Joanne Fedler

Joanne Fedler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand and at Yale University before returning to South Africa, where she lectured in law and became legal advisor at People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA), a women’s rights organisation that provides both frontline and advocacy services. Fedler’s debut novel, The Dreamcloth, was nominated for South Africa’s Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2006, while Secret Mothers’ Business was on the 2008 Der Spiegel bestseller list. Now a full-time author and writing mentor, Fedler works with aspiring female authors to help them find their voices through the power of writing.

Joanne Fedler was interviewed about her life, career and hope for the future for 200 WOMEN, a book and exhibition project founded on the principle of gender equality comprising original interviews and accompanying photographic portraits. This landmark project is the realisation of an epic global journey to find two hundred women with diverse backgrounds, and to ask them what really matters to them.

Q. What really matters to you?
I grew up with an older sister who is deaf, so I’ve always understood that some people don’t have a voice and that I had to use mine to speak up for others. Life’s blessings are not evenly dealt: the quirk of birth is that some of us get things and others don’t. I grew up in South Africa, where it was impossible not to appreciate that I had privileges – for no reason I deserved – and that others didn’t. This unfairness and injustice corrupts all beauty – how can we enjoy wealth, shelter, education when others around us can’t?
I thought the way to use my voice would be to change the laws. So, I studied law, and after I got my master’s degree, I went back to South Africa and became the legal advisor to POWA. My experience working one-on-one with abused women profoundly affected and changed me. I began to understand the limits of the law. I became disillusioned about what I could do.
I went into this work as an idealist. But then, one day, I was at a meeting of women’s advocacy groups. An old African woman stood up and said, ‘Why do you spend all this time talking about how terrible rape is? I was raped, my daughter was raped, my granddaughters have been raped and their children will be raped. There are worse things than being raped. We need medical care, housing and jobs. Those are the things that are important to us.’ I’d been working as a women’s rights advocate to end violence against women for six years. This matriarch had seen every single generation of her family brutalised, assaulted and violated. And as I listened to her say, ‘That’s just how it is,’ I realised I couldn’t speak on behalf of anybody, because I didn’t know their reality. I had no right to stand before these women and tell them we needed a more effectual system to deal with rapists. At the same time, I couldn’t bear that this was what it had come to – acceptance that this is just how it is. That was not a world I wanted any part of.
In that moment, I was humbled and shattered. I lost my will to fight that fight. Looking back, I can see that anger and bitterness is a necessary stage of human consciousness. When you’re becoming politicised, you have to be completely broken down in order to come back with a mature understanding of how to truly build community, how to be an advocate and how to heal.
Anne Herbert said, ‘Large change doesn’t come from clever, quick fixes from smart, tense people, but from long conversations and silences among people who know different things and need to learn different things.’ For me, change is about those conversations, so to exclude people based on identity or privilege is actually to cut off a source of access to a solution.
Since then, I’ve been on a twenty-five-year journey of spiritual awakening that’s taken me into meditation, Buddhism and therapy, and what amazes me is that storytelling is at the core of all healing and survival. When we can own our stories as storytellers rather than victims and make meaning from our experiences, we have a chance to transform. And when we can find our voices and share our stories, we light the way for other people to do the same.
Now, I don’t want to fight anymore. I want to hold. I want to hold peoples’ stories and allow them to reclaim their power through the narratives of survival, and I want to honour their pain. I now work to help people find that moment of surrender and change through creative expression.
After I left political work, I began to write. I just needed to focus on myself for a while. Now that I’ve had ten books published, I found that my own achievements make me happy about 40 per cent of the time; when our lives are just about ourselves, we get caught up in ego. Even at the height of my publishing success, I’d find myself anxious, jealous of other authors or feeling slighted by being overlooked for speaking opportunities – ridiculous, I know. Everything changed, though, when I realised that I’m not here for me, but to support other women in finishing and bringing their books into the world. Now, I mentor and help other women to write their stories. And that makes me happy 100 per cent of the time.
My brand as a writing mentor is WINGS: words inspire, nourish and grow the spirit. What matters to me now is to leave a trail of gifts for others, to share everything I’ve learned and to make opportunities available to people: to open doors. I aim to lift others up, either through my writing or through doors that I can open for them, or by connecting women, in particular, with who they are in this life and by helping them find value in that. We’re surrounded by this culture of narcissism, but I believe in the idea that I don’t have freedom until you have freedom – so I focus my life on others, on ‘we’ instead of ‘me.’

Q. What brings you happiness?
I’m not a happiness chaser; I’m not obsessed with the idea of being ‘happy.’ I try to live a meaningful life and, when I connect with my own emotions and with others, that feels meaningful. When I’m connected, I feel safe and deeply alive. Maybe that’s what people call ‘happiness.’

Q. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
My idea of misery is suffering without a spiritual framework. In my darkest moments, I’ve only been able to pull myself through with a belief in something that is bigger than me. To know that, though I feel alone, I am not alone.

Q. What would you change if you could?
I’d start everything from the beginning again. Our difficulty is that the table has already been set. We’re limited by what exists. Given that, I’d revolutionise the way we value things in our world. I’d switch everything we currently chase with kindness, service, generosity and humility. I’d swap consumerism with the stories of the meek, soft-spoken, humble warriors of this world. Less noise, more listening to each other.

Q. Which single word do you most identify with?
Service.