Black Life Richly Embroidered

life is on stage: hot lights, crowded with stagehands, a company of dancers, high-ranking Nazi admirers. Genevieve has no privacy, and every step is scripted by her manager. Her escape to the mushroom cave allows the reader to take a breath in the high-tension stakes that ratchet tighter and tighter as the novel goes on.

And finally, this subplot works on a metaphorical level. The French Resistance is “underground.” Mushrooms are cultivated underground, and Genevieve must go underground in order to forgive herself and her family for the pain of the past. Larger than that, the mushrooms are quiet and unassuming, just as Genevieve, her sister, and her mother, are dismissed as unthreatening because of their gender. Yet, all three women use their positions to help those they love by fighting the way they know how.

As Genevieve, the Black Swan, would tell you, it isn’t the mushroom itself that is effective, it’s how you use it. Your subplot can be anything, as long as it is wielded correctly to amplify the other elements of your story.

Katie Stine writes Feminist Regency Pugilist romances under the name Edie Cay. A Lady’s Revenge is a finalist in the Golden Leaf’s Best First Book Award. The Boxer and The Blacksmith is due out in Feb 2021. She is a founding member of Paper Lantern Writers.

BY WANDA WYPORSKA

Physical and Spiritual Colonisation in 19th-Century South Africa

Marguerite Poland is a multi-award winning South African author, with a fine range of books for children, novels (including the bestselling historical novel, Shades (2012)) and non-fiction works under her belt. Her seminal children’s book, The Mantis and the Moon, won the Percy Fitzpatrick Award and the Sankei Honorable Award for translation into Japanese. She is the recipient of two lifetime achievement awards as well as the Ingwazi Award for contribution to the cultural history of KwaZulu-Natal, and the Order of Okhamanga (Silver) for “her excellent contribution to the field of indigenous languages, literature and anthropology”.

Her latest novel, A Sin of Omission, is set in South Africa’s Eastern Cape in the late 19th century and tells the story of the Reverend ‘Stephen’ Malusi Mzamane, a young Black student educated by missionaries. The novel is based somewhat on the life of the Reverend Stephen Mtutuko Mnyakama, Deacon of the Anglican Church at Holy Trinity Mission, Nondyola, Fort Beaufort. Poland’s ancestors were Anglican missionaries in the Eastern Cape 1862-1916 and she was moved by her great-uncle’s account of his own missionary grandfather’s young Black students. As she recalls, “it haunted me despite the sketchy details. Forty years later, in 2003, I was commissioned to write an institutional history in the course of which I had to touch on the education of Black people by the Anglican missionaries in the 19th century. I came across an entry in a hand-written manuscript which made me realise I was reading about the student my great-uncle had Poland admits to being neither a biographer nor an historian, and despite extensive archival research, she concluded that there were simply too many gaps in the records to write a biography. However, she decided to reimagine his story, wanting to “remain as scrupulous as I could to the events, tone and themes that emerged from the material”. Poland is uniquely qualified to write about the subject, as her previous masters and doctoral research focused on indigenous South African culture, languages and folklore. As she tells me, “everything I have written – including children’s books - has had its genesis in my fascination for these subjects and my great love for the region in which I grew up – the Eastern Cape.”

Mzamane’s story envelopes us in the age-old struggles of conflicted loyalties within the family, community and social groups, against the backdrop of a struggle for the very heart and soul of a country riven and deeply damaged by physical and spiritual colonisation. The novel explores the internal hierarchies of the Church of England, and its interactions with the cultures and peoples it sought to dominate through its missionary work. Poland paints a fascinating picture of the complex layers of personal motivation, ambitions and desire for liberation, whether national or personal, seen through the eyes of Mzamane. It is a wonderfully rich exploration of the time, the missionary “project” and the internal struggles of a missioneducated African Christian.

At times the liberal use of Xhosa can distract from the prose, but Poland’s intention was to mark when the speakers were not communicating in English, and to convey the tone of what might have been said. Given the backdrop, the issue of racism rears its head, but this is where the novel feels a little flat for me, as a Black woman. Of course it would be anachronistic to expect an analysis of racism as we understand in 20th- or 21st-century terms, but having the experience to draw on would have added to the richness of the main character. “In writing the novel I was deeply aware of and sensitive to the responsibility in tackling a story outside my time, gender, ethnicity and experience,” the author notes. “I was particularly aware of this given the very real sensitivities of such issues in South Africa with its tragic history and ongoing divisions. But, like any novelist, I had to make choices about the ‘appropriation’ of someone else’s life. I did not want him to be forgotten – and the obscurity of the resources made that very likely if I hadn’t tackled the project.”

The beautiful descriptions of the country and the deep historical knowledge displayed set the scene and context in a way that draws the reader in. The novel commemorates a Black life, which would otherwise have been lost, and also inspired a set of four tapestries, which form another lasting tribute to Mzamane/Mnyakama. Contemporary South African artist weavers at the Keiskamma Trust, reclaimed him as their own, creating a thread between him and the present day, amplifying his story though traditional crafts. Poland takes up the story, “over more than twenty years they have created tapestries and wall hangings that are internationally renowned. Three of the tapestries illustrate events in the novel. The fourth depicts members of the present congregation at Holy Trinity Church in the village of Mazoka, Fort Beaufort district, where the story is set. When the artists visited the church, they agreed that the story had to include the community that lives there now and bring the story fullcircle. I own this vibrant piece and love it.”

“I first saw the four tapestries at my book launch, hung together in the stone chapel at St Andrew’s College in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown). They glowed like the stained-glass windows around them. I was deeply moved and it was wonderful to share the moment with the artists themselves who had been inspired to interpret the

WITHOUT A DOUBT, the real Elizabeth Macarthur must have been a remarkable woman, but she’s always been a mystery. What did she think and feel?

story through their own experience and imagery.”

As always, history reminds us that defining and regarding people as “the other” can have fatal consequences and causes lasting damage to society. A lesson we still have not learned.

Set in 1859, Marguerite Poland’s novel, A Sin of Omission, is published in South Africa by Penguin Random House. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Dr Wanda Wyporska’s Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland 15001800 was shortlisted for the Katherine Briggs Award. She is currently working on a trilogy of novels based on her collection of trials.

PASSION, SPIRIT & HUMOUR

BY BETHANY LATHAM

Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves

If we played word association and I said “Australia’s colonial period,” most responses might be “convict.” Yet there is much more to 1790s Australia, and Kate Grenville explores it through the eyes of one woman: Elizabeth Macarthur. Australians are familiar with Elizabeth’s husband, John, whom history credits as the father of Australia’s wool industry. Streets and public parks bear his name. Yet in Grenville’s view, John Macarthur “had one thing going for him: a ruthless single-mindedness in pursuit of his own advancement.” She notes that he was “a larger-than-life character blustering and bullying his way through the little world of early Sydney…In my childhood, Macarthur was considered a hero, but values change, and Australians today wouldn’t put him on any kind of pedestal.” Grenville chooses to focus on Macarthur’s wife: “Without a doubt, the real Elizabeth Macarthur must have been a remarkable woman, but she’s always been a mystery…What did she think and feel?”

Grenville answers this question through A Room Made of Leaves, presented as a memoir after the discovery of (fictional) long-lost letters. Elizabeth’s actual letters, which Grenville excerpts in the novel, are “bland.” She says, “Elizabeth was, in my view, a canny writer of fiction. Her letters are nothing but cheerful…Those letters are masterpieces of decorous pretence, because...Elizabeth knew they were public things, written with the knowledge that they would be read aloud in the family parlour...[T]he one weapon a woman of that time had was irony, and I came to believe that, like her equally canny contemporary Jane Austen, she’d perfected the art of saying one thing and meaning something quite different. As I read the faded spidery old words of the originals of her letters, I often felt that I could hear her laughing.”

Elizabeth is ripped from her “genteel world” and dropped “into the brutal, squalid, hungry place that was Sydney.” The catalyst for this is a young officer, John Macarthur. He is not particularly handsome, yet she is drawn to him, and a single mistake changes the course of Elizabeth's life: now pregnant, she has no choice but to marry a near stranger and accompany him halfway across the globe. Macarthur’s softer sentiments reveal themselves as pretense – he’s a Wickham minus the charm. Grenville explains, “Her marriage to John Macarthur is assumed to have been a passionate love-match and they’ve always been presented as a devoted couple…I had to put aside all the old ideas about the Macarthurs’ marriage and see it as something much more interesting but much more complicated.” Thus, there is no connubial sympathy for Elizabeth during the death of a child and a difficult sea voyage that lands her in a garrisoned backwater whose inhabitants, many of them convicts, are always one delayed resupply ship away from starvation. “I had to imagine my way into the bitter regret she must have felt, but also the strength and resilience she found, and her skilful determination to shape a rewarding life for herself against the odds,” says Grenville. This complete isolation from comfort and familiarity is a heavy burden for Elizabeth. “Like most of the early settlers,” Grenville notes, “she could only see the ways in which Australia’s landscape was different from England’s, and inferior to it. But over the course of the book she comes to recognise its beauty…she realises that this new landscape is truly home, the place whose dust she’ll willingly become part of.”

This settlement comes at a cost, both personal and societal – Grenville is careful to detail that, by making Australia her home, Elizabeth “dispossessed the indigenous people.” Elizabeth is allowed to interact with these people through her relationship with William Dawes, a man who offers her an intellectual and emotional engagement that her toxic, grasping husband is incapable of providing. Grenville fans may recognize Dawes; he’s the main character in her novel, The Lieutenant. Dawes is a soldier, but he is also, Grenville notes, “a man of sensitivity and the kind of intelligence that finds a new world fascinating rather than threatening.” Together, Dawes and Elizabeth explore this new world and each other, and Elizabeth realizes she need not be constrained by what, Grenville says, “society expected of women – to be compliant, obedient, pious and – if they could manage it – decorative.” She can have a life with more fulfillment; she can experience the “pleasure of straining to comprehend” the natural world and other, deeper pursuits and connections.

The contentiousness that makes John such an unpalatable husband eventually works in Elizabeth’s favor. Grenville elaborates: “When her husband spent two long stints in London (the first time – four years – because he shot his commanding officer in a duel, and the second – nine years – because he deposed the governor), it was Elizabeth who developed the gigantic Macarthur sheep empire into the richest in the colony.” Through clever breeding, Grenville’s Elizabeth becomes the mother of the Australian wool industry, helping the fledgling colony to prosper and providing herself with security.

At its core, Grenville says, her novel is “very much a book about emigration, about leaving the heartland of your childhood and having the courage and the largeness of spirit to embrace another place and another way of being.” Grenville wants her readers to feel, as she did after researching for this book, “that one individual woman has been rescued (even if fictionally) from the great silence that surrounds the interior lives of all our foremothers.” While the path may not have been an easy one, “Elizabeth Macarthur navigated an extraordinary world and a tumultuous life with passion, spirit and humour.”