Summary
In this short chapter, Mandisa's home is raided by the police in the middle of the night. It is 4 AM, and Mandisa doesn't know what has awakened her. The night passes, and Mandisa hears her husband snore. In the dark, Mandisa stares at the smoke emitted from her extinguished candle and stares at her ceiling. She does not remember when she fell asleep, but either way, she is wide awake now. She is exhausted, and her muscles ache as if she's been "standing on [her] head throughout the night" (59). Her eyes "smart as though I'd spent the night cooking over an open fire in a windowless hut - using wood that I'd left out in the rain" (59). But for a moment, everything seems peaceful. What woke her up?
She gets up out of bed and marvels at how soundly her husband Dwadwa sleeps. He says that it is his long days loading cargo on and off ships that make him into such a good sleeper, but Mandisa knows she works just as hard. She hears a sound and recognizes it to be the noise that woke her up just moments before. It is the muffled sound of a car door being shut carefully. Her heart leaps—is it her son? Has he stolen a car? No, she reassures herself, "Mxolisi is not a bad boy... just a young person taken up with this business of politics" (60). She watches the people approach the home silently in her imagination, hoping that it is her son, but "the only answer to my frantic questions is an eerie silence that blankets the pre-dawn air, pushing the walls of the house inward...inward...and ever inward" (60). The silence is full of possibilities, and Mandisa becomes afraid.
There is banging on the door, and "at once, the whole yard is alive and clamorous" (60). The police bang on every surface available—door, wall, and window. They shine flashlights into the windows. The home is completely surrounded. While the sudden onslaught freezes Mandisa, Dwadwa jumps out of bed and dresses. Siziwe in the same moment runs in to her parents' room and gets into bed with her mother. She is terrified, whimpering and "shaking like a leaf" (60). Mandisa quiets her daughter and then heads with Dwadwa to the door. It's clear that it is the police, and Mandisa worries that something has happened to Mxolisi, although "in the back of my mind I know that the police wouldn't come like this, in the middle of the night, to tell us about something happening to Mxolisi" (61). They break down the back door right as Dwadwa goes to unlock it, and the police flood into the home. Siziwe begins to scream, sure the intruders were coming to kill them. Mandisa silences her daughter and goes to meet the policemen.
"We said open up an hour ago!" they yell, "What'ah you trying to hide?" (62). Although they are wrecking the home, Mandisa is relieved to see that they are, at least, actually policemen. Soon after relief comes worry—what does it mean that they are there? The police are not exactly comforting presences in the community: "The police are no security to us in Guguletu... I remember people killed by the police... including children" (62). Mandisa has lost sight of her husband in the commotion. The police flood into the bedroom as Mandisa leaves it, shoving her to the side and removing Siziwe from the bed. It is chaos: "Boots hammer the floor, boots kick at what furniture there is in the house, sending things crashing against walls, colliding with each other and clattering onto the floor" (63). Someone grabs Mandisa by the neck and dumps her onto the floor of the dining room, where Dwadwa, Siziwe, and Lunga sit. "Where is he?" The policemen demand, and Mandisa, stalling by asking which of her sons they mean, receives a slap to the face.
"Had the police been searching for a needle," writes Mandisa, "they could not have been more meticulous" (64). They pull the house apart—knocking down walls, taking down the ceiling and pulling floorboards up. They destroy Lunga and Mxolisi's hokkie so thoroughly that it will have to be rebuilt from scratch. When they are sure that Mxolisi is nowhere on the property, they beat up Lunga, "because, as they said, he should have known his brother's whereabouts" (64). They taunt the family and finally take their leave. They leave, but "we could never go back to who we were before they had come" (64). Nothing would ever be the same for them, they "had been hurtled headlong into the eye of a raging storm" (64).
Analysis
In this chapter, we learn more about Mandisa's relationship with her husband. Often a source of comedic relief in the novel, Dwadwa and Mandisa bicker often. Dwadwa's concern for Mxolisi translates into disdain as he warns his wife that her son will bring her big troubles one day. The tension between Dwadwa and Mxolisi highlights the tension between unpolitical adults and the schoolchildren wreaking havoc on the community. Dwadwa sees a problem with Mxolisi's actions and is frustrated that Mandisa doesn't see them as well. When they fall asleep in a stormy silence, Mandisa stays awake, staring at the ceiling and overcome with worry. Dwadwa falls asleep easily—which is "typical," according to Mandisa. But when the police arrive, it is Dwadwa that jumps to action first, going to open the door for the intruders after making sure they aren't a group of violent thieves. Dwadwa is described as a simple man, but he is also strong, stable, and quick to defend his family.
In this chapter, we learn more about the relation of black South Africans to the police. Although Mandisa is relieved at first that they are, in fact, the police, and not something worse, that relief is very short-lived. The police bring with them brutality. They are known to be murderers, and it is also known that they act with little to no consequences, especially when they are interacting with black people. There is no respect for the family or their home during the search. Ending it by senselessly beating Lunga is very indicative of the kind of men are policemen at this time. They are casually racist and actively violent—"We are tired of this andaz', andaz' of you people," one says as they leave (64). Andaz' translates to I don't know; Mxolisi's family is being punished for having done nothing at all. Fortunately, the police tire of their violence before they kill anyone.
A motif of destruction emerges in this chapter. The motif, established in the previous chapter with the story of the forced migration, is one of violence enacted by white South Africans against black South Africans. In the previous chapter, as within this one, once the white people have come to destroy the homes of blacks, they are able to casually leave and go on with their lives. Black people are stuck in the destruction. Mandisa cannot understate how much was lost in her move to Guguletu, from her possessions to her cherished ones, even including her mother. In this police raid, they have lost much as well, primarily security and peace. They will never again know their family to be whole. "We could never go back to that time or place. Nothing would ever be the same for us" (64).
One of the ways that Mandisa relates to violence is as a woman. Beyond her roles of matriarch and mother, Mandisa is also simply a woman in a patriarchal society. When the police arrive, she is wearing nothing but her nightgown, a fact that preoccupies her a number of times throughout the chapter. The violence between the police and the women in the home is localized at the bed. At times, Mandisa utilizes sexual language to describe what is happening in the home, as when she repeats the word "grope" and describes the policemen pouring into an "entering." It is her daughter that she is most terrified for, so terrified that she continues to uselessly look for her daughter in the bed after she very well knows that Siziwe is no longer there.
