Historically, land is the most contested issue in SA. Twenty-seven years after the end of apartheid, the ANC’s land restitution agenda has achieved little, with redistribution characterised by ineffectual and ill-defined government programmes and a lack of political will.
In Damon Galgut’s latest novel, The Promise, what is contested is a “crooked little building”. The novel opens when Rachel Swart has just died of cancer. Her husband, Manie, and three children — alliteratively named Anton, Astrid and Amor — are all trapped by their own versions of grief. Only Amor, 13 and the youngest, cares about her mother’s dying wish — that Salome, the Swarts’s domestic worker, receive full ownership of the modest house where she lives with her family. But it is 1986, and under apartheid law, black people are not legally allowed to own property in white areas. The promise is buried with Rachel.
Galgut puts the family unit to good use as he explores selfishness and shifting social mores. Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the Swarts reflect the atmosphere of our country. As the last of her siblings stumbles towards death, Amor returns, now an introspective loner who has become a nurse. “It isn’t much,” she says to Salome’s son Lukas. “I know that. Three rooms and a broken roof. On a tough piece of land. Yes. But for the first time, it’ll belong to your mother. Her name on the title deed. Not my family’s. That isn’t nothing.” But to Lukas it is nothing. He is furious that Amor does not understand the house is not hers to give. “Everything you have, white lady, is already mine. I don’t have to ask.”
Galgut’s central interest has always been human nature and in The Promise he explores how land affects nation-building, citizenship and identity formation. Even the Swart family cling to their unremarkable piece of land amid tumultuous social and political change: “The farm, which is what they call it, though it is in no meaningful way a real farm, one horse and a few cows and some chickens and sheep, is out there among the low hills and valleys, halfway to the Hartbeespoort Dam.”
The mortality of the body is a key theme, with family tensions exhumed at each of these conflict-ridden gatherings. Manie committed an act of betrayal in marrying Rachel, a Jewish woman. “Afrikaners are a nation apart,” his brother-in-law muses as preparations are made for a Jewish funeral, much to the horror and disappointment of the older Swarts. “He really believes that. He doesn’t understand why Manie had to marry Rachel. Oil and water don’t mix. You can see it in their children, fuck-ups, the lot of them.”
The driver of the car who fetches Rachel’s body reflects on the anguish of death: “He has seen all of it before many times, including the curious pull that a corpse exerts, drawing people towards it. By tomorrow already this will have changed, the body will be long gone and its permanent absence covered over with plans, arrangements, reminiscences and time. Yes, already. The disappearance begins immediately and in a certain sense never ends.
“But in the meantime there is the body, the horrible meaty fact of it, the thing that reminds everyone, even people who didn’t care for the dead woman, and there are always a few of those, that one day they shall lie there too, just like her, emptied out of everything, merely a form, unable even to look at itself. And the mind recoils from its absence, cannot think of itself not thinking, the coldest of voids.”
Manie’s death is an absurd one. The owner of a successful snake park (this is Hartbeespoort after all), he accepts the dodgy family dominee’s dare to prove his faith by sitting in a tank with some of his most venomous attractions. It does not go well and a dying Manie is rushed to hospital: “The ICU is the worst of all, in a zone of greeny undersea gloom, no windows anywhere in sight. The same mournful army of worriers outside, though here, of course, there’s more to worry about.”
Astrid, once a beauty and later a narcissistic housewife, is incapacitated by her fear of death. “I was with him only yesterday … he was alive and breathing, how is it possible that he’s neither of those things now? But Anton can see once more inside his sister, cold and clear as the clapper of a bell, that it’s her own death she’s feeling. If it can happen to our father, it can happen to me. This nothing, this state of Not. She mourns herself in terror.”
Galgut has twice been nominated for the Booker Prize, and in The Promise, the boldness and clarity of his writing once again highlights his mastery of storytelling. There are some wonderful moments of magical realism that appear to fly in and out of the novel almost imperceptibly. A dead Rachel visits wearing different items of clothing from her wardrobe, “an evening gown, a flimsy summer dress, even a shawl she bought on appro once from Truworths and took back the next day”. Written predominantly in the third person, the novel unexpectedly shifts points of view and addresses the reader directly, almost accusingly: “If Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked.”
A complex mix of resentment and hope run through the story, but there are moments too of wonderful humour, particularly when it comes to the peculiar burial rites that us frail beings cling on to. It is a story about the ties that bind families to each other and people to the land. It is about people like us: “In the end, all you can say is that you got through this far, far enough for things to change and become easier, no need to hide any more. Holding on, holding out, an old South African solution.”
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