![]() ![]() The only one committed to upholding Rachel’s wish is her youngest daughter, Amor, who witnessed the deathbed bequest unnoticed: ‘They didn’t see me, I was like a black woman to them.’Īmor’s disempowerment, like Salome’s, allows her behind closed doors, but never comfortably. For hers is not a demand for upheaval – John the Baptist’s head – but a disquieting pull towards the promise of her own place a promise that is cast aside at every opportunity by Manie and two of his children. ![]() Like Maria in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003), the name Salome is burdened by the misplaced weight of Western culture. It is 1986 in South Africa, and already the idea of giving Salome the land on which she lives can’t help but invoke the paranoid spectre of widescale repatriation. Salome has cared for her, has mopped up ‘blood and shit and pus and piss’, doing the jobs Rachel’s family found ‘too dirty or too intimate’. ![]() Rachel Swart is in the final decline of a terminal cancer when she extracts a promise from her husband, Manie: he agrees to give their maid Salome the deed to the Lombard Place, a small house on the family’s farm. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |