Think prolific and Pieter-Dirk Uys will probably pop into your head. Currently busy with a run of his latest stage show Adapt or Fly, he also recently launched his latest book Panorama (Missing Ink) which first appeared as a play (performed in 1987) dealing with Robben Island and its inhabitants both then and now.
When the Soccer World Cup happened, Uys again thought of the play because of all the interest in Robben Island from tourists. He decided he could turn it into a novel.
He describes it as a small story told in a political context.
“Things so easily just become footnotes,” he says pointing to our past and the many stories that stem from those dark days and the way people encountered and experienced one another.
Panorama is the story of three women. Sibi is the daughter of banned parents visiting her father on the island when she comes face to face with two suspicious and scared schoolteachers who are resident there. It’s a life-changing experience and two decades later, Sibi returns to the island, now a World Heritage Site with her two born-free sons.
It’s a look at the country through the prism of the past but with today strongly present and that makes it interesting because you can reflect on what was, while contemplating today. What were people doing all that time ago and where are they today? How have their lives changed, what has been learnt and how much a prison the country had become all that time ago, even for those living in “freedom”.
Uys never lets go of the reality of what was to inform the characters as they are viewed today. He is determined to keep the story alive to remind people lest we forget.
“It’s the characters who tell the story,” he explains about the process of writing. This was one he felt compelled to do, and it happened quite easily.
And while there’s a strong political edge to everything he does, Uys knows how to work his audience. He has been doing it for long enough. He knows how to get his message across while making you laugh and cry.
And with Panorama, he has used all his wiley wit.
With only so much spare time at our disposal, we need to choose carefully and he hopes to entice as many as he can to dip into this one.
It is the lives of the women he decides to share that draw you in. None of them is cut from the same cloth and yet there’s an empathy because they’re in a similar position for different reasons, all shackled to some extent.
It’s not only the writing that kept Uys on his toes. As someone who has to fill many empty halls, he goes full circle.
“Certain South African imprints never make it on to Amazon,” he says. As a world traveller and savvy in those ways, he knows that a large part of his market will also be expats. “They want to read about what’s happening back home,” he says. That’s why he joined an author’s co-operative who do their own publishing and distribution and make sure it’s out there for everyone.
He’s also proud that the cover design is his own. “Of course it was streamlined by the designer,” he says but with the iconic image of Cape Town and Table Mountain as seen from Robben Island with a typical excerpt of a censored letter as the background, he gives away much more than one might think.
Showman that he is, he can’t help encapsulating the essence of what he is trying to say in a picture.
Panorama is both a picture and a state of mind for people who were unaware or in denial of what they were doing to others – no questions asked.
“We can’t allow the stories to die,” he stresses. As the son of a mother whose piano lives in Berlin’s Holocaust Museum, he is fully aware of the impact of the past. His dedication in the front of the book also reaches back. It is dedicated to his teacher who encouraged her pupils to write a poem. When he said he could not write, her response was something that inspires and encourages him to this day.
“Yes Pieter, you can do any- thing. If you believe it and work towards it. You can do anything!”
And his response a few decades on: “Thanks Miss Nell.”
In 2015, he turns 70 and he already has four projects in mind which have to be completed by that time. “I have been out of work since 1975,” he says with a wicked grin referring to his freelance status. With book in hand and the Gauteng run of Adapt or Fly over, he has already turned to other horizons.