Ghost Limb

• Main Author: Van der Merwe, Almini
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2018
• Subjects: Creative Writing
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/27405

This thesis, submitted as part of an M.A in Creative Writing, takes the form of a novel set in a small coastal town outside Cape Town and follows the life of Johanna, a maid to a pastor's family in the early 90s. At the centre of the novel is the relationship between Johanna and a first-person child narrator. Johanna arrives and sets out to undermine the household and social order with increasingly bold acts of violence. She is abusive but despite the sporadic abuse the narrator and Johanna develop an odd friendship. Her past is revealed in late night confidences (a paraplegic mother, a white employer who she identifies as family and a stint in a squatter camp where she loses her ID). Near the beginning of the novel the child and Johanna embark on a quest to obtain her birth certificate from her old employer (needed for a new ID). The journey is unsuccessful but signals the start of a kind of sympathy between the two protagonists (with insight by the narrator into Johanna's past). Johanna finds a kind of belonging in the neighbourhood and with the narrator's family, particularly with the neighbourhood children. She is like a child herself and they become a neighbourhood pack roving the streets on bicycle. But Johanna has periodic rages, throwing bricks or abusing pets and comes to focus her ire on the youngest member of the family, the narrator's youngest brother. When political forces at large come into play (as well as an increased sense of danger), the adults set out to anglicize the family in a half-baked attempt to emigrate. The children are sent to English schools and Johanna, sensing her loosening grip on the family ramps up her reign of terror. She recruits the narrator in a plot against her brother, a prank only half comprehended that she consents to in order to placate Johanna. When the time comes, they dress up as "bergies", capitalising on the paranoia of the time. They ambush her brother and what (at least for the narrator) was a game turns into a horrifying dismemberment of her brother. Johanna disappears for weeks but returns for one final confrontation outside the pastorie. After this Johanna disappears permanently from the life of the narrator and her family, and her brother is patched up with little visible impairment. Soon afterwards the family moves to a security complex, an island of safety in the crime-ridden reality of South Africa that recalls their European dream. Years later the narrator interrogates this suppressed chapter and longs for the Johanna of her childhood in relief to the cultural anonymity that has become her life. Constructed in episodes that succeed each other spatially rather than chronologically the novel seeks to reconstruct the childhood landscape while building obliquely to a tragic climax. The style is lyrical, referencing magical realism and could be read as an effort in prose poetry with paragraphs operating as lyrical units. Of interest to the story are themes of cultural and physical homelessness as well as language itself as it relates to a stable cultural identity.