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If You Want to Make God Laugh is Bianca Marais’ sophomore novel, and it is an exploration of three South African women negotiating motherhood and trauma, whose lives interact in a variety of explosive ways. The novel begins with Zodwa, a seventeen year old girl living in an impoverished village outside Magaliesburg with her mother, who is dying of tuberculosis. Zodwa has become pregnant as a result of a rape. She was attacked by her best friend’s boyfriend, who found out that Zodwa harbored desirous feelings towards her best friend. Her rape is indicative of the widespread misogyny and homophobia in her community, and her pregnancy is a reminder of both the traumatic attack and the systemic oppression she faces as a queer woman.
Zodwa’s mother secretly drops the baby at the home of two wealthy white women nearby, sneaking him from her daughter while she is sleeping, then telling Zodwa that he died while she was sleeping. Zodwa is unconvinced that her baby is dead, and because her mother dies from complications with TB before she can tell Zodwa anything, Zodwa is left completely alone and in the dark as to the status of her son. Meanwhile, the home that the baby is dropped off at is shared by two middle-aged sisters, who have returned to their childhood avocado farm for personal reasons.
One sister, Ruth, a former stripper that the press called “South Africa’s Wild Child”, is going through her third divorce and struggling with alcoholism, and her depleting funds force her to return to her childhood home. The other sister, Delilah, is a former Catholic novitiate and aid worker who returns home after receiving word that someone from her past has fallen ill and is dying in a hospital. It is eventually revealed that the man in the hospital is Delilah’s son, the product of her own rape by a priest when she was just seventeen. Her pregnancy caused her to be expelled from the Church, and forced to abandon her son to be raised by his father, who heaped shame on Delilah while refusing to disclose his role in the child’s birth.
The child dropped at the doorstep creates a rift between the already incongruous sisters, as Ruth wants to keep it, but Delilah does not. Ruth had suffered miscarriages throughout her life, and believes the child to be a gift for her, while the baby only reminds Delilah of the one she gave up. Ruth eventually adopts the child, and when his HIV positive status is revealed, Ruth commits herself to his safety and care wholeheartedly.
After much searching, Zodwa locates her son, and becomes a maid in Ruth and Delilah’s home, never disclosing that she is the child’s birth mother. The dynamic between Ruth and Zodwa can be fraught, as the two women negotiate what it means to be a true mother who provides for a child, all the while battling their own shortfalls. Zodwa knows that she could not afford to give her son the comforts that Ruth does, and especially cannot afford the HIV medications that are saving his life. The dynamic between Zodwa and Delilah is also very interesting, as they mirror each other in many ways, both rape victims, both teen mothers, both forced to give up their babies, both unable to disclose the reality of their trauma. The relationship between these three women and the baby play out amongst a great deal of political and racial unrest. The novel is a moving portrayal of the ties that bind women of all shapes and sizes, and the ways that female companionship can help us to transcend some of the realities of a society that has descended into moral chaos.