A Blade of Grass (37 page)

Märit has been here.

Tembi raises her head. “Märit!” Only an echo answers her call, only an echo thin and faint.

She stands, clutching the seeds, and looks towards the river. The foreboding shivers through her again, a feeling so intense it makes her tremble.

The river flows, silent, eternal, always moving. There are footprints and scuff marks in the sand near the shallows. Tembi does not have to examine them or place her own feet there to know that they belong to Märit. But the footprints lead in only one direction, into the river.

Tembi wades into the shallows. A flash of blue catches her eye—a bracelet of blue beads gleams on the rock. She holds it in her hand a moment before fastening it onto her wrist. Her eyes rest upon the smooth flow of the river for a long, long time. The premonition that she felt earlier is now a certainty. She knows it in her body, and in her soul is a sudden absence, as if something has been removed.

Tembi does not call out again. She knows with a terrible and final certainty that it is futile to call Märit’s name.

She turns and slowly walks away from the river.

Here is the farm: the windmill silhouetted against the blue sky, the grass rustling in the breeze, the white walls and thatched roof of the house, all so still and quiet.

She opens her hand and studies the five small seeds in her palm. She bends down and carefully places the seeds on the soil.

Here she will grow that which does not as yet grow. In this small acre of the world. From here the sweetness will come. A gift.

But first she must plant the seeds.

Ideas, interviews & features

L
EWIS
D
E
S
OTO
was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, to a family that arrived from Europe in the eighteenth century. His writing has been published in numerous journals, and he was awarded the Books in Canada/Writers’ Union Short Prose Award.
A Blade of Grass
has been published in 14 countries and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France). It is also a finalist for the 2005 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and is shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. A past editor of
Literary Review of Canada
, Lewis DeSoto lives with his wife in Normandy and Toronto.

I
N
1652 the first white settlement of South Africa began. Three hundred years later, almost to the day, I was born into the consequences of that arrival. After wars amongst Afrikaners, British, Zulu, Xhosa, and many others, (wars over land, over cattle, over water, over gold and diamonds) a system known as
apartheid
was firmly in place. The word means ‘separateness,’ and in practice it meant that by the 1960s the three million or so whites had separated themselves from the eleven million South Africans who were of a different color—a political separation, an economic separation, a physical separation, and most tragically, a psychological separation.

In the years before I left South Africa, all black political parties and workers’ unions had been banned; The Immorality Act had been passed, which meant that whites and blacks could not marry, cohabit, or have sexual relations; The Group Areas Act had come into law, whereby blacks and whites could not live in the same villages, towns, or cities; The Suppression of Communism Act had been passed, making it illegal to belong to the Communist Party; The Native Act required all black people to carry a permit with them all the time; The 90 Days Detention Act allowed the government to arrest people without allowing them recourse to the courts. All white males over the age of sixteen were required to undergo military training.

In those same years, 67 unarmed demonstrators, most of them women, were shot and killed by the police; the Prime Minister was assassinated; Nelson Mandela and his colleagues were sentenced to life imprisonment; schoolchildren rioted in
the black ghettos, and were shot and imprisoned in response; the South African military engaged in clandestine wars across its borders; political opponents of the regime were imprisoned, were murdered, went into exile, or disappeared.

Through it all we lived in our comfortable houses with our gardens, our swimming pools, our holidays at the seaside resorts—and our servants. We lived in privilege and poverty, in fear and anger, in hope and hopelessness, in struggle and apathy. We lived like strangers, in a strange land.

That was the South Africa I knew.

What do you think is the most common misconception people who haven’t been to South Africa and only learn about it from the news have about the country and its people, black and white, and how they relate to each other? Does your book attempt to address these misconceptions indirectly? If so, how?

When we have only limited knowledge about a place or situation we all tend to make judgments that are simplified. I suppose that’s human nature. In
A Blade of Grass
the relations between the characters, on both a political and personal level, are complex, changeable, and often contradictory. I wanted the book to convey the fact that what we sometimes know only from newspaper headlines is actually about human individuals, struggling on the most personal level, and that these characters might not be so different from us in their hopes and their fears.

Some of the events you describe in
A Blade of Grass—
such as the violent eviction of white farmers, food shortages resulting from political conflict, random, casual victimization of black people—seem to be ripped from the headlines. Are the countries surrounding South Africa going through the same trauma of the land that South Africa experienced decades ago? How does South Africa differ from her neighboring countries?

Africa is a troubled and varied and complex continent that is still struggling to find equilibrium after two centuries of upheaval
caused by colonial exploitation on the part of the European nations. It has been abandoned and thrust into the modern world without much in the way of resources or institutions. The histories of America and Europe contain all the convulsions that we now see being replayed in Africa. South Africa has an ugly history, but it is fortunate in now being wealthy, modern, industrialized, and having a stable political structure. Perhaps it can offer hope to the continent.

Did you intend for A
Blade of Grass
to be more of a social and political commentary or a reflection on the inner lives of your characters? If a story unfolds in a country torn by conflict, is it possible for it
NOT
to be political?

Politics in
A Blade of Grass
are mostly in the background, but always present. I don’t think it’s possible to write about a time of conflict and ignore the political situation. To do so would be false and dishonest. Although my book concentrates on the relationship between two women, all their actions and feelings are determined by the situation in which they live. Their desire to find a place to call home is a universal one, but the form of that search is shaped and qualified by the fact that they live in a time of oppression and racism.

Have you returned to South Africa since your departure for Canada? If so, how was this experience different from growing up and living there? If you haven’t been back, was that a conscious decision and if so, why?

I consciously disinherited myself from South Africa when I left and I have never returned. I did this out of shame and anger and because I believed that apartheid would not end in my lifetime, or if it did then the end would come in blood and flames. When Mandela became president in the first ever free elections I allowed myself to confront all that I had buried deep within my soul, to say the word home for the first time in decades. I intended to return to the country of my birth then, but I had started writing
A Blade of Grass
and I knew that I should finish the book before returning, otherwise it would be a very different story. I am now planning a trip back to South Africa, hoping to bring the past into the present.

IN ONE OF THOSE MOMENTS
of reverie, half-dream, half-waking, that sometimes come just before sleep, I saw an image of a woman walking on a dusty road in the African countryside, in the country of my youth. Her hair was shorn, she walked barefoot, and although she was a white woman, she wore the clothes of a rural farmworker. Such an air of tragedy emanated from her that the image lodged itself deeply in my consciousness, haunting me for days afterward. She seemed to be someone I knew, to have her origin in my own life. This was the woman who became Märit.

I did not wonder where this woman was walking to, because I knew somehow that she walked toward the future. I wondered instead where she had come from, what she had left, why she walked alone. As I retraced her steps in my imagination, along that dusty road, following the imprints of her bare feet in the sand, I saw a farm, a white-walled house with a thatched straw roof, a windmill turning in the breeze over the corn fields. And standing in front of the house was another woman, a young black woman, shading her eyes against the glare as she peered into the distance where the road disappeared toward the hills. On her face was an expression of longing, and of hope. This was Tembi.

These images arose out of the depths of my memory, out of emotions that had been lodged in my soul, still there after countless years, after departure, after exile, after the creation of another life in another country. Still the taste of dust on my lips, still the smell of woodsmoke from early morning cooking fires, still the sound of the cicadas in the long

grass. And still the longing and the hope. The tragedy that Märit carried with her and the yearning that was on Tembi’s face were in my heart, too.

When my wife read the manuscript she remarked that Märit reminded her of descriptions of my mother. Shortly after I left South Africa my mother died. Because of the circumstances of my childhood I never knew her very well. Looking at Märit now, I do see that the elusiveness of her inner character, and the air of melancholy that she carries, owe a great deal to my memory of my mother.

Some readers of the book have asked why I, as a man, have chosen to write from the perspective of two women. History, in fiction as in reality, has been a stage dominated by men. Sometimes I feel that male characters in books can no longer surprise us. But women are still capable, as characters in fiction, to do the unexpected, to set out on the uncharted journeys of discovery. At the same time, I believe it is true that women are more sensitive to the emotional nuances of situations, and more expressive of the effects of those emotions. Also, for me as a writer, to create characters that are mostly unlike myself is a method to retain some objectivity in the creation, so that the book is more art and less self-confession.

A Blade of Grass
is written out of memory, not the facts of history but the emotions caused by history. At the heart of the book is a simple question: Where is home? All the characters and all the actions are driven by this question. Where do I lay my head at night to sleep undisturbed and wake to serenity and peace? The anxiety that comes from not being able to answer the question is what gives the book its air of tension, and its tragedy.

I could not write this book until apartheid had ended in South Africa. Not for any political reason, but because apartheid had put a lock on my memory and my imagination. To write a book about South Africa while the system of racial oppression existed would have meant writing a political book, as an act and a statement. But there were other voices, better able than mine, more urgent, more desperate, that were speaking the necessary truths in those years. With the breaking of the chains that strangled the country came a release in my own heart, a return from an exile that allowed me to cease mourning, and to believe in the future again.

The language and style of the book have an intentional cadence and rhythm that owes a great deal to the Bible. During my childhood I was very moved by the narratives of the Old Testament. Tembi and Märit seem to me to exist in that elemental, almost archaic landscape. Their story of struggle and sacrifice and exile is an old, old one, yet it continues to this day, all over the world, still being created and played out in the lives of those who still ask, Where is home?

Home is not only a physical place, it is very much where the heart rests. The attempt at friendship between the two women, Märit and Tembi, of such disparate backgrounds, with so many impediments standing between them, is also an attempt to find a home—a home for the spirit and the heart, where both hope and love can exist.

GRACE LIVED WITH US
, in our house in the affluent suburb on the edge of the city. With us, but separate. I do not know when she came to live with us, to work for us, or where she came from. I do not know how old she was, for to a child all adults are of an age, and I was a child. Grace seemed always to have been there. A presence in the kitchen, in the laundry, in the big rooms of the house.

Grace cooked, she cleaned, she baked, she washed our clothes and ironed them. She assisted in serving dinner, bringing in the dishes she had cooked. But she did not eat with us. She ate alone, sometimes in the kitchen, when the dishes had been washed and the floor swept, but more often she ate in her room. Grace lived in a room next to the garage, just across a courtyard shaded by a leafy quince tree. The room was small, containing a dresser, two wooden kitchen chairs, some clothes suspended on a cord below the ceiling and a narrow bed covered with a brightly striped blanket.

Grace worked in our house for six days of the week. On Sundays we went into the city for a meal at the Zoo Lake Restaurant, where the waiters wore white gloves and jackets. I do not know what Grace did on her days off.

That year there was rugby and cricket at school, the first records of the Beatles, learning to dance the Twist, and a girl named Janis Meyer who kissed me at a birthday party. And there was also the shooting by the police of unarmed women at Sharpeville, the Suppression of Communism Act, the banning of the ANC, a bomb at the Johannesburg train station.

One day I saw two boys about my own age sitting in the courtyard outside Grace’s room. “There are two
piccanins
in the yard,” I told my mother.

“I know. They are Grace’s children.”

“Her children? What do you mean?”

For a moment I thought that Grace had kept the two boys hidden in her room all this time.

“Go and talk to them,” my mother said.

The boys were dressed alike, in clean but faded shorts and shirts, both barefoot.

“Hello,” I said. “Where do you live?”

“Ezulweni,” the older boy answered.

“Where is that?”

He waved his arm in a vague manner.

“Do you like soccer?” I tried to think of the names of some black soccer teams. “Orlando Swallows? Kaiser Chiefs?”

The boys frowned. It was obvious that they had never heard of these teams. Ezulweni must be far away.

Then Grace appeared from her room and broke into a smile when she saw me. “These are my boys, Baas Lewis. This is Walter and this is Nelson.”

That evening I looked at Grace in a new way as she served dinner. How was it possible that she had children? Where did they actually live? Where was their father? Who looked after them? Why had I not seen them before? It was as if Grace didn’t belong to us anymore, to our family, but had secrets and another life. I asked my mother why Grace’s children didn’t live with her. Because the government wouldn’t allow it, she told me. Because Grace was black and we were white.

Soon after, our family moved to Canada. We left Grace behind. She had been a part of the family but now I no longer knew what her

part had been. She was a servant, yes, taken for granted, yes, but also treated with affection born out of long familiarity. But how little we knew of her. Was her name even Grace? Or was that just a convenience, easier for us to pronounce than a Zulu or Xhosa name?

Memory fades, but our sins are written on the heart, and remain inscribed there forever. Does Grace remember me? Does she recall my name? I do not know who Grace was or where she is now. And she knows nothing of me. Grace: Surname unknown.