https://www.nb.co.za/en/view-book/?id=9780795710575
In the midst of it all
Thabile Shange
Kwela
ISBN: 9780795710575
It was with great excitement that I began reading Shange’s debut novel, In the midst of it all. Set in modern-day South Africa, the novel deals with love, trust, family, xenophobia in South Africa and the conflicts that arise between families, communities and loved ones during times of crisis.
In a strikingly written prologue, the reader is introduced to the very possible tension that will follow in the book. In the prologue, Nandi goes to Femi’s Auto Repair Garage to meet with him for a journalism class assignment on “The effects of xenophobia on foreign-owned business”. After Nandi and Femi’s initial interaction at his shop, it was clear that these two were far from done with one another.
We meet Nandi Nxumalo, an ambitious young journalist with a passion for what’s right and wrong, and Femi Adewoye, an attractive garage owner from Nigeria. Nandi lives with her father and sister, and Femi lives by himself. Nandi’s father is a strict man, and she often finds refuge in her mother, who lives elsewhere after having divorced her father, as well as in her younger sister, Thenjiwe, who acts like a cheerleader for Nandi. At the risk of giving away the storyline, it’s worth mentioning that Femi and Nandi’s love story is extremely complicated. Nandi’s father hates foreigners, because he believes that the death of his son was caused by a foreign national. He also believes the stereotypes of foreign nationals, that they’re stealing jobs meant for South Africans and pushing drugs into communities. Nandi knows where her father stands on the issue, and therefore struggles to tell him that she’s dating Femi. Only much later, Nandi opens up and her father’s response is devastating.
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With xenophobia as the through line of the story, we see how xenophobia attacks on larger and smaller scales impact the characters. On a larger scale, the attacks in South Africa are highlighted.
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With xenophobia as the through line of the story, we see how xenophobia attacks on larger and smaller scales impact the characters. On a larger scale, the attacks in South Africa are highlighted. There’s an absolutely gut-wrenching part of the story where one of Femi’s workers and his family hide away in the garage after attacks in the area where they live, get too unbearable. We also see how some boys in Nandi’s street talk down to her because she’s dating a Nigerian man.
I might be a bit of a prude, but a few of the sex scenes in the novel seem unmotivated. There is one scene, for instance, where Nandi and Femi come back from their neighbours after Nandi makes a few comments about the neighbours’ whiteness. Femi is angry at Nandi for how she reacted at the neighbours’ house. Nandi can’t take him seriously, and his anger is so hot to her that she wants to have sex with him in that very moment. For me, a very important part of the events in that scene gets lost when Nandi doesn’t engage with Femi on his anger. Femi, for instance, says to Nandi that she is racist – Nandi thinks that the white neighbours probably don’t even know Femi’s name; they just see him as their Nigerian neighbour. This moment between the two of them could have been such a strong scene if Nandi just took her mind out of the gutter.
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The story and the writer’s intentions are clear – to bring awareness to xenophobia’s impact on people’s lives. Nandi becomes sort of a spokesperson – here and there, Femi gets annoyed with her over it – for xenophobia. The only thing that bothered me about Nandi was how ready she was to give up her life for Femi. Now, I am not sure whether love can make you do that, but it felt like Nandi’s identity became all about Femi as their relationship progressed.
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The story and the writer’s intentions are clear – to bring awareness to xenophobia’s impact on people’s lives. Nandi becomes sort of a spokesperson – here and there, Femi gets annoyed with her over it – for xenophobia. The only thing that bothered me about Nandi was how ready she was to give up her life for Femi. Now, I am not sure whether love can make you do that, but it felt like Nandi’s identity became all about Femi as their relationship progressed. There’s nothing wrong with it; it simply bothered the feminist in me. This aspect of her is, however, what kept me reading. She’s such an unpredictable woman, that I was just never sure what her next moves were going to be. I would suggest that other readers also take their feminist lenses off when reading the parts about their relationship that deal with exes and trust.
This book is an important literary contribution to the discourse on xenophobia in South Africa. With love at the centre, In the midst of it all demonstrates just how we’re all more alike than what we might think.