The Creation of Half-Broken People | The Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu Interview

This interview took place in May 2025 over Zoom. It has been edited for clarity.

Background:

Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, The Creation of Half-Broken People is the extraordinary tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum is filled with artifacts from the family’s exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon’s Mines fame.

Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of protestors outside the museum. Instigating the group is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. She knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, the nameless woman finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions.

With a knowing nod to classics of the Gothic genre, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu weaves the threads of a complex colonial history into the present through people “half-broken” by the stigmas of race and mental illness, all the while balancing the humanity of her characters against the cruelty of empire in a hypnotic, haunting account of love and magic.

Interview

Sarah Marie: Thank you, Siphiwe, for joining me today. You are the writer of this gorgeous book, The Creation of Half-Broken People. A novel here to disrupt the circuitry of Gothic novels. Honestly, I’m so excited to be talking to you, and I am so excited to have this book in my possession.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: It’s nice to meet you too.

SM: So, I have watched a couple of your interviews and appearances on YouTube. The book is fairly new, but it came out in other countries before it did in Canada, right?

SGN: Yes, so it was published last year (2024) in South Africa in September, and came out in Canada in April (2025). So it’s been out for a bit in Africa.

SM: In those interviews, you described the book as a Gothic novel. The book jacket says “African Gothic Novel”. Other than the setting for the story, are those discrete categories? Is an African Gothic novel different from a Gothic novel?

SGN: No, I think the setting is what makes it African, but I also think, you know, for me, the reason I wanted to write a Gothic novel was so that I could write back to some of the things that I thought were a little problematic in a genre that I actually quite enjoy, because of its feminist takes on certain things, and certain books. But also, you know, when you read something like Jane Austen, you can’t help but notice that there’s also something very problematic around race happening in the novel, and so maybe what makes African Gothic novels or Gothic novels written in other parts of the world is that they are questioning some of the very things that underpinned the Gothic genre to begin with, or the Victorian version of it that went around the world, which was trying to protect this very interesting sense of Europeanness and whiteness from this idea of another that could maybe be dangerous. If you’re the other that’s been written about, it’s worth, I think, going against the grain of that. So I was playing with that. So yes, both the African and the Gothic matter in the categorization of the novel. But, I think the novel both plays with, and then also tries to work against some of the very tropes of the Gothic novel.

Read an essay by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu on the “African Gothic Novel” on CrimeReads here

SM: Oh, that’s a really great answer! I am sorry if you’ve had to answer that question a lot. I’m not a writer and I didn’t take any writing classes or anything like that, so I am kind of fascinated by these qualifiers. I appreciate you going through that with me. 

SGN: No problem.

SM: So, The Nameless Woman, the protagonist of this story, is having visions of women from the past that they may have some connection to, and those women also had visions. All of those characters were known to have visions, and were being treated differently by society in their time. At one point, one of the characters is having visions, but it’s being treated more like a special ability, or something exceptional, rather than as a problem.

SGN: Yes.

SM: In the periods where it is being treated as a problem, would you say that it’s a medical thing, or like, a gendered social thing? 

SGN: I think the reason I intersected all those things was because I wanted it to be all those things at once. So the real primary question is, “what happens when a certain way of thinking about people comes up across another interpretation?” So, you know, the traditional way of thinking about people who may be visionaries, or see into the future, or see visions, may not necessarily be seen the same way that the colonial administration would see them. They may only be seen as being mad or or unwell because that’s what the colonial system thinks. And so, I really wanted to look at all of those characters and interpretations differently, and explore a new way of thinking about each of them so that it’s not the same for every character, because the novel does take us through different historical moments.

But also the idea of gender was important, because, you know this happened predominantly to women, because women were not necessarily in southern Africa, at least, or in certain parts of the world where the colonial enterprise took on this form. Women were not necessarily supposed to be in certain places like the city, because they were not the ones who were going to actually do any labour. Black women who were in the city were already seen as breaking the law, and sometimes seen as mad, because they were refusing to be under patriarchal supervision, which was the only thing that would make their lives make sense. And so there’s a way in which gender being read by the colonial administrators also plays into it. So yes, you’re right. There’s a character who is seen as being a visionary, because that’s what’s happening in her time. This coming together of the colonial and the people who are already there hasn’t happened yet, so she’s just being read in this one way, as a visionary. But once the encounter happens for future generations, that’s not how they’re being read. It’s more problematic, and they sort of suffer a lot more for their ability to see into the future.

SM: Is there a larger literature on the social history of southern Africa that was informing the way you were writing this story? I am asking because the book covers a really long period of time, and I imagine that case studies might be few and far between.  

SGN: Well, it was influenced a lot by particular historiographies that were being written in the late 90s and early 2000s by mostly feminist historians. And if you look at the back of the book, there are references that you could look through. There’s a bibliography, and there’s the work of Lynette Jackson that is mentioned. So she was a huge influence. I think last year that I mean, I think, in South Africa, for sure there’ve been a few, quite a few novels that have come out in recent years that are really about mental health and race, and the systems built around people. I know that there was one that came out last year called Patient 12A. There’s also a very wonderful book called Not Either an Experimental Doll, which is a very wonderful title, but it’s really a very interesting look at the psychology of a colonized person. These very real letters back and forth between a young woman and another, an older woman who is sort of like her benefactor. But I think the Benefit Trust is not necessarily understanding that the young woman in her care is actually going through a very difficult time mentally. And so you never know if it’s because of the system that she’s in, or if she was always like that, you know, there’s a lot of questions.

SM: Thank you for that. House of Anansi is the Canadian publisher for your book. How did you come to connect with them? 

SGN: I think it’s just a very simple story. I think my agent at the time just shopped it around, and Shivaun, who’s  one of the acquiring editors at House of Anansi, liked the idea of it, and liked the manuscript that she read. She decided to get it. It wasn’t very complicated. I mean, I had been with Catalyst Press, which is a North American press, before. But, I don’t think we ever talked about why this particular novel would be attractive to a Canadian press. I think, you know, Canada has a very similar history. Canada is also a settler nation. I think there was a lot that readers would be familiar with and understand and be able to work through from the Canadian context.

SM: I mean, I’m so grateful that it got picked up by a press that is near me. I don’t know how I would have found it because I tend to look mostly at books by Canadian authors. But, I do think about how these gems find their way around the world. I do wonder how these things happen. I kind of just fumbled my way into these unique literary spaces by being someone who reads a lot of books and posts about them on social media.

SGN: I see.

SM: But, you aren’t on social media as a writer. Which is how I seem to find all of my new books these days. I actually have no idea what it must be like to try to market a book all over the world with no social media at all.  What is the marketing experience like? I guess you can’t really differentiate it for me from someone who’s all over social media, because you don’t have that experience. But, are you doing a lot of in person promotions or events? Or, are you getting more online or written interviews? 

SGN: I think that the process for me has always been more traditional. So I just let the publisher handle the marketing and sales part of it, and they will.

SM: Oh, interesting!

SGN: I’m in North America sometimes. Like, in New York at a residency. Then I’m back in South Africa for a while and I would go on the book festival circuit. But I don’t do those things myself. I just let the publisher decide and if I am available I go. And I love going. You know, I always hope the conversations around the book will be very fruitful for me and for the people who are asking the questions. It’s interesting, because things come out in southern Africa a year before they come out in the North American market. By the time it comes out here, there’s already been quite a few reviews and interviews and all that just in southern Africa. Yeah. It’s always interesting to actually see the different kinds of reception and the things that people pick up on in different places and what they choose to talk about. It’s always a learning experience. It’s very rewarding.

SM: Have you had any standout reviews so far about this one? The book has been out for a while now, you said, in southern Africa. So you’ve probably got a lot of engagement.

SGN: There have been a few. You know, I’ve been busy writing the fifth novel, so I’m not necessarily on top of everything. When a book comes out, I just collect some of the reviews people send to me. But for now I’m focused on something else. I’m very grateful for all the engagement. But, I do read through the reviews very quickly.

SM: Right.

SGN: But I don’t actually engage with them the way I would like to until I have time. I’m gonna do that because I like having feedback. But, when I am actually writing another book, sometimes I’m worried that that will start affecting what I’m doing, so I try very hard to have enough space between so that doesn’t happen.

SM: My friend told me that when he looks at engagement with his book, that sometimes the readers are having conversations with only certain parts of the book that meant something to them. Or, that they’re having a conversation about it that may not have anything to do with what the writer intended for the reader to get out of it. Has there been any conversation around the book that surprised you? 

SGN: Not yet. It’s still pretty new, though. The Creation of Half-Broken People is my fourth novel. My first novel has been out for a long time though, so I have some experience with this situation. For example, sometimes if one of my books is assigned reading for school, I get engagement from 18 year olds that surprise me because I never really intended for my work to be read as a group for a class like that. It was very interesting. I don’t check Goodreads but I know that sometimes you can tell when the readers had to read it for a class, and that they are having a completely different experience than an 18 year old who just picked it up for fun. What I really enjoy is actual feedback. You know, when I’m at a book fair and someone comes up to me and says what they like about it. It’s always very illuminating. Yeah. And so, yes, I very much care what the critics think, and I do love that. But I think also like what you’re talking about, the personal journeys that people have with novels, I get more from the interactions in person than I would from reviews.

SM: Ah! Ok, I see. 

SGN: Also, because I’m not on social media, I really only get that in person.

SM: Do you get asked more questions about any specific character in this book? 

SGN: The character that people are gravitating towards is Sethekeli. I think people really like the character, and I’m glad, because I think for most of the novel, you don’t really know what she’s doing until the very end. I think people just like her personality. That’s been nice, because it shows that I had some measure of success with her, since leaving the reader unsure about what she was up to was intentional on my part. I think one of the best things that I read that someone said about my writing was that the characters seem so real that you forget that they’re fictional. That’s a very nice thing to hear as a writer. In southern Africa, there’s a lot of knowledge and engagement with the very history that I’m writing about. So it’s nice to see when you understand the overall picture of the story enough to engage with the novel and allow it to take them on a journey like that.  

SM: [laughing] Oh wow! Ok. Um, I am actually not going to ask about that character, but that is an excellent answer. If you’re okay with it, I’d like to ask about Daisy.

SGN: Daisy. Yes. Okay!

SM: Okay, so, hopefully without giving too much away: Daisy is an event coordinator at a site where the main character, The Nameless Woman, is planning to host a gala. Daisy is obviously helping her to make decisions about the gala and talking about what the space can offer. And, The Nameless Woman has never met someone like Daisy before. Can you tell me a little bit about Daisy? About how you came up with Daisy, and about what she would mean to someone like The Nameless Woman?

SGN: So, okay, so I have to say at this juncture that all my novels are interconnected. And so, if you read the novel that came before The Creation of Half-Broken People, at the very end of it, there’s a child that is born, and that child’s name is Daisy. And, that’s the Daisy that’s in this novel that you’re referring to in this book, but as an adult. But, Daisy is also named after her grandmother from a previous book, so it gets a bit complicated.

SM: Holy! There’s a whole universe that you’ve created!

SGN: Yeah, the whole genealogy and a universe. But I think what makes Daisy stand out to The Nameless Woman is that she’s very unique. She’s very much her own person, which is something that the main character, The Nameless Woman,
has never been able to be. I think that Daisy dresses a certain way, doesn’t subscribe to certain categories, you know, it’s very fascinating to The Nameless Woman, who herself, I think, is queer, without necessarily having defined herself as such. And this is important, because I don’t think Daisy is really into definitions either, and so I think she gravitates towards it. But I found, while I was writing it, that while that was important, while the sexuality part was important, what was also important was the idea of nourishment.

SM: Oh, that is very interesting!

SGN: You know, Daisy is someone who cooks for a living, and she’s a chef. And, the heroine of this novel is starved in many ways of affection, of self-knowledge. But here is another character who is able to give sustenance in a way until she can sustain herself. So I like that about them and their journey.

SM: When I thought about what it must have been like to meet Daisy as The Nameless Woman, the word shapeshifter came to mind. This person can have all of these identities and still feel okay. Given the extremely restrictive circumstances The Nameless Woman is used to, you know, her sense of self isn’t really grounded in anything. She isn’t in control of any of the things that are changing around her. I think that if you have never had a say in who you are to anyone, the idea of someone being whoever they want must be very appealing. I was really excited to see that relationship go well. I think I would have been really upset if it went badly. But yeah, shapeshifter. You know, she can wear a lot of hats. She can move into these roles as a nurturer, or a business person, or have a romance and still feel like her feet are underneath her. That must have been a lot to take in for someone like The Nameless Woman.

SGN: I like that. I think I’m gonna maybe use that at some point. It is a very illuminating way of thinking about her character.

SM: I think, to somebody who doesn’t have the architecture to understand that they are different, and that different isn’t wrong or bad, for them to see somebody who is just moving through the world in these ways that aren’t prescribed must be such a huge deal, because, of course, we are talking about a person who is still being governed in every respect.

SGN: That’s true. Thank you. I really do like that.

SM: Anyway, yes, thank you for sharing that bit about her being part of this genealogy with me. I know Daisy comes later in the book, but she is one of my favourites. There are some characters that pop in and out, but they are very important to help set the tone for the reader to understand what’s happening with the characters who are having visions. If it’s ok with you, could we go right to Dr. Dobson?

SGN: Yes, sure.

SM: Dr. Dobson is a character who, sometime between the 40s and 60s, is working in a hospital. And there’s a scene where Dr. Dobson is talking about lobotomizing someone in the context of his relationship to their care, and he says “I’m not a cruel man, I’m actually very helpful.” As a reader, you know, I don’t know if he is trying to convince me or himself. It had this surprising effect on how I was going to read the rest of the book. He sees himself as doing what’s best, and he just can’t imagine a situation where he would not have done these things, like lobotomize someone, or take their child away the moment they were born. 

SGN: I spent a lot of time in the archives, and when you’re reading the archives as a non-white person who wasn’t living through that time, that’s exactly what it feels like. They are absolutely sure they are doing the right thing, that’s why they are so comfortable writing it down. I think you get that in different parts of the novels, even, you know, at the very end, when you have the actual letters from like the location superintendents which were actually archival letters. And there is this tone, you know? They say things like: African people need housing, but they don’t really need big houses, and they don’t really need a lot of land. I was reading this very historical text and it reminded me of that scene in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, where the sister is like, “oh, yeah, I know we’ll give them money, but, you know, they don’t really need that much.” You know, it’s the same thing in these real texts. I think when you’ve convinced yourself you’re doing the right thing, you can talk around all of these awful things you’ve done to be able to do this thing. I actually think in Dr. Dobson’s case, you know, he knows he has to explain some things. He’s been doing some things that are not appropriate. He’s been lying about the actual race of this woman for the purpose of manipulating a donor. 

SM: Yes.

SGN: So yes, in some ways, he’s trying to convince himself that if he gets the money and everything keeps operating, then that’s fine. I don’t think the ends that are important to him are the same that are important to me as a writer, right. He just wants money for this place that he runs to run the way it does, which is not necessarily run in a humane way. But if, you know, if he makes friends with this guy and this guy gives him money, then this is good, and it doesn’t really matter what happens to this woman’s body. It’s just a woman’s body, after all, and it really doesn’t matter what happens to her mind because she’s already not well.

SM: This callousness, I don’t even know what to call it. 

SGN: Calculating. Definitely. 

SM: Oh, yes, for sure! I guess like, the thing that makes his awful medical practices ok in his mind is that he is maintaining the status quo, and that is worth doing to him. It’s just such a short part of the text, but it did so much. His idea of himself. Bad, but actually helpful. No one else would care about these women anyway. But, he isn’t having a dialogue. Like, he’s only asking and answering himself, so he doesn’t ever have to hear that he’s awful. 

SGN: It was important that all those things were there early on, because I think that is the way most people who had power thought, right. They had to convince themselves on a very fundamental level that what they were doing, regardless of what it looked like, felt like, sounded like, was good. They must have hurt a lot of people, you know, heard a lot of screaming. They were still able to say to themselves, “yes, this is right.” I think we see a lot of that. Even today, people don’t even want you to say that those moments in history were bad, right. They just want you to say “That’s history!” Or, “yes, it was violent and cruel and bad, but still history. In the past.” You know, no one is saying that those events weren’t in the past, but they were bad, and we have to talk about them. I think that that contention is always going to be there because the people who wrote, I mean, you know, the British wrote down everything, and they wouldn’t have written down everything if they didn’t think what they were doing was fine. I am sure on some level, they knew they were taking people’s land, and just being cruel, but they had to have convinced themselves that this was a good thing.

SM: Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. You know, I think it’s fascinating that you were able to write all of these gendered characters being put through all of these awful things, who are not men in positions of power, and write those experiences without it necessarily having anything to do with the character’s relationships. You know, she wasn’t operated on without consent as someone’s sister. She was operated on without consent as a person. 

SGN: So I think it is important because I suspect that, for women around the world, the way they receive the histories of the women that came before them is that those women were wives and mothers, and part of their family history, and that part of the family history was that they birthed the next generation. We don’t have access to the histories of those women beyond their roles as mothers and wives. We don’t know what they liked, because none of it is necessary to know who they are in the story of the family. None of it is necessary to our understanding of ourselves as a people going forward. We lost a lot of those histories. And, you know, exceptional women do make it into the archives, but they have to be ridiculously exceptional, or they have to be breaking all kinds of laws and going against so many rules in order to be written down. This is sad, right. Because I think women have been complicit in this, too. I think people who are gendered or see themselves as women, or consume this history have been complicit, because I think we bought into the idea of good women being wives and mothers, and nothing else. A woman like Sethekeli, who was not going to get married, it’s very rare for that woman to exist in our collective memory. Bell hooks had this wonderful saying that patriarchy is something that both men and women do. Sometimes we talk about it like it’s a system that only men participate in. But it’s a system that everyone participates in. It’s just a very unequal system where everyone but men tend to lose. So, for me, it was important to excavate some of those other histories that women could have different lives that have nothing to do with their being mothers and wives. Or, even if they do have children, and even if they do get married, their story is still about who they are, and that is a thing that is worth remembering, and telling, and passing down. I am interested in excavating these misremembered people. You know the misremembered, the misbegotten, and the forgotten, because those are the ones that archives and oral histories just don’t remember, or those are the aspects of their lives that don’t get remembered, the ones that are a little transgressive. No one wants to remember that. And, so, it was important to me to tell those stories.

SM: Siphiwe, you’ve been exceptionally generous with me today. We had a fumble at the beginning with some technical issues, but I really appreciate you making time for me.

SGN: Thank you for having me.

Sarah Marie

Sarah Marie is a perfectly unqualified, no-talent, lit/poetry enthusiast.A~literal nobody~ on social media, you may recognize her from commenting on your posts as if you sent them to her personally. She isvery impressedby your dedication to your work and to each other, and she believes in you.  

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