Absence of Love: Malatji's Love Interrupted

By Rob Gaylard

Reneilwe Malatji is on record as saying: “We need stories that are told from the point of view of black people, we need stories from rural areas, we need stories from ekasi, ja genuine sincere stories.”
This debut collection of short stories, Love Interrupted (Modjaji) – written in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an MA in creative writing at Rhodes University – just about fits this description.
Malatji is familiar with the disjuncture between the rural poor and the privileged, educated class, and many of her stories explore the tensions this sets up.
Her strength lies in delineating particular situations, rather than in probing character and motive.
There is little sustained exploration of interiority, and little evidence of formal inventiveness, but the situations Malatji explores are often compromising or disturbing, and centre on dysfunctional relationships, marital abuse, and the irresponsibility of husbands or fathers. (A subtitle for the collection could be, “A good man is hard to find.”) There is, however, a flip side: what is the role of wives or mothers in apparently condoning or tolerating one-sided and often abusive relationships? What price marriage, one wonders?
The title story is one of the most powerful in the collection. Its grimly realistic narrative traces the decline and disintegration of a once-promising marriage between two school teachers.
How could things go so horribly wrong? It would be simplistic to blame any one person or one factor, although traditional expectations clearly have a role to play. The wife is “willing to go with the flow and be a good makoti”, yet, in the end, the story spares no one. All Anna (the wife) is left with at the end is “hope and faith”.

Settler of a different kind

By Rob Gaylard

SA letters has found a fresh, new voice. Rosemary Smith's memoir, Swimming with Cobras (Modjaji Books) covers just over 30 years of a very active life, from her arrival in Grahamstown as wife of a newly appointed English lecturer, to her "retirement" in 1999. This rich and interesting narrative is several things at once. Most obviously it is record of years of dedicated service for the Grahamstown Area District Relief Association and the Black Sash in Grahamstown.
It records how the shifts in the national political arena - from the Soweto uprising to the repression of the mid-80s to the beginnings of the thaw in the late 80s - were registered at the local level.
More than this, however, Smith's memoir records how the drama of alienation and integration played out in her own life, and how her political/welfare work was instrumental in finally making her feel a part of this small Eastern Cape town with its quasi-colonial society. It vividly records her initial discomfort and sense of alienation: the unfamiliar Eastern Cape landscape was a far remove from the "manageable scenery of Oxfordshire" and for some years she continued to feel "the strong seductive pull of English life". This recalls the sense of estrangement felt by many of the original 1820 Settlers: as with them, so here the green fields and country lanes of England form a kind of counterpoint against which to measure this unfamiliar new land. The book shows how a principled lifelong commitment to non-racialism, peace and justice enabled the author to find her feet - and her sense of herself.