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Opening New Horizons

Interview with Tara June Winch

The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative is an international philanthropic program created to assist rising artists to achieve their full potential. It seeks out these artists from around the world and brings them together with masters in various fields, for a year of creative collaboration in a one-to-one mentoring relationship. The 2008/2009 protégée in literature, Tara June Winch, talks about her experience of being mentored.

photo Tara June Winch and her mentor Nigerian writer and Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka   [©Rolex/Bart Michiels]

What was your first impression of your mentor, Wole Soyinka?

He was first mentioned in the letter from Rolex inviting me to apply. I hadn't heard of Wole Soyinka before then because in Australia--I think because we are so cornered into the Pacific--there is not a plethora of African writing available to us, which is really sad and completely different from America and Europe in their engagement with African writers. It's strange that I never noticed this in the past.

Then I started to read Wole's works and one in particular, a book of essays, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. The first chapter was on repression and reconciliation, and I was at a writing conference for my work when I got the book. Reading that chapter, I saw the complete correlation between the African problem and the [Australian] Aboriginal problem--exactly the same. It was completely transparent and I was crying.

Discovering Wole was like discovering a guidance you never knew existed, but it was the most important guidance that you could have. Everything that I have read of Wole's, it's as if I have been looking for that in writing--in terms of his poetry, essays and fiction and plays and in terms of everything I have wanted to read. It's all contained in his work. Then I couldn't get enough. I had stacks and stacks of Soyinka all over my kitchen table. And my first impression of meeting Wole, I remember I was just smiling when he came to the airport in Lagos to meet me and the other three finalists [before he chose his protégée]. I said to myself: "Stop smiling so much."

Have you ever had a mentor before?

No. A few people in Australia, a few older Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Australia who looked after me and always helped me out, imbued a sense of self-worth, of believing that I myself could create and make something tangible, creative and positive, but I've not had a mentor before, this is a relationship beyond empowering someone, it's equipping them for living, professionally and spiritually.

Would you regard editors as mentors?

No, it's a different relationship. As Wole said, mentoring is not just working on the writing, it's working around the writing, the business of writing. Whereas I think editors give practical help working on the writing. Mentoring is kind of holistic.

What do you hope to get out of this?

I've already got a lot out of it. My worldview has opened. I suppose the things that I am reading have opened things up, Wole's work and then more African writers; and I have his suggestions on Kafka, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Greek literature that I hadn't read at all before. Now I can see the parallels with Greek tragedies and Shakespeare's tragicomedies and Aboriginal stories about my country. It's really exciting to discover.

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