Mind Picker: The Promise

Do you promise me, Manie?

Holding on to him, skeleton hands grabbing, like in a horror film.

Ja, I'll do it.

Because I really want her to have something. After everything she's done.

I understand, he says.

Promise me you'll do it. Say the words.

I promise, Pa says, choked-sounding.

The Promise is engagingly post-modern: author Damon Galgut never lets you forget that you’re reading a novel — the POV flows between a first-, second-, and third-person perspective, sometimes singular, sometimes plural (sometimes all in one paragraph); this fluid narrator adding asides, sometimes beginning a thought before backtracking and beginning again; voicing opinions that could belong to a character or the narrator (or the reader…) — and Galgut’s refusal to allow the reader to suspend disbelief works to underline the fact that he’s not here to passively entertain but to actively engage in a conversation with his audience. Even the format of this book — four chapters revolving around the funerals of four characters, each about ten years apart and conveniently aligning with significant events in recent South African history; the specific fate of this one white Afrikaner family mirroring the general fate of the country outside their household; the characters more archetypes than recognisable people — feels deliberately unnovelistic and provocative; and it totally worked for me. If Galgut was attempting a conversation, everything in me was responding; and that’s no small thing to experience.

Amor is thirteen years old, history has not yet trod on her. She has no idea what country she’s living in. She has seen black people running away from the police because they’re not carrying their passbooks and heard adults talking in urgent, low voices about riots in the townships and only last week at school they had to learn a drill about hiding under tables in case of attack, and still she doesn’t know what country she’s living in. There’s a State of Emergency and people are being arrested and detained without trial and there are rumours flying around but no solid facts because there is a blackout on news and only happy, unreal stories are being reported, but she mostly believes these stories. She saw her brother’s head bleeding yesterday from a rock, but still, even now, she doesn’t yet know who threw the rock or why. Blame it on the lightning. She’s always been a slow child.

The Promise starts in 1986 as Amor Swart is brought home from boarding school after the death of her mother. Months earlier, watching from the corner of her mother’s sickroom, Amor witnessed the titular promise — that the family’s Black maid, Salome, would be given title to the ramshackle cabin that she and her family occupy on the Swart farm — but when Amor reminds her father of this promise after her mother’s funeral, he tries to backtrack on it and eventually sends Amor away again. The timeline will jump ahead to 1995 (with South Africa winning the Rugby World Cup in the background), then to 2004 (with the controversy-laden presidency of Thabo Mbeki), and then to 2018 (and the resignation of President Jacob Zuma). And in each chapter, Amor — who leaves the wealth and privilege of her upbringing to work as a nurse in HIV wards — will return for a funeral and remind her remaining family of the still unfulfilled promise. I should note that while POV does shift among a wide cast of characters, we never get the perspective of the aging maid, Salome, and must watch as she silently suffers being treated little better than a slave, no matter the rising fortunes of Black people beyond the farm’s boundaries.

You understand, he says, people don’t always take what you give them. Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time.
Yes, she says. But a promise is a promise.

As I said above, the characters feel like archetypes, and if the unfulfilled promise to Salome is meant to mirror a more general promise to Black South Africans in the aftermath of apartheid, then the three Swart siblings seem to represent different aspects of the white response to what is owed a people who had been institutionally held down and held back by their own ancestors. Anton, the eldest, says all the right things about what is owed to Salome, but he can’t work up the energy to put his words into action. Astrid, the next in line, is openly racist and hostile to the idea of Salome getting anything; she’s lucky the family keeps her on as she ages and slows. And Amor, from the beginning, wanted the promise to be fulfilled; but while she spends all of her time doing good works, Amor continually broaches the idea of doing the right thing for Salome without demanding it. Not until she’s the last one left, that is, and by then, maybe the gesture comes too late.

It isn't much, she says. I know that. Three rooms and a broken roof. On a tough piece of land. Yes. But for the first time, it'll belong to your mother. Her name on the title deed. Not my family's. That isn't nothing.

Yes, Salome agrees, speaking Setswana. It isn't nothing.

It is nothing, Lukas says. Smiling again, in that cold, furious way. It's what you don't need any more, it's what you don't mind throwing away. Your leftovers. That's what you're giving my mother, thirty years too late. As good as nothing.

It’s not like that, Amor says.

It is like that. And still you don’t understand, it’s not yours to give. It already belongs to us. This house, but also the house where you live, and the land it’s standing on. Ours! Not yours to give out as a favour when you’re finished with it. Everything you have, white lady, is already mine. I don’t have to ask.

That’s pretty much where the narrative ends, and if that is the prevailing vibe in South Africa, it seems a reasonable (if rather intimidating from a white perspective) response to generations of violent oppression and unfulfilled promises. I would like to note something I’m still confused about — the various religious mania. The mother goes back to her Jewish faith before she dies, the father becomes Born Again after Amor is struck by lightning as a child and eventually expresses his faith with snake-handling; Astrid converts to Roman Catholicism and Anton’s wife gets deep into New Age spiritualism — and I never understood why any of that happened. Still, I was completely engaged by this read, this “conversation”, and am rounding up to four stars.