As genres go, the historical novel perhaps presents as many pitfalls as triumphs. One obvious merit is that the material is ‘already there”, waiting, as it were, to be used. It is easy, however, to fall into a straitjacket, to misrepresent the spirit, the language and sometimes even the events of the time.
British literary critic Theo Tait argues that one of the ways in which the historical novel works is to take a well-known story, give a marginalised character centre stage and let him or her tell the story.
This is what Yvette Christiansë, author of Unconfessed (Kwela Books), has done in her novel, an ambitious and intelligent book, finalist at this year’s Hemingway/Pen International Award for First Fiction. Fetchingly compared with Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Unconfessed is a fictional take of Sila van der Kaap, a Cape slave woman. She was condemned to die by the courts in the 19th century for infanticide. Sila’s sentence was later commuted to 14 years on Robben Island.
In a way this novel is an attempt to grapple with a painful slave past that, in South Africa, remains largely unwritten; Sila, appropriately enough, speaks of the continent’s southern tip as the ‘Cape of Tears, Cape of Death, Cape of Struggles”.
‘There is no tradition of the slave narrative,” Christiansë says. She says Unconfessed is her coming to terms with a narrative form that is largely unknown in South Africa. As she wrote the book, the questions foremost in her mind were what if there were a slave narrative and if so, the possible form it would take.
‘It was a story I couldn’t resist,” she says of the book she researched for more than 10 years and which involved poring through court records from the 19th century.
‘I am suspicious about being well received by Americans,” she says, expressing surprise at the warm reception of the book in the United States. ‘I thought the book would be completely foreign to them,” she says, ascribing that largely to the ‘stilted way in which Sila speaks”. She ‘wanted Sila to trouble the English”. I was so engrossed in the conversation that I forgot to ask whether Christiansë meant the language or the people.
Christiansë says writing the book presented a different set of challenges. ‘It challenged me technically and ethically,” she says in the tones of a professor; she teaches at Fordham University in the US. She began writing the novel in the third person and changed into the first person when she thought that a detached narrator was ‘shielding me from the proximity of the experience,” she says during our interview in Parktown West, Johannesburg, where she was staying with friends.
Two days later, at a reading of the book at Wits University’s English department, she says working in a tradition where the slave narrative is virtually absent was liberating. Using the first-person narrator involved listening to Sila. ‘I just sat listening to Sila. She put me in the experience and I didn’t want to be there.”
There is so much to shock — ‘a man would rather a good dog than a woman” — and helpings of striking metaphors such as ‘the wind that blew in like a bad relative” and ‘I have never liked tongue. I do not eat anything that can taste me back”.
There is a certain succinctness only the world-weary have a capacity for: for instance, when Sila says, ‘it is hard to be a mother in this country”. The book retains a certain orality that is vivid even across languages: ‘Hunger is a demon with two heads. One head lives in a person’s stomach, one head lives in a person’s heart.”
During the interview I say to Christiansë that I felt sometimes Sila spoke above her station. These could be my prejudices, but I point out that she is unschooled, so how does she manage it? For instance, referring to her child she says: ‘Baby, I am your mother. I am the one who should know all things about you because I was there, but I am already less than your mother because I do not know which one is your father.”
Or, ‘after all these years, my body still has no say in what happens to it”. Her awareness of the fluidity of history is striking: ‘There is no behind. This is behind. And there is no forward.” Her questioning the very logic of slavery would confound the abolitionists and slave owners alike: ‘Do you think there could be something inside us that makes us slaves and them our masters and misses?”
Christiansë says this is her attempt at validating what she calls ‘discredited” and ‘folk knowledge” and a challenge to a system that said ‘few people are capable of thinking if they are not white”. ‘I am trying to say that slavery was wrong in assuming that blacks didn’t know what was being done to them,” she says.
What really caught my attention was the book’s version of asserting femaleness. The word feminism seems a bit anachronistic and, anyway, Christiansë expresses dislike for it, arguing that this is the kind of book she could not have written from an ideological viewpoint. I won’t be surprised when female and male feminists celebrate her. For instance, when Sila says ‘life is a disease women get from men”, or when she says that ‘after one day in the company of this man, I was jealous and afraid. And why? It is to do with the way the world sets itself around men. Are men like the moon and women like the stars?”
Or this crowning statement on her several relationships with men: ‘These men have been with me, but I have never been with them.”
It is a moving tale, one of the kind the whole range of emotions — from outrage, hatred, love and respect to despair — can’t quite contain. An uneasy read, but who says slavery, infanticide and death are easy?.