Identity in crisis

12 March 2013 - 02:17 By Andrea Nagel
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Carol Campbell's book My Children Have Faces: A Novel About the Karretjiemense of the Karoo, tells the story of a family's commitment to protect itself.

Descendants of the San and Khoi people, Karretjiemense have become known as the "Gypsies of the Western Cape". A few families still survive as nomads, their worldly possessions on a cart hitched to a pair of donkeys, traversing the dusty roads between farms to work as casual labourers. Singer David Kramer calls them ''the invisible people of the Karoo".

The image of a family on a cart freely living off the land, in touch with nature and sleeping under the stars, retains some romance, but the reality is that the defining characteristics of this existence are poverty, violence and alcohol abuse.

Muis is the central character of the novel. She is a mother of three who, for 15 years, has been hiding on the veld with Kapok, the father of her two daughters.

Miskiet is the reason Muis has joined Kapok on his vagrant travels in the Karoo.

Vengeful, violent and eaten away by the bitterness he was born with, Miskiet sniffs his victim in the air when she and her family are forced back to Leeu Gamka - the place Muis never wanted to see again - by the dryness of the Karoo veld and a message received by Kapok that there is work for him in the little town.

They return to the place where her rape and the murder of her lover, Miskiet's brother Jan, shattered Muis's life, forcing her to take her newborn son, Fansie, on the run with Kapok as her limping saviour.

The story unfolds with each character exquisitely captured in the nuances of expression of each member of the family, and by Miskiet, who hunts them like a bloodhound.

Miskiet believes that Muis's oldest, Fansie, is his child, ruined by the woman who dared to escape from him. Fansie and Witpop (Sponsie is still a baby) have learnt to live off the land and their story of survival is conveyed through the naivety of their expression. But one night, they are forced to grow up in an instant.

Witpop, just going through puberty, is humiliated by her smell and is teased in the small villages of the Karoo, like Prince Albert. Her greatest wish in life is to be able to afford a roll on, a face cloth and some sanitary pads.

Like her mother, Witpop has hung all her dreams on the acquisition of identity documents for the family, believing they will give them ''faces".

If they have documents they can get welfare assistance, schooling and, most importantly, authorities would know if they were to disappear. Miskiet relies on the knowledge that they don't possess IDs.

Campbell brilliantly uses thecommon bureaucratic inconvenience as a symbol to express the simplicity of her characters' needs and how they can be exploited.

Tension becomes almost intolerable as it is masterfully built by the chase. Each character speaks in the first person, allowing the reader to empathise with them.

Through the carefully constructed voices of the family, the travails of this remote existence are expressed. So is the remarkable humanity of the family as a whole.

Brought closer by the threat of Miskiet, we watch Muis, Kapok, Fansie and Witpop develop throughout the book, and their ultimate survival brings the story to a beautiful and intensely touching denouement.

'My Children Have Faces' is published by Random House Struik, available at Exclusive Books for R170

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