ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Karen Jennings achieves something quite remarkable in the harrowing opening pages of Crooked Seeds.  The novel begins by introducing its central character Deirdre van Deventer living in unbelievably squalid conditions in Cape Town, South Africa.  Everything in her dingy apartment is dirty and smelly, including her, the details rendered in distasteful detail.  I suspect that most readers would judge her harshly.

And then the reader’s perspective about this woman is reversed, evoking a sense of profound pity along with a sense of apprehension that the same circumstances could conceivably happen to any of us.  It is revealed that this is what it’s like during the water crisis in Cape Town in an entirely possible future. Or in many cities around the world with increasingly unreliable rainfall.

After good rains in 2013 and 2014, the City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change. Water levels in the City’s dams declined from 71.9 percent in 2014 to 50.1 percent in 2015. (Wikipedia, Cape Town Water Crisis, viewed 25/3/24)

Over the course of 2016 water restrictions were lifted from Level 1 to Level 3, and by 2018 Level 6 (87 litres per person per day) rose to Level 6B (50 litres per person per day).  There were plans to police the water distribution points across the city when Day Zero was declared, i.e. when the dam levels reached only 13.5 percent.  On that day the water supply would be shut off except for its use in hospitals and the CBD, and residents would have to rely on 149 water collection points around the City to collect a daily ration of 25 litres of water per person.  And this of course would affect the economy because employees would have to queue for water.  It’s not hard to imagine the kind of chaos and civil disorder that might ensue.

(Cape Town, a city of 4 million people, had no desalination plant.  Two were hastily built, but were decommissioned two years later. So — while they had a reprieve with good rains just in time to stave off Day Zero — they still don’t have a secure and reliable water supply.)

So when Deirdre wakes up with a raging thirst, it’s not a problem easily resolved.  Deirdre doesn’t have water to wash herself, or her clothes, or her bedding, or her crockery, cutlery and cooking pans, or to keep her place clean.  So resiling from  that hasty condemnation, the reader feels pity for this woman, especially because she’s disabled and finds it hard to queue for water on crutches.

But then the author engineers another reversal in the reader’s construction of events… all in the space of a few pages of sparse prose.

Such a crisis demands that people work cooperatively for the public good in order to prevent disaster.  But another seesaw of opinion occurs when Deirdre is revealed as a thoroughly selfish, lazy, ungrateful woman with a foul mouth who won’t do anything to help herself or anyone else.  What’s more, she’s a White South African who is still ordering around People of Colour, to get things for her, to cadge drink and cigarettes from, to carry her stuff, to drive her to places and to listen to her self-pitying complaints.  Her sense of entitlement is still in fine shape, and she is deeply resentful about the change in her privileged status in post-apartheid South Africa. Even her own daughter has abandoned her and gone to England for a better future.

(There is an odd aspect to the existence of this daughter, but I can’t raise it without spoilers, sorry.)

Into this messy situation and compounding Deirdre’s sense of resentment comes an intrusion from the past.  The van Deventer family home has been requisitioned by the government because it was built on an aquifer.  But the earthworks have uncovered the remains of several bodies.  Babies’ bodies.  And Deirdre — whose sole preoccupation has been herself ever since she was maimed in an explosion that destroyed that house — is resistant to police enquiries about her brother who disappeared long ago after involvement with a pro-apartheid terrorist group.  Her refusal to engage in interrogating the past is in direct conflict with the idealism of South Africa’s Truth and Justice Commission, set up to bring South Africans together after the violence and human rights abuses perpetrated by all sides. Deirdre is determined to isolate herself from the society in which she lives.  (And on which she depends for welfare support).

What are we to make of this bleak, shattering novel?

Longlisted for the Booker, Jennings’ previous novel, An Island, (2020, see my review) was a sophisticated allegory for the impacts of colonialism on individuals.  It featured a man who is neither good nor bad, but like most of us, is flawed in an ordinary sort of way and isn’t really equipped for the dilemma which confronts him.  But Crooked Seeds is less generously crafted and the purposes of its characterisation are less clear.  Deirdre is, unequivocally, an awful person.  She is dirty, crude, selfish and exploitative, while the People of Colour (police, neighbours, retail staff) are unfailingly clean, polite, generous and helpful.  It is all too easy to judge her because she has no redeeming features.  All that is evoked is a limited amount of pity for her circumstances, which wanes as the story progresses. What is she meant to represent other than a person who has failed to adapt to the new reality?

And while the high-handed acquisition of the van Deventer property without adequate housing or compensation afterwards is some acknowledgement that post apartheid South Africa is becoming a failed state with authoritarian tendencies, this is only a minor thread when compared to government incompetence in securing a water supply for the city.  What is not addressed in the novel is that the New South Africa is a democracy which offers its people the opportunity to chuck out incompetent governments, but the ANC has dominated post-apartheid politics long past its use-by date.

It is only at the end of Crooked Seeds that its epigraph made sense to me:

For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the sees 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; from The Double Dream of Spring, by John Ashberry.

Author: Karen Jennings
Title: Crooked Seeds
Publisher: Text Publishing, Melbourne 2024
Cover design by Donna Cheng & Cassie Gonzales
ISBN: 9781922790675, pbk., 219 pages
Review copy courtesy of Text Publishing