A Blade of Grass

Information and Book Review

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Lewis DeSoto

Mr. DeSoto was born in South Africa, but now lives in Canada and Normandy.  This is his first novel, however, he has written journal articles and was awarded the Books in Canada/Writers' Union Short Prose Award.

A Blade of Grass centers around two women, Marit and Tembi, one white and one black, who struggle to survive in an unnamed country bordering South Africa in the 1970s, torn apart by the horror and violence of apartheid.

Marit is a British woman, recently orphaned and recently married.  She moves to Africa with her husband Ben, who has purchased a farm there, fulfilling a childhood dream.  While Ben farms and forges relationships with the local African workers, Marit remains aloof from her new life, holding on to the few threads of "civilization" she can sustain in her new world.

Tembi is Marit's young housekeeper, a sensitive and resilient young black woman who owes her position in Marit's household to a tragic event that leaves her alone in the world.

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"Marit arrives at a fence, the barbed wire that marks the border of the farm, the limits of what she owns, the territory where she may walk without being a stranger.  A fence to keep others out, and to keep her in.  A frontier.  She paces along the fence, glancing through the strands of wire to the other side.  If she crosses and continues walking, how long before she reaches another country, the real frontier, where there are rumors of war?  She will not be welcome there.  If she crosses that country and goes to the next she will not be welcome there.  Or in the country beyond that.  In all the miles and acres of the whole continent it is only here, on this side of the fence, behind the wire, that she belongs.

Marit searches on the ground for a sturdy stick, then uses it to separate two strands of wire, the way she has seen Ben do, making a space wide enough for her to step through.  Her thick chestnut hair falls across her face and she pauses a moment to gather it back, fastening the tresses into a rough bun with an elastic from her pocket.

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