Advance praise for To the Volcano
‘These assured, accomplished stories are reports from a world in which unacknowledged dark energies undermine and render hollow our bright, rational self-understanding. With passion and intelligence, and rare moral insight, Elleke Boehmer traces the scars left on the psyche by the tortuous histories of the South.’
—J.M. Coetzee
‘Compassionate, intelligent and evocative: this is a morally serious writing, lucidly rendered.’
—Gail Jones
‘Arresting, intriguing, and brilliantly crafted, these stories explore the psychic wounds of our rapidly contracting contemporary world, with its complications of race, migration and trauma. Each unfolds with impeccable pacing, and gradually unveils a deeply humane sense of the world.’
—Kwame Dawes
Praise for Elleke Boehmer
The Shouting in the Dark
Longlisted for the Barry Ronge Sunday Times Prize
‘The story, as disturbing as it is enthralling, of a girl’s struggle to emerge from under the dead weight of her father’s oppression while at the same time searching for a secure footing in the moral chaos of South Africa of the apartheid era.’
—J. M. Coetzee
‘A secret duel to the death between a father and a daughter. Distilled with an intimate sense of history, and very moving, The Shouting in the Dark is a powerful novel of memory, family politics and awakening.’
—Ben Okri
‘Boehmer’s language is feathery—barely touching the surface of her stories, pregnant with things left unsaid.’
—Zoe Norridge, Wasafiri
‘An outstanding study of a deeply troubled family against the backdrop of political change, and one girl’s resilience in the face of ugly, sharp-edged obstacles.’
—Ashley Davies, The Scotsman
‘As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that this is a double investigation—into the moral chaos of apartheid South Africa as well as self. It is a mark of the writer’s skill that this is achieved organically, with nuance, through the telling of Ella’s awakening; it never feels heavy-handed or contrived.’
—Melissa de Villiers, Moving Worlds
‘Like any excellent book it both speaks to the specificity of its historical and geographical location and to the broader nature of human relationships and belonging.’
—Hans Ester, Nederlands Dagblad
‘This moving story is not to be missed either as a glimpse into the political chaos of Apartheid South Africa or as a beautifully rendered portrait of a childhood deprived of love or comfort. Astounding.’
—The Book Trust
Sharmilla and other portraits
‘Elleke Boehmer brings to her stories two qualities that all too often are mutually exclusive: the lucidity of her intelligence and the passion of her engagement.’
—André Brink
‘Perceptive new stories.’
—Caryl Phillips
‘The accurate simplicity is astonishing, especially because it is present in all her portraits.’
—Tshepo Tshabalala, Star Tonight
Nile Baby
‘A strange and often unsettling odyssey across England… the novel asks us to consider the complex nature of race and belonging in contemporary Britain.’
—Patrick Flanery, Times Literary Supplement
‘Boehmer’s eye for domestic detail and ear for the nuances of speech whisk the reader in and out of different ways of being… Arnie gradually realizes that life is shaped in unforeseen ways by history.’
—Angela Smith, The Independent
‘A focused, mesmerizing, and an occasionally stomach-turning story of two twelve-year-olds… [The novel] grasps the enigmatic depths of human, and continental, relations.’
—Derek Attridge
‘A moving portrayal of friendship.’
—Mariss Stevens, NELM News
Bloodlines
Shortlisted for the Sanlam Prize
‘An engrossing and intriguingly told chapter in anti-imperial history.’
—J.M. Coetzee
‘A postcolonial fantasia… an imaginative exploration of the possibilities of connectedness… The skilful tracing of bloodlines through several generations makes of a desperate act of violence a token of regeneration.’
—Michiel Heyns, Sunday Independent
‘A journey into the possible… an extremely good read.’
—Cape Argus
‘Bloodlines is an engaging and compelling book binding a potent theme and memorable characters into a brisk narrative… the writing shows a controlled resonance, the sign of a talent that must not be ignored.’
—Times Literary Supplement
An Immaculate Figure
‘Remarkable restraint and subtlety.’
—West Africa
‘A very clever book indeed… It adopts the aesthetic appropriate to a culture in a politically hopeless age.’
—Jenny Turner, The Guardian
Screens Against the Sky
Shortlisted for the David Higham Prize
‘A brilliant handling of an obsessional mother-daughter relationship… Her descriptions are achingly acute.’
—Financial Times
‘An astonishing debut… swift, deft and expertly told. With a mordant wit, she shows how discrimination can become as natural as breathing, and as unselfconscious.’
—Penny Perrick, Sunday Times
‘Eloquently expressive.’
—The Guardian
‘A beautifully authentic insight into a society turned in on itself in the face of black deprivation.’
—Wendy Woods
‘Elegant, percipient writing.’
—Zoe Heller, The Observer
For SM
If you keep going south you will meet yourself.
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
I shall make for the south…and never go north again.
Katherine Mansfield, last letter to Ida Baker (unsent), Fontainebleau, France.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Child in the Photograph
South, North
To the Volcano
Evelina
Blue Eyes
Powerlifting
Supermarket Love
Synthetic Orange
Paper Planes
The Park-Gate Notice
The Mood that I’m In
The Biographer and the Wife
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
The Child in the Photograph
‘FROM AFRICA IS HOW they introduce me,’ Luanda tells her mother on her first trunk-call home. ‘Isn’t it funny, Ma? Just from Africa. Can you believe…?’
A crackle zaps her mother’s reply.
After the Angolan port-city, Luanda tells her fellow Masters students in Development. Yes, that’s my name. But Angola’s not my country. See if you can guess my country. For starters, it’s landlocked and dry and farther south than the Sahara. Getting warmer? Luanda laughs. My country also has diamonds. That’s a dead giveaway. What d’you call yourselves, Development students? My country has loads of diamonds.
‘You tell them,’ her mother says down a suddenly clear phone line. ‘Your country’s brightest diamond. Easily. Brighter than any star.’
Luanda shuts her eyes. Her mother’s voice is as close as if she were right here beside her in the college phone booth. She pictures her there in the living-room at home, her big thighs spread across the fake-leather easy-chair beside the TV. She sees the black plastic mouthpiece wedged between her cheek and her shoulder in that clever way of hers, like the PA she is. She sees her re
d-painted fingernails twisting around the black telephone cord.
On the wall across from her mother are her own framed certificates. Luanda pictures them clearly: the certificates arranged on the wall in two columns, her university medals and honours and essay prizes, the rungs of the long ladder she has climbed to get to this ancient stone college with its single shabby telephone booth and muddy McDonald’s wrappings thick on the floor. She sees the gold-embossed lettering on the certificates catch the horizontal light of the setting sun.
‘Nothing short of a fancy sundial,’ her mother’s boyfriend Pa once mock-scolded. ‘Look, the letters even cast a shadow.’
‘Proud of her,’ her mother staunchly said.
A pink-and-white hand beats against the glass of the phone-booth door. The glass is cloudy with condensation. Luanda can’t see the body behind the hand.
‘Can hardly believe it, being here,’ she yells over another squall of static. ‘The other students can’t believe it either. I mean, me being here. When I walk into a room, they stop talking, they all stare.’
‘So you’re educating them. No matter how ancient and clever, they have something to learn.’
Luanda laughs at her mother’s joke, if it was a joke. She laughs the open-mouthed cawing laugh that she shares with her mother. Ha-ha-ha it goes, rasping to a close. Some days even Nana can’t tell their laughs apart.
‘I must go, Ma.’
‘Next time Nana will come say hello. Sorry, Lu. She was here but she’s run off.’
The swallow Luanda now makes hurts her chest. The hand again slaps the door.
Her mother is calling bye, over and over again. Bye, Luanda echoes her, bye. Then she presses the silver Next Call button and her mother’s voice cuts out. She stands holding the receiver in her hand, the dial-tone purring.
She rubs the condensation on the glass with her sleeve. Whoever was out there has given up. The foyer is empty. She scrapes off the McDonald’s wrapping sticking to her shoe and takes the stairs up to her room two at a time, breathing hard with relief, almost laughing, as if she has escaped something, has got through an obstacle course without injury.
Luanda relies on her laugh in the days ahead, at the hundred ice-breaker parties and inductions she lists in beautiful schoolgirl cursive in her diary. She laughs and watches her laugh’s effect on people, how it makes them turn towards her and smile. Laughing, she slides across thickly carpeted rooms between shuffling clusters of guests like a rain droplet down a windscreen, laughing when they stumble on her name, laughing when they ask about her course and then forget and ask again, laughing, laughing, till the other students start calling her Laughing Luanda. Laughing, she asks them to stop.
She wanders around the old university town, her university town, believe it or not, but now she doesn’t laugh. A dream is beyond laughter and all this is beyond even a dream, it’s beyond her imagination. Not in a thousand years could she have dreamed up this perfect green grass in the quadrangles or the spreading trees like pictures or the all-surrounding stone: the stone walls, stone flags, the Gothic stone arch of her bedroom window looking like it was stamped out with a cookie cutter, the stone steps up to her room worn away by the numberless footsteps of numberless students. ‘I mean, stone, Ma, cut stone, worn stone, like it’s melting,’ she said on the phone and still couldn’t quite believe it. She could not have dreamed up the pure coldness that rises from the stone and instantly chills her hand when she touches it. That anything could be so cold! She could not have imagined the cold dark shadows that wait in the corners of the stone and never shift. Even at noon they don’t shrink away.
Her university before this one, where she received the trophies and certificates on her mother’s wall, is no more than a cluster of single-storey prefab blocks built on the surrounding red sand. On the side of each building a single huge air-conditioning unit sticks out like an ear-stud. The dusty area in front of the admin buildings is called the English garden though the only plants that grow there are cactuses. The English garden! Looking around at the green grass, the spreading oaks, Luanda wants to laugh, remembering, but catches herself in time and feels ashamed.
She takes pictures of her stone window arch with the Polaroid camera her family gave her at the airport—Ma, Pa, Gogo, Nana, everyone. She photographs her window first from the inside, from several angles, then from the street, looking up. These are the first photographs she takes here at her new university.
She sends the photos home folded inside a long letter about the ancient stone and her new classmates, their difficult-to-understand English, the day-in day-out black clothing that they wear like a uniform. She tells them that the only place to get her hair done is out of town, two bus rides away, close to the industrial area. She writes about the café the students all visit after class, Luigi’s, how everyone helps her with her coffee order, each shouting louder than the last. Latte, macchiato, espresso, some of the new words for coffee she has never seen let alone said before. Up to now she had only ever tasted Ricoffy Instant. She tells them about her dissertation topic. The question of whether the water that flows over your land belongs to you. Especially when that land is dry. The whole thing sounds funny over here where it rains every day.
Should she be more amazed? she asks them all in closing. Her way is to think about the future and the next generation, not the past. But these walls and pillars and the solid stuff inside the walls—the paintings, great oak tables, massive card catalogues—these things have stood here just like they do today for hundreds of years. They will also go on standing just like they do for more hundreds of years.
Do you see what I’m saying, Ma, Pa, Gogo? They were the future then and somehow, though they are so old, they are still the future now.
On top of the bookcase in her bedroom with its cold stone walls she places two framed photographs. Ma and her Tata on their wedding day: Ma in a ridiculous short tulle veil, Tata already bowed and sick. And a studio portrait, herself in her graduation gear at the university with the cactuses. Into a corner of the wedding photograph she wedges a passport-sized photograph of a laughing toothless child in a red dress.
‘My little sister, Nana,’ Luanda tells her Development classmates when they come to her room to drink tea. She goes to their bedrooms to drink tea also. Sometimes she says more. ‘My little sister, Nana, trying to grow some teeth,’ she tells Archie, an angular English boy who did something in Africa on his gap year. ‘See, we have milk teeth in Africa too.’
Then, laughing, she changes the subject. ‘Now, seriously, how do you manage to cope with the cold in this country? Is it M and S underwear?’ And she laughs again.
She attends a gala party to mark the college’s eight-hundredth birthday. She stands beside the grand piano in the corner, champagne flute in hand. Can you believe it, that many centuries old? she imagines telling her mother on the phone.
This time people for some reason come over to her. A college fellow touches his champagne flute to hers and asks how Development is going. Laughter bursts from her mouth, she can’t help it. She grips the skinny forearm of his wife standing beside him and, without spilling her glass, whispers into her clip-on earring, ‘Yes, I’d prefer a cup of tea, too.’
The College President invites Luanda to High Table. She wears a blue-and-white waxed cotton dress that Ma’s dressmaker made. The cold falls from the stone walls in slabs and lies against her skin. She wishes she had brought a woollen scarf, a shawl, a blanket. Opposite, the President’s wife sits with a billowing cream bow at her throat looking like the Prime Minister herself.
A Very Big Man once in Government, our College President, she begins a fresh letter to her family. We ate a five-course meal on a stage and I sat beside him. I helped him with his wine glass because his hands shake. His wife motioned me using just her chin.
But Luanda doesn’t write about the dinners in London that follow. There are too many—the dinners with the College President and his wife and people they call the Great and the Good
in huge hotels with heavy glass doors that bellhops in uniform open silently as they approach. Luanda sweeps in between the two of them, the President and his wife, taller than them both, even without her head-wrap. Under her waxed cotton dresses she wears polo-neck jumpers and nylon spencers, sometimes even long-johns, like on freezing July nights at home.
‘Never knew any country could have enough Big people to produce a whole group called Great and Good,’ she tells her fellow guests over canapés and wonders why they laugh, including the College President. Which bit of what she said was funny?
She doesn’t write that some evenings she goes to London with just the College President. Lady Sarah tires easily, he says. The trip to London is too tiring for her. You can help him with his wine glass, Lady Sarah says.
Luanda also doesn’t write that one afternoon in the first-class railway carriage on the way back from London the College President asked to touch her hair. She doesn’t write that she let him, which is to say, she didn’t want to say no, she didn’t like to. She doesn’t write that, when he touched her hair, he called her Africa’s diamond—like her mother, but differently, too.
She doesn’t write that the very next day she paid the College President’s wife a visit. It was the middle of the afternoon so Lady Sarah made Earl Grey tea and they ate the shortbread biscuits that she had brought along.
Drinking tea that afternoon, Luanda tells Lady Sarah about the English garden full of cactuses at her old university. She describes the dressmaker’s tiny shop in the main street of their middle-sized town, which is in fact the country’s capital. This is the shop where the waxed cotton dresses that Lady Sarah has said she likes are made and also the fancy head-wraps in matching cottons for people who enjoy making a bold entrance ‘like you know I do’.
‘I want to order a couple more head-wraps from home,’ Luanda says, finishing her biscuit and putting her hand against the side of her head. ‘I like to wear my hair uncovered like this, natural, but lately I’ve had second thoughts. Maybe I should get a weave or some braids. The thing is, you wouldn’t believe how the Great and the Good like to touch my hair, Lady Sarah. You wouldn’t believe how many. They lean across and give it a feel, a pinch, you know, how people do with pregnant ladies, making free with their stomachs.’
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