The Innocence of Roast Chicken: A Novel

By Jo-Anne Richards

The Innocence of Roast Chicken focuses on an Afrikaans/English family in the Eastern Cape and their idyllic life on their grandparents’ farm, seen through the eyes of the little girl, Kate, and the subtle web of relationships that is shattered by a horrifying incident in the mid-1960s. Scenes from Kate’s early life are juxtaposed with Johannesburg in 1989 when Kate, now married to Joe, a human rights lawyer, stands aside from the general euphoria that is gripping the nation. Her despair, both with her marriage and with the national situation, resolutely returns to a brutal incident one Christmas day when Kate was thrust into an awareness of what lay beneath her blissful childhood. Beautifully constructed, The Innocence of Roast Chicken is painful, evocative, beautifully drawn and utterly absorbing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Picador Africa
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781770106925

Book preview

Innocence Lost

The Innocence of Roast Chicken was a story that just wouldn’t go away. I denied it for a good three years, but it stubbornly refused to budge. It became all I could focus on. Fearful of waking my young family, I spent my nights huddled on the bathroom floor with a torch, scribbling into a notebook.

On that cold floor, my debut novel took shape. A farm materialised. A child was born, who loved it and believed that ‘everyone should have a farm like that in their childhood’. But I could also see the brutal nature of her coming of age, and the adult she would become.

Yet still, I couldn’t bring myself to recognise it as a real story and type the first word.

Writing was all I had ever wanted to do.

‘A writer?’ my pragmatic mother had declared when the time came to discuss my future. ‘Don’t be silly. Do something sensible.’ Which is how I came to study journalism. She would have preferred a profession that began with a good solid letter, like a D or an L – not the capricious curve of a J. My daughter the … hmm, well, more practical than the alternative.

But the alternative, the soaring spires of the W – that was what I aspired to. At the risk of sounding mawkish, I believed it would give my life meaning and worth.

So, what if I typed the first sentence and it became blindingly obvious that I had no talent? Again, it was one of the practical voices in my life that jolted me from my stasis. ‘Are you intending to carve this book in stone? Has your computer lost its delete button?’

I typed the first sentence, and then the next. I typed the first chapter. I continued typing for a further eighteen months.

The Innocence of Roast Chicken is the book that gave me that elusive W, which allowed me, finally, to call myself a writer. This is the book that changed my life.

One minute I was tapping away in my converted garage in the northern suburbs of Jo’burg – boiling in summer, freezing in winter – the next I was catapulted into a different existence, with a two-book deal in London.

It felt like that, but it took two years to find a publisher. After a couple of encouraging rejections locally, I’d been introduced to a London agent, who, miraculously, liked the book. It took another rejection and enough time (almost) to give up hope, before I received her call.

Nothing could have prepared me for the novel’s reception, that November 1996, either for the praise or the backlash that followed. The book shot to number one in South Africa in the week it was released, and remained there for fifteen weeks. It appeared as the ‘Dark Horse’ on a London bestseller list, alongside Graham Swift’s Last Orders and Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. I was recognised in the street. My face was on television, my voice on radio. I launched at South Africa House in London’s Trafalgar Square, in Germany, in Johannesburg, in Cape Town and in my hometown of Port Elizabeth. I gave countless talks at innumerable functions.

I enjoyed it all. Probably a bit too much. My mistake was to believe it was all about me. I failed to take note of the broader context in which I had been published, despite the words of my very dear mentor and friend, the late Professor Tim Couzens, expert in African literature, who commented, ‘Strange … everyone expected a burst of black writers after ’94.’

What initially emerged instead, on the wave of liberation, was a handful of white writers, referred to by commentators as the ‘new’ writers, either with or without the further appellation ‘white’.

Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise. The 1980s heard repeated arguments for artistic considerations to be secondary to the political in literature. In 1987 JM Coetzee went so far as to call it a literature in bondage, ‘unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power, unable to move from elementary relations of contestation, domination and subjugation to the vast and complex human world that lies beyond them’.

Njabulo Ndebele drew attention to how little attempt there was to grapple with the minutiae of motive or social process. ‘People and situations are either very good or very bad.’

This prescriptive style, which encouraged the use of culture as a ‘weapon in the struggle’, became a major constraint, perhaps most keenly felt by white writers like myself, who experienced the pressure to ‘show where we stood’ in relation to apartheid – because of our race.

In this spirit of freedom, the ‘new’ writers shifted radically from prescriptive representations to an attempt to describe flawed human lives.

It may well have been this attempt in The Innocence of Roast Chicken that drew such a response. Readers stopped me in the street to tell me what my book meant to them.

The degree of public interest in this book – and as a result, in me – was completely unexpected. My entire focus had been on getting published. This was a debut novel, for which I drew on little more than my instincts as a loving reader.

Yet, somehow, The Innocence of Roast Chicken managed to hook into the mood of the age. Our nation had been through the worst of times, so perhaps the harshness of my protagonist Katie’s coming of age resonated with local readers. Her unsullied childhood, and its loss, might also have struck a chord with a generation of white adults who had been unable to indulge in reminiscence without guilt about a system that granted them their privilege.

But mostly, readers expressed to me their weariness with ‘struggle writing’ and said they were drawn to books that told them a story, without apparent didactic intent.

While the writers published after 1994 did not entirely leave apartheid behind, there was a greater freedom to explore what lay beneath the forms of childhood we had experienced, and the toll these had exacted on the human spirit. Beyond racism alone, writers were free to reject what academics referred to as the principles that supported the machinery of apartheid, such as patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, class and language bias and ethnic nationalism.

Above all, though, we were able to glance backwards, acknowledge the past, but turn to the future, with hope.

I couldn’t see much of that at the time. I thought the fuss had everything to do with my book. So, when I paged through a national weekly newspaper one Sunday morning and found an eviscerating half-page attack, I felt physically ill.

Ronald Suresh Roberts is a British West Indian writer and critic. He was living in South Africa at the time, fresh from Oxford and Harvard.

He argued that The Innocence of Roast Chicken – an archetypal example of the ‘new white writers’ – ‘launder[ed]’ apartheid and provided an ‘oxygen tent for the old lying days’. He contrasted the protagonist unflatteringly with two of Nadine Gordimer’s literary children, who deliberately resisted their conditioning, and ‘any amoral "state of suspension’’’, by defying their parents.

I found it an odd criticism. It assumed, surely, that I had prescriptive intent. In his mind, Gordimer’s children pointed the reader in the right moral direction. My protagonist, who does not always do the right thing and is certainly morally culpable, made the whole purpose of the book, in his mind, morally questionable.

Much, much later, Roberts was to be discredited as the voice of truth and prophecy that we had thought him to be. A decade after his review of The Innocence of Roast Chicken, in a moment of intense personal schadenfreude for me, he lost a defamation case over a newspaper article, titled ‘The unlikeable Mr Roberts’. The judge described him as ‘haughty, arrogant, vindictive, venomous and paranoid’.

Back in 1996, though, the literary and academic communities were in thrall to him. He was, to a society closed for so long to outside influences, an intellectual from the great and wonderful land of Overseas. He was hailed as an oracle.

In the months after his review, similar criticisms clustered in his slipstream. I was accused of the sin of nostalgia, an abomination, surely, when writing about lives under apartheid.

Nostalgia, though, is not the central message of this novel. I created a mythical idealisation whose purpose lay in its contrast to the evil on which it was built. My intention, through its gradual erosion and final annihilation, was to show the rot that underpinned the supposed idyll.

The resolution, in which my adult protagonist is finally willing to examine the past in order to face the future with hope, signals the need to move beyond the past and find a new, more sustainable way to move forward.

Further criticisms focused on what was termed the book’s ‘unwarranted’ success. Most of these critics were white; all of them were men. The focus slid effortlessly from race to a far more gendered view of me and my book. Much had, at its heart, an unquestioning and, possibly, unconscious misogyny.

They were tired of ‘whinging white women’. What was all the fuss about? I was after all, simply a ‘women’s writer’, not to be taken seriously. Why engage with my work as though I were.

Even those which were positive took a patronising line. She has knocked off a book, according to one profile, between tennis and bridge parties and juggles all these many balls between perfectly manicured fingers.

This … why? Because I was a woman? Because I was married? I was both, but certainly not idle. I worked as a freelance magazine and newspaper journalist, cared for two small children, and chaired a national organisation focused on driving primary genetic health care to rural areas. Oh yes, and I wrote books.

I did not play tennis, nor have I ever played bridge. And anyone who knows me will testify that my fingernails are generally bitten to the quick.

Roberts may have introduced the tone of derision, but he made me fair game. The general message was that I was a frivolous writer. Not to be taken seriously. A frivolous woman.

At the time, and at moments in my career, I felt the criticism keenly on a personal level. Now I find it galling on a more political plane – because of the casual sexism it implies. To call me a ‘women’s writer’ is insulting, and yet why? Does this imply men read more serious works?

Women form the bulk of the fiction-buying public. Book clubs – associated mainly with women – are what keep many book sellers in business. No matter the proportion of intellectualism to enjoyment each may apply to literature, they engage with books on a passionate level.

In keeping my focus tight, choosing the ‘personal’ narrative, I follow in the footsteps of many writers, male and female, who have shown us the lives of individuals in order to provide a sense of the larger society. I am proud to do so.

Now, though, in the spirit of honesty, I must finally admit to being slightly complicit in this response to me and my work, as a woman and as a writer.

I was a dyslexic child, in a time when the condition was not recognised. In my first year of school, my mother was told I was ‘retarded’, unlikely to make it through primary education.

I grew up unsure of my own intellect. The child who initially had no friends grew up desperate to be liked. It was easier for me to hide behind the ingénue, to be sweet, to rely on the attractiveness of youth and vivacity, than to demand that people engage with me on an intellectual level.

To be fair to the young woman I was, I also felt I no longer had to. I had written a book, one that was showing itself to be something to be reckoned with. Surely I could relax now, just be likeable.

At my London launch, I was introduced to a journalist who, still clutching my hand, turned to my publisher. ‘How clever of you to find her,’ he said. ‘She’s so fresh. It’s that air of the frightened gazelle, I think …’

What did I do? I smiled, of course, and responded in a suitably gazelle-like way. I was self-deprecating to a fault, a quality that got me into difficulty more than once.

On my return, I told this tale of woe to a local journalist. They asked what my hobbies were, for publicity purposes. I felt certain they hoped to discover a penchant for translating poems from Sanskrit. One couldn’t admit to just any old hobby. It wouldn’t feel right, for instance, to confess that one’s hobbies were ‘boys, food and clothes’.

I basked in his laughter, happy to be thought witty and ironic. Until the article appeared, with the intro: ‘Her hobbies are boys, food and clothes …’

More than twenty years on, I can see that the response to the book was reflective of the times. The reviews that focused on the novel’s literary merits were overwhelmingly positive, both locally and abroad. The major thrust of the criticism levelled against it was political.

Devastating it may have been, but I can now appreciate that this level of attention meant the book engaged the consciousness of general readers and intellectuals, both positively and negatively. It made people think. It caused a stir.

Shortly after the book was released, a cabinet minister in the new democratic government approached me at a function. ‘Your book,’ he said, ‘is what this country is all about.’

I hope he would say the same today. The novel is not ‘about’ apartheid and its immediate aftermath. It’s about ordinary people being tested by extraordinary times. And we are still being tested by extraordinary times.

Our innocence is constantly being pitted, in an unequal contest, against the universal forces of greed and venality. We continue to lose our innocence and fall into despondency.

This was a condition I intended to resonate through the novel – the swing in public sentiment between euphoria and hopelessness. It is my attempt at a plea for balance; the recognition that both extremes are unsustainable and only a degree of equilibrium allows someone to live, ultimately, without despair.

The Innocence of Roast Chicken is not my own story, although I’m still asked how I handled my childhood trauma. My grandparents were not Eastern Cape farmers, although they did retire to a smallholding in the then Transvaal.

Oh, I did draw from my own life. For example, my grandmother did once invite me to choose a young chicken. And I did give her a name: Sheba, a good name for a chicken. And yes, naturally, because my grandmother was a chicken farmer who thought me a pieperige kind, she did serve Sheba to me for dinner.

It is also true that she named a dog after me. As an eight-year-old, I was once instructed to hold Josie while a neighbouring farmworker left the property. She was too strong for me, though, and I couldn’t hold her. The incident, which left me traumatised and guilt-ridden, played out almost exactly as I describe it in the novel.

But those real, usually inessential experiences are plaited through more significant parts of the story that are not mine. The shocking denouement I appropriated from a court case I covered when I was a young reporter on the Cape Times.

As a child, I was never aware of conflict between my Afrikaans grandmother and my English-educated mother. Only after my ouma’s death, in my late teens, did my mother speak of the rift her education had caused between them. For the sake of my story, I imagined how it might have played out had I been privy to it.

Life informs art. Novels are never plucked purely from the imagination. They’re formed through a mix of observation and research. That’s why literature is important. It draws us into the lives of others, through which we can more clearly see our own.

As a journalist who became a writer of fiction, I believe that fiction can reach a deeper truth, and say the unsayable. It has allowed me to play with emotions and attitudes that no one would admit to on the record.

I believe in entering issues through people – and by telling stories. Plough on about a worthy subject, and we all go to sleep. Give us people, and lives, and we can enter into another person’s complex world.

For me, writing is a seeking to understand, rather than a way of grabbing people by the throat and forcing them to understand what I think I know. We writers have no special access to an overarching truth. We are here to investigate, and to leave our readers, hopefully, to discern the answers.

I believe in writing accessibly, no matter how serious or ‘literary’ your purpose. A novelist I admire, Michael Chabon, writes that entertainment has become tainted – the very intention to entertain has become suspect, something ‘no literary genius’ would admit to.

Yet entertainment as he defines it, pleasure and all, remains the only sure means we have ‘of bridging … the gulf … that separates each of us from everybody else.

‘The best response to those who would cheapen it is … to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, not passive, but a two-way exchange of attention, experience and the universal hunger for connection.’

I love that. It perfectly captures my writing philosophy.

Only when I came to write my PhD dissertation, twenty years after The Innocence of Roast Chicken appeared, did I realise how much I was influenced by the works I read as a teenager. TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral lent its sense of evil creeping into the everyday. Where he ‘smelt death in the rose, death in the hollyhock, sweet pea, hyacinth’, I had corruption crawl its way even into the innocence of roast chicken.

I first read LP Hartley’s The Go-Between in a setting and time as far removed from Norwich in 1900 as could be – the Eastern Cape in 1974. But something in the force of the voice formed a seed that lay in my subconscious until the early 1990s.

Rereading The Go-Between, I could see how much I owed Hartley, particularly in the intensity of the emotional and sensual experience he invokes.

As he does, I attempted to express the yearning for a childhood untainted by a system that was beyond the control of the child characters, and yet who were complicit merely through having lived through and benefited from it.

As does Hartley, I used an idealised childhood close to Nature. While Hartley’s Leo came face to face with the realities of sex, Katie came to a realisation of the inequality, violence and abuse of power inherent in maintaining apartheid.

The Innocence of Roast Chicken transformed my life from the ordinary. I was very fortunate. The book sold spectacularly, drew excellent reviews internationally and was nominated for a prestigious international award. It was chosen as an ‘outstanding debut novel’ by a British bookshop chain. I was invited to tour the United Kingdom and to speak in Europe. I sold the film rights and was flown to Pinewood Studios in London to meet the producers.

More importantly, though, it gave me pride. It gave me the courage to move forward with a literary and academic career, teach others to write, complete a PhD, and write more books.

That’s what the novel did for me personally. Since that handful of white writers appeared in the early 1990s, the South African literary landscape has become full and diverse. Men and women of all colours, creeds and cultures produce narratives, personal and otherwise, in a wide range of genres. It has become a rich literary landscape.

To have contributed to this vibrant post-apartheid literary scene makes me more than proud. It has, as I had hoped, given my life meaning and worth.

Jo-Anne Richards

June 2019

THEN

Everyone should have a farm like that in their childhood – too idyllic to be real outside the tangible world of a child’s imagining. And it really was like that, the perfect background for a charmed and untouched childhood. The farm itself was untouched: by ugliness, unpleasantness, poverty, politics, or so it seemed to me. Until that particular year when it was spoiled. Everything was spoiled.

As an intense teenager, years later, filled with angst and misplaced sensitivity, I wrote a poem about my childhood, I wrote of a white sheet hanging on the line on a summer’s day, rippling and flapping in a gentle breeze, warmed and dried by the cloudless heat of the day. Then I showed it fallen, a graceless heap on the grassless ground, soiled by filthy footprints which could have been mud, but which looked a bit like blood.

Don’t think badly of me. Everyone is filled with self-pity at fourteen. And for many years I carried the full guilt of that year. I lugged the intense, silent burden of having caused everything that happened by doing something very bad, or not standing in the way of the bad things – to field and divert them from us, from my farm.

I had too much faith in the way things would continue, in the beauty of before.

When I was older, I realised that, after all, I had been just a child, powerless to deflect the horror, not strong enough to be chosen as the cosmic goalie. Then I felt sorry for myself, until I was older still, and the guilt – more collective this time – settled again. That was when I locked myself away from all the perplexing ugliness of life, from any taint of hurt or violence.

But I didn’t set out to tell about 1966. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to describe how it really was, how it was before – before the ugliness. I want to tell you about the soft, lilting nature of my holidays there.

This is how it really was. Each morning at five we awoke, my two brothers and I, to the same sounds. The drowsy sounds of hundreds of chickens, interspersed with the sharp crow of awakened roosters. Lying very still in my bed I could hear the grating beat of the belt-driven generator. From the bedroom next door, the early news on the Afrikaans service, then my grandmother’s soft-intoned, Afrikaans-accented reading from the English Bible, before my grandfather’s deep English voice joined hers in the Lord’s Prayer.

The skree-bang of the fly-screen door into the kitchen and the cleaning noises in the lounge – invisible cleaning, for we never saw it being done. When the smells of bacon and Jungle Oats finally reached us, we catapulted noisily from our three beds, just in time to join my father heading for his unfailing early morning swim.

Before the full sun of the morning heated the dusty path through the orchard, I trotted barefoot alongside my father while my brothers raced for the pool. We joined them only after my father and I had stood to eat still-cool figs from the tree. And he invariably said: ‘The only way to eat figs, straight off the tree before the sun’s properly up.’

The swimming place was huge and old-fashioned, a reservoir built in the war years, now used only for swimming. Moving hand over hand along the sides in the morning, one could be sure of finding a bullfrog or two wallowing in the small square holes just above water level.

Shivering and chilled, we would make for the warmth of the kitchen, where we dried off before the huge coal stove, pinching cinnamon-flavoured soetkoekies from the china jar on the dresser. The admonishments this would draw from enormously fat Dora, who ruled the kitchen, never managed to outlast her chest-quivering, almost toothless laugh.

Breakfasts were huge, lunches merely a welcome interruption to an otherwise unfettered day, in which the grown-ups remained satisfyingly remote from our adventuring, but comfortingly near at hand for my little-girl needs. Ouma, solid and practical, had a face which brooked no nonsense and truly softened and sweetened only when she looked at us kids. To my kind, literary Oupa – so civilised and impractical – she spoke always in a hectoring tone, which he answered meekly but with a wink at me. Once, while I sat on his knee being read to – A Child’s Garden of Verses, I think it was, though I can’t be sure – he told me it was Ouma’s way of showing her love for us, the dreamy impractical ones, her way of chivvying us into coping with the harder side of life.

But it never worked. She always called me pieperig, and Oupa always sat reading or writing in his library, his soft, persistent cough and wisp of pipe smoke betraying his presence. Ouma, whom I never saw with a book other than the Bible, was out on the farm, supervising the feeding of the new chicks, the nailing of sacking over the chicken hoks before a threatened hailstorm and, of course, the killing – which I was never aware of and never went curiously in search of, as my brothers did. And when the crunch finally came, when the hardness of life finally came home to me, I wasn’t strong enough to deal with it. My grandmother’s attempts to toughen me were no defence against the events which caused the collapse of my life and the devastation of my childhood – or so it seemed to me at the time. Even if, in retrospect and with adult consciousness, you smile cynically and think me melodramatic, I can describe it in no other way. Anyway, I wasn’t going to talk about that time.

I was going to talk about Ouma’s boys – William, her right-hand man, Petrus, and the