Set in the near future, in an unnamed country caught in the grips of a devastating drought and a resultant war over dwindling water resources, For the Mercy of Water (which was awarded the 2013 Sunday Times Fiction Prize) explores challenging issues such as sexual assault and rape, the privatisation of natural resources, war, and the abstract concepts of mercy and justice with great sensitivity and poetic flair.
Inspired by Jayess experience as a newspaper journalist covering events in the Middle East, For the Mercy of Water is concerned with the ways in which control over access to water can be used as a political tool. Through its discussion of water politics, the novel deconstructs the rhetoric of domination and its role in gender-based violence. To control water supply, Jayes suggests, is to control the very essence of life, the bodies of those that fall victim to such systematic starvation.
For the Mercy of Water draws on enmeshed metaphorical relationships between the categories of female, the body and nature on the one hand, and the categories of male, the mind and culture on the other. In this sense, the war waged over water (nature) is also a war waged over the female body. The novel offers an unflinching representation of womens lived bodily experiences: the brutality of rape, the pain of having to stitch together the broken body of a girl child, the pleasure of feeling the soft cotton of a brand new dress against ones skin.
Although For the Mercy of Water operates strictly within an allegorical space, it is difficult not to find traces of South Africa in Jayess unidentified cityscape. On these streets, hawkers sell their wares out of large hessian bags, a taxi driver steers his vehicle with a spanner clamped to the axle in the middle of the space where his steering wheel should be, and companies are named after old revolutionary leaders.
This powerful novel is an important addition to the South African literary oeuvre. Despite its difficult subject matter, Jayess hauntingly beautiful, almost hypnotic prose leaves the reader feeling uplifted, assured that redemption and mercy are possible in even the most hopeless of circumstances.
ISBN: 9780143530213
Pages: 382
Paperback
Penguin SA, 2013
Good condition; Limited ink notes last (blank) page of book
B27
