Today I’m welcoming the brilliant Colleen van Niekerk, author of A Conspiracy of Mothers! It has received a starred review from Booklist and shining early reviews. Released as the #1 new release on Amazon in the African Historical Fiction category, this novel is one you can’t miss.
As a huge treat it is currently available on Kindle Unlimited if you have a subscription. If you don’t, make sure to sign up here! If you read books as quickly as I do, Kindle Unlimited is so nice to be able to just browse and read so many books on a whim.
Bookish Brews Snapshot
A Conspiracy of Mothers by Colleen van Niekerk
Set in South Africa in 1994 in the midst of their first democratic election, three mothers lives intersect in a story of love and betrayal that ripples through generations. Balanced with a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, these three women battle the trials of motherhood.
🌍 African History 😭 Emotional 📕 Literary Fiction 👁️ Multiple POV
- Genre: Historical Fiction
Book Club Questions
We’re always eager to not only discuss books but to help spark conversations about books for our readers to take beyond Bookish Brews. I think that reading with friends is so beneficial to your reading comprehension and your friendships. Colleen and I are on the same wavelength here because she has a wonderful list of book club questions to accompany A Conspiracy of Mothers on her website! If you have a book club, this is a wonderful choice for your next read.
Shame
Shame may not be the first thing we think about when we consider the damage done in the name of racism or colourism, but it is often what lingers. Long after the deep cuts inflicted in the name of those scourges have passed, it remains, stubbornly governing the unsaid. It informs our response to whatever the event or moment might be that has signified, once again, that we live in societies with pervasive and cemented racial inequities.
There is the shame of the oppressed: Being dominated and despairing in the face of it; coupled with knowing that others in your community, or family, may bear the same weight and the same burdened silences. There is the shame of the oppressor: Of the deeply uncomfortable reckoning — or inability to reckon — with what has been done in your name, by your kin. By you.
As an effective and awful aid used in service of white supremacy, shame goes to one of the central tenets of that rotten belief system: That those who identify as white will be tainted by close contact with those of colour, or other ethnicities; that that is cause for shame. The dominated need to always be rendered as lesser than, as a perch upon which to set your privilege. Without that, the entire edifice falls apart.
As a result, shame, or the potential for it, has been an accelerant for the particular kind of venom directed at interracial relationships. Time and again, society has shown itself to be supremely unsettled by the notion of races coming together in intimacy, as if they were tectonic plates, causing what the wider world often treats as unwanted upheaval. After all, there is the elemental question that these relationships pose: If all things are equal in love, desire and togetherness, then surely all things are equal, period? There is, too, the progeny of these relationships, showing in their diversity of faces that any notion of racial purity is fundamentally unsound, and entirely useless.
In South Africa, my country of origin, the apartheid government rendered intimate relations between the white race and any other race (the non-white races could do as they pleased amongst themselves) as not only a criminal act but a betrayal of religious faith and personal values. This was not only a matter of principle, but law. One of the odious pieces of legislation addressing this was in fact named the Immorality Act.
Equally disturbing is how this shaming, in the context of colonisation and settlement, became about the preservation of white womanhood and the subsequent invisibility and supposed inconsequential nature of women of colour. Every country bears scars from this.
In the United States, there is not only the murder of Emmett Till, but the many other instances of African-American men portrayed as predators preying upon white women. These men have been positioned by a self-serving white society as possessors of a limited, one-dimensional hypermasculinity that requires extraordinary levels of control and regulation. This has become a damaging force in its own right, while creating conditions ripe for shame to take hold.
Meanwhile, the ones left with the expectation that they are strong, proud, and able to bear anything at any cost (without considering the true toll this exacts), are African-American women. Yet their experiences and history during enslavement underscores the truth of who has been predator and prey in American society.
Shame leaves us unable to frame these experiences as what they truly are: Trauma, often generational, which requires sunlight, confrontation and care of self. It requires a trust that one can be vulnerable without being condemned for it. That one will be taken seriously.
In Canada, where I live currently, Indigenous women have been failed by many: By those who show a high level of apathy and hostility towards their wellbeing; by the chauvinism of government institutions; and, in the not too distant past, by archaic, genocidal institutions like residential schools, whose impact remains very present. These women have paid for this with their lives. Many have gone missing or been murdered in a crisis large enough to have merited a national inquiry three years in duration, and that’s without delving into the rate of suicide amongst First Nations, Métis and Inuit. I’ve found myself asking if this crisis would have happened if these women were white, only to simultaneously realise that the answer is that it simply wouldn’t happen, not to this calamitous degree, to white women.
In my native South Africa, endemic sexual assault of women of colour (predominantly) was and continues to be the norm. The deprivation of rights under apartheid, meant that Black and Brown women there have historically borne the greatest risks. Travelling great distances across segregated areas, usually on informal public transit in the dark; living in unsafe environments; earning a low income in white-owned businesses and homes within which abuse, and from which dismissal, could easily happen.
Much has changed and yet the pattern and unfortunately, the reality for many women of colour in that country has not, as Pumla Dineo Gqola eloquently outlined in her recent work Rape: A South African nightmare. Yet these women, like African-American ones, or Indigenous Canadians, are expected to bury all of this, get up, dust themselves off and carry on, because that’s just the way it is.
So we come to the true cost of shame in this context: It costs us the opportunity to come to terms with others, and ourselves, as fully-formed human beings. Like a hand over the mouth, shame is a dreadful spectre, keeping truths quiet and maintaining the destructive status quo. As if it were mold, it grows in the damp, dark spaces where there is no light, no fresh air to breathe and speak, only the stall of stagnation. Collectively, our responsibility is to pull it out by the roots, to understand what those roots truly are. Without this, we cannot see beyond our sense of dismay, scandal and disgust, to the beauty, complexity, depth and breadth of what’s always been before us, waiting for us this whole time.
