Discarded wraith of apartheid
IT’S been years since I read a book that strained the Likability Principle as viscerally as Karen Jennings’ new book, Crooked Seeds. Her previous novel, An Island, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but I fear the more I tell you about Crooked Seeds, the less likely you’ll be to pick it up – unless you’re wearing gloves and a mask.
The story’s opening episode quickly separates the resilient from the squeamish: Deidre, a white South African woman in Cape Town, wakes up to pee, painfully, into a mixing bowl by her bed.
The smell of her three-day-old underwear is pungent. She’s so drymouthed that she can’t slide in her false teeth. With no water in her dilapidated flat, she drinks a jar of pickle brine and eats some dangerously old Vienna sausages. “She spat out what couldn’t be chewed, ate two more, spat again, then drew her forearm across her mouth, seeing afterward the smear of grit and slime, and flakes of hideous pink.”
This novel couldn’t be any more overwhelming if it came in a scratch ’n sniff edition.
But the moral rot overpowers every hygienic offence. Fifty-three-year-old Deidre is putrefying in self-pity. Limping out onto the street, she immediately starts begging for cigarettes and cuts to the front of the water line. Marked by her amputated leg, she’s clearly a well-known figure in this poor section of town. Having exhausted her disability allowance on alcohol, she begs for credit that everyone knows she’ll never pay back.
Deidre is repellent, but she’s hypnotically repellent. And her unhappiness is not without cause, even if the responsibility for her situation is complicated by family sins and national politics. “Eighteen and I lost everything,” she whines. “What did I have after that? What could I become, huh? Everything was taken from me. Everything.”
There’s no denying she endured unspeakable physical harm, and she’s been removed from home and denied promised compensation. But in a country deeply scarred by the legacy of institutionalised racial discrimination, what do the concepts “home” and “compensation” really mean for an aggrieved white woman?
Jennings has summoned a rotting wraith of South Africa’s discarded apartheid culture. Bereft of her racial privilege, Deidre is an open sore of self-absorbed resentment. And this is a novel that dares to push us beyond disgust, beyond pity, to a point where we’re forced to touch the swollen tumour of another person’s deepest humiliation.
The real artistry of Crooked Seeds lies in Jennings’s ability to make this story feel so propulsive. In the novel’s present tense, nothing particularly momentous happens, but that’s essential to its terrifying theme: everything left to happen must come from disinterring the past. And once that digging begins, it unleashes an accelerating series of horrors.
Early in the story, Deidre is contacted by a police officer. Investigators examining the site of her old family home have found the remains of three infant bodies in the yard. “Look, you’ve made a mistake,” Deidre insists with rising panic. “You need to find the family that lived here before us. The place was a mess when my parents got it. There was rubbish and heaps of stuff everywhere, like a dump, like a actual dump.”
Deidre may not be responsible for these atrocities – whatever they might be and mean – but with no one else left to take responsibility, on whom should the burden fall? As in some Greek tragedy, the investigation proceeds offstage, with shards of news arriving periodically to screw Deidre’s agitation ever tighter. Her dread is reflected in the wider world that’s drying out and going up in flames as the mountainsides burn.
Does Deidre ever become genuinely sympathetic? Could any person’s suffering expiate the sins of South Africa? These are questions this urgent novel forces upon us. Crooked Seeds leaves us reeling, trying to get Deidre’s voice out of our heads. | The Washington Post ¡ is available online.