Down to the last
An award-winning novel about water wars is based on reality
IMAGINE that all our natural resources — even in the wildest of places — belonged to corporate giants. You couldn’t drink from a mountain stream in the Cederberg or Baviaanskloof, say, without paying for the privilege. In this extreme place, you probably wouldn’t be allowed to drink from the stream at all, but be forced by law to wait for the water at a tap, somewhere, or find it in plastic bottles, for which you’d also have to pay. In her debut novel, For the Mercy of
Water , which won this year’s Sunday Times Fiction Prize, Karen Jayes imagines a drought-ravaged world in which our dwindling water supplies are privatised.
Durban-born Jayes was the editor of the London-based activist newspaper Middle East Times in her 20s, and is now a convert to Islam. It was while she was working for the paper, that she “started noticing stories about water”.
“A Kiwi journalist arrived at my office and said, ‘I went on a trip to Afghanistan, where some water companies are actually mining the water, bottling it, and selling it back to the population. One bottle of water costs half a month’s wages, and unemployment is 85%.’
“So they were stealing the water,” she concludes. In October, her interest in water issues sent her to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where she says Israeli forces are using water as a “tool of the occupation”.
“While at the Times I realised there was a
water issue in the region. The water was controlled by an Israeli water company and rationed according to the politics of the time. During the Palestinian uprisings the water would be cut and rerouted, as punishment. And this happens still,” she says. “I spoke to an engineer who worked for Palestine’s water department. This was after I’d written For the Mercy of Water, and he retold me my book exactly as I’d written it. I’d had no idea how accurate it had been — down to every detail of how the water is rationed.”
According to Jayes, water “theft” takes place in South Africa and Zimbabwe. “Large companies are using a lot of water on mega-crops. That water is taken out of the water table, and the villages around the farms are lacking in water.”
According to Jayes, her tale is an allegorical one but it depicts a real and present water crisis.
“The environmental factors in the novel are informed by social issues, and politics,” Jayes says, and adds that she was supposing what would happen “if water were a precious commodity, and we were fighting over it in the way we are fighting over oil. The book is a warning about the danger of allowing corporate interests to control public assets such as water and land.” TELL US: Are you concerned that the country depicted in Jayes’s novel could become a local reality? E-mail walterst@sundaytimes.co.za