MIDDLE OF SO MEWHERE

For writer and architect YEWANDE OMOTOSO, there was only one South African suburb in which to place the lead character of her latest novel – and that suburb

When I decided to try to write books, I did what the cliché urges us not to do: I quit my day job. Leaving architecture was temporary, I told myself; I just needed a year to see. For money, I would hustle and freelance; for food and shelter, I would leave Cape Town and live with my dad in his new home in Centurion, Gauteng. My father’s house was on a road called Jakkalsdraf, and to get there you turned off another called Hendrik Verwoerd. For a year, I lived in Centurion, and years later Centurion (and its cousin Midrand) are still living in me.

What haunted me so much about Centurion? From my arrival onwards, a sense of nowhere-ness pervaded. The nomenclature surprised me, the spectre of Verwoerd – but I also appreciate the ways in which our towns and spaces carry footnotes to history, even painful ones. While I couldn’t put a finger on it, Centurion was not the practisedease, greased-with-money ambience of Sandton I had become accustomed to. Nor was it the trendy grit of Melville. It was awkward; it was a mesh of cultures and tongues, navigating neighbourliness with varying degrees of success. As someone forever wrestling with the enticing complexity of belonging, the sense of mismatch was appealing.

On moving in, I initially regarded the decor with a sense of bemusement. A bar featured a massive lion’s head in clay relief along its façade. When the lights were off, the lion’s green glass eyes (two marbles) glinted back at you. In the kitchen, the main wall had been painted by hand with a river scene – cool grey waters, the odd palm tree. In the centre of the artwork rested a small carving of a woman in a boat, paddle and all. I had imagined all these details simply as the idiosyncrasies – we all have them – of the previous owners, but a chance visit to a nearby garden store suggested something different. The gnomes, the water features, the wildlife replicas – nothing quite fit with the other, and yet the effect was of something rugged and real. One had the sense not just of home but of home-making. A kind of trying, a reaching-towards that felt poignant.

I moved on from that home. My father eventually sold it. Is that woman still placidly paddling in the kitchen? Does the lion still wink? Who knows. And yet just over half a decade later, when the time came to imagine a place for my character Mojisola to run to when she hears that her daughter has killed herself, when I had to find a place for her to hole away in and struggle and grieve, it was Midrand.

With the pace of life, there is very little time and space given to figuring, so when I knew my novel An Unusual Grief would be about a 60-year-old woman whose grief journey would also be a sexual journey with kinks and oddities, and when I knew Mojisola would spend the pages of the book figuring herself, her dead daughter and her errant husband, and when I had to think of where to place her – it was Midrand. It seemed to me that in spaces like Midrand, whose history lies in a suburb called Halfway House, I could tell this kind of story that isn’t about arriving anywhere but about the strangeness (that woman paddling away) of getting there.