Childhood in Black and White
A novel based on an award-winning play about growing up under apartheid.

Reviewed by Wendy Kann
Sunday, August 6, 2006

THE SYRINGA TREE

A Novel

By Pamela Gien

Random House. 262 pp. $24.95

In the early 1960s, the South African government, increasingly dominated by ultra- right- wing Afrikaners, decided that their "petty apartheid" policies -- banning interracial marriage, for instance -- were not enough. They began to pound through new, far grimmer laws they called groot or high apartheid with clenched-tooth determination to separate the races irrevocably. Blacks were hunted down and driven into filthy townships or barren reserves, with only servants granted passes to enter white areas by day. Whites faced heavy fines for harboring undocumented blacks or their families. Fear and paranoia quickly permeated all levels of society. Ultimately, though, even fear was different in apartheid South Africa. Whites always knew that only a too-empathetic heart or profound bad luck could result in real trouble. For blacks, however, the horrors of the era were unimaginable.

The Syringa Tree , Pamela Gien's evocative debut novel, based on her award-winning play of the same name, is set against this charged backdrop and narrated with Scout Finch-like candor from the perspective of a 6-year-old white child. Energetic, sweet-toothed Elizabeth has a tendency to root in the sugar bowl and wet her pants.

But for all this delightful innocence, Lizzie worries. In Ferndale, her lower-middle-class suburb of Johannesburg, she learns that while purebred, God-fearing Afrikaners represent the pinnacle of evolution and a black skin its sorry depths, people in between cling uneasily to the totem pole of privilege. Jews, Catholics, Portuguese, Indians and mixed-race people are compartmentalized with varying degrees of disdain. Even longtime British settlers are regarded with deep suspicion.

These tangled currents of hatred and hierarchy bewilder Lizzie. Of British descent, she frets as her delicate Catholic mother sighs and wafts. She waits anxiously for her Jewish father, a doctor, to return from his illegal late night visits to a hospital in Soweto, the massive, squalid black township. She eavesdrops as adults in her family fume about the government's forcing of rural blacks off their ancestral land and into far-off reserves. "This bloody new government should just borrow Hitler's trains for the job, and be honest about what they're doing," Lizzie's grandfather says. But Lizzie's anxieties find their sharpest focus in her adored nanny, Salamina, who, with the complicity of Lizzie's family, is illegally hiding her baby, Moliseng, in the cramped servants' quarters of their "whites only" suburban backyard.

Charged with keeping Moliseng safe from prying neighbors and clandestine police raids, Lizzie nervously pats down the air around her, "making sure no crippling spells were riding the gusts, no evil spirits coming near. I busied myself with this secret job all day and every day," she confides.

Lonely, she tries to befriend Loeska, the daughter of a Dutch Reformed Church leader who lives next door. "God tells [my father] everyfing ," says dainty Loeska, bedecked in petticoats and voiles, the epitome of high Afrikaans culture. "Those kaffirs will kill you, if you go in there," Loeska warns about a prospective school trip to Soweto, one for which most parents at Lizzie's Catholic school had refused permission. But the rebellious school nuns nevertheless take a small contingent of Lizzie's young classmates to sing at a black school on the outskirts, just the outskirts, of Soweto. Lizzie witnesses the flimsy dwellings of cardboard and corrugated iron and "broken-down cars that sat like rusty, discarded sardine tins at the side of the road. Useless. All useless, it looked like to me," she says.

Brave by day, swinging high in the branches of her backyard syringa tree, at night Lizzie lies awake in her ostensibly safe suburb, terrified of tsotsis , itinerant black thieves who used razor-embedded rods to fish through windows, and tokoloshies , shape-shifting African spirits who live under the bed. She watches her dark shutters flicker with police searchlights outside, worrying about Salamina and Moliseng, listening for the frightening slap of bare feet running, van doors slamming and muffled screams as people are kicked and bludgeoned to their knees.

Eventually, Lizzie learns that whispered chants and patting down the air do not, in fact, keep the world safe. By that time, Moliseng also knows not to play in the front yard or near the fence. "Like a well-trained little dog who had never tasted delicious red meat, she was content with the crumbs of life in the back," Lizzie observes. Perhaps Gien should have ended her tale there. While most of The Syringa Tree is a subtle layering of tone and detail in the careful construction of character and setting, the last pages abruptly change in pace. Suddenly, the story rushes through Lizzie's youth and early adulthood in a way that feels forced, as if Harper Lee had fast-forwarded through the civil rights movement at the close of To Kill a Mockingbird . But that should not detract from Gien's overall achievement. The Syringa Tree is beautifully written, seamlessly translated from its original incarnation as a play.

Having grown up in Rhodesia, a country that was on the verge of racial war in the 1960s, I am intimately familiar with what it means to live on the razor's edge of taboo, with early breath-catching awareness of things you didn't ask, places you didn't go. Gien has authentically recreated the unexpected terrors and confusion that once came with growing up white in South Africa, where hate was dense and palpable. At the same time, she acknowledges the senseless brutalities inflicted on millions simply because they were black. For that, she deserves accolades. Hers, one hopes, are truths that heal. ·

Wendy Kann is the author of a memoir, "Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa."