Praise
The task for the writer aware of fiction’s dangerous routes — and Stockenström and Coetzee are surely two such writers — is to find a way to write literature that resists reproducing harmful fantasies of romantic worlds forever beyond our grasp... Stockenström mounts a brave fictive challenge to utopian fictions that annihilate the present.
I'd love to read the entire novel to you, passage after passage because it's not only the story of a woman who struggles her way to freedom, but someone through whose eyes we see a world of existential beauty beyond the boundaries of dispiriting struggle. This slim book takes a place high in my own pantheon of beautiful novels come to us out of Africa.
[A] powerful, brief narrative about slavery.... J. M. Coetzee’s tersely brilliant English translation, which first appeared two years later, carries a tremendous lyrical charge... [His] tightly paced, restrained rendering of a complex text gives due weight to every word. It should ensure that Stockenström’s compelling picture of suffering and loss becomes a classic in English as well as Afrikaans.
This J.M. Coetzee-translated novel of a young African girl’s life, memory, and survival by one of the most important writers on the continent is one of the year’s most important books in translation.
Using image-rich and poetic language, the illiterate narrator vividly evokes enslavement, isolation, and longing.
Stockenstrom’s starkly dramatic tour de force is deftly translated from the Afrikaans by Coetzee, by whom it could as easily have been written.
Thanks to Stockenström’s rich language (wonderfully translated by award-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee) and brilliant use of symbolism, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree is a heartbreaking story about what we stand to lose as humans, and about how what we stand to lose can never be returned.
[Stockenström's protagonist] discards the constraints of human language, culture, and systems of categorization; unraveling her conditioning as a slave, she improvises a language of her own, a vocabulary masterfully crafted in Stockenström’s prose and expertly preserved in Coetzee’s translation.
It’s a disturbing journey through the many pathways of this former slave’s memory, which gives this short book its power. Highly recommended.
The Expedition to the Baobab Tree is a bittersweet novel that paints a complex psychological picture of slavery, and one woman’s struggle to maintain her humanity even under the most difficult circumstances.
In a week when #WomenInTranslation month is announced for August, I find I'm already deep into the theme, reading this wonderful stream of consciousness narrative, translated by J.M. Coetzee.
“Every few years, a book comes along that I read only a few pages at a time, lingering over exceptionally well-crafted prose…this slim work... should be on every postcolonial studies reading list.”
Although it might be tempting for readers to view the lasting significance of Stockenström’s lyrical, visionary and moving work solely in terms of racial apartheid, this novel, like Coetzee’s work from the same period, the masterful Waiting for the Barbarians, transcends the binary opposition of black and white. Baobab is an allegorical meditation on the male drive to dominate that which it labels the other—whether women or barbarians.
The life and experiences of the narrator are complex and multifaceted, and the psychology that developed in response to them is no less so. The Expedition to the Baobab Tree feels more real, and thus more successful, because of this ambivalence. The narrator is a novice when it comes to free thinking and self-analysis, which makes it a joy to observe her in the act, even when the heroic façade falters momentarily
Expedition to the Baobab Tree in many ways lacks precision or hard edges, like a dream half-remembered. This creates a heightened awareness of the details that matter, however, and, spurning allegory or symbolism, it has some real force to it.
Seldom does a future Nobel-winning novelist moonlight as a translator, but JM Coetzee shines with his 1980s English version of Afrikaans writer Wilma Stockenstrom's The Expedition to the Baobab Tree .
Extras
Starred Review from Publishers Weekly:
First published in the U.S. in 1983, before translator Coetzee became a Nobel laureate and South African author Stockenström won prizes for fiction and poetry, this mini-masterpiece is less a novel than an intimate monologue illuminating the nature of slavery, oppression, womanhood, identity, Africa, and nature itself. The narrative begins in a hollow of the titular baobab tree, where an unnamed female slave has taken refuge. Between forays to a nearby stream, she recalls her past, stringing together memories like the beads left by natives, who think that she’s a tree spirit. She remembers being captured by slave traders who sell her to a wealthy man with a taste for innocent girls. After giving birth, she is separated from her baby and sold to a spice merchant. Her third owner is the merchant’s youngest son, for whom she entertains guests and manages his household. When he dies, she begs a friend of her owner’s brother (the merchant’s eldest son) to purchase her, and then joins her new owner and the merchant’s son on their ill-fated expedition into the interior. Using image-rich and poetic language, the illiterate narrator vividly evokes enslavement, isolation, and longing. She never uses specific names, locations, or dates. She has little sense of time. All the slave possesses is a sense of self, despite the confines of her life, which Stockenström portrays with such a winning combination of art and artlessness that, 25 years after its introduction to English-speaking audiences, this tale still proves moving and vibrant.
Eileen Battersby at The Irish Times names The Expedition to the Baobab Tree one of her favorite titles of 2014
Flavorwire lists The Expedition to the Baobab Tree one of The Best Independent Fiction and Poetry Books of 2014
The Independent names The Expedition to the Baobab Tree one of the best translated books of the year.