Title: Spilt Milk
Author: Kopano Matlwa
ISBN: 9781770097919
Publisher: Jacana
Publication date: April 2010
In her debut novel, Coconut (Jacana, 2007), EU Literary Award-winner Kopano Matlwa tackled the weighty issue of racial and gender identity in post-apartheid South Africa through the life stories of two teenage protagonists from widely differing backgrounds. At first glance her second novel, Spilt Milk, sets out in much the same vein, as it explores the state of South African democracy through the lives of the two main characters, Father Bill and Tshokolo Mohumagadi. However, where Coconut is a coming-of-age novel in the best tradition of the Bildungsroman form, subtly exploring racial and gendered identity through clever characterisation, Spilt Milk very obviously functions only at the level of political allegory. While the central plot revolves around the awkward love relationship between Father Bill, a disgraced white priest, and Mohumagadi, a ruthless and ambitious black educator, the novel is not really concerned with the life stories of either of the two protagonists. Instead, Spilt Milk offers readers a tentative love story as a national allegory, where the two main characters are evidently constructed as allegorical representations of black and white South Africa in their struggle to move beyond the shared pain of a troubled past.
This is both the novel’s greatest strength and its most evident lack. The troubled love affair between the aging, unpopular white man and the beautiful, triumphant black woman works very well as a symbolic investigation into post-apartheid society. Father Bill, “the shabby old white man” (10), “poorly dressed” (11), “clumsy”, with a “crustiness at the creases of his eyes” and with painful “yellow blisters” on his “cracked lips”, is “a joke” (21) according to Mohumagadi, who is herself described as a “tormented, angry woman” who “appeared to have to try hard to be politically correct” (6).
The fact that one is meant to read these two characters at the level of symbol and metaphor is made apparent from the very first page. Spilt Milk opens with a beautifully lyrical description of the birth of South African democracy and its rapid descent into rampant consumerism and corruption, as people who “had held hands and flung them into the air”, who “had embraced complete strangers”, who “had torn down old street signs” and who “had paraded into the streets and sung those songs that could only be sung by those who had suffered before” very soon lose interest in everything but “the purchasing of German cars”, “the buying of new wardrobes”, “BlackBerrys, MP3s, electronic notebooks and hands-free sets” and “filling up leather purses with shiny gold and silver cards” (1–2).
Mohumagadi’s solution to this bleak reality is the founding of Sekolo sa Ditlhora, a prestigious, expensive and, above all, exclusive school for black students. Initially, Mohumagadi is thrilled when she learns that the bishop is searching for a place to station a white priest outside of the church for “fall[ing] prey to the desires of the flesh” (9). “How perfect,” she muses, “to bring in a banished white priest! None of the haughty holiness, no grand robe, no condemning bow ... No one,” she concludes, “could be a better example for the children” (9). To her extreme dismay, however, the priest turns out to be a former lover who broke her heart when he abandoned her – significantly, in 1994.
Nevertheless, readers are left with very little insight into either Father Bill or Mohumagadi, as they function only at the level of symbolism and not as fully developed characters. Even Father Bill’s diary, addressed to God, becomes a supporting document in the service of Matlwa’s national allegory, rather than an illustration of the character’s deepest thoughts and emotions. The plot is also rather sketchy, apart from Father Bill’s arrival at the school and the obvious threat his presence holds for Mohumagadi’s carefully constructed facade of power and control. For example, readers never learn why young Bill never came back for young Tshokolo, why he never contacted her in fifteen years, or what motivated the affair which led to his banishment from the church. The four children Father Bill meets at the school show occasional glimmers of fascinating and complex personalities, but for the most part they, too, remain two-dimensional characters in the service of a larger allegorical message and, thus, often speak in ways no ten-year-old child ever would.
Furthermore, the character of the brightest and most tormented of the four children, Mlilo, most obviously functions only at the level of symbolism. Mlilo is a young boy of mixed racial parentage – a black mother and a white father – with Father Bill and Mohumagadi symbolically taking the place of the absent parents. His dark skin and bright green eyes suggest that Mlilo physically embodies the dream of a new, hybrid “rainbow nation”. However, when the old, deeply buried anger between the two adults indirectly leads to Mlilo’s suicide, Father Bill and Mohumagadi are forced to face their troubled past. It is their shared pain and anger that becomes the “spilt milk” of the title, which Father Bill rather callously dismisses: “It’s all just spilt milk now, Tshokolo; no point crying over it” (168). But even the moment of climax, the terrible confrontation between the two ex-lovers for which the reader has been waiting all along, functions only as allegory, and not as real words of hurt and betrayal between two people who have known real pain:
You want to call fifteen years of pain ... fifteen years of madness, agony and rage, “spilt milk”? So should I just forget everything, is that what you are suggesting, Bill? All those promises you made in ’94, I should just forget them? (168)
It is only with the death of Mlilo that Father Bill and Mohumagadi can finally set aside their past grievances and reunite, which, given the allegorical nature of the novel, almost suggests that black and white South Africans will be able to truly move beyond the pain of the past only once the dream of the “rainbow nation” is dead. At the same time, one could read the ending as a cautionary tale urging black and white South Africans to face their troubled pasts before they contribute to the death of their hard-won democracy. However, the novel ends with a message of hope and reconciliation, as Father Bill concludes that “[y]ou don’t forget spilt milk ... you clean it up” (168), and as “Mohumagadi got up and held his hand, a white man’s hand, [because] even Mohumagadi knew that we had to stop hating at some point” (195).
In conclusion, the novel presents readers with a beautiful and optimistic allegory of nation-building, but, sadly, at the cost of its plot and character development. Matlwa’s style is engaging, her use of symbolism is clever and her message is timely, but one cannot help but feel that allegory should be one component of a well-crafted novel, rather than a novel’s raison d’etre.