Andre Brink - an appreciation

When I was living in England in the 1970's and 80's, there were two major reactions to my being a white South African:
1) Taxi-drivers and the white middle- and owning- classes would suddenly feel free to express racist ideas and opinions, assuming that I would be in agreement with them or
2) I was ostracized by the social activists and left-wingers whose company I sought in the Women's Movement and in the other organisations I joined. I didn't always realize this. People would just turn away from me when they heard my accent. It wasn't violent - just isolating. And of-course, it led to feelings of self-hate and guilt. And I blamed and despised the Afrikaners who had devised apartheid and the racism it symbolized.

I don't know when I first discovered the books of Andre Brink - it was probably in the late 70's. Maybe it was when the English translations were published? They were a revelation. Here was a terrific writer - a white Afrikaner - writing great stories about the tense world I knew - full of the racial complexities with which I was familiar. I felt understood, validated, intrigued and informed by them. They made an enormous difference to how I perceived myself and other white South Africans. He was writing in very difficult circumstances but he did it anyway. Reading his books: Rumours of Rain, Looking on Darkness, A Dry White Season and An Instant in the Wind - gave me courage. I could overcome the guilt, I could tackle the racism that I carried, I could maybe even love myself. He was a white South African of whom I was immensely proud and I recommended his books to anyone who showed an interest beyond the usual stereotyping. Ricky Sherover-Marcuse, from California, who in the early 80's had begun to run workshops for white people on Unlearning Racism, was one such person.

Andre Brink died last Friday at the age of 79. The obituaries and articles this week are very matter of fact - although starting to improve: for instance, click on the link to see one in the UK Guardian. He was considered a great writer and was highly honored and decorated. Somehow no-one was writing why. Novels engage our emotions - he did that in so many different ways exposing the pain inherent in the relationships we had and still have in our country, and he was especially great at revealing and recreating the danger and tensions that existed when ordinary human behaviour was forbidden and might be discovered and punished.

I know I am not alone in thanking him for what he gave to the world. Hamba Kahle Andre Brink!

An Intriguing Coincidence - World War One and the Rosetta Mission

In an almost perfect synchronization of events, the 96th Armistice Day marking the end of World War One which is always commemorated at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month was last year - the 100th anniversary of the start of the war in 1914 - followed on the next day by an extraordinary European collaboration. European scientists from those previously warring countries came together 10 years ago to send a spacecraft to explore a comet - Churyumov-Gerasimenko - 310 million miles from us and on the 12th November 1914, the small lander separated from the orbiting Rosetta, came in to land, bounced twice and was finally stable, sitting on very rocky terrain on 67P (the shortened name of the comet). Scientists waited with bated breath in an auditorium for a blip on a screen signalling the Philae landing and the place erupted in cheers and hugs.

It was heartening to see that the spirit of human comradeship which was present within the respective armies could almost a century later which included yet another World War, cross national boundaries for such an historic occasion. Maybe even the Middle East could succumb to peace and collaborative endeavors in 100 years time?

Now, a couple of months later, not many reprises of the year 2014 include the Philae landing - a testament to the fickleness and national chauvinism of the global media.

Where Is My Tree?

Everyone knew it was a crap present. Barmitzvah boys all over the country probably silently groaned when they opened the envelope and saw the certificate. Oh no! Not another tree in Israel! (Sometimes if the donor was flush, it was six trees in Israel!) But you couldn't say anything negative. How could we not be delighted and honored to help the Halutziot (the Pioneers) who were taming the land and making the desert bloom? The taboo against saying how you felt about this non-present was as heavy as speaking ill of the dead.

A parent's voice would change - become almost reverential - "How thoughtful!" You had been honored in some mysterious way. Thus generations of South African Jewish children were cajoled and persuaded into writing 'Thank You' letters to the people who gave us, as presents, trees in our name in Israel. These were usually older relatives or our parents' friends - people with - dare I say it - no imagination. If the aim was to make of us Zionists or at least supporters of Israel, it eventually did weave a kind of mysterious magic.

How could a tree be in my name? Did someone carve my name in the bark or were there plaques attached to each tree like in the botanical gardens? If I had been given a lot of trees, did they plant them in the shape of my name so that if I flew over in a helicopter I could see my name written in trees? If I went to Israel could I find my tree?

The Psychologist Adventurer

Maps Mapoyane and Gail Womersley

Earlier this year Gail Womersley gave a talk to the Cape Town Self-psychology group (CTPSPG) about her 2 years working with Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). It turned out that we were extremely fortunate to hear this plucky young clinical psychologist. MSF, recognising her qualities - she is creative, culturally sensitive, eloquent and charismatic - had sent her on an event-packed fund-raising tour to raise money for their projects in the war-torn Central African Republic.

It seems that self-psychology still provides something of an emotional and theoretical touchstone for Gail. With MSF, she had moved far into the field of trauma response in a very short space of time and probably felt the need for recognition and understanding from her former colleagues and mentors. I think she got that - we were spellbound. She had raised the question of whether the kind of short-term work she was doing was ethically acceptable from the viewpoint of promoting the kind of changes to which long-term therapy aspires. A question I felt plagued by myself at the Trauma Centre where I often felt that I was dispensing plasters for wounds that were never going to heal. I don't think many of us were too concerned about addressing, let alone answering such a question - it was the riveting adventure of it all that was so gripping.

"Outwitting History" - preserving Yiddish

Twenty-three years ago when I and my siblings were clearing up our parents' flat in Cape Town, I asked Lillian Dubb whom I'd met 10 years before at a summer Yiddish program in Oxford, what we should do with my mother's collection of Yiddish books. I think Chava Leah (which is how I knew her because we all used our Yiddish names that summer) referred us to the Kaplan Centre at UCT. Someone came to look at the books. They took some they didn't have copies of, I kept a few, including the two volume: "Jerusalem of Lithuania" (about the Jews of Vilna) and my sister took a copy of the Rakishok (Rokiskis) Yiskor-buch, but what of the rest? The person said we pack up the rest and when we have enough to fill a container or half or whatever, we send them to a Book Centre in Amherst, Massachusetts. It seemed a bit sad that no-one would want them in South Africa (quite a few had originally come from the Western Hemisphere already - Argentina no less) but it was comforting to know that we didn't have to throw them away or bury them - something Jews do with worn out prayer books.

And that was pretty much all I knew or bothered to find out until a friend lent

me "Outwitting History", Aaron Lansky's account - both hilarious and moving - about saving a whole culture before it got thrown in the trash by hiring trucks, donning gloves and doing the hard dusty work of saving Yiddish books from attics, basements and garages all over the United States and beyond. Then subsequently setting up in a specially designed building, the  Yiddish Book Centre.

I've forgotten most of the Yiddish I learnt that summer in 1982 but the impact of what it meant to me to study it has stayed with me to this day. It was a form of cultural liberation. I wrote about the experience shortly after, in a booklet that some of us in the London Jewish Women's History Group published

The International Slavery Museum

On an autumn day last October, whilst on a visit to London, I travelled by train to Liverpool - a city which I had never visited in almost 30 years of living in the UK. A bitterly cold wind swept me down towards my waterfront hotel. I had come for an overnight visit in order to spend the next day at the International Slavery Museum which comprises one floor of the warehouse-like building housing the Maritime Museum.

What had led me to make this special trip?

Last year I attended a few day workshops organised by the Human Rights Media Centre (HRMC) in collaboration with the Cape Town Holocaust Centre. To these, the HRMC brought people from the refugee community together with South Africans who had experienced human rights violations during the apartheid years. Shirley Gunn of the HRMC had asked me to come in case people giving testimony needed emotional support.

The event is structured so that the Holocaust, the exhibition and the Centre's educators, provide both the containment and the catalyst for invoking feelings about the other atrocities the participants have experienced. Survivors being enabled to tell their stories in the context of the group listening and acknowledgement, serves to break down barriers between people and communities. This may not be the goal of the 2 organisations involved, but that is my viewpoint of what the workshops achieve.

I think it was the second time I went: we had been taken round the exhibition and were having a debrief about what came up for people. A Cameroonian refugee said: "I feel bad. It's as if we black people are not important. There is no museum for us. Slavery transported millions of Africans and many died - it was our holocaust."

Immigrant Analysts and the Search for an Emotional Home

Papers on the subject of the immigrant analyst seem to have floated into my awareness in recent weeks. There was a chapter by Kirloff about the consequences for psychoanalysis in the UK from the immigrant analysts who arrived there fleeing from the Third Reich. A recent issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues features papers by two very different analysts: Glenys Lobban - a white South African practising in New York and Dori Laub - a Holocaust survivor and trauma specialist, who has practised both in Israel and the USA. Now the International Association of Self-Psychology has sent out notices for their conference to be held in October this year in Jerusalem and lo-and-behold, the title is: "Where Do We Feel At Home?: Self Psychological Perspectives of Belonging and Not Belonging".

It seems the time has come for me to reflect on my own immigrant experience as a therapist, both in the UK and then when I returned to South Africa (which was both a homecoming and an immigration after 32 years away). Glenys Lobban uses the term "double consciousness" coined by W.E.B. Du Bois, to describe her experience of the multiple selves the immigrant has to negotiate in her new country. Among them was the position of both simultaneously being inside her own experience of foreignness and seeing herself and her foreignness through the eyes of someone living in her new host country - “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”.   The keyword here is "always". Just in order to survive, an immigrant does need at times to perceive  themselves and their culture as others see them. (I would call this an "assimilating self"). But to be always having to do this and for it to be through the negative lens of racism - this is what I think was meant by "double consciousness".