WHIPLASH
By Tracey Farren
Tracey Farren’s debut novel “Whiplash” is the hard hitting, gut wrenching story of Tess, a Muizenberg prostitute who is telling her story to her mother, who turned from the truth a long time ago and retired under a mouldy duvet.
Tess describes a critical year in her life with shocking honesty, determined this time that her mother will hear. She tells her heartbreaking story with a humour that she can’t help.
When a condom pops, Tess’s life swings one eighty degrees. Tess hits the road harder, flogs her body, but there is no going back. She is grimly determined to get back on track. To do this, however, she needs to take a break from her drugs.
Tess’s cold turkey opens up a window in her psyche. Her new sobriety invites awful truths into her memory. Pictures from the past ambush her mind and Tess is whipped into a shattering understanding of how she got here. But while she is stalked by vivid, frightening flash backs, her universe conspires to heal her. Friends close in on her, despite her efforts to isolate.
Tess learns to see miracles, even in pain. She finds herself sewing sequins onto bright, silky cloth. She finds herself learning to belly dance, “shik shik” with her hips. Tess dumps her old identity in chunks. Tess gets ready to dance.
About Tracey Farren
I am a forty one year old full time writer. I live in False Bay, Cape Town with four dogs, a surfer and two teenage children. I have a psychology honours degree from the University of Cape Town. Before I turned to fiction I worked as a freelance journalist, publishing in South African glossies like Men’s Health and Shape and in newspapers like Mail and Guardian, Sunday Independent and Cape Times. I focused on issues of governance and social development, including child justice, prison conditions, domestic violence, land reform and Aids.
I published several short stories in collections like Urban One and Urban Two and Nobody Ever Said Aids.
This first novel was inspired by the feisty street workers I met during my journalistic research. I was fascinated by the horror of their daily lives, and the audacious courage that it takes to confront it. ‘Tess’ was born of my deep curiosity and their indomitable spirit.
I have started a second novel called Snake in the Grass. It is a psychological thriller about a little farm girl who watches a charming stranger destroy her family. She is the only one who can stop him.
Whiplash
By Tracey Farren
Published by Modjaji Books
Retail price R150
http://modjaji.books.com
Ends
Issued by HIPPO Communications
On behalf of Modjaji books
For further information please contact
Beryl Eichenberger
021 556 8200
0824906652
beryl@hippocommunications.com
Editors’ note
Why this subject?
A rash of books has been written by and about sex workers recently. There seems to be climate of curiosity, a will to understand how it is possible to do this work. Of course, there is probably also a powerful voyeuristic hunger running in the market. ‘Whiplash,’ I think, might disappoint voyeurs. It contains a good measure of mechanical sex, but is, in essence, a psychological and spiritual journey. The journey is action packed, fraught with dilemma. Tess tells it herself, in her dark, funny way. As a reader, you go along with this woman in trouble, equally shocked and entertained. At first you think Tess is hard boiled, blunted, but are intrigued by a glimmer of fear. Then you spot something courageous in her, a battle below the surface. When she finally shows you her terror, you side with her, pray for her.
Before you know it, you have a prostitute friend.
‘Whiplash’ intends to uncover the sameness of all human beings. Some call it ‘spirit’, some call it ‘soul’. Whatever you call it, ‘Whiplash’ celebrates it with silk veils and whipping hips, in the beauty of the belly dance.
How ‘Tess’ came about
Tess is a composite of people I have met. She is as fearful as I was as a child, as irreverent as a couple of friends who strayed off the edges of society, as blunt as one of my hard case aunties, and as self destructive as the street workers I came to know while living in Muizenberg.
I approached the latter while working as a freelance journalist, researching the issue of decriminalisation of prostitution. They told me how they rely on drugs to cope with high levels of stress. They showed me their wounds from clients and pimps. Burn wounds, bruises, knife slits. In six years, three of the seven women who worked the beat near my safe, pretty home were brutally murdered. The police made no effort to find their killers. Prostitution is illegal, you see. Because they are seen as engaging in a criminal activity, the women are denied police protection. Our law pushes them right outside of society, stripping them of their human rights.
I wanted Tess’s story to do two things, one political, one spiritual. The first was to take ordinary people into the life and the mind of someone they would normally see as ‘other.’ I wanted to surprise them with empathy, to ask them to understand Tess’s internal logic. In doing so, I hoped to disarm much of the judgement directed against sex workers.
If people can think, ‘She must have her reasons,’ rather than, ‘How could she?’ then the book will have helped to bring wholeness.
On a political level, Whiplash supports the move to decriminalise prostitution. Decriminalisation is different to legalisation. It does not condone sex work, but does insist that sex workers have a right to protection from coercive pimps and violent clients.
The second thing I wanted to do was show that everyone has a right to recover. We are all here to remember our spiritual identity. The spiritual message in ‘Whiplash’ is deliberately unaligned with any religious rule book. Tess develops a sense of precious spiritual worth through her brave exploration of her ‘nothingness’ in the world. But redemption is not unique to people in pain. It is everyone’s quest. Some do it the easy way. Some do it the hard way, like Tess.
