That sense of helplessness in the face of illness is one of the book’s great achievements and in combining it with Thandi’s rootlessness, her puzzling of her identity, Clemmons skilfully marries the themes of the novel. She cannot stop her mother from dying – she cannot even dictate the contents of the salad drawer. But when family friends visit, they bring offerings of their love: big pots of comfort food, fatty and rich, and as Thandi makes way for a congealed pork roast, she weeps as she realises her powerlessness. In another scene, Thandi tries to care for her mother by healing her with food, stocking the fridge with fruit and vegetables, banishing the artificial and the unhealthy. That “some dying” strikes the reader like a blow, and achieves the effect of Thandi’s own realisation that her mother is actually going to die, that this is really happening. The stench was nothing more than molecules moving in and out of my nostrils, the scene nothing more than light reflected off objects alive and inanimate, some dying.” As she sits in the hospital room where her mother is in a coma, she says: “I let the smell overwhelm me until I couldn’t smell it any more. The matter-of-factness and plainness of the language heighten the emotional intensity of Thandi watching her mother die. “This was the paradox: how could I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.”Ĭlemmons is ambitious with her narrative form: the fragments of the novel make associative leaps from narrated scene to excerpts from academic studies, graphs of Thandi’s depression, song lyrics, and musings on subjects as diverse as the death of the photographer Kevin Carter and studies of cancer rates in communities of people of colour.īut the novel is best when it simply tells the story of Thandi’s mother’s struggle with cancer, and it is here that Clemmons’s restrained prose reaches its full potential. The narrative never settles in one place, but rather, moving through Thandi’s early life, her mother’s illness and death, and then finally her own motherhood and divorce, alights from memory to memory and idea to idea, always circling back to the loss of her mother.

The voice of the book is thus one of stunned grief: a kind of anhedonic restlessness, disconnected and dislocated.

When her mother dies, Thandi is distraught. Thandi’s only home is her mother, the lodestar of her existence, a woman who teaches her daughter how to live in the world and whose instructions Thandi faithfully follows, trying to please her even when she is not there, in everything from how to wear her hair to roasting a chicken for a man in an attempt to seduce him.

What we lose zinzi