SCATTERLINGS

In 1927, when “illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives” in South Africa is prohibited by the Immorality Act, the van Zijl family's fate turns tragic.

South African writer Manenzhe’s debut looks back to an especially cruel moment in history when sexual relations between Blacks and Whites were pronounced unlawful, threatening prison for the adults involved. Such is the situation for Abram van Zijl, who's White, and his “black and English” wife, Alisa, who are parents to two daughters, Dido and Emilia. One horrific decision by Alisa shatters the family early in the book, and it's her psychology, history, and choices that dominate the story and set the tone. Born the daughter of a slave in Jamaica, orphaned when young, she was adopted by a kindly White man who brought her to England. Alienated and haunted by her birth father and the stories he told her before he died, Alisa has always felt herself unloved, unrooted, condemned to a “legacy of wandering and melancholy.” She travels tirelessly, eventually heading to Africa, sensing she might trace her origins there, but onboard ship she meets Abram, of Dutch and English heritage, and instead discovers a love that will bring her a home and family. Over time, however, the relationship fades, and Alisa’s unsatisfied need for connection returns, but now the external world is poised to intervene. Manenzhe’s poetic narrative, sometimes dreamy, piercing, and lyrical, at other times denser, is threaded with heartache and suffering as well as ancestral myth and symbolism. There are loose ends—questions about Alisa that are not fully answered by long extracts from her journals included in the text. The result is a choppy story of long-endured, compounded oppression. Its closing chapters allow a suggestion of peace, but not for all.

An elegiac view of colonial and racial injustice.