It is rare when a writer accurately captures the hopes and anxieties of an entire nation but everything is here in This Place I Call Home, the first published collection of short stories by the promising South African writer Meg Vandermerwe.
It is rarer yet when a writer can do it so prolifically in so brief a book. The collection runs only a bit over 150 pages but in it Vandermerwe presents 10 forceful portraits of South Africa’s past, present and future.
In the powerful The Red Earth, we meet a young woman who lies dying of Aids in a clinic, fighting in silence to keep both her mortality and the bored nurses from stealing her pride. In her dying, she imagines the blood of all the victims in her village staining South Africa’s soil a deep red. “Everything dies,” Vandermerwe writes.
“That is what you learn if you lie in bed all day with nothing to do but look out through the locked window or watch the sick growing only sicker with each new full moon. Everything comes to its end — daylight, sun, night, rain.”
So many of her stories are about people searching desperately for a way out of their suffering, whether it is an old, pathetic Jewish widower lamenting the way things used to be, or a man shivering on the side of the road, watching smoke rise from his house that was burnt down to make way for World Cup tourists.
And in every story Vandermerwe demonstrates her talent for imaging the other. Hijack Story is a swift, furious portrait of a wealthy Indian doctor in post-apartheid South Africa as he lies, face planted on the hot pavement while hijackers struggle to steal his Mercedes-Benz.
But tucked in between the tales of woe, paranoia and mistrust are small but profound moments of grace, redemption, and then pride, both lost and won back again.
These are certainly what make the book and, in a larger sense, South Africa.
In The Mango Tree primary school teacher Mathapelo defends child victims of xenophobic violence against a school principal in a last-ditch attempt to redeem herself for her own inaction. And in The Holiday, one of the most powerful stories, there is the domestic worker, once promised a trip to Europe by her lonely, selfish white madam, who saves up enough money to send herself to Paris.
Vandermerwe is now working on her first novel, which she has said focuses on African immigrants and is set during the World Cup. Fiction-lovers from every country should look forward to its publication. Besides her obvious versatility as a writer, Vandermerwe’s prose is deeply felt, compassionate and sincere; it is clear she is struggling to make sense of her country, just as much as her characters are.
As one character, imprisoned for life for teaching fellow-workers words from an English dictionary, tells it: “It is not, you see, my friend, an enviable task to choose between the unbearable realities of the present or the unbearable losses and memories of the past.” If this unenviable task is what Vandermerwe chooses for herself as a writer, she will certainly succeed.