While the complexities of the city I’ve internalized are expanded by my experiences, they are also limited by what fits on a page, but always there are new connections, new circuits rewired and re-contextualized. And I’ve learned to use this in my fiction, to find the telling details that speak to a subtext, to develop an ear for how people speak and speak differently, the revealing dialogue that will be bolded for emphasis on the magazine page. I’ve stolen the journalism techniques for novel research, talking to cops and artists in Detroit, refugees, music producers in Johannesburg, location scouting in Chicago. Every person I speak to gives me a new perspective, a different lens. It’s made my writing more than it would have ever been. And it’s still an excuse to go adventuring.
Pop culture has a nasty habit of producing them. You know the type: the girl in the trunk with her long bare legs dangling over the bumper, the torture victim in the basement in a dirty camisole and panties, matted hair masking her face, the broken ingénue with her dress fetchingly rucked up, one high heel kicked off and blood pooling under her.
The murder victim becomes a puzzle that has to be solved. She is the sum of her injuries, of the violation done to her, rather than her life.
We focus on the gory details—the exit wound of the bullet, the angle of the knife, the pattern of the blood spatter, the DNA under her nails, the defensive cuts on her hands. We learn this from TV. This is what is important: what was done to her. Passive voice. Because there’s no subject anymore. Only object: the dead girl; the body. And a body doesn’t mean anything. It’s an empty snail shell. It’s okay to look. There’s no one in there now.
But there was once.
Which is why I wanted The Shining Girls to be a book that is as much about the victims’ stories as the killer’s.
Serial killer folklore maintains that they often have a type. Ted Bundy was into young women with middle partings and brown hair, for example. But what if my killer was not into physical characteristics but some inner quality that shone out of young women? Bright, full of spark and curiosity, engaged with the world, kicking against convention, pushing past their doubts and fears. What if the story was more about their lives than their deaths? What if the pretty corpses had voices, and that’s part of why they were cut down?
I was interested in writing women who were exceptional in ordinary ways, who didn’t quite fit in, who took a stand and would have made some kind of contribution in their fields if they hadn’t been robbed of their potential: from a microbiologist to an artist, an architect, an activist, a single-mom welder, a transsexual dancer, an economist.
If the violence in the book is shocking, it’s because it is supposed to be. Because real violence is. All those pretty corpses and the raging gun battles and torture porn on-screen have made us virtually immune to violence and the ripples it sends out. But it should be gut-wrenching. It should be traumatic. It should be about the victim.
Of course, in the real world, real violence is rarely perpetrated by a serial killer. Usually it’s someone the woman knows. A partner or husband or friend or neighbor. But the truth about violence is that it is all domestic. As in every day—playing out with tedious regularity in any number of configurations. Ask any cop, any social worker, any paramedic or crime reporter. Bodies lose their flavor. Often they don’t even make the news. Especially if they’re not a pretty corpse or a celebrity, if there’s no whiff of scandal. Especially if they’re poor.
Writing this book was very personal.
In 2009, Thomokazi, a friend of my family, was attacked by her abusive boyfriend. He stabbed her, poured boiling water over her, locked her in his shack in one of Cape Town’s desperately poor shantytowns and walked away, like she was nothing.
She lay there for five days until neighbors were alerted by the moaning and the terrible smell, and called the police. They broke down the door and summoned an ambulance. There were flies thick on Thomokazi’s skin, but she was alive, if half-mad with pain. We didn’t know it was already too late. With burns, the infection sets in deep, the same way violence does in society. After repeated trips to hospitals and clinics, she died four months later, waiting for treatment in an emergency room. She was twenty-three. The public hospital put it down as “natural causes,” because maybe that kind of thing is.
I tried to help the family. We tried to get justice. Three months after Thomokazi was buried in her traditional home upcountry, I accompanied her sister to court. But before the case was called, the prosecutor summoned us into his rooms and told us—furious—that he couldn’t try the case. He wrote an angry report to the police pointing out all the holes in their investigation. “Holes” was the wrong word, though, because there had been no investigation.
The police docket was one pathetic page—the dead woman’s statement. The cops hadn’t bothered to interview anyone, to check the medical evidence, even to warn the family that the attacker was forbidden to stalk or harass them. We watched him swagger out of court, his new girlfriend, maybe nineteen, trailing two steps behind him like an obedient dog.
The only witness to the crime was Thomokazi. It was her word against that of her attacker, and she was dead. And the dead cannot speak for themselves. But I thought I could. I got the case into the papers, because I’m middle-class and I have a voice and I know how to use it—and I believed in justice. With the support of the prosecutor, I got the investigation reopened. I gathered hospital records, the names of witnesses who could testify that her boyfriend had punched her before, pulled out her hair. I found out which neighbors had called the cops, tracked down the paramedics.
Then her family phoned me. They couldn’t bear to go through it all again. They couldn’t face having to exhume her body for a police autopsy. They couldn’t talk about it anymore. All the words had been used up. They asked me to let it go.
I still haven’t been able to. I’m still angry. About the violence that happens every day, about all the girls and women like Thomokazi whose deaths go unmentioned, who will never have a voice, whose obituaries come down to their autopsies. As Kirby, the survivor in The Shining Girls, says: How am I supposed to let this shit go?”
How are any of us?
At least in fiction, unlike real life, you can get justice.
Justice Unity Dow does not take crap from anyone. Not from the Botswana government: she took the state to court as a young attorney in 1990 over her right to pass citizenship on to her children, and consequently had the law overturned. Not from the senior South African Judge Hlophe, whom she called out publicly when he introduced her salaciously at a legal conference as “the woman I’m going to be spending a lot of time with,” Nor from Botswana’s state counsel (and special presidential advisor), Sidney Pilane, who found himself spending an unexpected week in jail for contempt of court during the contentious Basarwa land case. And certainly not from a journalist who crosses the line between her private life and her public persona.
“None of your fucking business,” she says in reply to a relatively innocuous biographical question, not even bothering to raise the register of her voice, which makes the effect all the more shocking. Her face has stiffened into cold severity, as if someone has plunged a needle of Botox into her. There is no question that she is in control. Nor will I dare to try to pursue this line of questioning. I suddenly, acutely, empathize with Sidney Pilane.
The weird thing is that we have already crossed the line. Until this moment, she has been the most generous of hosts, throwing open her home and her life to us for the weekend to reveal the woman behind the formidable reputation. As a High Court judge and one of Botswana’s leading novelists, she is taking a risk, giving us the all-access backstage pass, but that doesn’t mean she has to like the vulnerability.
The first time photographer Pieter Hugo and I meet her is in her chambers at the High Court in Lobatse, and I am immediately struck by the sharp curiosity that radiates from her features. She comes across as driven by uncompromising ideals, but unlike some of her redoubtable coll
eagues, she is also warm and wickedly droll. She connects with people readily, but at the same time, you are aware that she is measuring you up—and keeping something of herself in reserve.
I quickly learn to keep my notepad stowed. She is an impatient interviewee, especially if the questions are ones she has been asked a thousand times before (like how she became a lawyer: by chance, a teacher’s recommendation) and she becomes cagey whenever she catches me jotting down her words.
In conversation, however, Unity is genial, opening up about the twenty-one-year-old AIDS orphan she has taken under her wing, or sweeping us off on a driving tour of Mochudi, the tiny village where she grew up, and where, she says, “if you went even four houses from your home, you were out on a major adventure.” Now, she flies around the world as a matter of course, attending conferences on human rights and doing book tours.
She is at her most open at home, with her family, and especially around seventeen-year-old Natasha, the youngest of her three children, cool in her purple Converse sneakers. Natasha is protective, admonishing me to “write good things” about her mother, but also candid: pointing out, with a teen’s affectionate exasperation of a parent’s foibles, the notes Unity writes to herself in the front of books she’s reading—brief diary entries caught in airports and train stations.
At a dinner party at Unity’s non-traditional timber house (the unconventionality upset the neighbors no end), her sister, Tiny Diswai, claims “That sister of mine has balls!” Her friends agree, laughing and teasing her about the time she threw the prosecutor in prison. Unity waves it off, dismissive rather than humble.
Her notoriously convivial gatherings of friends include Gaborone’s intelligentsia: artists, writers, activists, educators and an AIDS immunologist, among others, tonight embroiled in sparring banter about the education system and international crime tribunals over red wine and slightly singed steak on the braai. Normally, these affairs evolve into dancing until dawn, but perhaps subdued by the presence of journo and photographer, the party tapers off at one in the morning, which is perhaps lucky, considering what is to come . . .
The coincidence is absurd. It is an event peeled from the pages of one of her books, akin to a Nazi prison camp guard rocking up on Bernhard Schlink’s doorstep or a gang general in the 28s asking Jonny Steinberg for a light on a street corner.
In the morning-after wake of the party, a young woman arrives at the gate, pleading that she has been attacked. Natasha pounds on the shower door: “Mma? I really need you.” While the High Court judge hurriedly gets dressed, Pieter and I go with a discomfited Natasha to unlock the gate, where a cowed girl with disheveled hair and soaked-through sneakers is waiting, clutching her dirty t-shirt. When Natasha slides opens the gate, she moves in complement to open her hands briefly, to show us the rip down the front of her shirt, exposing her breasts. She is shaking.
Inside, at the kitchen table, she fondles a mug of tea overloaded with sugar, while Unity quizzes her in Setswana, cool and calm, already having procured her a clean shirt, a sweater. I can’t follow, but in the gaps, Unity explains. The girl was hitching a ride home from the golf course where she works, when three men stopped to pick her up in a van. They pulled off the road in the dark and told her, “We’ve been looking for someone like you.” Unity says, “What she’s saying is that they wanted her for a ritual murder. For dipheko or muti.”
And this is where the absurdity comes in. It is one thing to chance upon the one house in this semi-rural neighborhood that just so happens to belong to a High Court judge known for her work on women’s rights; it is another entirely when that judge also happens to have written a novel on this exact issue—Screaming of the Innocent.
Her book is based on real events. In 2001, there was a riot in Mochudi over the unsolved ritual murder and mutilation of schoolgirl Segametsi Mogomotsi, reduced to bloody parts for superstitious and powerful men—an atrocity, Unity says, that happens at least two or three times a year in this otherwise urbane country of 1.7 million people, where education and medical care and even land are dispensed for free.
“Nobody was ever brought to trial,” Unity says, which makes it all the more difficult for me to understand why she is not now insisting that the trembling young woman with the bruises on her arms go to the police. But I don’t intervene. I have not been privy to all the details, and she is a judge, after all, with a long and lauded history.
We drive most of the way to the young woman’s village in silence, stopping only once, briefly, to survey the place where she says she was attacked. When we drop her off and watch her walk into her modest house, I realize I never asked her name. She raises one palm as we pull away, the rescue affected.
It is only on the way back that Natasha asks the question: “What happened to her?”
And it’s now that Unity throws me, flipping my suppositions with a canny dissection that reveals a judge’s experience, but also a novelist’s raptor eye. She has been weighing this all along.
“I hear a lot of witnesses,” Unity tells her daughter. “She wasn’t telling the truth.” There were holes in her story, Unity explains, which shifted like the dust does here, during the drought.
For starters, she was too old, at twenty-one, well beyond the age of the budding virginal pubescents required for such gruesome medicine. She claimed she escaped from the van into the darkness and thorn bushes, and found refuge by breaking into a yellow house just across the way, failing to see the lights or hear the noise of the braai at Unity’s house or the local bar around the corner. And she only came for help at ten in the morning. “I’ve worked with women who have been attacked,” Unity says. “In these kinds of situations, you can’t sleep. You go for help at first light.”
She was hesitant about the details of the assault. There’s no doubt that there was one. But not the way she described it. Unity guesses it was probably a boyfriend, maybe one her parents disapprove of, which would explain her reluctance to go to the police or tell her mother. But then she adds, “Poor kid. Nobody deserves to be attacked.”
When Pieter and I first arrived in Gaborone two days ago, it was to find the papers infested with stories about women: a brouhaha about Miss Botswana refusing to be photographed in a bikini, a school principal under investigation for taking one of his teen pupils off into the bushes at night, the “passion killings” that have become an epidemic here, committed by jealous boyfriends or husbands who often turn the gun on themselves afterwards.
The subject of women’s rights is one that will always itch under Unity’s skin. After she overturned the law with her landmark case in 1990, she set up the Metlhaetsile Women’s Center (which provides legal aid to the women of Mochudi); in 2002, she became the first woman High Court judge in the country.
But she found her new role constrained her. “As a judge, you have a different voice, a powerful voice that has to be used very carefully,” Unity says. “You’re making powerful decisions that can affect other people’s lives. I can’t just pick up the phone and give a comment to the newspaper because there’s confusion as to whether I’m speaking as an individual or whether this is an official position from the court. It’s the retreat and self-censorship that made me write novels. I’m still talking, but from a safe harbor through fiction.”
In her novels, her passion seeps through the page like a watermark, overwhelming her protagonists, but not her sense of story or characterization. “What moves you at any point is what I write about,” she says. And what moves her is AIDS and violence against women in Far And Beyon’, cultural identity in Juggling and muti murders in Screaming of the Innocent. I ask her if this event will make it in to her next book. She shrugs, noncommittal. It not quite everyday, but neither, in her experience, is it remarkable.
Her new book, The Heavens May Fall, is due out later this year. The title is inspired by a Latin saying, “Let justice be done or the heavens fall,” but it also seems a good précis of her life. I get the idea that with her stubborn and uncompromis
ing will, Unity Dow would be capable of bringing them down herself.
“Hey, watch out,” João says, yanking me back under the safety of the overhang as a black garbage bag drops onto the rubbish piling up on the landing, like the silt of the mine dumps that used to rise up around the city. He’s nineteen years old, with a sharp face, a blunt nose and pit bull puppy eagerness. He pokes his head out from the safety of High Point’s undercover parking lot—an action hero checking for snipers—and then beckons me over to safety.
It’s 2008. I’m researching my book Zoo City. Historically, the idea of the great South African novel has been all about the journey into the interior, the wide expanses of Karoo scrublands that expose the interior of the soul. I wanted the journey of my story to be vested in more corporeal things. Forget the soul, I wanted the sparking nerves, the guts, the pounding heart of the cityscape.
João explains that the building’s elevator is not working. The water goes off periodically; people try their taps, cursing and cranking them wide open. Forget to close them and when the water comes on again, it floods the sinks and bathtubs, spilling down the walls. The last time this happened, it drowned the elevator’s electrics. It will cost a million rand to fix. And in the meantime, building management has told residents it’s okay, as a temporary measure, to drop their garbage onto the landing rather than lug it down twenty-four flights of stairs.
We carefully skirt the garbage drop zone to the edge of the landing, which looks down onto the street: me, João and his young burly partner, Mike, and my fixer, Johnson, a Zimbabwean recommended by a photographer friend, whose job is to escort me through the wilds of inner city Johannesburg. Tour guide, translator, bodyguard. We have agreed he should leave his gun at home. “It just makes more trouble,” Johnson says, and we are not here looking for that.
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