While literary prizes are often chosen with a historical dimension in mind, The Promise didn't win the 2021 Booker Prize solely for reflecting South Africa's national history. Through dexterous brushstrokes and a shift in narrative perspective, Damon Galgert tells a light and suspenseful story - the protagonist's mother will leave a house for the black maid before she dies, but in 20th-century South Africa, will anyone admit it?
Written by | Miyako
"Promise", by (South Africa) Damon Galgert, translated by Huang Jianshu, one page folio|Guangxi Normal University Press, November 2022.
Interesting funeral opening
In 2021, the Booker Prize announced the award for South African author Damon Galgert's novel The Promise, stating in his acceptance speech that "the book is a true masterpiece in form, a powerful writing for a declining family and troubled land". This has brought the eyes of readers of novels, especially domestic readers, once again to the easily forgotten country of South Africa, which became the second South African writer to win the prize since J.M. Coetzee.
Naturally, for Chinese readers, this is not a hindrance, as an African country, South African literature is also easy to create a natural gap among readers, where things are too far away, political and social backgrounds are too unfamiliar, the black life it shows is not part of our daily experience, African history does not intersect with Chinese history so much, and literary and religious allusions appear in it are often beyond our reading awareness. However, Damon Galgert's novel is not so difficult to read, it can be read as a novel that ignores the historical context (although this is certainly not the author's intention), and the story style of "The Promise" is also like a "simplified Faulkner", with the skeleton of stream of consciousness and indirect narrative, but not immersed in the same room or time for too long.
Like Faulkner's "On the Occasion of My Death" - Eddie's funeral is the opening scene of "When I Die", she asks herself to be buried with her family after death, but there are many obstacles in the process of transporting the coffin - "The Promise" also opens with the funeral of her mother, in which the conflict is simpler and more direct than Faulkner's, the protagonist Amor's mother converted to the Dutch Reformed Church (the largest Christian church in the Netherlands) in South Africa, but chose to return to Judaism before dying, thus angering the family. There was disagreement over how to house her grave and what religious form of burial should be used. It is very interesting for a novel to open the funeral, and when reading, we can't think of any scene that radiates a richer time and space than the funeral, it can be the end of the conflict, it can be the beginning of the conflict, it occurs in the present space, but the people involved in the funeral can introduce the past and future time into this scene, and due to the special nature of death, what happens around the funeral will also have a natural sense of eternity.
These factors come together to make it difficult for us to imagine a writer who can write a funeral scene well, so this scene is usually the place where a writer can best show his writing talent. If Galgert inherited the style of Faulkner, the writer who had a great influence on him (he himself said that he frequently read Faulkner's novels in his spare time for inspiration for language style), this language style is also most evident in the funeral part of the novel:
"Fortunately, she is not heavy, and the disease has long hollowed her out; It didn't take much effort to carry her down the stairs, around corners that were difficult to get around at the bottom, and down the hallway into the kitchen. Going out from behind, the bossy sister of the deceased's husband ordered them to walk along the side of the house and not to carry it past the guests. Only after hearing the start of the long car and the sound of engine vibrations fading in the air would visitors realize that the deceased had finally left the place.
Then Rachel was gone, really gone. Twenty years ago, as a bride, she came here pregnant and has not left since; But now, she would never walk into the house through the front door again. ”
In such fragments, air and people, the freezing and flow of time, and the past and present are completely blended together, while the brief absence of the narrated subject gives this scene its own sense of existence.
Damon Galgert.
The suspense of a promise
After the funeral, the plot of the novel is also not complicated. "Promise" is the only thread in the whole story. The protagonist, Amor overhears her mother's conversation with her father on the occasion of her death, and before she dies, she mentions to her father that she will give a house on a farm to Salomi, a black maid who has served at home for many years. Amor's father granted his wife's request before she died. But when Amor publicly mentioned it after her mother's funeral, her father denied it. Her brother Anton and sister Astrid are also very cold about this - even though all three were raised by Salomi.
Whether it is Anton's opposition or Astrid's indifference, "The Promise" does not choose to create that explicit and stereotypical racial discrimination scene, although South Africa has always been one of the countries where racial discrimination is extremely serious and black-white conflicts are very frequent, but Galgert does not take conflict as the core of the novel's writing, and the gap between different classes and skin colors, as well as the nearly 40-year history of South Africa spanning in The Promise, are all shown in the form of undercurrents. Then, after his father's funeral and his sister Astrid's funeral, Amor mentioned his mother's promise for the second and third time, but it was ultimately unable to be fulfilled. After each family member's funeral, the discussion about whether the promise is fulfilled is the suspense of the novel, which attracts us to keep reading, although from the experience of reading the novel, the opening promises and contradictions will most likely not end until the last scene of the novel.
Amor's brother Anton presents a chaotic face in the novel. He was a soldier by background, but his personality was cowardly and irritable, and he shot and killed a woman because of a little offense by the locals, which is why when he received a telegram of his mother's death, he would think that he had shot his mother, because "I killed someone else's mother." That's why my mother died." He became disgusted with the war and left the barracks to become a deserter. And at this moment, he very loudly preached that he would embark on a different path in life than before, different from others.
These stories that happened in the first chapter can't help but give us a lot of expectations in the character of Anton. But that's not the case. He did not embark on any unique path that was out of the ordinary. Anton knew of the crime he had committed, and later, after his sister Astrid was killed by robbers in South Africa, he muttered to the police in the morgue in confusion - "Yes, I have seen corpses, I have killed a person before". But the confession of sin did not translate into an act of redemption in Anton's person. He hid and waited for the so-called final judgment, like a mud man who expected a heavy rain to wash away the mud and legacy of South Africa's history, but did not try to shake off the filth through his own actions. Anton had repeatedly obstructed the "promise" to Salomi, the black maid, mentioned by Amor . The first was out of law, and he told Amor that even if his mother did make such a promise before she died, even if we were willing to give Salomi the house, it was against South African law (at that time, black people did not have the right to accept the inheritance of the house). By the time of the second family member's funeral, South African society had changed and blacks already had this right under the law, but Anton still did not keep his father's promise, but tried to plan a deal.
In Anton's body, we can see the refraction of South African history. He served as a soldier during white rule and shot civilians; For the black maids who raised themselves at home, he did not act oppressively and tyrannically, but in his bones he did not believe that they had equal rights. There was another episode before Anton attended his final funeral, that is, he was drunk and driving, and it was a black law enforcer who escorted him for alcohol testing and fined. These fragments reflect how South Africa's history has changed over the decades. And so is our protagonist, Amor . She left her family and ran away from home to become a nurse caring for AIDS patients. It is also a choice related to South Africa's history, because former South African rulers believed that AIDS was a purely American propaganda conspiracy and that AIDS was nothing more than a poor disease caused by lack of funds, so they rejected Western medical treatment in favor of the use of indigenous South African herbal remedies. However, the "Promise" still does not directly describe the process of these events and the disasters they bring, or through the family's handling methods, let the social background settle in the family's room, thus showing the real and simple daily life.
If there's anything regrettable about this novel, it's probably the closing moment. After Anton's death, Amor can finally fulfill the promise his mother made to Salomi decades ago. But after many years, the real value of the house is no longer so important, and Salomi is no longer extravagant, and when she makes this decision, she is faced with a question from Salomi's son: "You don't need it anymore, and you don't mind throwing it away." Just like the leftover food you ate, you gave my mother, this kind of thing, thirty years late. It's better to give nothing. You can't give alms to someone after you're done with it, this white lady. "This is undoubtedly a historical questioning of blacks in South Africa against whites. Amor defended himself, saying that he had never used his family's support for years, and that all the money he had saved over the years could be given to Salomi as compensation for their belated promises. Amor is undoubtedly positive and kind, but it also seems to symbolize that humanity has no other way to compensate for history. Throughout the novel, Amor insists on her choices and commitments, but the texture of her existence as a literary character is not heavy. The great behavior implied by ordinary characters has been the shaping trend of world literary creation in recent years, but to some extent, this undoubtedly limits the unpredictable possibilities of characters.