Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night - Softcover

Sindiwe Magona

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0704343215 ISBN 13: 9780704343214

Publisher: The Women's Press, 1992

Synopsis

Stories depict the injustices in South African women's lives, including a mother of five children who flees her hut in the middle of the night in the hopes that her mother-in-law will care for the children she cannot feed, if only she is not there.

About this title

About the Author

After achieving degrees from UNISA and Columbia University, SINDIWE MAGONA started working for the United Nations Organizations in New York where she stayed for nine years. At the end of 2002, Sindiwe finally returned to her home country and now lives in Marina da Gama. She wrote many award winning novels after To My Children’s Children, which includes Forced to Grow, Push-Push and other stories, Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night and Mother to Mother, which has now been made to a major feature film. In April this year, she was awarded with Order of iKhamanga Bronze medal award by the President at the Union Buildings.

From Booklist

Both tragic and seemingly inconsequential events are equally important--and equally poetically rendered--in these stories of South African women's lives. This collection is a forceful document of injustices. The voices that emerge are elegant and moving in their simplicity. In the opening story, a woman leaves her mud hut--and her five young children--to flee to the misty mountains beyond her village. She had been awake at night, in despair, considering where their next meal would come from. Her move is incomprehensible--the youngest child is still nursing. Then one comment gives meaning to the whole: "To be a good mother I must leave." Her mother-in-law will take over, she hopes. It is only later that we learn, she has become hired help in a white household to earn money to support her family. Magona is a storyteller centered in her power, convinced of the universal relevance of what she sees. The effect is felt like the strong South African sun, each story's momentum like the pounding of a drum. Deanna Larson-Whiterod

Edition details

• Publisher: The Women's Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0704343215
• ISBN 13: 9780704343214
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168