Book review: Everyday Matters: Selected Letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi

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Everyday Matters: Selected Letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi
MJ Daymond (ed)
Jacana
ISBN: 9781431409488

In Margaret Daymond’s Afterword to Everyday Matters: Selected Letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi she writes of the “pleasure of reading personal, intimate letters” like those she has edited for this selection. For us as “secondary readers”, not the “person to whom the letters were written”, there is added to our emotional and psychological responses a “largely intellectual” pleasure as we read of these women interacting with the “historical context”. The context is that of the apartheid years. All three women suffered some form of exile due to their resistance to the state, and they would continue in their exile to register in their letters – which have now entered the public realm – their awareness of and responses to that political context.

Enlarging on her focus on pleasure and adding to it the element of “instruction” to be found in these letters, in particular in the interaction between public and private they reveal, Daymond says they show that “[w]hen allowed the small freedoms that creating a home requires, even if it has to happen within a larger unfreedom, many migrants do manage to create new lives for themselves.”

The ability of these three “remarkable” women to create “a home life (both viable and difficult)”, despite “the suffering brought by the loss or denial of a home”, offers, then, a “note of hope” at a time when millions of the world’s citizens are regularly forced into migrancy. And Daymond notes the potential for optimism (even if muted) among South Africans as we face the task of “recreating a capacity for empathy” among ourselves.

All three were also housewives and mothers and – keeping in mind the centrality of debates around motherhood and mothering in gender studies – we note that Daymond says that if apartheid inflicted severe personal and collective trauma that was “amplified by women’s primary role as mothers”, the very same role also became a source of strength, as they moved to restore a sense of home – despite the depredations of the state.

To weave a link between the “emotional anchorage that a home [can] give” and the capacity for responsible, humane citizenship is by no means fanciful. Njabulo Ndebelo, one of this country’s most thoughtful writers, lamented in The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003) the emotional and psychological damage caused by the loss of home: black South Africans were estranged from their very homeland as well as their families. One has only to watch a few episodes of SABC1’s Khumbul’ekhaya (“Remember home”) to have some insight into the persistence of the suffering caused by apartheid’s deliberate breaking up of black families. South Africans have also been estranged from one another.

Dora Taylor (1899–1976), the first of the volume’s correspondents, was born in Scotland. As an immigrant to Cape Town she flourished, becoming unofficial secretary of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) from the 1940s to 1960s as well as a writer of political articles and reviews. Bessie Head became an internationally praised novelist in the 1960s and 1970s, the period of the letters published here. Lilian Ngoyi was a leading trade unionist in the 1950s and 1960s: she was the first woman to be elected to the ANC’s national executive and helped launch the Federation of South African Women.

The letters by Dora Taylor selected for this volume were all written in 1963 to her daughter Sheila Belshaw, who lived in Zambia. Like Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi, Taylor’s “selfhood was bound up with her household objects” and with her home as a space where family and friends were welcome. But while on a trip to the US with her husband, she realised that if she returned to Cape Town she was likely, like her activist friends and associates, to be banned or imprisoned. In her letters to Sheila she expresses her shock and anguish at being cut off from the site of intimate contact with the place and people that had fed her sense of purpose. While James Taylor’s academic career was not dependent on his return to South Africa, Dora never truly regained a fulfilling sense of purpose. In 1963, in letter after letter to Sheila, she sends requests and instructions regarding sale of home and contents, what to ship to England, who is to receive various gifts. The repetitiveness, at times, of such requests is a mark of her anxiety and pain. On 8 November 1963 she writes, “It saddens me to think of our home being made nice before it vanishes for ever. It is like a woman whose face in death somehow becomes touched with the beauty of the days of youth.”

And yet, if on 19 August 1963, alone in England while her husband is in Washington, she writes to Sheila that “The days are timeless when you are alone”, in the same letter she shows that she has stayed in touch with events that have affected her political contacts: “[T]he time has been an anxious one. Tabata,* Jan and Mr Honono, a teacher from the Transkei who was under house arrest, have escaped from SA” and she cites news of other activists, such as Neville Alexander.

Bessie Head (1937–1986) chose voluntary exile – a form of resistance to the homeland – in Botswana in 1964. She had not found in Natal, Johannesburg and Cape Town an environment to foster her writing and, at first, Botswana disappointed her too. The letters here to Paddy Kitchen, a novelist who lived in England, begin in the 1960s and continue until 1986, the year of Head’s death. The letters trace her enthusiasm for a gardening project she undertook with members of the local community in Serowe, her interactions with the community, her turbulent relations with editors and publishers, and her pain as her son Howard becomes increasingly hostile. But here she is, having told Paddy that she “can’t seem to stand much drink” any more, enthusiastic about her daily life in Serowe (11 February 1970):

A lot of village people are working with me now and not so long ago we transplanted onion seedlings in pouring rain, just last Sunday, in fact. It was a great day because the onion seedlings are going to bring us a lot of money when we sell them. That day too, I bought a fat chicken who made a terrible roar and commotion when I killed her. I thought: “God forgive me, this lively little beast does not want to die.” I had to screw every nerve to kill her. She had a big egg at the bottom of her tum … so no wonder she made such an uproar. But the combination of roast chicken, transplanting onion and rain and some hungry friends made it gala day number one.

Likely to be of special interest for those who are already admirers of her work, is her account of the time of her descent into mental illness and about how she decided, courageously, to write A Question of Power (1974). In this fictional narrative of her dark night of the soul she depicts her protagonist as grappling with spiritual questions such as the nature of good and evil.

Lilian Ngoyi (1911–1980) suffered severely when banned, first in 1962 for ten years, then again in 1975. Known as a powerful, effective orator, she had her public voice silenced: she could neither make speeches nor be quoted by newspapers. She had earned a living as a seamstress but, with no income, she lacked food, the contents of her home in Soweto became decrepit, and her tormenting social isolation – “‘No church, no funerals, no cinemas”, as she put it – was aggravated in 1976 by the Soweto uprising and following events. Confined to her house, she could see and hear the chaos around her but not participate. In a letter of 24 August 1977 she writes (grammar and punctuation are as in the original):

My Blood Pressure is very high. This is what happened, one morning I was picking up papers in my garden, when I suddenly heard screams. When I lifted my head up I saw Women at the corner. As a banned somebody I stood aloof when I looked towards the school opposite … 4 Police trucks and each truck had two Police dogs, chasing children from the lower Primary and biting them. I screamed to the top of my voice, helpless, and suddenly I lost conscious[ness] … Hell is loose here. I would not like [to] see the brutality of Hitler happening in any Country. You must Pray for Southern Africa. Pupils are shot dead almost every day, dogs set on them in school rooms … School are empty, students are determined to oppose Bantu Education even if it cost their lives.

Letters to and from her Amnesty International contacts were, literally, her lifeline, with their gifts of money for food. They also sent books. Both Head and Ngoyi were dependent on the kindness of others for the intellectual resource of books, this at a time when added to their poverty were the ambitions of the apartheid state to control what people thought. Ngoyi’s letters are filled with requests for books. Her correspondence here is with Belinda Allan, who, from 1971, forwarded contributions from Amnesty International and later would continue to assist Ngoyi “out of her own pocket”. The letters convey Ngoyi’s charm and generosity: despite her own troubles, she is constantly interested in Allan’s family, and rejoices with her at the birth of a baby.
Daymond invites us to read these missives for their pleasure and instruction, but what a delight it is to read her own contributions. In the sections on the life and writing of each correspondent she presents, with scrupulous respect, readings that are close to the primary material, deeply sympathetic, and alert to what she terms the letters’ “charm” and “their mystery”. The details provided for each woman’s life flesh out her personality and enlighten us as to the meaning and significance of her letters; historical details add clarity and are backed up by footnotes, a brief bibliography and a brief index. Daymond’s Introduction and Afterword are especially to be praised: they suggest, in their eloquently argued analyses, the riches that letters may yield. This book is the work of a critic and scholar of commitment and mature wisdom.

* IB Tabata (born 1909), a close friend of Dora’s, was one of the founders of the NEUM. In May 1963 he fled South Africa, taking refuge eventually in Zambia. In 1965 and in 1970 he made speaking tours of the USA. He died in exile in Harare in 1990.

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