Cape Fever
Nadia Davids
Simon & Schuster
“Dear Colony, please stop the cruelty, stop, just stop. Stop.”
If playwright and author Nadia Davids were to pen a telegram to 20th-century Cape Town, this would be her plea.
In her latest novel, Cape Fever, Davids has created a city set in a colonial empire in 1920: its scenery and socio-geographic spacing (and displacing) are deeply reminiscent of a Mother City of yore.
Class, structural violence, interpersonal relationships, and injustice are explored via Davids’ (antonymous) protagonists: the “young but incredibly canny, with a feverish interior” Soraya Matas — from the Muslim Quarter — and the peculiar Mrs Alice Hattingh, living on ‘a street of houses grand and gabled that look out into the dipped bowl of our harbour city. A row of homes, my father told me, for doctors and ambassadors,’ Soraya describes to the reader. The former, a maid to the latter, whose employment under Mrs Hattingh’s rule(s) results in a sinister and unsettling experience.
The novel’s opening sentence — I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read — establishes the relationship between labourer and employer: Mrs Hattingh, (feverishly) awaiting her son’s visit from London, offers to help Soraya write letters to her fiancé on her employee’s behalf; Soraya dictates, Mrs Hattingh creates.
What could be read as an act of deceit is rather one of defiance-meets-preservation of the self, regarding Soraya’s lying to Mrs Hattingh about being illiterate: “There’s a quality of holding back the full extent of her experience, or the full extent of what she’s feeling,” Davids explains. “Crucially, Soraya is lying to Mrs Hattingh, but she’s not lying to us.”
An interesting feature of Gothic literature is a woman who is able to see things that are uncanny, or finds herself enmeshed in a very strange place. — Nadia Davids
A dictionary entry of “fever” reads: “A body’s temperature temporarily increasing while it’s fighting an infection”. The physical seeps into the personal, says Davids of the two women “orbiting each other in the very dark space of a very particular domestic arena. They’re under the structures of empire and of colony, and it’s in a way in which that is an infection. And it does create a fever dream in some ways.”
Near-delirium and out-of-body experiences permeate the pages as Soraya slips into a netherworld of sorts upon entering Mrs Hattingh’s imposingly grand, yet deteriorating house: “She’s entering a fantasy realm, nothing is quite as it seems. I thought about the names,” Davids adds of naming Mrs Hattingh ‘Alice’: “It’s Alice in Wonderland, she’s mad as a hatter!”
An “off with her head!” — à la Lewis Carroll’s fictitious maniacal monarch — approach to the theme of perceived female rage should rather be read as “the idea of unmediated rage and grief, or metabolised rage or grief,” which manifests in the theme of mothers who lose their children: “Mrs Hattingh’s son is far away from her; she can’t get to him. But the shadow of that is Soraya’s mother, and the loss of her child to this house.”
Soraya’s head remains one of “an extremely rich and feverish interior world: she has a certain kind of kinetic intelligence. She’s able to see things, and when she sees these spirits” — for yes, the physical world does meet the metaphysical portrayed via spectral past maids of Mrs Hattingh and an eerily uncanny painting of a former maid who resembles Soraya — “in her world, they are extremely real”.
As a writer, Davids depicts these spirits as “psychic manifestations of unfinished and historical business”.
The history of class, race and structural violence, and having a woman narrator at the centre, are representative of the Gothic, Davids says of the novel’s genre: “An interesting feature of Gothic literature is a woman who is able to see things that are uncanny, or finds herself enmeshed in a very strange place.”
The uncanny aside, Davids draws on corporeality when sketching Soraya’s experiences of being out on the streets in the vibrant, bustling, multicultural space of the ‘District’:
The street has begun to trade. If I am lucky enough, I will find a little spot where I only hear unfamiliar tongues … A man wheels his fruit and vegetable barrow out in front of me and shouts that I should mind his path! I shout back that he has no business on the sidewalk … one of his mandarins falls to the ground … I take it for myself …
In this moment I am perfectly happy … I laugh and wave when a gang of boys charges past me, making their way onto the back of an ice cart … all ignoring the man at the front who screams at them in a stream of Cape tongue. Ahead of me, a woman who fancies herself a politician stands on an upturned fruit crate, a gaggle of people around; she speaks about not trusting the settlers and taking the matters into our own hands. The men watching her surprise me because they look without sneering, they listen without jeering …”
“On the streets, in that space, she has a very transformative feeling. I was thinking a lot about District Six and I haven’t really seen literary texts set during that era,” Davids expands. “All the work that’s done around it, understandably and including my own, is interested in the moment of removal, or the moment just before removal. I’ve often wondered ‘what would it look like to render the space when it’s one of its apexes of its most vibrant and interesting, and the spectre of removal has not yet been cast’? It’s a moment where people are colliding, inventing a new way of being together, and imagining a new way of being together.”
The outside world is relevant to, and reflective of, Soraya’s internal world: “People have two faces, and I’m talking about the context of labour,” says Davids, who thinks of Soraya as having three distinct voices: “there’s the interior one that is frenzied and alive and perceptive and sometimes paranoid but deeply insightful. And it’s a complex voice.
“Then there’s the one she uses for Mrs Hattingh, which is simple and direct — it’s about the management and running of the house. Then there’s the one that she uses for her family, which is practical, loving, and orientated around the now. She’s free."
Concurrently, yet contradictory, the colour grey manifests in various ways, alongside the vividness one associates with fever, with Soraya introducing the reader to the Grey Women: They’re everywhere in this city, stalking the streets … frightening the horses of the rich, scaring the men who hurt them … They are neither ghost nor jinn … Not jinn, because they have known flesh; not ghosts, because they do not envy the living … At least one of them in every big house — usually the spirit of a servant known to the property.
“The Grey Women have been through their own war, and they exist in that nether-space,” says Davids, whereas greyness physically materialises in “the shadow of this apocalyptic war, and this terrible pandemic [the Spanish flu] that ripped through the city. Everybody is walking around in an ashen way. What happens when you see a ghost? You go ashen. You lose your colour.”
The still-prevalent disharmonious nature of a contemporary Cape Town can also be equated to contrasting colours, as Davids — who grew up in the City Bowl’s Walmer Estate, less than a 10-minute drive from Vredehoek, where I was raised — recalls having heard the Mother City described as “a sunny place for shady people”.
A shadow cast not by a fever tree, but one of modern-day coloniality. To echo Davids: ‘Dear’ Cape Town, stop upholding harmful systemic practices. Please stop. Full stop.
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