English Studies in Africa

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‘Is it a family saga or a farm novel?’ Reading

Damon Galgut’s The Promise as a Foil for
Metonymic Dispossession and Restitution in the
Contemporary South African (Im)moral Economy

Kirby Manià

To cite this article: Kirby Manià (2023) ‘Is it a family saga or a farm novel?’ Reading
Damon Galgut’s The Promise as a Foil for Metonymic Dispossession and Restitution in the
Contemporary South African (Im)moral Economy, English Studies in Africa, 66:2, 25-32, DOI:
10.1080/00138398.2023.2247244

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‘Is it a family saga or a farm novel?’ Reading Damon Galgut’s The Promise
as a Foil for Metonymic Dispossession and Restitution in the Contemporary
South African (Im)moral Economy

Kirby Manià

In Damon Galgut’s 2021 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Promise, one of the text’s key foca-
lizing characters, Anton Swart, works on writing a light roman à clef about his life growing up
on a farm outside Pretoria. Anton’s unfinished novel, emblematic of his own failed life, finds its
way into the hands of his only surviving family member – his younger sister – Amor, and as ‘she
starts to read, the book travels into her from a long distance, from his mind to mine, across a gap
in time’ (230). The protagonist of Anton’s novel is Aaron, and as his ‘life breaks down, the nar-
rative does too’ (231), and soon Amor finds the story disassembling into ‘febrile scratchings-out’
with frequent ‘interjections from the author in the margin’ (231). One of these interjections
reads: ‘Is this a family saga or a novel?’ (231). Anton’s novel is plotted out seasonally, in
four ‘intervals of roughly ten years,’ to map out the phases of the man’s life (231). It does
not take the reader too many beats to recognize the formalistic parallels between Anton’s
thinly disguised memoir and The Promise. Both are a family saga and a farm novel – or to
use the more bucolic and local appellation, a South African plaasroman. Yet unlike Anton’s
novel (where the narrative is focalized through the experiences of a single character), The
Promise places within its crosshairs all members of the Swart family and their social milieu.
The thread that weaves together the four distinct parts of Galgut’s text (which also distinguishes
the deaths of Ma, Pa, Astrid and Anton) is the family’s promise to bequeath an annexe of their
farm to their domestic worker, Salome, as recompense for tending to their terminally ill mother,
Rachel Swart, whose death becomes the catalyst for the story.
Risking a charge of reductiveness, it is very easy to read this metafictional element of The
Promise, with its layering of familial and spatial narratives, as doubly metonymic since each text
points to a larger context, above and beyond itself. Whilst being careful to note that there are
multiple ways to read Galgut’s novel, it is seductive to interpret both Anton’s unfinished
novel, along with the Booker Prize-winning product, as unfolding temporal representations of
South Africa through the period of its sociohistorical and political transition. The Promise

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DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2023.2247244 English Studies in Africa 66 (2)
[email protected] © 2023 University of the Witwatersrand
pp 25–32
Kirby Manià

overlays the death (the collapse of apartheid) and birth of a nation (the new democratic era),
whilst four of its main characters (figures of the old order) meet their mortal end. The plot
tells the story of the Swart family and their farm, as well as their abeyant promise, and spans
four decades of South Africa’s turbulent history: 1986 under the State of Emergency with
P.W. Botha at the helm; the New South Africa’s 1995 with its Nelson Mandela-stewarded
rainbow nationalist triumphalism (coinciding with the nation’s fleeting moment of unity upon
winning the Rugby World Cup); the post-transition period of 2004 under Thabo Mbeki’s presi-
dency with his disavowal of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the rise in violent crime; and then, finally,
2018 – exploring the country’s descent into systemic graft and its national energy crisis under the
corrupt leadership of Jacob Zuma. In this way, this story of a white Afrikaans-Jewish family,
which is also a story of their farm, can be said to be a story of the land on which it sits, those
who were dispossessed of it, and can therefore be said to be a story of the last four decades
of the shifting nature of the South African moral economy.
This narrative recursion (proffered by the two texts) invites the reader to read Rachel’s
promise as synecdochic. This is a position shared by reviewers of the text, such as Nonhanhla
Dlamini (2022), who writes that,

The Promise is not only a curse handed down to the Swart family by Rachel, but also a
curse that haunts South Africa today in the form of the failed and perverted transform-
ations of the postapartheid governments after the negotiated settlement, the TRC and the
deferred reparations. The Promise sits squarely at the heart of South African politics of
(un)belonging, poverty, despair, and deferred dreams, against the backdrop of the ‘mass
of suffering South Africans – a growing throng of the wasted and depleted and maimed,
brandishing their wounds’ (192). The deferred promise made to Salome does not only
depict the hypocrisy of a Christian/Afrikaner ‘who goes back on his word’ (25), but it
also shows the complacency of the ANC presidents who are not keen on ensuring that
restorative justice prevails in the country. (139)

Dlamini goes on to observe the interrelationship between Anton’s novel and The Promise with
the nation state in the early twenty-first century:

It is fascinating to note that the structure of the novel is adopted from Anton’s ‘failed’
novel. However, the grey lines between hope and despair that hover in the narrative
paint a realistic rather than imaginary picture of how contemporary South Africa is con-
stituted. (139)

In this way, the novel presents a meditation on South Africa’s transition to multiparty democracy
but also questions the health of the new political dispensation, signalling the malaise of the
present. The authorial decision to present four narrative parts taking place over four different
(yet similarly significant) time periods in South Africa’s recent history indicates that the
novel is preoccupied with the passage of time. The importance of time is something Galgut
explicitly identified as being the ‘real theme of the book’ in his interview with the Booker
Prize committee. The confluence of temporality and mortality become throughlines that
connect the individual bodies of the Swart family in their living and dying (excepting only
Amor, who survives the tale) with the metanarrative of the death of the old South Africa and
the birth of the new. This interpolation of mortal and political endings is accompanied by the
somewhat arresting descriptions of the visceral functionings of the individual body. After

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 Is it a family saga or a farm novel?

Rachel (Ma) has just died, Galgut delineates her absence through the fulness of the living’s phy-
sicality (and the body’s base needs) through an examination of the waste they generate in the
family home:

The three toilets downstairs, unused to such traffic, have between them flushed twenty-
seven times, carrying away nine point eight litres of urine, five point two litres of shit,
one stomachful of regurgitated food and five millilitres of sperm. Numbers go on and
on, but what does mathematics help? In any human life there is really only one of every-
thing. (26)

In The Promise, life and death are shown to coexist in uncomfortable proximity; Galgut makes
the ignominies of the body unavoidable to the reader. Later, when Manie (Pa) dies after being
bitten by a cobra at Scaly City (the reptile park he co-owns), we are confronted with another
similar antinomy where the sombreness of his passing alone in a hospital bed is clouded by
the description of the ignominious workings of the bodies of his surviving family members:

Herman Albertus Swart dies at 3:22 in the morning on 16 June 1995 and the waiting
room is empty. His family have all gone home to their various beds, where they snore
and fart and mumble and toss their way towards dawn. (88–89)

The discomfort produced by these moments of juxtaposition is sustained by a shifting point of

view that moves with little warning from third-person omniscient, to first-person, to second-
person narration. Moments of free, indirect discourse segue disorientingly into narrative ruptures
of second-person narration, tearing down the fourth wall, and catching the reader off guard. This
sense of flux that issues forth from the text’s formalistic bedrock conveys a state of bewilder-
ment, which, at times, maps over the uncertainty at the root of the South African post-transitional
project.
Most of the narrative focalization takes place through the lens of the dispossessor.
Reviewers have noted that Galgut does not grant much access into the psychic interiority of
his limited cast of black characters: Salome and Lucas (see Day). However, we do briefly get
to hear from Lindile/Hotstix/Killer’s point of view when he hijacks Astrid’s vehicle, and we
are afforded insight into his discomforting mental state all the way until he shoots her in the
boot of her own car. I think it is interesting that we are granted more intimate access into Lin-
dile’s mind, but not Lukas’s or Salome’s, the more prominent members of this plaasroman’s
family saga. But perhaps this was a deliberate choice of Galgut’s: after all, Lindile can also
be read as a dispossessor, like the Swarts, in his misappropriation of property (and lives).
Speaking of the misappropriation of property – or land, specifically – summons the spectre
of the plaasroman in the history of South African literature. To maintain the translineal fantasy
of owning the land on which the plaas is developed in the (im)moral economy of the white Afri-
kaans South African family, J.M. Coetzee in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South
Africa (1988) argues that it is a literature of necessary silence, silencing those whose bodies pre-
viously populated the land before the peddling of the colonial terra nullius fantasy (81). A key
feature of the plaasroman is that the genre makes ‘silence about the black man’ (5). In her own
study of the genre, Caren van Houwelingen (2012) writes that the plaasroman renders the black
person ‘an extension of the landscape’ who is ‘denied his/her rightful ownership of the land’
(94). This reduces the black person to a ‘shadowy presence’ on the farm – a function of expedient
amnesia and avoidance (Coetzee 5). The plaasroman is thus widely considered a literature of

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Kirby Manià

dispossession, marginalization and silencing. Galgut seems attuned to the ethical quandary of
this literary tradition, and points out in The Promise – his own iteration of the plaasroman –
the problematic nature in which Salome is rendered invisible (and silent) to the Swart family
(to the exclusion of Amor, of course):

Let Salome do it, that’s what she’s paid for, isn’t it? She was with Ma when she died,
right there next to the bed, though nobody seems to see her, she is apparently invisible.
And whatever Salome feels is invisible too. She has been told, Clean up here, wash the
sheets, and she obeys, she cleans up, she washes the sheets.
But Amor can see her through the window, so she’s not invisible after all. (24)

It is interesting, then, that this critique of the Swart family’s indifference to Salome is carried
over to the reader much later in the novel, when Salome is thinking, in her old age, of returning
to her hometown:

[It] might not be so very bad to go back to where she came from and live out her last years
in her tiny village. Just outside Mahikeng, only 320 kilometres away, and if Salome’s
home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked, you didn’t care
to know. (236–37)

The potency of the narrator’s arresting use of the second-person lays its charge against its new
target now: the reader, who is accused of being complicit in Salome’s silencing – thereby perpe-
tuating settler colonial practices of dispossession and marginalization.
However, towards the end of the novel, Amor visits Salome to inform her that the Lombard
place is finally hers. Salome’s son, Lukas, is quick to point out to Amor that the fulfilment of this
promise has taken thirty-one years, that his mother is elderly and the house is a dump – he makes
it clear that her gesture amounts to too little, too late. To add further insult to injury, Amor admits
that the entire farm is currently subject to a land claim lodged by another dispossessed black
community. In a Beckettian moment, Salome, after three decades of waiting for her house,
will probably not be able to enjoy the spoils of the title deed for very long. This irony (or absurd-
ity) seems to suggest that justice deferred for long enough is, in fact, justice denied. Salome’s
long-awaited recompense belongs to a complicated matrix of precarity: not only is there the
land claim over the farm (in accordance with the ‘land back’ movement), but even the much-
vaunted title deed is aporic: Galgut’s narrative cannot even commit to the existence of the
deed, as the narrator admits:

Tomorrow is the day she [Amor] sets off on the footpath around the koppie to where
Salome lives. Hasn’t wanted to walk it yet, not till she has the paper in her hand. And
though it’s too soon for her to have it, let’s say that she does, let’s say the lawyer
drew up the document this morning and gave it to her, so there it is, right in front of
your eyes, she has the paper in her hand. (234)

Amor, sitting across the table from Salome, is described as laying down the deed, but we are
reminded by the narrator that ‘she can’t yet possibly have [it] in her possession’ (236). The
Lombard house is dilapidated and, given that it is bequeathed as an accoutrement of the
‘master’s house,’ it is a curate’s egg, at best. Read from this angle, the final delivery of
the titular promise seems to offer no comfortable resolution to the novel’s question of restitution.

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 Is it a family saga or a farm novel?

Perhaps this is an important caution against narratives that are too optimistic about how the
South African transition has unfurled. This lack of absolution and resolution (for both Amor
and Salome), its unsatisfying outcome, seems to play into the hands of scholars of Galgut’s
earlier texts who have critiqued his work for ‘predicting failure for the new dispensation’
(Barris 35) and for pandering to metropolitan literary tastes (Barris 37).
Yet perhaps there is an alternative way to read this degree of ambivalence in the ending of
Galgut’s novel. Consulting some of the earlier (but more favourable) scholarship of his work
helps to shed some light on the matter. Borrowing from Sofia Kostelac’s (2017) reading of
Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003) – an earlier novel also shortlisted for the Booker – The
Promise can perhaps be profitably read through the lens of Paul Ricoeur’s concept of ‘narrative
identity’ (45). This theory posits that we make sense of our lives through the stories we tell about
ourselves and that narrative, in weaving together the different strands of lived experience,
becomes constitutive of life instead of subservient to it (Kostelac 45). Ricoeur argues that narra-
tive functions similarly for the construction of both individual and collective identities: in other
words, the ‘organizational mechanics of narrative are as essential to the production of a national
identity … as they are to an individual one’ (Kostelac 45). For Ricoeur, though, using narrative
techniques to lend coherence to identity should not be in aid of constructing a fixed sense of
self, precisely because the self is not entirely knowable, and identity is instead protean and
mutable. This is the case for both individual and collective productions of identity: one cannot
truly ‘know’ the self in a complete sense; it is always a work in progress, consisting of ‘plural
mutability,’ rather than being constant and rigid (Kostelac 46). ‘Narrative identity,’ then, issues
forth from a space of discontinuity: it is the product of tensions between divergent or conflicting
versions – but telling one story does not preclude other ways of telling – and so the selfhood that
emerges is one that needs to be continuously open to re-examination and reconsideration (46–47).
Might it then be helpful to think of Galgut’s work as reflecting the collective identity of
South Africa in terms of this plural mutability? Kostelac argues that despite the many critical
reviews of The Good Doctor, which cast it as a regressive and dystopic representation of
South Africa’s transformation, the novel, Doctor, is instead purposefully ‘interrogative’ in
that it does not look to solve but rather pose questions (44). Kostelac finds his work to be ‘dis-
trustful of hegemonic narratives which offer premature resolutions to our problems and mask our
inexorable ambivalence’ (44). Ricoeur’s ‘narrative identity’ could possibly present an antidote
to these constraining metanarratives; as Kostelac argues, novels that defy closure and embrace a
degree of indeterminacy become helpful conduits to tell ‘stories … about ourselves and our his-
tories’ that ultimately open the possibility for meaningful and empathetic change (44).
The ending of The Promise appears to play into what Kostelac comparably identifies in The
Good Doctor: the lack of closure as well as how it boasts potential for change. Amor, standing on
the roof of the family home, has just attempted to scatter Anton’s ashes, but this does not quite go
as planned. The breeze subsides and instead of carrying the ashes along with it, deposits them in
a ‘long brown streak across the roof’ (242–43) – yet another reminder of the disgraces of the
flesh. Amor is then struck by a hot flash and removes her shirt. Again, the narration blends
death and life in its characteristically undignified way:

Amor in her bra on the roof. Middle-aged Amor in her bra on the roof. There she sits, at
the centre of her story, not the same people she used to be, nor the ones she might yet
become. Not old yet, but not young any more either. Midway somewhere. The body
past its best, starting to creak and fail. (243)

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Kirby Manià

Now positioned at the centre of both her own and the novel’s story, Amor is placed at the
threshold of an uncertain future. She is ‘midway’ somewhere. Anton’s widow Desirée then
calls to her and Amor is pulled from this reverie and dresses, leaving the urn there, ‘Feeling
… better than before’ she ‘starts to climb down the roof, step by step, towards whatever it is
that happens next’ (243). This final ending is uncertain and open-ended but could be read in a
more hopeful light than the delivery of the promise made to Salome. I think, however, that it
is important to return our attention to Anton’s incomplete novel. In another note made in his
novel’s margins, Anton appears to bemoan the challenge of finding a conclusive way of
telling his story. He writes: ‘Impossible in this country to speak for anyone except yourself’
(231). Does this caution us against reading the novel too metonymically? Perhaps. Still,
Galgut’s novel puzzles over this question of plural mutability, polyvocality, beginnings and
endings, and what it all might mean for the post-transitional national moment.
The question over what post-apartheid endings and new beginnings could look like in the
realm of South African letters has received sustained critical attention. Elleke Boehmer’s
(1998) ‘Endings and New Beginning: South African Fiction in Transition’ (1998) is one that
comes to mind. In this essay, Boehmer contemplates how authors will write the South
African transition (and post-transition), and remarks that it would be encouraging to see

the return of endings that allow for new beginnings, for gestative mystery, the moments
and movements following apocalypse, also the dramatization of different kinds of gen-
eration and continuity. That is to say, one looks forward to an open-endedness that makes
room for new and various ways of thinking about the future … . (51)

Boehmer’s assertion raises the question of whether The Promise (and the novel’s outcome – par-
ticularly for Amor) seems to live up to this call for ‘endings that allow for new beginnings’ that
make room and concessions for ‘gestative mystery,’ for open-ended ‘movements’ that follow the
death of the one regime, leading into generative spaces within the birth of another. However,
within the scope of The Promise, this summoning appears too optimistic. Cummins (2021), in
reviewing the novel for The Guardian, acknowledges that ‘this isn’t a book that leaves you com-
fortable in your certainties’. Galgut (2023), himself, notes that, ‘because life is hardly ever neat
and comfortable,’ the novel should not necessarily reflect unrealistic resolutions but rather enter-
tain the possibility that ‘disorder is the truth’.
How does this narrative discomfort reflect the state of contemporary South African society,
where the much-anticipated ‘rediscovery of the ordinary’ (as per Njabulo Ndebele’s predictions
for post-apartheid literature) appears to manifest as little more than a continuous vortex of dis-
possession – a still spectacular subject but now wrought with the subtleties of indeterminacy – an
unhomeliness situated on the threshold between old and new? An old order is taking its time to
die (as is symbolized by the protracted deaths of most members of the Swart household), while
the uncertain present for Amor, Salome and Lukas is still too provisional to offer full absolution
or redemption. This is an in-between space between justice and restitution – not absolutely con-
ferred. It is an attenuated success. In this way, The Promise reminds us of Ndebele’s famous
injunction that ‘the problems of the South African social formation are complex and all embra-
cing; they cannot be reduced to a single, simple formulation’ (52).
The Promise is perhaps slightly pessimistic about contemporary South Africa precisely
because not enough has substantively changed since the collapse of apartheid. The text considers
what justice and its central ‘promise’ mean in the context of a society trying to address the legacy

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 Is it a family saga or a farm novel?

of grandscale racism and racial segregation while being confronted by a present dominated by
systemic violence and self-enrichment. In keeping with Ricoeur’s conceptualization of ‘narra-
tive identity’ and the indeterminacy of stories about the nature of the South African present,
The Promise is both a family saga and farm novel. It also points to the ongoing questions
about land dispossession and restitution that have captured the attention of the nation as it
tries to unravel itself from the inequities of apartheid spatial planning. From a literary standpoint,
Boehmer observes that the explosion in Indian Literature in English post-independence took
thirty to forty years to come to fruition (53). By comparison, South African literature is only
just entering its own period of literary regeneration. Perhaps what South African society, as
well as its literature, needs is more time to figure itself out and move slowly, ‘step by step,
towards whatever it is that happens next’ (Galgut 243).

Notes on Contributor
Kirby Manià earned a PhD in English from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits, Johan-
nesburg) and holds a Master of Arts in Modern Literature and Culture from the University of
York (United Kingdom). She currently teaches courses in academic writing and the environment
at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She also holds a visiting research fellowship
at Wits University. Her research interests include post-apartheid South African literature, urban
ecology, environmental justice, postcolonial ecocriticism and writing pedagogy. Recent
examples of her scholarly work can be found in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
and English Studies in Africa. She also co-edits an eco-urban poetry journal called SPROUT.

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