The Fatuous State of Severity

By Phumlani Pikoli

The Fatuous State of Severity is a fresh collection of short stories and illustrations that explores themes surrounding the experiences of a generation of young, urban South Africans coping with the tensions of social media, language insecurities and relationships of various kinds.

Intense and provocative, this new edition of the book, which was first self-published in 2016, features six additional stories as well as an introductory essay on Phumlani Pikoli’s publishing journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Feb 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770106079

Book preview

The Fatuous State of Severity

The Fatuous State of Severity

MACMILLAN

Copyright

First self-published in 2016

This edition published in 2018

by Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19

Northlands

Johannesburg

2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 978-1-77010-606-2

e-ISBN 978-1-77010-607-9

© in the text Phumlani Pikoli 2016, 2018

© in the illustrations as individually credited 2016, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Editing by Sean Fraser

Proofreading by Wesley Thompson and Katlego Tapala

Design and typesetting by Fire and Lion

Cover design by publicide

Title page tombstone illustration by Alex Papkok

It’s only worth it if you get a story out of it.

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Introduction: The Lack of Severity in a Fatuous State

My Beautiful Little Boy

#Blogging4Likes

Not For You

Divine

Audience

Seasons Change

Birth Pains

Worthless

A Gentle Mess

Alexander

Biko

Tumblr

I Know Where I’m Going

Deactivate

Revenge

Time

To Shy Away in Silence

Conversation

This House

Let’s Pretend Everything is Not Okay

Cargo

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Lack of Severity in a Fatuous State

When this adventure began it seemed such a realistic goal that I never once questioned its success or failure. I just knew that this was something I was prepared to do. A few coincidences helped speed along the process and I had secured a team ready and prepared to take on the tasks I had asked of them. The Fatuous State of Severity – a mouthful for most – was a state of mind I had learned to occupy while recuperating from a depressive episode at a psychiatric clinic. It was the great liberation that helped me launch myself onto the authorship radar. The old guards would speak of vanity publishing, but it was exactly that vanity that helped me publish my first book.

I kept speaking to peers about the need to be validated as an author.

‘You don’t need people to give you permission to write,’ my friend Masande softly encouraged me. It took a while for me to take in his words, and accept them. A few months later I’d be excited by the prospect of never getting the chance to experience publishing my first book a second time. The second print run would always be overshadowed by the feeling of seeing that first batch of the books, once a dream, manifest into reality.

Once out the clinic, I took off running. I’d promised myself, my family and those close to me that I’d take things slowly, one at a time. That I’d count each step I took. Growing up playing sport, that competitive psyche never left me and fuelled my acceleration from a jog to a full-on sprint. The first thing I did was bank on my social capital and network to get the book some kind of buzz. People had followed my writing career with a mild enthusiasm and adding fiction to the repertoire would have been a great way to stay in vogue. (You know something is dated when phrases such as ‘in vogue’ are replaced with simple words like ‘trending’.) Right off the cuff, I secured an extract from ‘Alexander’ to be published on Siphiwe Mpye’s The Noted Man. From there I was interviewed on SAfm and on Good Hope FM by Makabongwe Tanga.

It took me about three weeks to put the book together; pulling an all-nighter, Dan ‘The God’ Buchanan did the layout and placed the stories in order; and it took another month for the books to come fresh off the press. It was like a whirlwind, a dream, and no sooner had the book started gaining its legs when I quit my job – with no regrets. December was looking great and a lot of the people buying the book were posting about it online. It became a sort of niche commodity to own a copy in print, although I had made the PDF freely available online. Mails poured in requesting PDF copies regardless. I’d opted to print only 100 copies, and toyed with readers by asking them to value the book themselves. The notion freaked people out, and yet it still worked. It was funny how people in the artistic community were afraid to try to value the art of others. Surely we’re meant to be all about mutual support, honesty and fair trade. Although, to be fair, very few people had read any of my fiction, considering that only one story was avail­able online. Initially published in 2015 by Jalada in A Pan-African Writers’ Collective, ‘To Shy Away in Silence’ was the only story available for consumption prior to the book debut. By the end of 2016 the books had sold out, but this was not the end …

As some of the books made their way to Cape Town, The Fatuous State of Severity became my summer. In January the Expresso Morning Show ran a clip of my brother and me, who had both self-published our own books, and the Mail & Guardian called the book ‘an audacious debut’ and ran three extracts. Thandiwe Ntshinga at The South African described my writing style as, ‘Negatively inclined, dark and pessimistic.’ It was January and the book was still gaining traction.

It was summer and the Cape Town holiday tour hadn’t ended, and as luck would have it a friend and honest collaborator Tseliso Monaheng happened to be by the seaside at the same time. He had equipment, I had a vision; he wanted to play around and so did I. So we filmed different people, friends and collaborators reading different stories from the book and giving their honest responses to them. I went on camera to further elaborate on the project and where it came from. SAfm’s Nancy Richards then invited me onto her book show, where I think I had my favourite interview on the topic of literature. Once shooting wrapped, which only took two days, a childhood friend in the form of Kelsie Milward announced that she lived right across the road from where I lived with my parents in Cape Town, and that I could edit my film at her place. I cut the film, she came up with the guitar score for it in 20 minutes and suddenly the project had taken on a new form. We screened it at a casual social event, played 30 seconds and then I uploaded it to YouTube. I was just happy that things were moving and that I was getting the chance to enjoy the Cape Town summer energy.

‘I swear,’ I remember saying to Tseliso at one point, ‘you could spend a whole day filming me right now and it would not be wasted.’ He gave me his infamous side smile, which often made me question whether I’d said something to impress him or something idiotic. It mostly indicated the latter.

Radio 702’s Phemelo Ngcobo and Azania Mosaka both interviewed me on the book. Azania asked what my father’s thoughts were on the subject matter, considering that quite a bit of it is bizarre in different ways. Weirdly, at this time my mother kind of became my manager. She’d listen to each interview and then break down how I might be able to answer follow-up questions on different subjects. Or ways I might be able to direct my interviewers to certain topics. The Mail & Guardian listed me as one of its top 17 people to look out for in 2017 and a 5FM producer got in touch to ask whether I’d be willing to speak to DJ Fresh as his show’s Monday Morning Motivator.

This stunned me on all sorts of levels:

One: WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED?

Two: HOW?

Three: I had honestly thought that the book would perhaps make a little splash, be something of a niche fad for a while that would give me the same sort of micro-notoriety the internet does when you post a great status or nail-hitting tweet. It was an exhilarating feeling, a wild moment and hot damn did I not jump at the chance. I even fan-boyed DJ Fresh for a bit before he dropped the line on me. That interview would score me another of my favourite interviews. Next I spent 45 minutes chatting to Koketso Sachane on CapeTalk about the book, what was going on in my head and the lack of infrastructure, support networks and public knowledge of mental health. He went on to read one of my stories on air, which I’m sure must have alarmed some of the listeners.

I’d go on to do more interviews with City Press, Power FM and Between 10and5, and give the go-ahead on a second print run, still hyped up on all the momentum the book seemed to be getting. In interviews I came off as anti-publishers and a bit of a rabble-rouser. But, in all fairness, how else was I going to get their atten­tion? The running around that’s required when you’re publishing, printing, selling, setting up interviews, and doing your own market­ing had actually taken up so much energy that I had forgotten what I had told myself when I was discharged from the clinic: that I’d take it slow, one step at a time. By this point The Fatuous State of Severity had gone from being a liberator to a lifestyle and had finally become its own character through me. I had forgotten my fragility and managed to burn myself out again.

With the reviews came the story that made the book: that most of the stories were written while I’d been undergoing psychiatric treatment for clinical depression. A few jumped to label the pro­cess as a catharsis, a treatment for my illness. I think this is a mistake that we often tend to make as a society that has an extremely limited understanding of mental illness and likes to glamorise it for artists. Although Hollywood and pop culture would have had me grow up thinking