For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.
— From “Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery
Almost at once she began tapping her fingers on the crutch handles, her throat dry and wanting. She glanced across at the queue, hoping to catch an eye, to ask if someone had a cigarette, but no one looked at her. Nothing else to see in the dawn other than rooftops starting to appear slowly, a series of them, going back and back into the gray light, each straddling something dark and stillborn — the empty rooms of empty homes. So many people had left. Yet even in the ones that were inhabited, there was only darkness. Everyone was here now, in this queue. There was no other life.
Set in a near-future drought-stricken South Africa, Crooked Seeds begins like a dark dystopia, following a one-legged woman as she joins the early morning queue at a water truck. This Deidre is bitter and abusive — a self-proclaimed “thing of need and desperation” — and as she makes aggressively self-pitying demands on the people around her, it begins to dawn on the reader that, yes, there’s a water shortage and wildfires and government incompetence putting pressure on these citizens, but for the most part, the dystopia that Deidre lives in is of her own making. I was very impressed by the allegorical nature of Karen Jennings’ Booker Prize nominated An Island and Crooked Seeds continues in this tradition, with Deidre standing in for a certain kind of post-colonial white South African; resentful of what she has lost and willfully oblivious to the guilt of her forefathers. This is quite a short novel but it packs a powerful punch; light spoilers ahead. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
She woke with the thirst already upon her, still in her clothes, cold from having slept on top of the covers. Two days, three, since she had last changed; the smell of her overcast with sweat, fried food, cigarettes. Underwear’s stink strong enough that it reached her even before she moved to squat over an old plastic mixing bowl that lived beside the bed. She steadied her weight on the bed frame with one hand, the other holding on to the seat of a wooden chair that creaked as she lowered herself. She didn’t have to put the light on, knew by the burn and smell that the urine was dark, dark as cough syrup, as sickness.
Deidre’s life is suffused with her own stink and filth: living alone in public housing — her father is dead, her mother in a nursing home, her adult daughter is in England (Deidre refusing invitations to join her there), and her “genius” older brother hasn’t been seen since the incident that cost Deidre her leg at eighteen years old — she hobbles along on her crutches, bumming cigarettes from the security guard, bullying the young mother down the hallway to help her with chores, begging the bartender at the local club to extend her just a bit more credit to quench her “thirst”. When police detectives start to ask Deidre questions about the house she grew up in — a property that had been expropriated by the government because of its location over an untapped aquifer — she will be forced to reckon with what kind of man her brother, affiliated with a pro-apartheid group in the 90’s, really was.
There are subtle hints of racism in this narrative: The self-pitying Deidre is on disability — living in public housing, blowing her government cheques on cigarettes and boxed wine — but everyone she takes advantage of (the security guard, the neighbour, the bartender, her daughter) is revealed to be a hard-working Black person. Even the detectives are Black (when one of them is referred to as Constable Xaba, pronounced with “a small click in the side of the mouth”, Deidre scoffs that it would be easier for her to pronounce it Zaba, “With a name like that, she must be used to it by now”) and, post-apartheid, her demoted social standing is the real dystopia:
There had been stories about that in the tabloids. About white people losing their jobs, not being able to find any others, of losing everything and having to live on the streets, where they were starving to death. There were photos of white children begging, of white women working as domestics for black families. A world on its head. A world that had been feared by some and that was easy to point at now, these few cases, and to say, “You see, you see.”
The novel’s title is inspired by the poem “Soonest Mended”, excerpted in its epigraph (and above), and this analysis of the poem (noting that it “explores alienation, learning the lessons of life and personal history”) was influential in my understanding of the novel. Seemingly the story of one person (highly unlikeable because she refuses to take responsibility for herself) being forced to make a reckoning with her family’s past, the themes of Crooked Seeds can be extrapolated to any colonised country: the first step in moving forward is acknowledging and taking responsibility for the traumas of the past. Really well done; especially impressive in such a short work.
