There is a tradition in literary fiction of the city that is so present it functions as a character in its own right. Joyce's Dublin. Dickens's London. Coetzee's Cape Town.
I make no grand claims for In the Name of the Mother alongside that company. But I will say this: Cape Town is not incidental to my novel. It is structural to it.
What cities do to people
Cities shape the psychology of the people who live in them in ways that are real but often invisible. The pace. The social stratification. The physical geography — who lives where, who moves freely and who does not. The history that is written into the architecture and the street names and the silences.
Cape Town has all of this in abundance. It is a city of extraordinary contrasts that are not metaphorical — they are literal, visible, present in a way that affects how everyone who lives here thinks about proximity and distance, safety and exposure, belonging and exclusion.
The Atlantic Seaboard as setting
A number of scenes In the Name of the Mother take place in and around the Atlantic Seaboard — the part of Cape Town where I have lived and worked for years. It is a beautiful and somewhat sealed world: magnificent views of the ocean, a particular set of social codes.
It is exactly the kind of environment in which a family secret might be maintained for a long time. Most know the form. And when something begins to crack, the cracks are all the more shocking for having been invisible for so long.
The West Coast
Much of the drama and action in the book happens on the windy west coast of the city. Important character connections are grown on Bloubergstrand and Big Bay – the global mecca for windsurfing and kiteboarding enthusiasts.
TheBo-Kaap
The novel reaches deep into the Bo-Kaap, that fiercely colourful neighbourhood on the slopes of Signal Hill that is one of the most photographed and least understood parts of the city. There, the colours are not metaphorical either. They are an assertion: we are here, we have always been here, and we are not going anywhere.
That assertion — and the history behind it — matters to the story I was telling.
Read the novel at https://janehudsonbooks.com/