The Woman Next Door

Death does that. It throws people into each other’s arms.

~ Patty Dann

By Yewande Omotoso

Your people…white people say to forget it and move on. But…we must also get better Sometimes you move on and you remain sick, and then what is the point of going forward? We must get better too.

This book is about two women who were definitely thrown into each other’s worlds. I have not read many books about the experience of apartheid, other than Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s frank and disturbing autobiography, Part of My Soul Went With Him. And that was many years ago. In this charming book, Yewande Omotoso brings a new voice to the effects of apartheid, delivered by a new generation. And she does it in a story that brought me to tears and laughter.

Omotoso introduces us to two women of South Africa, next door neighbors, one white, one black. Both have experienced a personal relationship crisis, a late in life coming to terms. But both, also, are experiencing a world of change and the possibility that their age has brought them past the ability or desire to adapt. Omotose brings us into these women’s lives with a gentle humor about negotiating the equivalent of what we in the United States would call a homeowner’s association. The personalities, the petty power struggles.

But when the home improvement project of one neighbor damages the house of the other, these two resentful women are thrown into an unlikely dependence.

And as she walks us more deeply into the lives of these two neighbors we see the skeletons of apartheid in their closets. Omotoso gives us an inside view of how apartheid shaped the lives of two women. The challenge of coming to terms with a system from which they benefitted, where wealth and race gave tacit permission to domestic abuses of power. And Omotoso shows us the effect these abuses of power had, not only on the abused, but also on the self-proclaimed innocent abuser. Of one protagonist, the narrator tells us:

At the age of thirty-one Hortensia James started to hate. It took her some time, the way certain fads stutter before they really take off. She wrestled it for a while, resisted. She understood that hate was a kind of acid and she preferred not to burn. Also hate was unpopular and, back in those days anyway, she’d still wanted to be liked.

She went from resenting just [her husband] , to the housekeeper, the driver, the market woman. People were slow, simple-minded; they all harboured ill intentions, seemed determined to be unhelpful, especially when their jobs required being of service. They didn’t answer questions properly, spoke as if they had been trained all their lives to frustrate whoever addressed them. Hortensia’s foul temper kept her mouth in a line, her brow knit, her teeth pressed together and her eyes cutting. She got good at chopping the legs off people with no knife, with only words….She tied a block of concrete to her ankle and let it drag her down. Hating, after all, was a drier form of drowning.

I was of course, chastised, at my own presumed innocence around racism. I am learning that my privilege has created benefits for me at the expense of others. But, more deeply, I saw the sad nature of where privilege can take us when a system that makes one group subservient to another produces a toxic elitism where entitlement creates its own forms of hate, that drier form of drowning.

As Omotoso suggests, we must all get better. The oppressed and the entitled. And sometimes that looks like getting unexpectedly thrown into the arms of the other.