Between the lines: Morabo Morojele, respected drummer and author, has published his second novel, ‘Three Egg Dilemma’. Photos: Supplied
So, this is one of those weeks when I’m reading, rather than listening. When that happens, I’ve usually got a good excuse: either the book is about music or written by a musician.
The musician, in this case, is drummer (and development scholar and a few things besides) Morabo Morojele. The book is his second novel, Three Egg Dilemma, published in June, a full 17 years after his fiction debut, How We Buried Puso.
The wait was too long, but worth it.
Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor has noted the dangers of reductive genre labels, and the way the term magical realism “gets slapped on to certain non-Western writing … just to give it a name”.
Both that label and another, “dystopian fiction”, fit somewhere in discussing Morojele’s novel, but neither alone or combined do they do the book any sort of justice.
There’s a ghost that pops in and out of the narrative, haunting one of the narrators. It’s visible and tangible to some of his companions but not to others and serving as a terrifying (albeit frail) horseman of the apocalypse, trailing personal and community misfortune in its wake.
The book is set in a place identifiable as Lesotho, but not exactly the Lesotho of here and now.
Some features — depopulated, isolated and impoverished rural areas, corrupt, rogue and simply absent authorities, Covid — confirm the setting. Others take the consequences of a breakdown of community and the rule of law to a far more universal place that could be Lesotho, or parts of KwaZulu-Natal after the June 2021 riots, or Sudan right now, or the fragments of the former Yugoslavia.
Dystopia doesn’t only happen in Africa and never did.
The book can’t be reduced to either of those elements. It’s essentially the story of two people and their community negotiating that context.
EG was pretentiously named “example” by his father to echo the English translation of his surname and impose an unattainable ideal he can never live up to.
EG is a well-educated, semi-retired been-to, living on his family plot. He could have been a contender, in love and in status, but it never happened.
Now he lives modestly and, like many old bachelors, intermittently fulminates and obsesses about things around him.
He can be snobbish and tetchy, but he’s not a bad man, and doesn’t always resist (though often regrets) his genuine impulses to help others.
Enter Puleng-who-becomes-Pearl, driven from her own village by the same social breakdown.
Stranded at the edges of one of the intermittent military rampages against EG’s community, she seeks help and he takes her in.
How We Buried Puso laudably foregrounded the strength of community women even when they were at the margins of the plot.
Three Egg Dilemma (a metaphor for how things might be apportioned out) does something far more subtle and subversive. It lays out the myriad ways a kindly but all-too-human fellow like EG can stereotype and hurt a woman staying in his home (“the woman-child” he calls her): night-time fantasies, harassing her near to assault, unquestioningly accepting household labour, patronisingly giving her his mother’s pearls.
Close to the book’s conclusion, Morojele lets Puleng sing out a powerful voice and agency that slaps back every single one of them.
EG assumes she is uneducated but “of course I have dilemmas,” she asserts. “All his books, he thinks I haven’t been to school.”
And more: Puleng, as she describes her choices, completely deconstructs the three-egg dilemma. I don’t think Morojele would have titled the book as such if that gender relationship and that plot hinge weren’t central to the story he’s telling us.
To say more about where it all goes would spoil the read. No way is it an easy read, anyway. Despite beautifully put-together words, the story of civil collapse is visceral, bloody, and most frightening for the way the writing conveys how we — all of us, everywhere, who think we’re immune — are just a stone’s throw away from that future. If we aren’t already living it as a present, that is.
EG and Puleng aren’t the only characters. There’s a motley collection of drinking companions, relatives, storekeepers, tenants, pastors and more, each responding in their way to the convulsions around them.
Mkhulu, the elder who keeps EG’s smallholding going, is the most clearly symbolic: his shrewd good sense and fortitude signal from early in the book that people have the capacity to fight through, cope and survive. But all, with all their idiosyncrasies, are deftly and observantly realised. Even if they’re only with us for a few pages, we remember them. The subtext is people matter.
There’s less explicit music in this text than in the first novel, but it’s still the writing of a musician and still carries a soundtrack: the sounds of gunfire; the sounds of rain; the sound of the ghost’s voice; even the many tiny sounds heard in ostensible night-time silence. The writing carries a reader into its soundscape: “It rained and it rained as if to scour the earth and cleanse it of all its illnesses … inside the house, I could have danced to the rain dripping through the leaks in my roof, plock plock on the carpets and fast ting tings on the enamel vessel I laid about to catch the worst of it.”
Yes, Morojele’s still a drummer.
Three Egg Dilemma has all the magical realism of its ghost — a neat post-modern literary device, constructed “to point at and name things that you do not want to see”.
And the narrative certainly paints a dystopia, some of which we already inhabit, the rest of which we all too easily could. But it also has another, wholly non-dystopian message.
Speculative fiction writer Cory Doctorow asked, in Walkaway, whether you’d visit your neighbour in the middle of an apocalyptic disaster with a covered dish of food or a gun.
The only way to survive, he argued, is to pick the dish of food even if your neighbour might pick the gun.
“If she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can both [share a meal].”
This book tells us we’re not inevitably doomed.
It’s the comradeship of your mates — the solid ones, and the rat-arsed drunk, mean, miserable misfits — that’ll help to get you through.