The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

Starred review from January 27, 2014
First published in the U.S. in 1983, before translator Coetzee became a Nobel laureate and South African author Stockenström won prizes for fiction and poetry, this mini-masterpiece is less a novel than an intimate monologue illuminating the nature of slavery, oppression, womanhood, identity, Africa, and nature itself. The narrative begins in a hollow of the titular baobab tree, where an unnamed female slave has taken refuge. Between forays to a nearby stream, she recalls her past, stringing together memories like the beads left by natives, who think that she’s a tree spirit. She remembers being captured by slave traders who sell her to a wealthy man with a taste for innocent girls. After giving birth, she is separated from her baby and sold to a spice merchant. Her third owner is the merchant’s youngest son, for whom she entertains guests and manages his household. When he dies, she begs a friend of her owner’s brother (the merchant’s eldest son) to purchase her, and then joins her new owner and the merchant’s son on their ill-fated expedition into the interior. Using image-rich and poetic language, the illiterate narrator vividly evokes enslavement, isolation, and longing. She never uses specific names, locations, or dates. She has little sense of time. All the slave possesses is a sense of self, despite the confines of her life, which Stockenström portrays with such a winning combination of art and artlessness that, 25 years after its introduction to English-speaking audiences, this tale still proves moving and vibrant.

March 15, 2014
An early-1980s South African novel about a female slave living in a tree receives American publication three decades after it was written. Written in Afrikaans by a prolific playwright and poet (The Wisdom of Water, 2007, etc.), this belated appearance will likely attract most attention due to its translator, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Coetzee (who translated the work in 1983). It's a densely detailed novella, without chapters or named characters, narrated by a female slave who has passed through various owners and who plays chronological hopscotch while blurring the lines among reality, dreams and imagination. "My dreams fill me and help me eat time," she says. "It no longer matters to me that I cannot neatly dispose of time and store it away and preferably forget it; for now I perceive that dreaming and waking do not damn each other, but are extensions of each other and flow into each other." Thus, there's a hallucinatory quality to the narrative, addressed to an unknown reader by a writer that reader only knows through what she reveals, some of which she dreams. "Only when I am asleep do I fully know who I am," she says, "for I reign over my dreamtime and occupy my dreams contentedly. At such times I am necessary to myself." As she moves from the tree in which she has come to live through her memories of the past, she tells of how she was sold into slavery, how her sexual attractiveness gave her some power, negated by her ultimate powerlessness, how babies she birthed were taken away from her, and how she ultimately ended up on an expedition that led to a slaughter that led to her home in a tree. The result is a meditation on humanity, mortality and time. A challenging, compelling work for readers who are willing to give it the concentration it demands.

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December 1, 2014

Published here in a small edition in the early 1980s, before Stockenstrom came to prominence and translator Coetzee won the Nobel Prize, this work opens with a slave woman sheltering in a majestic baobab tree. She is the only survivor of an ill-fated expedition deep into Africa and despairs at being spared: "With bitterness, then. But that I have forbidden myself. With ridicule, then, which is more affable." As she recalls in heartbreakingly lyrical language a difficult life of being passed from owner to owner, she particularizes the African experience while illuminating human values.

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