Go Tell the Sun
Wame Molefhe
Modjaji Books
In Molefhe’s collection of short stories – her second; the first was for children – six of the tales are linked by a character called Sethunya, the remaining five by another called Marang.
Set in contemporary Botswana, in simple yet finely honed language, the stories invite the reader to tap into profound emotions of their characters.
In Who Do You Tell?, Sethunya’s emotions are those of grief and despairing resignation.
Married to a serial adulterer and drinker, she tells the reader that her loveless marriage has “spawned” certain “habits”; the distaste and disgust hinted at in “spawned” become fixed as characteristic of her experience of marriage when she tells us, bitterly, that at her wedding she “wore a white silk dress with a sweeping train that brushed all [her] mother’s doubts under the red carpet”.
In the second story, Sethunya’s husband, a different person, is kind, but still she suffers, because she “likes girls better”.
In the third story, Botswana Rain, Sethunya learns of the suicide of her first and deepest love, Kgomotso.
“Home. School. Church. Everywhere” she was “cast into a mould” of “a good Motswana woman” who marries.
Her guilt and grief are based in the knowledge that she has, through conforming to expectations, betrayed both her husband and her beloved: she should have run away with Kgomotso.
The closing paragraphs of this story are a masterstroke, compounding our sense of the unhappiness that may be caused by conventional beliefs around gender and marriage.
Yet the tone of the stories is gentle, often matter-of-fact.
Her stories are told without the anger found in the fiction of Unity Dow, Botswana’s first female judge, who also exposes the abuse of women in that country.
This is a deliberate stylistic choice, Molefhe said in a recent interview.
“To take the harshness off the stories, I think they had to be told gently and I have tried to create a sense of normalcy and people going about their business, but within this there are these currents of ugliness that people choose either to bury or to confront.”
Not all of Molefhe’s tales tackle taboos, such as those around speaking about adultery, sexual orientation and Aids.
In Coloured Locks, Sethunya meditates on the value of traditional customs. Her daughter accepts the custom of having her head shaved when her grandmother dies, so leading Sethunya to regret the alienation from language and culture that comes with “modern” mores and aspirations.
In the last five stories there is loss of some kind: the death of a son, or of a father, or of innocence through being raped by an older “uncle”.
Yet Molefhe says, “I do hope these stories speak of survival and strength.”
Certainly, in her ability to confront these painful aspects of life in her country and present them in tales both aesthetically told and inviting compassion, she offers readers catharsis in her truth-telling. - Cape Times