A nameless African woman has made herself a refuge of sorts in the hollow trunk of a baobab tree. We don’t know exactly where she is – somewhere in the southern African veld, which teems with dangerous wildlife. We don’t know the period – some time in the past. We piece together her life story and its desperate culmination from dreamlike recollections that flit raggedly in and out of her mind. Snatched from her mother as a child and sold as a slave, she served several masters, often sexually. The children she gave birth to were not hers to bring up. She exists in a perpetual present, without past or future. Stockenström’s imaginative interrogation of slavery is the richer for encompassing the appeal of preferment, of pleasurable sex, of gifts, while at the same time fully aware of its boundless pain and grief. Her highly literary language sets up a tension in relation to the lived experience of her first-person narrator, but it’s a measure of the book’s success that we accept this contrast between character and voice. JM Coetzee’s translation from the original Afrikaans is marvellous.
