About book The Expedition To The Baobab Tree: A Novel (2014)
Sometimes I trust incoherent book recommendations more than I trust well-argued ones. An ability to conjure many and persuasive words, often as not, leaves me cold, especially if those persuasive words contain nothing personal, nothing that another reviewer equally endowed with “objectivity” couldn’t have said as well. On the other hand, a few simple words from my dad―“Try this, it’s interesting,” the review that served for both Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds and Wilma Stockenstrom’s Expedition to the Baobab Tree―gets me wondering, despite that I know that half of what he reads (Somerset Maugham, Norman Mailer, a recent spate of contemporary crime potboilers) probably isn’t for me.A few days ago I had seen a hammerhead shark leaping in spasms there on the beach where fish-drying racks cast their grid-shadows. It was trying to lift its whole body up from the sand as if wanting to swim upwards into the sky. Sometimes one eye was buried in the sand, sometimes the other; one saw doom, the other spied hope, and in uncertainty the poor thing struggled. Spasmodic jerks, fanatical till death, eyes that till death bisected the world. Would he, even in death, have to reconcile the one half with the other half to find his way in that haze? Deeper and deeper he steered himself on into death with thrusting movements of the head. To the left hung death as a grey apparition, to the right hung death as a grey apparition, no choice for him, but perhaps he fabricated his own death and chose the total nothing of seeing nothing more, and nothing has neither tinge nor grain nor substance. The Expedition to the Baobab Tree―what is it then? The hyperreal, not to say semi-hallucinatory, first-person narrative of an escaped slave, many times courtesan to the prominent men of an unnamed African city, now lone resident of a baobab in the veld, watched over like a goddess or a prisoner by an unnamed tribe of protectors. It’s violent, sometimes horrific, shadowed with pain, but maybe because its author is a white woman, seen as if through a slight fog of dream, something like Beckett’s depictions of the homeless (in First Love and Other Novellas) but more tied to quotidian reality. What Stockenstrom’s motive in writing it could be is difficult to guess, beyond the exploration/assuaging of collective guilt, but never in an obvious political sense; instead, the guilt, like the landscape through which the expedition wanders, is simply present, to be experienced. Nor is Stockenstrom’s protagonist bland heroine or cipher; from kidnapped child trained in coquetry by older women, to teenager made egotist by the dawning realisation of her power (such as it is) over her white male captors, to pretend princess outcast among her fellow slaves, she progresses at last to enlightenment:I drink my own life. Quickly, water-spirit. Let your envoy carry out his task swiftly. Yes.As a bird takes leave of a branch. Fruit falls. A bat. Like a bat, black and searching.I dive into dark water and row with my wings toward the far side where in descending silence I am no longer able to help myself and deafly fly further and further. I will find rest in the upside-down. I fold my wings.The text is translated from the Afrikaans by J.M. Coetzee. The prose is clean, sharp, coolly precise. It’s easy to see why Coetzee might have taken on this project; in many ways it’s the yin to the yang of his Life and Times of Michael K, containing everything spiritual which that documentary-style, masculine, also Beckettian tale of alienation only suggested. If the word “visionary” means anything any more, this is visionary, but not with the Gothic or technicolour intensity of Poe or Marquez or Raymond Roussel. Mosaic-like, almost flat in places, but always alive, this is a minor but unique masterpiece. I recommend it as my dad did, with a shrug, not entirely sure of what I’ve read. See what you think.
i waited too long to write my review for this book, and for that i apologize, because my memory of it has become a little jumbled. which, in a way, is fitting, since this is such a nonlinear and confusing splay of a book following an unnamed slave woman in south africa throughout her life: her horrifying capture and the destruction of her village as a young girl, her various owners and their treatment of her as she is moved around and sold, her rescue by a man she sees as a protector, but calls "the stranger," and her retreat into a baobab tree after she is the sole survivor of an expedition gone terribly wrong, where she ultimately descends into a madness of confusion and fragmented images. also, a death by crocodile.it's a little embarrassing to admit that i was frequently confused reading this book. i used to be such a good reader. but this book, told in a stream-of-consciousness rush, by a woman who has been psychologically compromised by all that she has seen, doesn't make it easy. it was tricky sometimes to distinguish from what part of her life each scene was relating, and while there were moments of narrative clarity, and instances of beautiful and alternately lyrical and stark prose, at the end of it, i didn't feel like it contributed all that much to the canon of slave narratives. i have read this kind of story before: the horrors of slavery, its alienation and dehumanization, the moments of hope and peace and small reliefs, the cruel owner, the lustful owner, the kind owner, the preferential treatment that makes life easier but breeds jealousy and suspicion among other slaves… and unfortunately, i was only able to read this in bits and pieces because stupid life got in the way, so that might have contributed to my confusion - this is a book best read in one long gulp. i apologize to you, book, for not reading you in the right way, and please accept my three stars as a token of my regret.
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This book is full of gorgeous writing, like reading a long poem full of beautiful, memorable turns of phrase. Stockenstrom writes best when she writes simply, catching the voice of the slave girl as she addresses her protector and home, the baobab tree. Consider this passage as the narrator ruminates on sleep and dreams: "Only when I am asleep do I know fully who I am, for I reign over my dreamtime and occupy my dreams contentedly. At such times I am necessary to myself." Or this reflection on thoughts, memories, and reality: "I used the artifacts of forgotten people to while away time, to coagulate time, with the bitter realization that it was changing nothing in the nothingness." The simple beauty of such thoughts, however, can be undermined by phrasing and word choice that do not seem consistent with the narrator: “circumambient”? A misstep in continuity? For the author, or for translator J.M. Coetzee as he steps from Afrikaans to English? Is this Stockenstrom reflecting the narrator’s rich, sophisticated thoughts divorced from her actual voice? Whatever the case, I prefer the deceivingly complex expressions captured in the simple phrasing. This is a challenging read, and one perhaps best exemplified when the narrator states: “I like to reconnoiter. I like to discover. I cannot get enthusiastic about humanity, but I do not stop testing and I do not stop searching.” Be prepared to test, search, and ultimately discover with this work of art.
—John Jeffire
stream of consciousness narratives normally leave me cold, but this novella grabbed me from it's first lyrical sentence and wouldn't let me go. I hid in the Baobob tree along with the narrator and felt the fear, the delight, the horror, the calm, and the desperation of a young girl captured and sold into slavery. The weaving of time and tale were somewhat confusing but yield attention to Wilma Stockensturm's beautiful language and you too will be rewarded with an exceptional tale that will penetrate your ordinary life like a scalpel wielded by an expert surgeon. A book to treasure.
—Sandy
