. And then, at 13 years old, I moved to Gaborone to go to boarding school there. I spent a little bit of my life in a much smaller village called Makalamabedi in the northwest of Botswana. I was born in Serowe, which is where my family is from. And you know both small-town life and big city life in Botswana, don't you? ![]() She joins us now from Provincetown, Mass. SIMON: "Call And Response" is the first book from Gothataone Moeng, whose work has appeared in the Oxford American and A Public Space and who's a recipient of a Wallace Stegner fiction fellowship. It had been only two days since my older sister Boitshepho's return home from God knows where, and she and Mama were still staying out of each other's way. She was stooped over African violets and wax begonias, quiet except for the huffs of angry breath spurting from the tight line of her lips. GOTHATAONE MOENG: (Reading) One sun-dazed October morning, in the year I was 9 and given to daydreaming, I watched my mother stab the soil in the potted plants on the veranda. Here's how the author begins her story "A Good Girl." "Call And Response" is a collection of short stories that reveals the world as lived by girls and women in a village and in the capital city of Botswana, girls and women who seek lives that might reach beyond or around traditional ways and current circumstances.
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