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- Published 20241105
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-01-2
- Extent: 196 pp
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Little gifts of flowers
Almost immediately after completing a draft of my novel, I become preoccupied with a letter housed in the National Library of Australia. The 1930s correspondence between the English and American publishers of an Australian novelist concerns their decision to reject that author’s most recent manuscript – so, of course, that’s where my thoughts fixate, yesterday’s triumph already faded to mocking echo
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Tawny child
FictionCarefully, Morgan loosened the fabric. The crying increased in volume. Eventually, the small dark head of a bawling, tawny child emerged into the clear light. Morgan looked at the child with her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed, as if she were considering an heirloom of unknown value. Hans took the envelope from the fingers of the man in the blue suit and tore the gold seal. Inside were five crisp, dry banknotes. The man in the blue suit told them that such payments would be forthcoming every month, and that the child’s name was Many-gift in the local dialect, but they were to refer to him as Albert and raise him as their own.
Religion as resistance
Non-fictionIn their youth, my parents participated in the anti-apartheid movement, attending meetings and outlawed protests. From birth their lives had been prescribed by the apartheid regime, from the suburbs they could live in to the beaches they could swim at to the benches they could sit on; there was little it saw fit to leave unregulated. Both of their families had been forcibly relocated from District Six when it had been reclassified as a whites-only area. They attended Coloured schools, where they were taught by both white and Coloured teachers. At one of these schools, my teenaged mother challenged a teacher for making a racist comment and subsequently chose to leave the school when they backed the teacher instead. My father’s father was a Shaykh, his uncle an eminent Islamic scholar known across both the Cape and wider South Africa. In their youth, my parents participated in the anti-apartheid movement, attending meetings and outlawed protests. From birth their lives had been prescribed by the apartheid regime, from the suburbs they could live in to the beaches they could swim at to the benches they could sit on; there was little it saw fit to leave unregulated. Both of their families had been forcibly relocated from District Six when it had been reclassified as a whites-only area. They attended Coloured schools, where they were taught by both white and Coloured teachers.
Feeling our way to utopia
Non-fiction JANE AUSTEN WAS just twenty-one years old when she wrote her first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Today, we understand her works as more than...
