The Tragedy of Broken Things

“The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again.” 

Thus begins this novel of powerful themes. The novel explores how one’s country creates pain and gives comfort at the same time.

Written by South African author Alan Paton in 1948, Cry, the Beloved Country is set in Ndotsheni, South Africa, a beautiful place tainted by the fear of a broken people. It is set during the difficult time of a racial segregation, where the rich and powerful white South African is frightened by the violence of the deprived black South African.  

In its core, the novel talks about the struggle of an old Negro priest, Kumalo, who learns that his only son has committed the most horrible crime of all: taking another man’s life. The young man who was killed was the son of the rich white South African, James Jarvis, who is a quiet and agreeable man in the village of Ixopo. His son was an active and a well-respected reformist in the city of Johannesburg and he was accidentally killed by Kumalo’s son, who along with two other young men, intended only to steal from the white man’s house.

Kumalo travels to the city of Johannesburg where his son is being kept. The old priest is frightened by the busy city, and is extremely distressed about his son; and although the novel is about the boy, the story is not his.

This is largely the story of the father who raised him, who had held his little hand in the darkness when he was afraid, who had looked at him and envisioned so many wonderful things for them both, who had prayed for him all the goodness of the world.

Now, sitting across his son in the jail house of Johannesburg, Kumalo asks the boy, “Why?”, but the boy could only hang his head and weep. He was going to be hanged for his crime. Kumalo wonders what breaks in a man, at the moment that he strikes another man, with the same hand that had groped for his father’s hand in the darkness, afraid, when he was a little boy. This breaks Kumalo’s heart, and he finds no solace, even, momentarily, in his faith.

He is only comforted by the memory of the beautiful land of Ndotsheni:

“Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal. Aye, even the name of a river that runs no more.”


Even the title of the novel is an address to the land, this unfortunate land, which embraces a people who are fearful and broken. It is a land where the young are made to think that progress is only achieved through violence in the city and where the old are left in the mountains to remember their children, because they do not go back. It is a land where the color of the skin dictates one’s fate. The title of the novel is an address to the land, telling it to cry for the unborn generation who will inherit the fear and the hopelessness.


The conclusion of this story is one of surrender, as Kumalo walks up the mountain on the eve of the hanging of his son. He had gone there before, in two occasions of crisis, when he needed to commune with God in solitude. On the way up, he meets Jarvis, and in words that are neither condemning nor kind, the two fathers both remember the son who died by the hands of the other son. Jarvis, “after such deep hurt, had shown such deep compassion” and Kumalo has seen it. The old priest is assured that there is hope—for him and for the land that he loves.


As the sun rose on the day of the hanging, the father rose too, with a panic in his heart that he quelled with a prayer. Somewhere else was a son who was looking straight at the same sun, with the rope around his neck, the same panic in his heart and perhaps, the same prayer; and up there on the mountain, the father saw his beloved country and wondered when the land, like him, would start to heal.

A Silence and A Half

To this day, four years after I read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, I have been able to articulate only to two people my wonderment with how Rilke closed this opus.

I'd mention scenes from the book in class, or at the dinner table with friends. My students would always punctuate my narration with wondering silence, their eyes searching inwardly, as people do when a secret is revealed to them. A silence and a half later, almost always, one or two would start with  a wow, and after that, the class will erupt with thoughts.

They'd ask about Rilke calling Paris the city where one goes to die--'isn't Paris where people go to declare their love?' They'd  ask about other things, and they'd give examples for their own declarations.

But it's the silence before the Wow that I look forward to. It's those few seconds that comprise the pause that I tell the story for.

More often than not, it is in that silence that each of us becomes connected with each other. We become a singular energy. And while there are many many thoughts, we are united in thinking about one thing only.     

Within that silence, I can see in my class's minds the images that Rilke so masterfully paints: a man holding in his hands a worn-out face, thinning and torn in some parts, as he sits forlornly on the Parisian sidewalks, forgetting for two seconds that he is sitting there exposed, faceless. Without a face.

The first person narrator, Malte, sees this from across the street, and shaken to his core by the sudden jolt of the faceless man now realizing his carelessness, Malte walks away hurriedly, realizing, poor men shouldn't be disturbed when they are thinking.

Within a silence and a half, our minds build the physical form of fear--this abstract concept suddenly comprehensible in tangible terms, through Rilke's words. Our hearts drive us out of ourselves, Rilke says, our hearts pursue us, and we are almost outside of ourselves and we can't get back in. Like a beetle that someone has stepped on, he says, we gush out of ourselves. 

We gush out of ourselves, Rilke says. And like magic, it all makes sense.

Once, at a lunch with my mentor and her friend, we got around to talking about the laws of nature. A retired Physics professor, my mentor's friend brought home a point with an example: a heavily pregnant woman is often criticized as arrogant. Apparently, the arch of her back and the tilt of her head make her look like she is looking down on people. She explains, it's not arrogance but the woman's center of gravity that has shifted, requiring her to adopt what people perceive as a proud posture.

It was my turn to fall silent then. I remember the first few pages of Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge saying our deaths are born with us, and living is all just a prelude to a death that we should strive to be proud about. Regarding it this way, Rilke rearranges the hierarchy between life and death: it is death that matters more, and one's life becomes the condition with which one's death may be judged as good or bad.

The pregnant woman is proud, Rilke says, because she is carrying a life aside from her own, and with these, not one but two deaths.

But I did not say this out loud. I found myself keeping it for myself, like I keep from sharing the conclusion of Rilke's book. I can talk endlessly about this Rilke, but I have never once mentioned how it ends in class, or at the dinner table when I invite friends over. I fear that we reveal so much by how passionately we retell something we find beautiful. In this sense, it is us who decide whether we allow ourselves to be seen, and by whom.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge holds so much Seeing. Delicate sensibilities articulated in precise language. It talks about those who have taken to themselves the entire task of love; those whose strengths consist in being found.

It talks about beginnings. And it talks about endings--those conclusions one knows will eventually come. In Rilke's words, we are always painfully aware about 'partings one has long seen coming'. Cursed with this Seeing, we can only surrender, giving back to the universe what only the universe can endure.