The Yearning: A Novel

"The Yearning is still very fresh in my mind because I’m analyzing it for a chapter in my dissertation. It’s a very tough read, but the author tries to use humor to get you through the story, because it includes sexual violence of a child, and she is that child. It tells the story of a girl named Marubini and her journey towards psychological recovery. What’s so interesting is that she does not remember what happened to her as a child. She’s gone through school, through varsity, and she’s a working person now. She’s quite senior, so she’s been working for a while. Then, one day, she hears a song playing in her head. The song sounds familiar to her, but she cannot place it. It’s the small person in her remembering: this was the song being sung by other children outside when she was abducted into a house. It’s repressed memories coming back to her. It’s really a story about healing, and it’s interesting because she introduces traditional practices for healing in Southern Africa. Her father was a sangoma, and that also becomes part of her healing journey. I read that as metaphoric, the idea that you cannot be a healer if you yourself have not healed. So if she is being called to be a sangoma, then there are some things in her life that she needs to reckon with. So these memories are coming back because she’s got an ancestral calling, and she cannot ascend or be enlightened to another version of herself until she’s healed. So The Yearning , really, is about her yearning to be healed and find a place in the world and a purpose. As I said, there is humor in there. It’s not really political, but there are political incidents because, as I said earlier, these things just make their way into the narrative. When she’s young, she’s in Soweto, which is a township in Gauteng province. When she’s older, she’s in Cape Town. The song comes to her when she’s in Cape Town, and the full story of the trauma is revealed to her when she goes back to her hometown in Soweto. That’s when it comes out, as well as the fact that she’s got this calling. It’s really an interesting book. I think it’s my number one. I don’t know if it’s because it’s fresh in my mind, but it’s really good."