SA reads discussion

Welcome to week 3.
I'll add some thoughts later today.

The book certainly lives up to its name. It's strewn with corpses. The sad thing is that it is still a pretty accurate description of everyday life in SA. A bit like reading the Daily Sun's headlines on the way to work.

Our local news last week featured the brutal murder of 17 year old Justin Langley. And yet this was not the story of the week, neither was Nkandla. It was Kim K...
I feel like the everyday people are being forgotten and lost. The bodies only count if they belong to the famous.
Case in point: Anene Booysen last year, slaughtered. Now relatively forgotten. Versus Reva Steenkamp, now martyred via social media. I'm not trying to minimize the grief of those around us. But I wish that everyday people counted more.

Any thoughts about Toloki's father?

I cannot make much sense of Jwara as a character. He is obviously a creative man and the source of Toloki's artistic ability. Noria was his muse, as she will be for Toloki in the future. However his hatred for the 'stupid, ugly' Toloki is bewildering. I know that tribal custom is heartless in dealing with deformed or retarded children, but there is no indication that Jwara's son was either. Toloki was just plain ugly, which indicates that Jwara, as the father, was no oil painting himself.
What is Zake's getting at?

Is this supposed to be a fairy tale of sorts? The happily ever after kind?
I picked up something on pgs 12 & 13 - there is a narrator that appears only once in the entire narrative. It is not the standard 3rd person narration that occurs throughout, but rather an omniscient one, as in a fairy tale. At the end of the short narration it reads:
"So, we put the idea of getting Noria and Toloki together out of our minds until today, at the funeral of this our little brother."
The "we" must be the ancestors or gods. The little brother is Noria's child that she gave birth to twice, both under miraculous circumstances.
What are your thoughts?

Does Jwara need a reason for his cruelty? Perhaps he looks at his son as a reflection & magnification of his own failures- his son is as ugly as he is, therefore his son is doomed to fail too.

Jeffrey Eugenides used the same style of narration (a plural narrator) in The Virgin Suicides. In that context the narrator was symbolic of a Greek chorus in a Tragedy.
I wonder if our communal narrator represents communal story telling?

I do not know what to make of Noria's 15 month pregnancies.
That poor woman losing both her sons.
The first Vutha's story made me think of the children seen begging on roadsides. Heart breaking.
I think Mda has taken multiple pictures of township life, living in poverty and cruelty; and combined these pictures into one narrative.

Lisa wrote: "I do not know what to make of Noria's 15 month pregnancies."

Are they metaphors? Illustrative of different views of time?

I hadn't thought of that.
It's possible.
I wondered about how 'urban' legends are born. Plus in rural SA, witchcraft is believed in. To think someone is cursed to be pregnant indefinitely would fit.