Summary
The first chapter of Mother to Mother is titled "Mandisa's lament," and is written completely in italics. This style is used throughout the novel to distinguish text in which Mandisa directly addresses the other mother. A lament is a passionate expression of one's grief, and through hers, Mandisa allows us to examine, first, her deep emotional response to the murder. This offers a strong contrast to the author's preface, which was rooted in fact. "My son killed your daughter," she opens, "People look at me as though I did it" (5). Mandisa is at once as implicated in the murder as Amy and her son, as much as it happened to them, it happens to her. She is defensive: "As though I could make this child do anything" (5).
It is her community's blame that seems to bother Mandisa the most, and this is the first thing she addresses in her lament. Shame born from community scrutiny is a common theme in Mandisa's life, as we will see later in the novel. "People look at me as if I'm the one who woke up one shushu day and said, Boyboy, run out and see whether, somewhere out there, you can find a white girl with nothing better to do than run around Guguletu, where she does not belong" (5). Mandisa's son was not so obedient as to go kill on her behalf. She makes it clear that if he were so obedient, he would not have committed the deed at all. Mandisa takes no blame for what her son has done.
Mandisa tells us that she is not surprised about the murder: "I have known for a long time that he might kill someone some day" (5). She has seen that her son is capable of murder, but is surprised that it wasn't one of his friends or one of his siblings that he eventually hurt. She does not follow this claim with any explanation, but simply leaves it there for the reader. This introduces a mystery: if she knows her son is capable of evil, then why doesn't the story of this murder end with his blame? A potential answer comes with the fact that murder is so common that it is not such an offense in her society: "We live here, fight and kill each other. That is our business" (6).
Mandisa believes that Amy was mistaken in going to Guguletu, and that she would have faced violence whether she ended up in that fateful confrontation with Mxolisi or not. She writes that even if Mxolisi had died, Amy would have faced the possibility of violence from other places: "there is always the possibility she might have got herself killed by another of these monsters our children have become" (5). She writes that Amy "must have been the type of person who has absolutely no sense of danger when she believes in what she is doing" (5). She calls this Amy's weakness—that Amy has "no inborn sense of fear" (6).
Amy was an unexpected face in Guguletu the day she died. "How many young white South African women were here in Guguletu that day when she was killed?" Mandisa asks, "Do you see them driving up and down this township as though they are going to the market?" (6). This is important to Mandisa, that Amy's mother knows how out of place Amy was on the day of her death. Another important note for Mandisa is the fact that had Mxolisi killed a black woman, he would not have faced the same amount of punishment for his crime, nor would the family have received the same amounts of social scorn for his actions. The awful legacy of apartheid has created a situation in which black life is undervalued and inter-racial violence is rampant.
Mandisa closes her lament with a series of questions that position the government as an antagonist in the novel. She notes that the government is now paying for Mxolisi's living for the first time in his life. As she writes: "Where was the government the day my son stole my neighbor's hen; wrung its neck and cooked it—feathers and all because there was no food in the house and I was away, minding the children of the white family I worked for?" (6). She questions where the state was when Mxolisi went hungry as a child and recalls an instance when she was unexpectedly forced to stay for a whole weekend at work and therefore had to leave her children to fend for themselves with no warning. She wasn't given the opportunity to leave her children enough food for the time she was away, and she didn't have a phone at the time to call them. And yet the government is feeding Mxolisi now, as punishment? Mandisa rages against the hypocrisy: "Why now, when he's an outcast, does my son have a better roof over his head than ever before in his life? ...living a better life, if chained?" (7).
At the end of her lament, Mandisa addresses God directly. She does not ask for a lesser punishment for her son, but wonders at the pain that God has sent her way. "The cup You have given me is too bitter to swallow," she writes. The chapter ends with her asking for Mxolisi's to be forgiven.
Analysis
Almost immediately, Mandisa introduces her complicated relationship with her son. She denies her ability to control him in response to claims of her guilt in Amy's murder. This inability to control him started young, but really it started "from before he was conceived; when he, with total lack of consideration if not downright malice, seeded himself inside my womb" (5). Mandisa's relationship with her son is an important component of the novel, as it explains many of her motives as a character. Although she loves her eldest son deeply, she resented him for a long time when he was a child, as his birth meant the loss of her childhood. Later, Mandisa writes that the initial shock of her pregnancy has prepared her for this more vicious shock of Amy's murder.
The tone of this chapter is important to note, as it offers us an important window into Mandisa's psyche. Although Mandisa is addressing Amy's mother, she is not doing so particularly delicately. Mandisa's shame is not without anger, and she makes it clear that she believes that Amy holds some blame for being somewhere she should not have been. She is not angry at Amy, she is angry at her son. She has been angry at her son since the original shock of her pregnancy, that "unreasonably and totally destroy[ed] the me I was... the me I would have become" (5). This anger is everpresent, and although she finds ways to accept her son, she will never be able to accept this final decision. Mandisa is in pain, and it is important that we see that this pain for all that it is, including the parts that are less forgiving of Amy's original decision to go to South Africa.
Through her lament, Mandisa begins to paint a picture of her son for the reader. So far, we have not seen many positive qualities. Mandisa has described her son as a disobedient shock in her life. More damning, however, was her description of him as a potential killer. Mandisa writes that if he killed anyone else, his life would not have been interrupted. She rebukes him for not having any sense: "Did he not know they would surely crucify him for killing a white person?" (6). Mandisa's emphasis on her son's faults and blame takes an important narrative role, as we expect she will come to justify her son's actions through the rest of her story. As readers, we are made to condemn Mxolisi first, so that we might forgive him later. We follow Mandisa's own arc in her relationship with her son upon his birth.
A question of goodness arises. Mandisa repeatedly writes that Amy "so believed in [her] goodness" (6), and this is what condemned her to operate without life-saving fear. "They so believe in their goodness," she writes, "know they have hurt no one, are, indeed, helping, they never think anyone would want to hurt them" (6). Mandisa, even though she is one of the people Amy went to South Africa to help, sees through Amy's decision to go. She saw that Amy might have assumed that because she was there to help, she would not be victimized by those she intended to aid. Mandisa writes that to people like Amy, "doing good in this world is an all-consuming, fierce and burning compulsion" (6). But Mandisa's message is clear when she asks where this goodness has gotten Amy, and whether that much good came from her work after all.
Ancestral baggage is another theme in the novel. In chapter 1, Mandisa writes: "Your daughter has paid for the sins of the fathers and mothers who did not do their share of seeing that my son had a life worth living" (6). Mandisa means that while Amy herself did not go to South Africa to further oppress black people, she could not navigate the country without being understood as one of the oppressors.
