Achmat Dangor

A Man Booker Prize finalist. “[A] deeply unsettling novel about the new South Africa . . . The people and their stories are unforgettable” (Booklist, starred review). With the publication of Kafka’s Curse, Achmat Dangor established himself as an utterly singular voice in South African fiction. His new novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award, is a clear-eyed, witty, yet deeply serious look at South Africa’s political history and its damaging legacy in the lives of those who live there. The last time Silas Ali encountered Lt. Du Boise, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on Silas’s wife, Lydia, in revenge for her husband’s participation in Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. When Silas sees Du Boise by chance twenty years later, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is about to deliver its report, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering the Alis’ fragile peace. Meanwhile Silas and Lydia’s son, Mikey, a thoroughly contemporary young hip-hop lothario, contends in unforeseen ways with his parents’ pasts. “In the vein of J.M. Coetzee’s novels, but from the perspective of black South Africans,” Bitter Fruit is a harrowing story of a brittle family on the crossroads of history and a fearless skewering of the pieties of revolutionary movements (Publishers Weekly). “A haunting story of a family disintegrating, wonderfully authentic . . . its progress like slow dancing.” —The Independent “Bitter Fruit has a shocking ability to surprise the reader with the persistence of racial feeling in South Africa.” —The Guardian

Bitter Fruit

Bekki

And now we can't sell, we can't get out of here. Ja, they call us apartheid's astronauts, trapped in this damn twilight world. Let Mr Mandela come and live here, and then tell me about his miracle.

'Ag tog, Gracie, kry nou rus, Alec said. 

She absorbed Alec's Afrikaans and resentfully translated it into English.

When you lose your language, you lose your soul. But English isn't your language, he would retort, Zulu is. 

She realized, later on, that she had been exposed, she and her child, to potential assassins, rapists, men who would do anything to intimi-date people working actively against them, all because Silas hadn't confided in her. 

But she also thought: there is no point in starting another argument about this.

 It is men's nature to hide things from the people they love.

He stood with his back to her, looking at X-ray plates raised to the sun.

The nurse joined him, a slight breeze from the corridor stirring her white tunic, and also looked up. 

A crucifix had been hung there on the wall, because Silas had written 'Catholic' on the questionnaire, and the two of them appeared to be gazing up at it. 

Somehow, out of expediency, through collusion, because of the sheer need to re-establish the surface continuities of their lives, things returned to normal. 

And it was Mikey who put his arms around her, whispering It's okay, Mama, it's okay.'

It was Mikey she turned to, because Silas had walked away into the humid night, escaping to a bar, to the sweaty warmth of a dark-wooded place, full of late-night drinkers, an atmos-phere of softened belligerence. He would confess his sorrows to them.

She observed his slender body, saw in it a fragility she had not noticed before, and longed to reach out and touch him, tenderly, as a mother would touch her son, but knew that that was impossible now.

Already he had about him the gruffness that some men acquire later in life. 

He will be incapable of loyalty to any one woman, he will be the kind of man who comes and goes without warning. 

How difficult it will be, from now on, to love him only as a son.

You asked me a question. Would I help a homeless man in his quest for justice, or is it vengeance? Yes, there is a point to be made.

There are certain things people do not forget, or forgive. 

In ancient times, conquerors destroyed the will of those whom they conquered by impregnating the women. 

It does not require a Sufi prophecy to see the design in that. The Romans and the Sabine women, the Nazis and Jewish women in the concentration camps, the Soviets in Poland, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian refugees, white South African policemen and black women.

You conquer a nation by bastardizing its children.

He decided to take his time, to soak in a hot bath, sip a glass of cold wine. There was no need to hurry. Why are we so eager to celebrate our own mortality?

Bitter Fruit quotes

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