Beverley Naidoo and G. P. Taylor are two authors who do not shy away from tackling meaty issues in their fiction – race, religion and politics are just some of the subjects they have covered. Here they explore their own personal approach to tackling the big themes.

Recently, I was asked to discuss The Death of ‘Issues’ Fiction at the first national conference in the UK on Young Adult Fiction. Fantasy is ‘in’ and real life is ‘out’! Young readers are bored with ‘issues’ and can’t get enough fantasy! That’s what we are being told by book selectors for the big chain stores and publishers’ marketing managers.

Bali Rai, Keith Gray and Kevin Brooks (my co-panelists) and I decided that we were not yet ready to be nailed into our literary coffins. Without prior consultation (honestly, we are far too individualistic!), each of us rejected the notion that we write novels within a category called ‘issues fiction’. Yes, each of us creates characters in ‘real life’ situations. Yes, the challenges our characters face are sometimes discussed in terms of ‘issues’, even layers of them. But our characters and their stories don’t survive because of their ‘issues’ but because their human dilemmas resonate in the imaginations of readers.

Good fantasy writing operates on the same principle. Myths, legends, fairy and folk tales survive from the past because they reflect timeless aspects of our human condition as characters laugh, play, suffer, cry. These stories survive by satisfying our deepest need to imagine the ordinary and extraordinary. Fantasy can operate on different levels. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gives us fantastic adventure along with political satire. But fantasy can also be escapist, a turning away from reality and manipulative. The rise of ‘fantasy fiction’ as a celebrity genre marketed primarily amongst young British and American readers raises a number of questions. For example, is it significant in the wake of September 11 2001 and Western invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq? Is it significant at the beginning of what has already been called the ‘Century of the Refugee’ when wealthy Western nations – beneficiaries of globalisation – batten down their doors to ‘outsiders’ seeking to escape conflict and pain within their own fracturing societies? Is it significant that it has happened when international conventions and resolutions established so painstakingly through the United Nations are dismissed under President Bush’s 'new world order’? Or at a time when values of the Enlightenment are being squeezed by religious extremism? In this context how innocent are fantasy battles of 'good' versus 'evil' and ‘us’ versus ‘the other’? These are not rhetorical questions. They deserve to be taken seriously.

The title story in my collection Out of Bounds opens with the image of the boy Rohan’s father topping up the fence at the back of their house with concrete bricks and curling barbed wire. This is South Africa in the year 2000. Rohan’s family lives in a comfortable residential area on top of a hill, no longer segregated by apartheid laws. Millennium floods have washed away people’s homes and increasing numbers of poverty-stricken squatters seek refuge on the hillside, constructing their shelters out of whatever they can find. Amongst the house owners on the hill top, initial acts of charity are soon replaced by fear and higher fences. I place Rohan in a situation where he has a difficult choice, both practical and moral.

The fiction writer’s task is not to find solutions to ‘issues’ but to tell their story well. The reader must be captured; must engage in the lives of the characters; even put on different lenses and look at the world afresh. There has been a fashionable view in the West that if you have strong political feelings, you will inevitably write fiction badly because ‘message’ will dominate your writing. I take a less fashionable view. ‘Message writing’ makes bad fiction but, if you take your craft seriously, politics with a small ‘p’ does not stop a writer creating good fiction. Coming from Southern Africa, I find the proposition absurd that the writer should deliberately seek ‘non-political’ material. Can one imagine the characters of Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Lilia Momplé, Tsitsi Dangarembga and a host of writers across the continent not breathing any of the ‘political’ air in their societies?

As a writer of fiction with young people as my major readers, I feel a certain responsibility to find signs of life and hope, even in the most desperate situations … and, hopefully, to lead readers into questions. People who are busy asking questions are, I believe, a lot less dangerous than those who insist they know all the answers. As a white child in South Africa, I didn’t ask questions. In Journey to Jo’burg, my first novel, I imagined myself into the experience of black South African children denied the right to live with their mother by apartheid. Like most white South African children, I had two mothers: my own biological mother and somebody else’s mother, a black mother. I needed to turn my own racialised childhood experience inside out to enter my characters’ lives and face many unasked questions. The banning of that little book and so many others by the apartheid regime was a futile act of a failing power, refusing to look in the mirror and interrogate itself.

Each of my subsequent novels have emerged from questions I want to explore. I am constantly led into new territories of research, seeking to understand experiences beyond my own and to make connections. The imaginative nature of fiction encourages writers to dig deep into themselves. The process involves a search for meaning and sometimes it is a comment from a reader that brings something to the surface much later. When I wrote The Other Side of Truth about Sade and Femi, who overnight become refugees in London, I was not aware that the way Sade’s mind constantly reverts to Lagos was a reflection of my first years in England. I had been 10 years older than Sade when I left South Africa and although I was physically in England, my head was frequently ‘back home’ wondering what was happening to my brother and friends in prison. I am glad I wasn’t thinking directly about that. Sade’s ‘mind-flipping-back’ is more deeply rooted in the novel because it emerged subconsciously, out of my imaginative engagement with her, rather than as a conscious strategy.

We have a responsibility to be true to our characters. In my play The Playground (based on a short story in Out of Bounds), set in South Africa, Rosa is sent by her mother to be the first black child in an all-white school where many parents remain hostile to Nelson Mandela’s new integration laws. Rosa is terrified. The situation also tests Hennie, the white boy whom Rosa’s mother has looked after since he was a baby. Rosa and Hennie’s fears are different and each requires courage to face them. Writers too require courage. Take Elizabeth Laird and her young adult novel A Little Piece of Ground that conveys the brutalising nature of war for everyone – and how hard it is to hold on to decency and humanity in war. Why the attempts to censor this novel (some successful)? Because the author is true to her young Palestinian character Karim living in Ramallah under Israeli occupation. We see the disturbing world through his eyes. The tragedy is that fear prevents those who most need to step into that other world from doing so, even imaginatively. Fear becomes a wall in the mind.

In times like these, literature matters more than ever, especially literature that invites us to cross boundaries. We need literature, of whatever genre, that takes us into ‘the other’ instead of more demonising and dehumanising. Rather than more violence and its corrosive effects on us all, let us use our imaginations more. We need to enter each other’s worlds. The act of writing is itself an act of hope – the hope that others will make the effort of engaging with our words, the hope that we can at least still talk with each other.

Beverley Naidoo won the Carnegie Medal with The Other Side of Truth (Puffin 2000). Her latest novel is a sequel to Web of Lies (Puffin 2004). She is on the web at www.beverleynaidoo.com