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.