Recent reading IV

Some books you just don't seem to get through, sometimes because you are not drawn into it, sometimes because the book is too tedious to read and sometimes because the script is outright too bad. When I was younger (maybe I should say young), I hated giving up on such books. The older and wiser I get I increasingly refuse to spend time on books that give nothing back to me as a reader. But there are cases where I have a feeling that there is something in the book although I don't seem to be able to get through it.

Sindiwe Magona's book "Mother to Mother" has been such a book; I have begun to read it any number of times since I bought it in a bookshop in Namibia in 2001, but until now I still hadn't made it through the book and for none of the above reasons. It is pretty easy to read, the story is catching enough being based on the killing of a white woman in a black township in Cape Town, South Africa in 1993 and discussing how the situation developed into these outbursts of violence. Maybe I've been reluctant to the topic because I was afraid it would exploit the tragedy and all involved.

However, Magona writes about the absurd situation in South Africa in general from the perspective of a fictional mother of the murderer, and she does it after she has herself realised that one of the real-life murderers was the son of a neighbour - and asking herself if it could not as well has been her own son who had been drawn in and part of the violence. Thus, the book captures well the frustration of the black community which was pretty much devoid of prospects for the future, through letting the murderer's mother address the mother of the victim. Not through a letter intended to merely apologize, but through giving the sad account of how things could end as they did, with finding herself the mother of a murderer - and the other mother deprived of her daughter.

The book leaps back and forth between time periods, setting the subject from the first sad sentence "My son killed your daughter" but while alternating between the childhood and youth of Mandisa (the mother), the childhood of her son (Mxolisi) and brief pictures of his life before the killing, and citing from the letter from Mandisa to the mother of the white woman who was killed it tells its story in no straightforward way, and it is not until the last pages of the book that we get the whole picture. Or as whole as it gets. I'm thankful that the description of the violent events are not drawn out more than they are. But I keep wondering what happened to the non-white people in the car the woman drove. And for a while I kept wondering what happened to Mxolisi. That is, until I remembered the passage where Mandisa reflects on that the state now provides Mxolisi with food, clothes, and a roof above his head while it hasn't given him anything at all during his entire life before he killed the woman. So although I can't remember that it directly says so anywhere else in the book, Mxolisi was found and brought to jail.

It is an important book, because it demonstrates the frustration and hate that apartheid created. But I think that it also pictures a general problem in societies with big differences between rich and poor, in societies where some has and some has not - and I wonder about our presentday global society, where we in the richer parts of the world depend on people in poorer parts working almost for nothing. And about countries as Sweden where we again have begun to increase the gap between those who have and those who have not, be it money, influence, jobs, education. My view is that as soon as you sustain that kind of society, you also create groups that see no real future for themselves or their children and children that grow up without any belief in the society. I think that what we do now is close to as dangerous as the apartheid system in South Africa was, for everyone. Isn't it time for us to start paying the costs? The real costs for production of e.g. food, clothes and different kinds of electric devices, just to name a few. And the real costs for schools, health care, etc. In stead of demanding access to cheap supply of whatever we wish for, and in stead of electing politicians that ask you to vote for them in exchange for decreasing taxes without having to state which implications this have for sustenance of quality in education, health care and other kinds of social security. If we don't look further than our own private economy and our own well-being, what will remain? Does anyone remember the word solidarity?

The book can be found at Adlibris, Bokus or Amazon - or you could borrow it from me.