chris van wyk shirley goodness and mercy

However, my interest is in childhood narratives that have been written from the vantage point of the post-apartheid moment, which gives the added charge of reaching across a political gulf to explain why childhoods under apartheid might yet have been vivid and extraordinary. Many evoke the rich intensity of lives under apartheid as well as the features of testimonial. South Africa is awash in memoirs both of the formal, edited, published kind and the family stories which are often self-published and of varying quality (see Nixon 2012 for an assessment of the ' boom ' in nonfiction writing in the post-apartheid era). In addition, in parts of the world like South Africa, for women and for black authors, writing memoir or autobiography is often the route to becoming a published writer with recognition and worth, and therefore memoir is also a significant and important vehicle for self-expression and livelihood.

This is especially the case when the author is black and has suffered the deprivations of apartheid oppression and the experience of listening to a voice intended to be silenced imparts an extra thrill to the writing. But their imbeddedness in a historical moment now passed lends them the supplementary aura of testimony and quasi-history. Childhood memoirs of apartheid-era South Africa written by both black and white authors evoke this same intensity all childhood memoirs are capable of. To approach these narratives with the wisdom, experience and world-weariness of adulthood is to experience the frisson of re-entering a moment of life which is closed forever and can never be regained in quite the same way, except tangentially or vicariously (and often through this genre). Not only does it deliver deep, intense memories filled with sensory information, it also often provides these details in the idiosyncratic language and mis/understandings of a child. Childhood is a rich and fertile terrain for the writing of memoir.

Chris van wyk shirley goodness and mercy