Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlist | Morabo Morojele on the genesis of ‘Three Egg Dilemma’

FICTION

Criteria:

The winner should be a novel of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.

Three Egg Dilemma by Morabo Morojele (Jacana)

Morojele’s phantasmagorical story follows the life of EG (short for ‘Example’) and a group of unlikely friends and neighbours as they attempt to survive societal breakdown. Taking place in an unnamed locale — which could be read as Lesotho, South America, the Balkans or the US.

Judges said: A cleverly rendered dystopian novel, Three Egg Dilemma presents a complex narrative that juxtaposes the natural and the supernatural. The author deftly weaves together the familiar realm of village life, drinking dens and sexual exploration, while exploring the visceral, all against the backdrop of a society on the brink of a military strife. Written with lucid and poetic prose, this is a universal and timeless novel. 

Morabo Morojele on the genesis of Three Egg Dilemma

A twisted Saturday Afternoon.

I have had countless, hopeless and twisted afternoons, afternoons in limbo between mornings of rue and regret, and nights of what sleep may come, and terror.

And where I live, at least, there is a village with people whose clothes of years and years hang off their shoulders like weathered flags. They are happy because their lives are only as far as they have been, even though they have electricity and television, and gadgets in their hands and so see worlds away, every day.

Three eggs are excessive. Two are sufficient. One egg would have you square-shouldered, with ribs like accordion bellows, and with other bones barely able to prop you up upright.

The world falls apart and is decimated far worse than we have ever known, there where we all can see. It is unforgivable, as it is in other places where it might be less vicious, but still serves to strip life of hope and dignity.

Nevertheless, love still, love always, whether between a mother and her child or between siblings, or even grudgingly, years later, a strange affection between neighbours; love is always possible, even if it doesn’t always remit.

Three Egg Dilemma was many years in the writing. The title came to me when I dropped and couldn’t save one of the four eggs I had left for my sustenance. Life pointed forwards to many gigs as a performing musician; to saving my life by moving from the big city; to finding love somewhere in between and then misplacing it; and then to almost falling off the face of the earth, I was at the eyebrows of life, as we say. The book is my gift to those who saved me.

EXTRACT

I know Mkhulu is alive because how could a man like him be dead, who every morning used to look to the horizon where life comes from and then sink his hands into the earth and raise it to his nose to smell it, remembering after the rain. He woke up every morning and would be exactly the same as the day before, no new frown on his brow, or a goitre, no new sudden limp, or a rash to scratch beneath his shirt. Mkhulu smelt of soap and tobacco and used to steal me oranges and black bananas from the house. If I had my way, Mkhulu would be the one to announce my child to the world, to name it, to cut a small scar into its flesh, to bring me herbs to burn to make it fall asleep, or to burn to rouse it, if it ever chose to die.

Sticks had always despised me. He used to think I would tell EG to make him go away. He is a small pitiful man with his fifty-cent eggs. He is an indigent bootlicker. He knows when to come and when to go. He is probably sick. That thing will search him out and eat him, in the way the dogs forage in the cactus wood where villagers go to shit; I mind my language, but sometimes, a thing is what it is.

Perhaps the thing draped its arm over his shoulder and led him out of the house; I’d noticed it is strangely polite and almost apologetic about its presence — it certainly never looked me in the eye; and led him to a corner of the yard, where it sat him down and whispered to him, until he was dead. If I were there, I would do funeral things, but would stay all the time at the back of the house, pouring water and stirring pots, as is our way, and talking to my courageous child, born at a time like this, lying asleep on a blanket in a shade close by. But by the way of the world, he is probably still alive and if I were to go to the house now, he would not say a word, but just look at me through his sick, purple eyes and go out to his rooms.

I often used to wake up in the middle of the night and pace around the living room table and stop to sometimes look for the future through the windows. I’d see the thing knocking respectfully at EG’s bedroom door as always, to enter. Before it came, I would have made a mix of coal dust and squirts of my urine which I would smear on my forehead and at the edges of the doors and windows of my room and EG’s room with my finger, mouthing incantations I remembered from my Catholic school days. It would turn and look at me and sadly shake its head, as if to say I had saved EG, and then wink and smile as if to say next time, if not for EG, it would be coming for me.

I had no interest in knowing its name, because to know something by its name is to know its purpose. It was familiar, if you like, though it didn’t come every night and I only ever saw it a few times. When it was cold outside, with EG passed out in his room, it would elbow me to shift me to get closer to the fire and we were the two of us.

I did not know if it had followed me here or if it had been here all along and had somehow decided to rouse itself, to become that portal through which we would all finally, truly re-see ourselves and know how we would die.

I punched it in the ribs. I kicked it with my knees and elbowed it out of my bed one night when there had been nothing in my bladder to make my piss to smear against the cracks of my windows. Next door, EG’s old steel-spring bed creaked and he woke to imagine a thing in my room that did not exist.

I want many things. I want my child to swell my belly and to round my cheeks. I want a man who will die in a bed at home, many months after we would have seen his death coming, so that everything would be prepared; the curtains drawn; heated water in buckets nebulising the rooms; a whiskey-smelling doctor, first, and then a busy priest, at our house and then off into the night, to other houses, to other dead. I want a man whose relatives I would hear in the other rooms as I sat on the solid foundations of a mattress purposefully put on the ground, as if death needs mourning as near as possible to the dead under the ground.

I want to hear them and remember for the future of this child, their disappointment as they rummage about in cupboards, looking to find and to change the will. I want to hear the tinkling sound of ornaments as they take for themselves his mother’s shiny, worthless things out of sideboards, her bells for summoning servants, her four small shot glasses on a copper tray, her bric-a-brac. I want a man who used to have trucks, their carcasses strewn about the yard now, the outward symbols of a rich life, and chained dogs that even I, his wife, would be afraid of and would feed from a distance. I want a man with a gun in a bottom corner of a cupboard I am not allowed to touch. Who shoots it into the sky every few months, to remind the chance boys never to come to this house. The kind of man who would shoot another man in the thigh because he was at me with his eyes, or with his greetings. A man whose shoes the working girl shines once a week, whom he looks at from behind his newspaper, and then shouts to me, “She is a stupid girl. She is no good. Send her back to her mother.”

After he is dead and everything has been arranged, as it should be, I want the man I love to come, when the children are asleep, and stay and leave, deep into the night. They will call him uncle and he will bring them sweets.