Looking back with deathly gaze on life lived
A’Eysha Kassiem Loot.co.za (R205) Kwela Books
BASTIAN Bredenkamp is the heir to the Goedleven farm. He has a rare condition that is like hyperthymesia, which gives him a highly autobiographical memory. When we meet him he is also dead. An unusual start to a brilliant novel.
A'Eysha Kassiem's book Suitcase of Memory tells us the story through the eyes of a man who is dead, and is able to survey his life, from birth to the grave, with perfect recall. With a dead protagonist he muses on what the meaning of it all was.
He has parents, Pa Bredenkamp and Mamma Sanri, and he grows up on his family's Stellenbosch wine farm. It's a privileged upbringing, with a father who is proud of him and a mother who dotes on him.
Change comes when Khadeejathree arrives at the farm gate wearing a burka and looking for a job. In the lexicon of Bastian's life, she is to be classified and brown or black are bad. He's been taught this by his father there are “Hotnots”, and “K……s”, and for the majority of the minority of whites in the country this separation is nonnegotiable.
Bastian is being taught to be a “baas” as a creed.
The society his parents mix in, where a white woman won't touch a jug of water that a coloured Muslim woman has touched, is a reality. His mother's friends sit on the porch talking books and wearing lace gloves. But, looking back on his life, Bastian has another memory of another woman loving him fiercely as a baby. Who she is becomes apparent when he gets to the end of this novel, that is both shattering and tender.
When Khadeejathree asks if she may bring her daughter Rashieda to spend her time after school on the farm, Mamma Sanri agrees. There exists between the two women a link that binds in a way that is hidden from others. Interwoven through the story are Bastian's reflections being dead, he has an all seeing eye on what happens to him after his death.
His life story is at times shocking,
at times revolutionary, and also funny and human.
When Bastian makes a radical decision and has to finally face the secret he has known all his life, it brings him into danger, and calls into question how far and at what cost one will go for love.
Suitcase of Memory is an exceptional novel, that pulls the
reader into a life where everything is not as it seems, and through doing that is able to pull apart our past in this country, but also the past of her wonderfully drawn characters.
There is a reason why a time comes when Mamma Sanri can no longer face eating a grapefruit – read this novel to find out why, it will break your heart.