Part I: Reading Mara and Dann

Last visit I told you about Doris Lessing and my profound encounter with her early feminist novel, The Golden Notebook. I also confided about my guilt - it's not confidential any more, is it - nothing's confidential on the internet - unless you're an NSA hacker who can hack into iPhones. Then I guess you know how to keep the lesser (Google) hackers out. Nah, Google'd just use a hybridised Gmaps to find it. And so begin the Cyber Wars. Bring it. Just wait for me to find a techie minion with something to prove.

I have a foolproof (and I mean 'fool') strategy: Say nothing, write nothing, but hear and see everything. The middle one being problematic. Do as I say, not as I do, friend!

I was fretting about how to tie my conspiracy rant (is it a conspiracy if it's true? Let's ask Wikileaks) and the sidelined subject of this post: Mara and Dann. Then I told you what to do (like in an autocrat and that's exactly what this - my blog is an autocracy, paeon - friend) and if I had an advisor (where do I get one? For free?) she would have said, "the What Did You See game! In that game, say what you can afford to, write nothing, see and hear everything."

Mara and Dann is set on a continent named Ifrika (ingenious, that) in an unspecified and difficult to decipher time. The sister and brother are born and grow up in the middle of southern 'Ifrika'. A drought is spreading from the south out, pushing columns of refugees north before it. In these columns, the only prejudice is against people who have more than others: water or food. And there is often little to stop the stronger taking what they want from the weaker.

The size of the animals is bizarrely exaggerated: water dragons and stingers about the size of dogs lurk in and around water holes, picking off the weakening animals - and people. The former is usually found on Darwin's islands and the latter is a mutant scorpion.

These scenes, in pencil on tracing paper, are laid over the southern Africa in which I live and have travelled through. I know this feeling because often I feel like a foreigner in my streets, cities, country, region and continent. I suspect this is intentional (although who can ever pin down the intentions of an author - Future Author Me plans to contradict everything anyone says - it's boring to repeat "The answer is in however you see it." Yes, well, you're not dead and the book exists in black and white, not as a hologram, so say something, dammit!) to mimic the characters' confusion and sense of displacement.

But I (the reader) have my own reservations (always!) about viewing the foreign, too. About pasting (not glue, obviously, but ctrl + v) pictures of the smiling and obsequious people you meet next to photos of oblivious animals. (Oblivious unless you smell like a fleshy meal or have a gun in one hand.) When you meet someone foreign to yourself, you catalogue their differences, right? And, be honest here, you perceive these differences as wrong or inexplicable, friend. Even ridiculous.

In Mara and Dann, these differences are mostly threatening - remember: food and water, pursuit by mutant animals, racial difference. Is this not how war curdles, whether offensive or defensive? (Ok, usually not with mutant animals.) (War, a truly ridiculous custom.) This war is not addressed in the first half of the book, but it is there traced over people's interactions, particularly in Mara's answers to the What Did You See game. (This is not your monotonous I Spy - this is how 'Mahondi' children are taught to reason.) She senses destruction, knowledge and cunning, where others see a kopje or prison.

Although, as a reader primed to read the signs, all this and more seems obvious.

Knowing what we do about the psychology of the strong confronted by the weakened (and the nature of stories), that the North is a pipedream or unreachable seems obvious. But then, I don't like (nor do I believe in, but that's another story) happy endings. So I'm betting on the sure thing: war. (FYI I think war is ridiculous, but I would also like to see a return on my money. You know, if you're interested, I know someone ...) But I think Mara already knows. I think that because of what she did see, she knows what she will see.

PS. I am halfway through the book. There is so much more to say, so I am concentrating on the political issues, as a base in her oeuvre. Also, because I want to and I am autocrat here. Though I am still thinking of a fitting designation: Queen - too haughty; Tsar - too haunted; Prime Minister - so boring ...