For today’s Friction Friday we bring you another excellent excerpt from JM Coetzee’s English translation of Wilma Stockenström’s Afrikaans novel, Die kremetartekspedisie. Archipelago Books is set to publish the translation, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, in April this year.
Previously we shared an extract in which the protagonist, a slave, recalls witnessing a procession of people newly condemned to servitude. Now, courtesy of Asymptote, read this piece in which the protagonist describes working in the spice merchant’s house, including the fact that: “At night it was legs apart for the owner on his sweaty skin rug.”
In two low huts with collapsed roofs we lived, the slaves, all together, not separated by sex. From sunrise to late at night we toiled for him, the spice merchant. The work was what separated us. The men worked in his warehouse on the waterfront and the women in his residence. From far and wide we came, we spoke a variety of tongues, but here we got along by mangling the natives’ language and turning it into our idiosyncratic workers’ language. We were acquired second-hand, third-hand, even fourth-hand, mostly still young and healthy, we women fertile and rank. At night it was legs apart for the owner on his sweaty skin rug. Some of us welcomed it. Not I. He was clumsy and rough. I envied the slaves exempted from this sort of service. It brought a certain freedom along with it, after all, to be unmanned, I thought. I did not mind standing in front of the fireplace. I did not mind toiling with pick and hoe in the garden in the murderous heat to keep it neat around his mango trees and yam vines. I did not mind tidying his house under the eye of his shrew of a wife, obeying her expressionlessly, keeping my murmurs for the sleeping quarters, and even there being careful, for there were tell-tales amongst us. And to be discovered meant that your tongue was cut out.
I kept myself to myself. Lived as much uneasily as patiently. I was a coward and refused nothing.
Book details
- The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenstrom, JM Coetzee
EAN: 9781935744924
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