Ougat

From a Hoe into a Housewife and Then Some

By: Shana Fife

Narrated by: Shana Fife

By the time Shana Fife is 25, she has two kids from different fathers. To the colored people she grew up around, she is a jintoe, a jezebel, jas, a woman with mileage on the pussy. She is alone, she has no job and, as she is constantly reminded by her community, she is pretty much worthless and unlovable. How did she become this woman, the epitome of everything she was conditioned to strive not to be?

Unsettlingly honest and brutally blunt, Ougat is Shana Fife’s story of survival: of surviving the social conditioning of her Cape Flats upbringing, of surviving sexual violence and depression, and of ultimately escaping a cycle of abuse.

A powerful, fresh, and disarming new voice–Shana’s writing is like nothing you’ve heard before.

©2021 Shana Fife (P)2023 Jonathan Ball Publishers