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.
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My review
Mon, 4 Nov 2019 | Review
by: Breakaway R.
One of the most gut-wrenchingly honest books I’ve ever read.
The highlight of Katie’s year is spending Christmas on her grandparents' farm in the Eastern Cape. It is 1966 and Kate aged eight and her two brothers, Neil almost sixteen and Michael, twelve as they arrive with their parents for their annual idyllic holiday, filled with huge farm-cooked food and watermelon dripping down their chins while sitting under the ancient fig tree. Kate and Michael have a strong bond and spend hours together exploring the farm, while Neil has reached the age where he’s not quite an adult yet but no longer interested in their childish games.
An Afrikaans farmer bought a section of the farm. He also took over several of her grandparents’ staff to help with the dairy and sheep. Kate and Michael meet and befriend the man’s son Kobus and his black sidekick, Jonas, a young boy dressed in rags whose father works on the farm.
Fast-forward to 1989. Kate is a school-librarian and married to Joe an up-and-coming labour lawyer working through the pitfalls after the ANC has been declared legal, and workers are fighting for fair wages. His optimism of the future of South Africa is met with cynicism and snide remarks from Kate. In fact, their relationship is reaching a breaking point. He knows that a cataclysmic event took place in her life and it had something to do with her grandparents’ farm but he cannot get her to talk about it. Kate describes that she’s “safe in the secrecy of my glasshouse.”
Joe has always believed in the goodness of others. Believed that people will behave in a civilised manner when negotiating. Unfortunately, his perceptions change when he takes on a case of the workers demanding higher wages from their powerful employer, SAMPCO. The union bosses call a strike which unfortunately leads to violence and many innocent people are burnt alive or beaten to death. He breaks down at this realisation. Is this the catalyst which will finally get Kate to break her glass dome and share the horror of what she saw and experienced on the farm in 1966?
Kate aged eight arrived on the farm with pictures of the beauty and the peace and freedom she can have running wild, playing with the dogs or watching the meerkats or the hoopoe in its daily hunt for food from her previous visits. What she starts to see and hear, shakes many of these illusions. Cracks appear in her precise safe world and she must start questioning the cultural differences, between people, White English vs White Afrikaner. Farmworkers were treated with utter contempt and lack of empathy for their rights to being treated as human. The Dutch Reformed Church vs “English” religions. The incidents that she notices make her pray for her “perfect” picture to return.
Jo-Anne Richards has a way of writing that draws you into the story so that it’s a vivid picture running through your head rather than a bunch of words. One that struck a chord was describing the sound of a fly-screen door, “skree-bang”. If you’ve ever lived on a farm and had a fly-screen door, this is exactly how it sounds!
This book is both beautiful, but shocking and Jo-Anne has captured both the 1960s and 1980s exactly as I remembered them.
Like Kate, I too had an idyllic childhood, and like Kate, I too had to learn the realities of what was going on around me. What Jo-Anne Richards portrays in this book identifies exactly what was going on in the country during those times, the whites lording it over people of colour, with appalling cruelty and lack of understanding.
None of us was free of guilt. I’ve offered many prayers asking for forgiveness for my own small part in the country’s bitter history.
Treebeard
Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.
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