Margie Orford

Margie Orford (born 30 September 1964) is a South African journalist, film director and author of crime fiction, children's fiction, non-fiction and school text books.

Margie Orford at the British Library in 2022

Quotes

• If I don’t write down what I’ve witnessed, who will? We can easily say we can’t look at this stuff, we can’t record it because it’s too shocking, but then what happens is there’s this silence, there’s this lacuna around it and it disappears.
  • Her reply when asked if she saw her own inner dialogue echoed in Cora’s art

• It’s a thing that requires complexity, people’s sexualities are very complex. There can be great desire in submission. It’s the image making and then the reduction of a full human response to this two-dimensional thing.
  • The idea of coerced consent when there is a power imbalance

• In fiction you have the mind, the interiority of the person, and the action happening at the same time. But I agree with you, they’re such different forms.
  • What happens when you have a crime committed against a person that never ever comes to an end?’—Margie Orford talks to Jennifer Malec about her new novel The Eye of the Beholder (8 September 2022)

• There was such a sense of liberation and opening that sort of space that had been closed off so completely under Apartheid – no light, no oxygen – it really opened and expanded and into that came so much publishing and writing.
  • Her description of how, later the new South African constitution in 1994 constitutionaly protects the right to free expression

• I think we keep the secrets from ourselves. Because we have experienced a moment when you look into a person’s eyes and you see that how they are looking at you is dehumanising. In that moment, all your humanity is lost. And it’s unbearable. We keep that secret from our daughters, because we don’t want them to be seen in that way.
  • Answer to how we write our stories on to our daughters (23 November 2022)

• The heart is blind. You can’t love unless you have the heart of a child. It’s beautiful, but it’s the thing that makes you vulnerable. And when this connects with the secrets you hold, it can create a distortion in the psyche.
  • Margie Orford focuses our gaze on secrets, obsession and intergenerational trauma — and produces an exquisite work of art

• With language and art, we can restore something that has been erased. It’s a way of saying the unsayable, of restoring humanity.
  • Elaboration on what makes her book titled, Eye of the Beholder special

• Our culture works with ways of looking. If you think of the colonial gaze — the scopic power is masculine. You see it. You take it. It’s yours. We learn to reflect this gaze back on to ourselves as women when we look at ourselves in that objectifying way.
  • How our culture makes us look at ourselves