October: Period Pain
by Barbara Boswell

Review by Moon Mokgoro

Kopano Matlwa is a South African writer and doctor known for her novels Coconut, Period Pain, Spilt Milk and others. She has won multiple awards for her work, and in 2015, along with Chrystelle Wedy, she won the first-ever Aspen Ideas Award.

Period Pain is an epistolary and intimate novel of a nation in crisis. It tells the story of Masechaba, a young black doctor struggling to survive in an under-resourced South African public health system while grappling with personal trauma, endometriosis, and living in a dysfunctional country.

Masechaba’s pains and psychological wounds deepen throughout the story. She battles through memories of her deceased brother, rape, gender based violence, misogyny, and physical pain. The book explores the unspoken struggles of women with endometriosis and menorrhagia. It unearths South Africa's shadows – our rape culture, colourism, xenophobia, misogyny. It exposes the post-colonial experience of Black South Africans living in an unjust, still broken, corrupt, and dysfunctional “new” South Africa, and how we still remain haunted by apartheid’s legacies. Of rape culture, she writes, “I should have listened. I should have been calmer, quieter, more thoughtful, more focused. I was too, too excited. That’s why those men raped me.” A painful reminder of the blame forever placed on victims, the lessons young girls are taught – to hide themselves, rather than young men being taught not to rape. Of colourism, she writes, of her daughter, “I was happy she was light in complexion. At least God had given her that. Being dark on top of everything else (a child of rape) would have been too much.” Colourism persists in South Africa, manifesting in everyday interactions and reinforcing social and political hierarchies.

Masechaba’s journey is volatile. It is gut-wrenching and unpleasant. It is also, however, the reality of many South African women. Whether that be just parts of the story or the whole story with slight changes. It is not a foreign experience. It is known. Many of us know someone who has experienced the horrors written about in Period Pain, and that is partly why it is a necessary read. Not merely because of empathy and sympathy, but because it is a reality, and because we are living in this reality.

In her TEDx talk, Matlwa says she believes, by faith, that she is capable of achieving things that psychiatrists would ordinarily term “delusions of grandeur.” In this book, Matlwa achieves something great. Her achievement lies in telling a story so raw and visceral, of pain and horror but also of hope. Period Pain is resistance. It is a powerful narrative of exposure and confrontation.

“How long have you known for that this lay on my horizon?” Masechaba writes in a diary entry as a conversation with God. How long has God known the path towards her pain, but   in addition to that, how long has he known what that pain would bring? The strange, hopeful joy that came as a result of that pain?