You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr

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The long arc of history and the passage of grief, hurt, cruelty, and shame down the generations make this an ambitious work – the task Damian Barr sets in meeting that ambition is a hard one.

With some spoilers…

The opening account of the British ‘Scorched Earth’ attack on a Boer Farm is horrific because of its claim, orderly, bureaucratic cruelty – this is not the frenzy of battle. And this is followed by the concentration camp – one of the earliest examples of this systematic dehumanising of a population, a people. The treatment of the white Boers is terrible, the were separate black camps where conditions were even worse.

This is history now beyond the reach of living memory, but Damian Barr brings it vividly to us in the stories of individuals, stories of women.

Moving forward in time the focus shifts to lives of black women living under Apartheid, living proud despite the oppression of the State and neglect of men. Complex women, real in their imperfections.

And then on again to Willem, post-Apartheid child, not living up to a step-father’s ideal of masculinity. Sent to a military training camp Willem finds intimacy with Geldenhuys. After attempting to escape, they are put into punishment cell. Willem’s Grandmother comes to the rescue just in time for Willem but too late for Geldenhuys.

The reveal at the end is the camp stood on the land of the farm where we began, run but descendent of the women we followed to the camp. This twists any assumptions we might have been holding about any easy binary between oppressor / oppressed – what went before can not justify what came after – where does reconciliation come, will the cycle of violence ever end?

This is unsettling, appropriately unsettling – and in that I think Damian Barr managed to write something worthy of the memories of those that have suffered across South Africa’s many generations.

How We Named The Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica

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NB: Includes Spoilers…

This novel sets the stories of Daniel and his late namesake Uncle side by side, separated in time yet finding themselves walking different paths. The tales of unfolding understandings of sexuality come to us piece by piece, which feels very authentic to the ways we learn to understand our own sexualities.

The younger Daniel is a student, paired with room mate Sam, they become friends and then even lovers, a blissful first year at University that takes a turn when Sam’s fledgling awareness of his sexuality takes a step back.

An email breaks the news to Daniel that Sam is ending their relationship, ending even their friendship.

A phone call breaks the news to Sam has died in an accident.

Heartbroken Daniel travels to Mexico to spend the summer with family their. During this time he learns move about the Uncle whose name he carries, including eventually that elder Daniel was also Gay.

In Mexico younger Daniel has a fling, but the grief for Sam prevents him being open to it being move, and when he communicates this the response is toxic and coercive.

There are moments when it can feel that this is heavy with the baggage of so many “bury your gays” plots – elder Daniel and Sam both dying young. That would be to miss the point, and the beauty, of this all – love and self-discovery are not always easy, but they are always essential.

I read this on the flight back from REG Conference in Bermuda – there is something intense and claustrophobic that feels suited to encountering this in a single session. Although there is a passage of time, and narratives occurring in different times, younger Daniel’s narration of it all his intense recollection of it.