Ruinscapes and Subversion of Temporalities in 'For the Mercy of Water'

Abstract

For the Mercy of Water is the story of a writer travelling to an unnamed, abandoned countryside, in an imagined Global Southern country, to interview an old woman identified as “Mother” after the murder of the young girls by the water security guards of “the company.” I examine For the Mercy of Water’s representation of exploited, marginal rural space as a ‘ruinscape’ that manifests the palimpsestic overlay between linear time, industrial time, colonialism, and neoliberal globalization. I use the term “ruinscape” in the literary imagination, not as imagery of damaged space, but as spatial representation of the negative social, economic, and environmental processes across historical periods that interpenetrate each other. I argue that the novel also presents an emergence of new potentialities by counter-hegemonic temporalities that reconceptualize the present moment as an ongoing accumulation of time and space, rather than a linear organization of resources.

Keywords

• 21st Century South African novel
• temporalities
• neoliberal globalization
• water wars
• ruinscape

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