The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University The Seed Thief Jacqui L’Ange LNGJAC001 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing Town Faculty of the HumanitiesCape Universityof of Cape Town 2012 COMPULSORY DECLARATION This work has notUniversity been previously submitted in whole, or in part, for the award of any degree. It is my own work. Each significant contribution to, and quotation in, this dissertation from the work, or works, of other people has been attributed, and has been cited and referenced. Signature: Date: Town Cape of University Abstract At face value, The Seed Thief is a contemporary quest story. Maddy Bellani, a botanist with the Millennium Seed Bank in Cape Town, is sent on the trail of an African plant thought to be extinct on the continent, and believed to be growing in Brazil. Maddy is a reluctant heroine, a botanist of many places but no home, who responds to the call because she believes it might help her put some of her unsettledness to rest. But when she finds herself in a place that shakes her preconceptions to the core, the myths she has constructed to prop up her life and sense of self come crashing down around her. We are all unreliable narrators; the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives are merely versions of a truth. So it is with the story Maddy narratesTown to herself as she waits, stuck in transit en route to Brazil. For the first half of The Seed Thief, Maddy reflects on the events that set her on her present journey. In the second part of the book, she is on her return journey, changed. As is her story. Cape The Seed Thief is a book about coming homeof to truth – or perhaps about coming home to oneself. It is a story about dislocation, disconnection and transience. It is about family ties, about ownership, about the legacies of colonialism and the neo-colonialism that is biopiracy. And it’s about the secrets we keep locked up in the spaces between memories. University Town Cape of University The Seed Thief Town Cape of by Jacqui L’Ange University Town Cape of University The art of losing isn’t hard to master. ~ Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’ Town Cape of University Town Cape of University Prologue A girl on a boat on a river. The river still, the boat motionless, the girl in flux. The water is no colour, or all colours, so dense and dark that it mirrors all the green around it. Trees, taller than apartment blocks, denser than any city, the river a boulevard cutting through them. On the banks the trees reach up, trunks to leaves to sky. Down on the mirrored river course they are inverted, trunks thrust down, leaves reaching out as if to scoop up the girl, to claim her, the sky left somewhere behind her so that she, on her slow canoe, feels herself to be tipping forward, falling. TumblingTown into green and flipping back out again. Without moving at all. Sixteen, self-destructive, lost, she floats on the Rio Negro and searches for herself in the reflections of the trees. Cape Reflections double everything. As above, so below. One is real, the other only an image of it. But which is which? of Those trees, stately green, exist. She has walked under them, stumbled over their roots. Now she loses herself in their inverted replica, sometimes rippled by breeze, or a passing boat, but always regathering, returning to stillness. Perception or reality? If she were to dive into this image she would know that what lay beneath thisUniversity surface was something else altogether. Space. Spaces between molecules, pushing up to create an apparent surface, a reflecting meniscus that fooled her eye into thinking there were trees there, and roots there, when in fact there were only fishes. Everything rests on this illusion. Of that she was newly, absolutely, certain. On this duplicitous Amazon, a sixteen-year-old girl with a death wish found that she cared rather too much about life. It’s in her heartbeat. And growing louder. 1 The drums pull her back in a dizzying rush, out of the silence and the cool and the green, and into too much colour. Maddy opens her eyes and it swirls in front of her, yellows and blues and red, too much red. She cannot focus. She smells the heat of bodies. Dizzy, dizzy. She looks down at her feet, which seem a long way away. There are other feet all around her, in sandals. The ones on her right are small and thin, with red painted toenails. She remembers seeing them earlier, before she tumbled into green. She longs for the calm of the water, would so rather be there, than here. No sooner has the thought formed, than all hell breaks loose. The woman with the slim feet is on her knees, then on her side, then rolling, spinning out of control over the floor. People step aside out of the way, but no one tries to stop her, or help her. How is it possible to move like that? She is rolling like a log on a river caught in turbulence. Maddy looks for invisible hands, butTown she knows this is no magic trick. The woman’s body has reached the end of the hall, and now it is making its way back again, still spinning. She looks so small and frail, like a child. But the energy propelling her is not innocent. The drums are hystericalCape and the bodies are whirling, people are shouting and the colours are all running into each other. She is struggling to breathe. Zé – where is Zé? She looks for theof drummers through the bodies on the other side of the hall, doesn’t see him. She remembers that he wasn’t there last time she looked, a moment before she went wherever it is she’s just been. There is a shout, and then a series of cracking gunshots from outside the hall. Nobody takes any notice, if anything they become even more frenzied. Maddy feelsUniversity herself disintegrating. 2 PART I – OUTGOING Town Cape of University 3 Town Cape of University 4 In Transit [1] 22:50 00:00 HEATHROW BA573 CANCELLED 23:15 00:00 MUNICH LH4698 CANCELLED 01:15 00:00 BOGOTA XA439 DELAYED 02:20 00:00 RIO DE JANEIRO TP796 DELAYED 03:45 00:00 SINGAPORE SQ212 DELAYED 05:30 00:00 TOKYO JAL342 DELAYED 06:00 00:00 MADRID VL5069 CANCELLED Town I would curse this volcano, if only I could pronounce its name. This transit lounge should be empty so early in the morning. Not crowded with people and their sweaty frustrations. Stranded, onCape hold, their plans undone by a petulant volcano that refuses to stop spewing ash, grounding all flights for an indeterminable time. I feel zero connection to these fug-headedof travellers wandering from one fast food outlet to the next. I see them lugging their time zones aimlessly between terminals, or crouching over their laptops trying to explain to loved ones why they won’t be home for dinner. I just want to find my own private island of empty seats, create my own personal no-go zone. I’ve coloniseUniversityd a row of three orange scoop chairs, barricaded my space with my backpack on one side, travel literature on the other: Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. I don’t really mind the delay. Not yet. Transit lounges offer the ultimate in paused potential. There’s nowhere else in the world I feel so honestly, anonymously myself. It’s the people I can do without. I like travelling solo. Solitary travellers have no witnesses, no one to confirm or contradict their version of events. No one to impose demands or expectations. No one to require anything of you at all. 5 It even defies physics. Nature abhors a vacuum, but even with ten tons of atmosphere pressing down on every square metre, transit feels gravity-less. Between the predictable bookends of touchdown and take-off, the transit lounge is a weightless space. Weightless, but not storyless. These transit people, like any other kind, play heroes and victims in their own private narratives. I have no interest in making friends or sharing stories. I’m avoiding eye contact with all of them. I just want to enjoy this time between what lies ahead and what I just left behind. If I can pause the looping replay of my failed relationship. If I can suspend my nagging anxiety about this trip. If I can put off calling my father until I’m in the air again, and the urge becomes useless. Maybe somewhere in this limbo space I’ll work out how I really feel about returning to a place that formed and defined but never fully held or nurtured me. One of my almost-homes. Saudades, Brazilians call it. Sow –daa – jies. The stretchedTown middle vowel always reminds me of a hammock. It weighs down the word, this longing for something that may not exist outside of sentimental imagination.