Interview of Nadia Davids by Freya Bennett
If you’re into moody, gothic stories, slow-burning tension, with a deeply satisfying ending, Cape Fever by Nadia Davids is going to grab you and not let go. Set in the 1920s, it follows Soraya, a young maid, and the mysterious Mrs. Hattingh, whose decaying home holds secrets, spirits, and simmering power plays. Nadia is a masterful storyteller, blending lyrical, poetic writing with a page-turning pace that makes the gothic tension irresistible. A book that’s short and sweet yet masterfully complete, leaving you with a full, unforgettable story.
I caught up with Nadia to talk about the women at the heart of the story, the ghosts that haunt them, and how she balances poetry with page-turning momentum.
Hi Nadia, how are you and where are you talking to us from today?
Hi Freya. I’m in Los Angeles (though a part of me is forever in Cape Town☺)
Huge congratulations on Cape Fever, I absolutely devoured it! What inspired the story behind Soraya and Mrs. Hattingh?
Thank you so much – I’m really so delighted to hear that you enjoyed it! Cape Fever had something of a mystical beginning: I woke up one morning, still in a dream-state and the outline of the story was there- two women, a house, one an employer, the other a servant, the employer offers to write letters on the younger woman’s behalf, believing she can’t read… I was convinced that because the outline was so wonderfully clear that I’d be able to write it quite quickly. I was mistaken. It took years to understand when the story was set, where it was set, who these two women were, and how love, grief and loss shaped them both in different ways. Once I understood the historical currents, the political context, and how those things determined the dynamic between Soraya and Alice Hattingh, the outline began to fill.
Cape Fever is beautifully written but also incredibly propulsive. How conscious were you of balancing poetic language with momentum while you were writing?
You’re very generous- thank you. I wanted to work with the urgency of the ‘ticking clock’ one feels with a four-act play, but (hopefully) with a brooding, languid interiority for the characters that only a novel can grant. I kept returning to an image of a duck on water: we see them gliding along but beneath the surface they’re paddling furiously.
The house in the novel feels alive — almost like another character. What drew you to the gothic tradition, and how did you approach giving the setting such psychological weight?
I’d grown up reading 18th and 19th century Gothic fiction and I loved the deep political and social commentary embedded in those works and how the writers- so many of them women- placed their protagonists in houses where the uncanny and the inexplicable occurred. I’d also grown up in Cape Town’s Muslim community where the adults around me (mostly the women) spoke frequently about ghosts and jinn – there was a sense, always, that every space was shared as much by what was seen as was unseen. That negotiation between the past and the present, between what is known and unknown, between what is recognised and what is suppressed, is what sets the scene.
The ritual of letter-writing between Soraya and Mrs Hattingh is both intimate and unsettling. When did you realise that this device was key to the novel, and what did it allow you to explore about power and control?
It allowed me to explore so many ideas around narrative voice, agency, the telling of one’s own and others lives, how we narrate ourselves through stories, how writing can be used to free and imprison us. In a sense, the novel is a very long letter, written by Soraya to the reader and while she may have deceived her employer about not being able to read, she does not deceive the reader: she tells us in the first sentence that she’s lied, why she’s lied and then how that lie leads to the letter-writing.
Soraya’s voice is restrained for much of the book, yet the story ultimately feels empowering. How did you think about silence, containment, and voice when shaping her character?
I thought of Soraya as having three distinct voices: there’s the voice of her internal world, the one she uses with her family, and the one she uses with Mrs Hattingh. Her internal one is rich and contradictory, powered by a feverish imagination, in which she sees, knows and understands all sorts of things she doesn’t convey to anyone, (and when she does, it’s in the form of her stories.) Her voice with her family is frank and undisguised, it’s also the language of the practical, the familiar, the quotidian – of daily life and love. With Mrs Hattingh, she hides almost all of herself. Her employer knows almost nothing about her, except what she chooses to reveal- she plays the part of the Mrs Hattingh’s expectations of servant as much as it’s the role she’s been forced into. Somehow, Soraya carves out autonomy for herself under impossible circumstances.
There’s a slow, simmering anger running beneath the surface of the novel. Were there particular historical or personal questions you were wrestling with as you wrote?
I’m always pre-occupied by questions of power in my work – personal, structural or political – and I think if you take those questions seriously, it’s impossible not to feel a constant simmering rage, whether you’re looking at history, or at the present, or at the way in which the past shapes the present. Cape Fever is a work of fiction, but I did think a great deal about my Mama, my paternal grandmother, who was a Cape Muslim woman, about her mother, and her mother before her, about the women from that part of my lineage. I wondered about their lives, how they negotiated the racism, classism and religious prejudice they’d have encountered intensely and constantly in colonial and Apartheid-era Cape Town.
The ending is so satisfying without being ‘neat’. What did you want readers to feel in those final pages, and how hard was it to land on that final note?
I hope readers feel moved in some way. Without revealing too much, I wanted to give Soraya some reprieve, for Alice Hattingh to face a reckoning, and for readers to know that neither was state is permanent but that both may be transformative. I also wanted to convey that Soraya is a careful thinker, a freedom-dreamer, who understands that that the struggle that lies ahead is a long one.
