Published in 2016, The Woman Next Door is Yewande Omotoso’s second novel. The book recounts the story of two older women who are neighbors in post-apartheid South Africa. Hortensia is black, Marion is white, and both are retired from long, successful careers in their respective fields: interior design and architecture.
Omotoso’s writing is vivid, unyielding, and bitterly hilarious. The parable of post-Apartheid race relations looks like a quiet, character-driven novel on the surface but just beneath the plot lies an incisive yet compassionate portrait of two human beings who were forged in one of the world’s most brutal systems of oppression.
A Brief Synopsis of The Woman Next Door
While they’d been neighbors for 20 years, the two harbored not-so-quiet resentment toward each other and only begin to form a tense, begrudging relationship with each other when Hortensia breaks her leg during a botched attempt at a home repair that also results in Marion needing temporary shelter while her own home is being fixed.
Forced together, the two butt heads constantly as decades of animosity and racial tensions boil to the surface. Over time, a sort of begrudging coexistence develops that almost looks like friendship.
The Unexpected Heroism of Hortensia
We expect so much from our heroes. To be more precise, we expect very particular things from our heroes. They must be humble and kind to the point of absurdity. They must be courageous and bold in the form of grand gestures. They must come to the rescue of damsels in distress and helpless villages. They must martyr themselves or make some great sacrifice for which their only reward is the knowledge of a job virtuously done.
To have these wildly disproportionate expectations of heroes is to suggest that we cannot all be heroes — that it takes a special kind of muster, a special kind of person that only comes about once in a great while. In the meantime, we must content ourselves with being helpless village people, tormented by monsters.
Hortensia of The Woman Next Door is not that kind of hero. She does not make grand gestures or exaggerated shows of her humble and kind nature. She is an aging woman, grown bitter and stubborn in her ways. She becomes bedridden, rendering her incapable of setting out on any noble quests or slaying even minor monsters. Yet she is undoubtedly a hero and not a small one either.
She manages a feat that neither Beowulf nor King Arthur has achieved. She, a black woman, befriends (in a strenuous, not quite friendly way) a racist white woman and accomplishes the enormous task of scraping away 80 years of calcified beliefs about race.
Before I go any further, let me make clear that no person of color, heroic or otherwise, is responsible for single-handedly de-racializing a white person’s mind. Indeed, Hortensia herself is not comfortable with this role and most of her heroism is in her simple unceasing presence and active refusal to play the savior rather than any conscious decision to save her white neighbor’s soul. When Marion attempts to talk about her own guilt and “rotten” feelings, Hortensia tells her, “I’m not here for that. I’ve got my own horrors.”
For the bulk of the narrative, her heroism is her own stubborn obsession with placing herself precisely where she is not wanted. She attends neighborhood meetings of exclusively white women because she relishes watching how uncomfortable and stiff they become.
She has no interest in a rescue mission. She simply wants to rub this horrifying legacy of racism in their faces, make them squirm in a pile of fecal matter of their own making. Yet, through her persistence and through circumstance, she unwittingly grows closer and eventually (very eventually) becomes willing to help Marion on her journey to finally tackle the legacy of racism she has been raised to ignore.
For Marion’s part, it is a surprisingly tender and empathetic portrayal of a white woman’s painfully slow realization of her own complicity in a racist system. Marion’s growth is an important one to witness for any white person who is struggling with the task of taking on responsibility in a world that is everywhere encouraging us to refuse responsibility; that wants us to just accept our privilege without thinking about the price of it. It is no easy task to confront your own complicity in a tragedy but the other path of remaining ignorant, as Marion realizes, is not really any easier:
This life of ignoring the obvious required a certain kind of stamina. The alternative to this was to set on a path to make rubbish of what had gone before us. This approach — of principles, activism, and struggle — required stamina, too. All the same, she’d chosen the other one.
Realizing she had chosen the wrong path, she begins the difficult and confusing process of switching to the more principled path — in a character arch that does not reward her for doing what is, in reality, the bare minimum, but does reveal in vivid detail how it can be done. Yet none of this growth we see in Marion would have been possible without Hortensia’s constant presence, her refusal to hide away unseen by her white neighbors.
What results is a companionship that grew out of a mutual hatred, and this is possible because the hatred itself was always an honest one. Neither put on airs of politeness nor pretended to tolerate each other. It was this blunt openness that provided the space for an understanding to develop, and it was on that understanding that a companionship could be built. It is in that companionship, then, that the women are able to face and, within their own relationship at least, begin to transcend the legacy of racial division.
This transcendence does not look like some delusional utopian vision of a world where people all dance and smile and love each other without a prejudice to be seen. This is a realistic vision of what the next step could be in a progression away from the horrors of our racialized society. And it’s a step that takes a lot of hard work.
It does not require fighting monsters, rescuing damsels, or martyring ourselves on stakes. This is a quieter and, in many ways, more challenging kind of heroism because it demands that we use our strength against our own ugliness, and to defeat a system that we have only ever known how to perpetuate.
Hortensia is the hero who really matters because she is the one who teaches us that heroic acts do not need Michael Bay level special effects. She shows us that the world is saved, not by the epic heroes we fantasize about, but by the billions of real people who live in it.