Parched Earth (2001)

Elieshi Lema

Although subtitled "A Love Story", this book (published in Dar es Salaam by the Tanzanian author) is no African Barbara Cartland-type novel, but an examination of love yearned for, gained, lost, unfulfilled or compensatory, and occurring in many contexts, such as parent-child relationships, friendships, as well as more conventional heterosexual bonding. In many ways this text is a serious meditation on the way particularly (but not only) women survive in a world where the love-need is so central and so urgent, yet is so frequently thwarted - and so seldom lasts.

Relationships do turn around and grow on people, growing in them and around them. They grow by them, like partners, attaining life and character, breathing in definite impulses like a third entity. The eye of my senses could see this between Godbless [the narrator, Doreen's brother] and mother. I had always been able to feel it, but it was nameless in my mind. (102)

The generally meditative, sometimes dryly informative and at other times tenderly lyrical voice is that of Doreen Seko, a mature Tanzanian woman who thinks back over her life in her middle age. Doreen grows up in an extremely poor, but just adequately fed, single-parent family. In the small village where she lives as a child, the mystery behind their unusual circumstances - with a toiling, unmarried mother and no father in evidence, whereas all her school companions live with both their parents - is initially not even noticeable by her, for Doreen's mother works hard to mask their actually deprived circumstances from her children. And when Doreen does begin to ask questions, her mother's powerful but (self-?) protectively secretive nature still blocks her own personal and their family history from her daughter.

Much later, Doreen learns the romantic/tragic story: at barely fifteen, Foibe (Doreen's mother) was wooed and later impregnated by a man ten years her elder, married and with a child, deeply and desperately in love with her (he had been the village Casanova before his marriage, and the young girl Foibe his first true love). Foibe returned his love, so sweetly innocent that she did not even know what was happening to her when her body began to change with pregnancy - and as ignorant of the social pressures that would be gradually but inexorably brought to bear on them. Pregnant, Foibe is ruthlessly ejected from the family by her (Christian) father, while her lover fails to stand by her; only her kind and worldly-wise aunt will take her in. Here she gives birth to her son, ironically named Godbless - Doreen's elder brother. Doreen herself is born as a result of a brief but failed reunion between the thwarted lovers. The children's father returns to his wife and his other children, completely removing himself from Foibe's life.

Only when she becomes an adult does Doreen begin to understand her mother's immense and unusual courage. For in a village where this is "not done", she dares to raise her four children (for she later bears two more sons by different - but to her elder children, unknown - fathers) by herself. And more importantly, theirs is a home where melancholy or a sense of abandonment is not allowed to reign. Doreen reports that she had heard her mother express her determination: "My children will find laughter in my house" (134). And the children are inextricably bonded to their mother in a "cluster" (92).

The story of Doreen's parents' growing love is lyrically and tenderly depicted; when it begins to wane and wither under social pressure, "the girl [Foibe, at fifteen] carried sadness like a tarnished sheen underneath the youthfulness of her face" (113). For her married lover's part, Foibe's face "stood before his eyes like an apparition" (114). But Doreen's mother's strong spirit began to surface within that sphere of abandonment and rejection: "She refused to take loss of love as her lot, refused to believe that loving was wrong … even when the man was tamed and failed to stand up for her" (37). So Foibe learns to cope with "the poison of social cruelty" - for all her gentleness, hers was a spirit "too wild to tame and strap into conformity" (118).

If Foibe manages to "defy the rules set by the male order against her femaleness", her aunt (Great Aunt Mai to Doreen) is the realist or conformist or cynic - and Doreen does think of her great-aunt in all these ways at different times - who has resigned herself to the point of view that "A woman is a social orphan, truly" (5).

Doreen's own love (and life) story unfolds along lines that touch now on her mother's, now on her great-aunt's perspectives. Following her domestic, rural and quiet girlhood, the initially timid young woman falls into love like a water current swept over a cliff - irresistibly; profoundly. And in daring to love so wholeheartedly and in (much later) realising that the commitment is irreversible, her love story resembles her mother's. Initially seeming more fortunate than her mother in her choice of lover - for Martin is not only tender and passionate but devoted - she moves into a marriage (with him) that is at the beginning quite unusually blissful and playful. Things change somewhat, but perhaps only for the better, when they have a daughter. Then, inexorably, the pressures of marital - which is to say, gender - conformity begin to make themselves felt. The ostensible cause of the tarnishing of their love is their inability (failure?) to have a boy-child. Doreen had realised, even in her mother's household, that sons are favoured over daughters (and from her friends, that fathers are the household gods of nuclear families). As Doreen feels both passion and love waning between herself and Martin, she sees them both as becoming "orphans of our senses" (141), deprived now of the deep and loving sexual delight that had connected them. For intercourse is not producing the required son-and-heir. Martin strays; acquires a young girl-friend; Doreen sinks into despair and obesity. "Doreen Seko herself", she feels of this time, "went under ground", while "the silent struggle slowly mutated [her] into … Mrs Patrick" (Patrick being Martin's surname, although his is as much a Tanzanian village background as her own).

This dreary period in Doreen's life is vaguely paralleled with her brother Godbless's almost harrowing need to be acknowledged by the father who had, since his early childhood, denied him. In Doreen's case, her earlier intensely powerful (but vague) yearning to love and be loved is likened to a "daemon", but "the sharp want of love", likened to "a small bubble in the deep inside" (20), is a description equally applicable to her brother's unassuaged hunger for paternal love and a close filial relationship with his absent father. When Godbless eventually surmounts the hurt he feels at having been rejected and goes to confront his father - provoking only anger at the way this disrupts the older man's domestic peace and comfort - Godbless is healed of his anguish. He sees that this is not a man who could have given him what he needed. In Doreen's case, the ironic title of the novel's second section - "Daemon at the Hearth" - predicts how, in her case, marital and social pressures extinguish the flame of passion (and, very nearly, the will to live). She describes this process of deterioration as occurring when the "magic" in their relationship was "threatened into hiding by social norms which defined our place in the stifling web [of conformity to conventional marital gender roles] and in which we put more trust than in our hearts" (72). It is the "social web", says Doreen, that forces women (and men) to "hide exuberance" (158). When love has been "doused" (160), a following phase ensues, Doreen finds (as her mother did before her) - this is the "journey of knowledge" which is "the return into self and the meeting with truths" (167).

All too easily, this second personal journey can remain a mere groove of apathy. However, Doreen recalls her feisty mother's attitude, which non-verbally conveyed to the much younger Doreen an insight that has now become a reinvigorating memory: that it is necessary to "fight life with life" (169). When she has a chance meeting with a distinguished, divorced man on a bus, new possibilities slowly begin to show themselves to Doreen. This man, too, has lost the love of a spouse whom he loved and relied on. He teaches Doreen the theoretical term - patriarchy - for what she had named the "web" that ensnares both men and women. As Doreen had realised earlier, Joseph (her new friend) knows that in this web, "even those privileged can become victims" (182). Because the web stifles what is most precious and fragile in relationships of all kinds - reciprocity - we are given to understand why the name of a painting done by Joseph (just after he had learned that his wife had taken a lover), Parched Earth Needing Water, became the title of this novel.

This novel - so low-key and unremarkable-seeming initially - gathers great persuasive power as it moves along and as its intimate, female voice probes more and more deeply into the painful life-lessons that are its territory. The effect of the writing is like the slow-motion explosion of a bomb; the way it centralises the experiences of women results from no second-hand, theoretical feminism, but grows from a deep conviction that "the stories of motherhood are what marks women and shape their lives. And when these stories are traced within the matrix", says Doreen, "they are found to loop the lives of all women's children, female and male" (93).

In a text that concentrates on relationships and inner feelings to the extent that Parched Earth does, there is little room for the description of settings and detailed social contexts; these are generally lightly sketched or suggested by means of occasional details, such as the occurrence of Swahili expressions in the English text. One beautiful description features early in the text, where Doreen's childhood circumstances are indicated. A typical, peaceful evening in their village home is experienced as the time when, "other than that presence [of the resting cows] in the darkness, the night was like a warm wall around the out kitchen where the fire and the murmurings of the cooking food softened our mood as we talked quietly to each other" (49).

This novel has a memorable, paradoxical effect: it is sweet and harsh, lyrical yet cynical; at times seemingly superficial, it also plunges its reader into unexpected depths where one is made to confront uncomfortable feelings and difficult truths. For a first novel, it is a remarkable text.



LitNet: 30 March 2005

Have your say! To comment on this review, write to webvoet@litnet.co.za, and become a part of our interactive opinion page.

to the top

© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf.