Sara-Jayne King, radio presenter and
journalist and, most recently, author,
speaks often about the “primal wound”
that adopted children feel, the terrible
severance of the bond between mother
and baby before that child is even conscious
of what’s happening.
But it’s in the
reading of her book, 'Killing Karoline',
that you get a sense of the visceral, relentless
pain of that wound.
Sara-Jayne was no ordinary adopted
child.
She was born in 1980, the progeny
of a “forbidden” affair between her
British-born mother, Kris, and her black
South African father, Jackson.
In a mad
scurry to avoid the fallout of their actions
under the then Immorality Act under
apartheid, Kris took her baby to England
and gave her up for adoption.
Enabled by the fact that her newborn,
whom she named Karoline, looked
“white” initially, Kris concocted a story
whereby her baby needed medical attention
in the UK, but died.
Thus the title of the
book.
Kris returns home
to South Africa with her
tall tale for friends and
family, and apparently
continues her life as
though nothing has happened.
Back in the UK meanwhile, plagued by
questions surrounding her own identity
and unable to “fit in”, Sara-Jayne (originally
named Sarah Jane by her adoptive
parents) became increasingly self-destructive
as she entered adulthood, cutting
herself, drinking too much, binging
on food then purging, and taking refuge
in dysfunctional relationships.
This
despite impressive achievements driven
by a desperate need to validate herself in
the world: Sara-Jayne has an LLB from
the University of Greenwich, a master’s
degree in journalism, and, today, hosts
her own show on CapeTalk radio.
She returned to South Africa when she
was 26, to face her demons in rehab after
getting fired from a job in Dubai.
When she was out of rehab, Sara-Jayne
reached out to her natural family – her
half-brother Alex, born to Kris and her
then husband Ken.
It’s another harrowing
journey of love and acceptance,
peppered with compromise and more
rejection.
Her birth mother Kris’s first rejection
came when Sara-Jayne attempted,
understandably, to make contact with
her mother and get some answers about
the circumstances of her birth.
She was
rejected outright in a letter that is astonishingly
cold and steeped in denial, published
verbatim in the book.
As the reader, your heart goes out to
this brave author, who has had enormous
courage in telling her truth, in stark contrast
to Kris, who has clearly buried any
attempt at facing her past truthfully.
Sara-Jayne’s adoptive parents are
ill-prepared for the inevitable questions
about how and why they adopted her,
and it is soon clear that the only real
heroine aside from Sara-Jayne to emerge
from this is her adoptive mom Angela, a
liberal conservative doing social work in
the community at the time.
Angela, who
couldn’t have children of her own, has a
British-style inability to address emotive
issues of identity with her daughter, but
there is never a question that she is steadfast
and supportive throughout.
The complexities of adoption are
excavated with depth and honesty in this
memoir, but what makes it exceptional
is the rarely explored, extra burden of
cross-cultural adoption on an adopted
child.
In Surrey especially, where Sara-Jayne
grew up, black children were a rare
sight, let alone those with “white” parents.
“I once asked my mum if she would
ever have married a black man. She
replied with an answer that troubled me.
She said that she didn’t think she would
because they would have nothing in common.
I realised then that mum did not,
perhaps could not, see who I was outside
of being her daughter. Where the colour
of my skin had been the very reason I
had been given away by Kris, to mum it
was no more than an aesthetic difference
between us.”
Sara-Jayne has since navigated her
own path in South Africa – she settled in
Cape Town and is shaping an enviable
career for herself – thankfully having
resolved the need to re-establish contact
with Kris, who is now living in the US.
As the reader, though, you are left wondering,
like the author has on so many
painful occasions, what kind of woman
could simply turn her back on her child,
not only at birth, but repeatedly after
that.
This book left me angry, on Sara-Jayne’s
behalf.