There are many houses we pass through during our lives. Maybe it’s true that they also pass through us. Some of them remain with us, and we are able to return to them long after they are gone. One such house was a farmhouse in KwaZulu-Natal, just over the hill of the boarding school I attended between the ages of ten and fourteen.
These lines are extracted from an opening essay which the author utilizes to help illuminate his process of creation. He proceeds from here to describe the farmhouse from his youth as a way of setting the stage for linking the way that reality influences the writing process; he sees this as done in both an intrusive way that is sometimes explicit, as well as a way that exerts its power subliminally. What is most insightful about this addition to the novel in its revised and updated edition is the revelation of the extent to which the real-life inspiration for the titular domicile took hold of the author’s imaginative spirit.
It has been her technique, perfected over the years, to survive her husband by noticing him as rarely as possible.
One of the central components of the novel is the brittle, painful marriage of Patricia and Richard, which has nearly always been marked by discord. The story commences on the last day that Patricia and Richard are to spend in the Dwaleni house. One might see the house, by virtue of the title, as the centerpiece of the narrative, but ultimately the novel suggests that a house is just another building unless there is something warm, loving, and sustaining inside to make it a home. Patricia and Richard most assuredly do not have a home under this claim, and Patricia hopes desperately that things will be different at Durban.
Drinking from the cup makes her feel simple, clear, strong.
Beauty enjoys drinking from a cup of Patricia's that Patricia no longer cares for. It has a faded image of Queen Elizabeth on it and isn't much to look at, but it makes Beauty feel elegant and special. She also takes a small, perverse pleasure in the fact that she has decided to make it her own and take it with her; this is one of the only examples we see of Beauty doing or thinking anything contrary to her general loyalty and honesty, and thus it is significant. It is a subtle message that she is her own person, that she and other black South Africans are coming into their power, however slowly, and that colonial rule and codified white supremacy no longer hold sway. That's a big message to take away from an old teacup, but Higginson does it purposefully, paralleling it with other examples of how times are changing.
In almost every room the floor is filled with boxes, boxes spilling objects from the past whose meaning is unclear to Beauty.
The boxes are a ubiquitous component of the house, remarked upon by all the characters and occupying a steady and unobtrusive presence in the rooms. They represent the past, as they are cluttering the space, full of inexplicable things, and subject to determination as to whether or not they must be brought into the future or disposed of—just like painful, repressed memories. The fact that they've sat here for so long and that they aren't immediately coming to Durban parallels Patricia's journey from wanting to live ensconced in the comfortable past even though it was not serving her to wanting to move on and leave some of the past behind, albeit in a truer, more authentic way due to Looksmart's visit.
The bloodwoods, solemn as totems, are barely visible above the old dog-run. She doesn't know what possessed them to plant those trees.
Patricia comments upon the bloodwoods multiple times, starting with this passage from the novel's very first page. We learn they are where Rachel is buried and that they have been around for a long, long time. Higginson did not choose these trees accidentally; rather, this type of bloodwood (there are bloodwoods worldwide, but the one in the text is a specific South African variation) is known for its distinctive red sap that gives the tree the appearance of bleeding. This is wholly appropriate given the violence perpetrated on the land and the black body here at Dwaleni and in South Africa as a whole.
He has a shameful secret: even today, he's unaccustomed to the freedom he's been given to drive around the country and go wherever he likes. Whenever he sits down in a restaurant or cinema, surrounded by white people, part of him still expects someone to ask him politely to leave.
Looksmart has a good job, expensive clothes, an expensive car, and is by all accounts very successful. Yet, because he is black and lives in South Africa, a country obsessed with racial hierarchy and separation, even after apartheid's official end, he cannot easily navigate his world. It might seem fair and equal, or even actually be fair and equal, but the psychic trauma for those who grew up in apartheid is real and difficult to eradicate. For so long, Looksmart was treated as inferior, and even though he ostensibly is not now, the vestiges of that powerful racist system live on. This fact colors all of the present-tense events of the novel, for even though apartheid is over, Patricia and Looksmart are examples of how difficult it is to navigate the new, "free" world.
Still it feels like a place that has never experienced the sun.
Looksmart returns to Dwaleni, the place where he experienced so much of his youth, and its concomitant feelings of happiness, frustration, confusion, love, and rage. He compares what he sees to what he remembers; here, he concludes that it is a place that seems to never have "experienced the sun." He isn't just being literal, because the symbolic connotations of the sun—light, illumination, revelation, warmth—are also lacking in this house. The house is dark and dank, rotting, cluttered with boxes; thus, it is full of secrets, lies, repression, and death.
"Unimportant?" she says. "I have no idea—but the past doesn't amount to much in the end, does it?"
Patricia has a complicated relationship with the past. On the one hand, a lot of her past was undeniably painful and it is no wonder that she has purposefully and unconsciously repressed a lot of it. She needs to move on by going to Durban; she needs to put Richard and John Ford behind her, and forgive herself for Rachel's death. Yet as this quote reveals, she is also approaching the concept of the past from a place of privilege, selfishly denying Looksmart a confrontation he needs and a reckoning she needs to endure. It is easy for her to tell Looksmart to stop being fixated on the past because she's talking about his past, and it does not, to her knowledge at the time, affect her.
...for Patricia, Grace was in another category: like that cry of hers they heard, she was slightly less than human.
Looksmart's critique of Patricia here is damning: he is suggesting that she does not see Grace as really human, or if she does, she is a lesser sort. She barely factors into Patricia's thinking at all, he claims; Grace is the "other," an unimportant setpiece on the stage of Patricia's life. Indeed, Patricia initially seems to reinforce this view. She remembers only that Grace was "half-clothed," which seems to be a judgment and that she herself was "irritated" with Grace for apparently taunting the dog and for making this mess for her to deal with. As time passes, though, Patricia does begin to confront some of her prejudices and problematic conclusions; though she still has a long way to go, she is open to being challenged and critiqued, as well as apologizing.
"I'll be leaving for Durban now, Janet. I'm sorry I won't be able to return for the funeral."
For a moment at John Ford's house, Patricia allows her doubts to take over. She tells herself Durban was only a dream, that it was unlikely she'd ever go, and that she should stick around for Ford's funeral. But moments later, she has steeled herself and reversed course. This is a profoundly important moment for Patricia, though it is rather subtle in the text. Instead of allowing herself to remain stuck in the past, ruminating over Ford, staying in Dwaleni, and doing what she thinks is her duty, she decides that she will learn from her reunion with Looksmart and the soul-searching that resulted from it. She knows she should leave, put Richard in a home, and settle in a "home," not a "house." There, she will be living with greater knowledge of the past, but living in an authentic and meaningful way that centers the present and gingerly hopes for the future.
