By Phil Murray
JUST KEEP BREATHING: SOUTH AFRICAN BIRTH STORIES
Sandra Dodson & Rosamund Haden
Jacana Media
This is most definitely a chick book, but it's not flimsy or frothy in the least. It is honest and sometimes even painful in its exploration of the truth about pregnancy, birth, tragedy and euphoria.
On the surface, it appears to be an unassuming and unobtrusively feel-good book with its rainbow/hippy cover but it is an important and meaningful collection of the true experiences of African men and women on the same terrifying, yet often humorous journey towards parenthood.
At first I thought I'd skip around and read a sprinkling of the stories, just gleaning an idea of the collection, but I started at the beginning and didn't leave out a single page till I hit the back cover.
Reading this book is a personal way to share feelings about being pregnant and giving birth, without having to do it in that public, competitive world where everyone's experiences are more death-defying, more tissue-splittingly painful, or longer than the next person's.
So many of the stories appeal in so many ways and I was left with the powerful feeling that we are really all the same; our fears and joys animal and instinctive. My heart leapt and recoiled in the same way that the storytellers' did.
Upon running my eyes down the biographical notes on each short-story writer, I thought I spotted a flaw before I even began - that the writers were largely white women, and that most were from the same socio-economic group.
But Just Keep Breathing does not make a political statement. The stories show a wide variety of experiences, and while many women, limited by their circumstances, are "reluctant or unable to testify to their emotional trauma", Dodson and Haden hope that this collection gives all women "a voice".
Some stories perfectly describe the "(swollen) ankles of bovine" women, and the "peculiar sheep-like bleat" of a brand-new baby. But some made me gasp with empathy, like the father who "(buckled) before the white fridge door" in grief after the difficult decision to abort his baby, possibly deformed by antiretrovirals. Just Keep Breathing is contemporary, serious South African writing at its most poignant.