How ‘Casualties of Truth’ drew on a novelist’s experience in South Africa

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Lauren Francis-Sharma’s new novel opens on an unsettling note, as a police officer nurses his injuries from the day’s work – “The American girl had done some real damage,” he thinks – and then finds that his car tires have been slashed.

The events that trigger that act of vandalism, and the violence unleashed afterward, are the engine of “Casualties of Truth.” It draws on the author’s firsthand experience in South Africa, observing hearings held by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard testimony about human rights abuses committed by the state during the apartheid years, as well as violations committed by the liberation movements. Shifting between South Africa in the late 1990s, and Washington, D.C., two decades later, the novel tells the story of Prudence Wright – the American girl – who is forced to confront a past she has tried to suppress.

Francis-Sharma and I met in early February to talk about the book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Q: The novel draws on time you spent in South Africa when you were in law school. What did you observe while you were there?

A: I was about 24 at the time, working at a firm that had been hired by the ANC [African National Congress] to help with amnesty applications. So I just happened to be in Johannesburg during the amnesty hearings. I started taking notes because there was a paper I needed to write when I got back to school. But there was some part of me that suspected that even though they were recording everything, we weren’t going to be able to find this later – and I was right, by the way.

I knew about apartheid; I wasn’t completely naive. But what I didn’t know was the systemic nature of putting down the resistance. It wasn’t just hoses and putting people in jail – which also happened – it was torture, kidnapping, murder. That first day that I was there, a security agent testified about a group of boys who, just like in the book, had been tricked into getting on this bus and were told they were going to help save their country. And they weren’t just killed – they were tortured, and the perpetrators cleaned up afterward and covered it up. I’m watching the mothers learn, for the first time, what happened to their sons. They’d suspected the state was behind this, but they didn’t know. I wasn’t prepared for that.

I wrote every single word down. I had five, six legal pads by the time I left South Africa. Every time I moved, I kept them.

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Q: What made you turn to those notepads as inspiration for your writing after all these years?

A: When I got my first book published, I thought to myself, Now that I’m a writer, I might actually tell this story. But I still didn’t know how to tell it. I’d been workshopping it at cocktail parties all these years. “Oh, you were in South Africa? That’s so interesting.” “Yes, I was at the amnesty hearings, and horrible things were taking place.” And people were drawing back, almost annoyed. I got a sense of, “I don’t want to hear that.” So when I sat down to think about how I’m going to tell this story, I knew that I had to tell it in a way that people wouldn’t turn away. I wanted it to be tight, fast-paced, a little suspenseful. A little bit of a page-turner.

But it also focuses on a very strong woman who sort of ends up being a superhero, on some level – protecting her family in the way we see male characters do all the time. But she also struggles. She has this kid who needs extra attention, and she’s given up her career and is struggling with that. Frankly, I don’t see that story for Black women that often.

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Q: Why do you think people resisted those conversations?

A: I think we’re uncomfortable with other people’s pain. Americans in particular – we don’t do a very good job with that. You can see it now, in our current political environment. Do we lean in? Do we learn from other people’s stories? There’s a little bit of, “That’s Africa. What does that have to do with me? Oh, those poor people. Glad that’s done.” One of the things that I realized is that, when there’s an extended period of trauma, it becomes un-absorbable. Which is why, when I was writing this book, I knew that I had to make it short. Because the appetite and the ability to absorb this kind of pain … It’s just too much. And it’s too much for me, too.

Q: How did you go about balancing the two timelines: Prudence’s experience as a wealthy D.C. resident in 2018, and the amnesty hearings decades earlier? It’s a stark contrast – she has struggles with her marriage and motherhood and her child’s private school and so on, which we learn about in detail, but she also has a pretty comfortable life.

A: True, but I think it’s about shame and secrets. One of the things about the South African government’s power was its ability to suppress the media and to keep people from sharing their stories. Amnesty was a lot about trying to heal the country through storytelling: “This happened to me, to my family. Hear me. See me.”

So [with Prudence], we’ve got a character who had something happen to her – not just in South Africa, but deeper in the past, with her father’s murder. She’s carrying all this shame. It eats away at her.

I wanted to play around with class, with race, with shame, with history and our understanding of it. What are we doing with our stories about our shame? And how do those stories that are left buried affect us? What does it mean to have justice? Does vengeance get us justice?

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Q: Your two previous novels were also historical fiction, but set further back in time. How did your writing process change for this one since the events are more recent?

A: There was far more for me to infer in the previous ones, particularly in the last book [“Book of the Little Axe,” set around the 19th century in Trinidad and Montana]. Black people weren’t in the record very much. So I was making up a story that was based on numbers, and not human lives that were recorded. It felt in some ways – though I wouldn’t have said it at the time – easier. So much more research went into it. But the imagination was let loose a little bit.

Q: “Casualties of Truth” is a historical novel but also has thriller elements – surveillance, chases, even an undercover operation. That includes the ending, which – though I don’t want to spoil it – implies that Prudence, after it’s all over, still can’t find peace. How did you decide to end the story that way?

A: I wanted it to be clean. I wanted her to just move on with her life, you know? But when I think about what I was trying to do with this story, about shame and secrets and violence – and the perpetuation of all that – because you are trying to hide something about yourself, I couldn’t let her get away. I just couldn’t.

I want you to leave this book thinking: When does this end? This violence that we subject ourselves to, and subject others to: Is there an end to that?

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