52 pages • 1 hour read
Sindiwe MagonaMother to Mother
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Preface–Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Author's Preface Summary
Magona explains the real-life event that inspired Mother to Mother: the 1993 murder of American student Amy Biehlin a black community near Cape Town, South Africa. The case attracted a lot of media attention, not least because Biehl was in South Africa as an anti-apartheid activist. Magona wonders, however, whether it might not also be important to think about Biehl's killers, and the circumstances that led them to commit the murder. Those circumstances, Magona says, are inseparable from the "legacy of apartheid—a system repressive and brutal, that bred senseless inter- and intra-racial violence as well as other nefarious happenings" (v). She explains that in the novel she has written, the (fictionalized) killer's mother combs back over her son's life in an effort to find peace and understanding.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Mandisa's Lament”
Mandisa addresses the mother of Amy (here, an unnamed American student) directly and explains who she is: "My son killed your daughter" (1). Since the murder, Mandisa says, people have treated her differently, as if they hold her responsible for her sons Mxolisi's actions—though in reality, she has never had much control over what her son does. She scoffs in particular at the idea that she would have encouraged him to kill a white woman: "People look at me as if I'm the one who woke up one shushu day and said, Boyboy, run out and see whether, somewhere out there, you can find a white girl with nothing better to do than run around Guguletu, where she does not belong" (1).
Nevertheless, Mandisa admits she "was not surprised" to learn of her son's actions, and she pleads with her fellow mother for understanding (1). She expresses outrage and dismay over the fact that the American woman drove into Guguletu in the first place, and surmises that she must have had a naïve faith in herself that blinded her to her danger: "People like your daughter have no inborn sense of fear. They so believe in their goodness, know they have hurt no one, are, indeed, helping, they never think anyone would want to hurt them" (2).
Mandisa continues to discuss what life is like in Guguletu. Violence and poverty are both common, and go largely unnoticed by South Africa's white population; in fact, Mxolisi likely leads a better life in prison than he did while free, since he now has a guaranteed source of food, clothing, and shelter. Mandisa says she can't make sense of this irony, and finishes by pleading with God to forgive Mxolisi and relieve her own suffering and "shame" (4).
Preface–Chapter 1 Analysis
In Mother to Mother's preface, Magona describes the novel as a deliberate attempt to shift attention to the life and experiences of Biehl's murderers: "What was the world of this young women's killers, the world of those, young as she was young, whose environment failed to nurture them in the higher ideals of humanity and who, instead, became lost creatures of malice and destruction?" (v).Interestingly, however, Mother to Mother begins not with Mxolisi but with his mother Mandisa. The decision is significant, in part because Magona depicts Mxolisi's actions as the inevitable culmination of historical forces much larger than himself. The most obvious of these forces is of course apartheid, which was, as Magona says in the preface, "a system that promoted a twisted sense of right and wrong, with everything seen through the warped prism of the overarching crime against humanity" (vi). Throughout the novel, Magona will frequently dramatize this theme through the relationship between successive generations of parents and children, ultimately suggesting thatMxolisi was simply following through on the hatred and resentment he had learned from his elders (Mandisa herself included). By focusing on Mandisa, then, Magona asks her readers to consider the extent to which Mxolisi himself is responsible for his own story.
It would be a mistake, though, to read Mandisa solely as a symbol for the various racial and economic forces acting on her son. In keeping with its title, Mother to Mother opens with Mandisa speaking directly to the murdered student's mother, and the novel itself is as much (or more) her story as it is Mxolisi's. One stark reminder of this is her description of the circumstances surrounding Mxolisi's birth: "Nothing my son does surprises me any more. Not after that first unbelieving shock, his implanting himself inside me, unreasonably and totally destroying the me I was…the me I would have become" (1–2). The reference is to the fact that Mandisa conceived Mxolisi while still technically a virgin, but by raising the issue where and when she does, Mandisa suggests a parallel between her own experiences and those of the murdered girl and her mother: in different ways, apartheid scars the lives and bodies of all three women. This gendered aspect of racial violence will be a recurring motif in the novel.
