Since I’ve been away from this blog, I’ve read Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and I think that’s it. Notice that all but one of these books are by Africans, and I must say I’m a little Africa’d out!
I’m now reading East of Eden by one of my heroes, John Steinbeck. For my reading group, I’ll be reading something else, but I don’t know what yet. I think it’ll be something by Jesse Fauset.
Hm. Mother to Mother. What to say about Mother to Mother? I’ll start by stating it’s based on true events. Amy Biehl, a white woman — a kid really — was in South Africa on a Fulbright working on the first democratically held elections in 1993. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was killed in the small, black village of Guguletu, Capetown. That’s the true part and what begins the book and the basis for the book.
The novel is somewhat epistolary, but it is entirely narrated by the mother of one of the
murderers. It is addressed to the mother of Amy Biehl. Still with me?
Okay, moving on to the author — and this is my justification for this review — Sindiwe Magona. Magona lived not far from the mother who is telling this story. Besides this work, she has written another novel, a couple of autobiographical books, and a couple of short story collections. She has also written eighteen children’s books. Eighteen books written in a style that children can understand and enjoy. I really think this explains why I had a problem getting into Mother to Mother: the style was somewhat juvenile.
That sounds like a really condescending thing to say, but what can I say? I can’t lie about how I felt reading the book. The story itself was very compelling and Magona makes it very clear the atrocities that were taking place at the time of the murder and prior to the murder. She makes real the horrors of apartheid and power. She writes about the politics of South African sexism and misogyny (similar to so many other sexual politics the world over) with a practiced and careful voice. But, I couldn’t get past the repetitiveness, the simple language, sometimes a la Dr. Gray. For instance, dig this section, obviously written to connote a heavy helplessness, a despair, but somehow doesn’t work for me:
Now they were gone. The police were gone. Gone to wherever they had come from. We could not. No, not us. We could never go back to who we were before they had come. We could never go back to that time or place.
(87)
Granted, not all of the book is written this way, but a lot of it is! And this kind of writing is hard for me to read in its simplicity. It was off-putting.
I feel bad saying that. This book got rave reviews from some pretty heavy-hitters, but here I am, little ol’ me, feeling that this book is inadequate. I was really worried before about emperor’s clothing and whatnot, but then I did a little link research for this here blog and learned that the woman wrote eighteen children’s books. That makes swallowing the short work a little easier. Even with that said, does anybody want a slightly used copy of Mother to Mother?
0 Responses to “<i>Mother to Mother</i>: Review”