Getting rid of it

by Lindsey Collen

Jumila, Sadna and Goldilox Soo have big plans. They are sick to death of being the sitting ducks of history. But first they have a problem to deal with, Jumila's problem, contained for now within several plastic bags, but threatening to leak out at any moment and send them all to prison.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Meaghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story takes place, in real time, over a single day, as three young women (all of them marginalized, poor, homeless, the cast-offs of Mauritian society) try to find a way to dispose of the corpse of a dead baby. They didn't kill the baby -- it was a late miscarriage -- but they are quite justly afraid they will be accused of illegal abortion if they take it to the authorities. So they are trying to get rid of this tiny, sad package wrapped in plastic bags, so no one will ever know.

It would have been a good story but it seems Lindsey Collen was more interested in putting forth statements about the problems and inequalities in Mauritian society, particularly for the women, and she did this at the expense of a believable plotline. For example, each of the women had female employers who committed suicide due to repression by men, a coincidence which severely strains the reader's ability to suspend disbelief. And one of the women managed to get pregnant twice before she even had her first period, and it never says how -- one minute she was washing off her brother's pet dog, and the next she was delivering a stillborn baby, which left me wondering if the word "dog" was actually a euphemism for something else. (I still can't figure that one out.) Then she went to live in the woods and soon had another baby, without any man being mentioned in the story.

I really didn't like this very much. The writing style was very confusing and there was too much going on.