The South African short story was invented by Bessie Head or Herman Charles Bosman, or Miriam Tladi or Nadine Gordimer – or in the reclaimed sand of Mitchells Plain, or was it in the dry hinterland, or in exile or ‘back home’, or was it ‘back in the day’, or was it in the throats of the !Xam, or on the wet slasto alongside a pinched swimming pool where the maid slipped or the madam slipped up with the gardener; and then it was between the rounds of buckshot and the sounds of a shot blesbok on a dark farm that called to mind the kicked-up dust of a hundred hooves and the dust-up at Mafeking, of which Solomon Plaatjie wrote in ‘A Black Man’s View of a White Man’s War’, when Winston Churchill was still able to run and when the hamstrung Communists were recalled to Moscow and a sangoma purged an illness from a young girl, whose mother knew another and another?
Which is to say that a collection of this nature is a snapshot, a moment, of stories that might catch your eye and hold your ear. Moreover, a woman’s moment.
Muthal Naidoo’s pensioners in ‘The Bridge-Playing Rain Queens’ live in a fertile land, where ancient cycads grow and lend their name to the area – Cycadia. Arcadian and pedestrian at the same time, this wet place is reigned over by the delightful Ordinary Rain Queen, (ORQ). The shifting landscape of these short stories gives way to the dry bureaucratic landscape of Lusaka, just prior to the return of the ANC exiles in the early 1990s. In Makhosazana Xaba’s story, women are preparing themselves for freedom, but getting bogged down in clauses, while the narrator escapes into a fantasy that is both harrowing and homesick and unfree. Some writers have written the landscape from the air – Willemien de Villiers’s character circles over the big hole at Kimberley, waiting to land – and others are back firmly on the ground, as in Mary Watson Seoighe’s ‘The Lilitree’, where a fantastical tree takes root in the Cape. And parkland and park benches and South African suburbia are scenes of difficult decisions, as with Joanne Fedler’s shoplifter woman. Alex Dodd’s teenage girl narrator feels the pull of the powerful Umgeni River as it passes through her neighbourhood, tamed for a short time, as the character’s emotions appear to be. The action in Henrietta Rose-Innes’s ‘Forensic’ unfolds in a park, the scene of a murder, the isolated landscape of sensation and desensitisation. In Kirsten Miller’s ‘Chance Encounter’, the complex story of the drying up of a writer’s inspiration is simply told, the landscape all the time in the shadow of an urban drizzle. Landscape and climate, the political versions of weather, historical or current, apolitical or steeped in dank guilt, are evident throughout. Anne Schuster’s protestor squares up against the apartheid state in a line of Black Sash women, willingly silent, until further layers of inequality silence her found voice. In Amanda Gersh’s ‘Home Helper’, the comic and utterly sad voice of Julie, a girl scout in the comfortable Cape Town suburbs, listing her needs, but then needing her lists to impress her family and the ubiquitous Brown Owl, delivers an impressive turn as the indomitable Baden-Powell – the little scout, as a little scout for the empire.