History's living scars

A provocative tale told with compassion and finesse, this book needs to be read and discussed as widely as possible, writes

In the litany of human pain, it’s old. Its naming, however, is fairly recent. Transgenerational trauma is what psychologists call the stress disorder that was first noticed among the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

With the naming came the awareness that our offspring carry forward our suffering in two ways: as vertical transmission down a family line, but also horizontally, as cultural trauma, affecting a large population in society.

British author Damian Barr’s first novel You Will Be Safe Here examines the idea that this twofold diffusion of past pain can also become the transmission of brutality. Inspired by true stories, old and new, which have seared the South African consciousness, the novel interweaves two different narratives, separated by more than a century.

The first begins as recordings in a diary kept by a Boer wife and mother, Sarah van der Watt of Mulberry Farm. It is 1901, the height of the Anglo-Boer War. Sarah’s daily jottings are addressed to her husband Samuel, who has gone off to join the fight against the English, while she waits, with growing trepidation, for the arrival of the enemy.

“We know they are coming. We’ve watched the smoke rise for two weeks now knowing they will soon be at our gates, the gates you promised to finish white-washing when you returned.”

Over the next 100 pages, the reader shares Sarah’s anxieties even as she goes about hiding family treasures — the tea service and the silver spoons from her son Fred’s christening. Her thoughts zigzag between the past, when thunder meant the arrival of rains, to the present where the “new thunder is the booming of the big guns brought on great ships from England, more noise than has ever been heard in our young country. Thunder with deadly rain.”

More deadliness arrives: a letter in a crumpled blue envelope asking the residents of Mulberry Farm to prepare for evacuation. “Refugees are being concentrated into regional camps. This is for your own safety.” (Yes, concentration camps are a British invention that also date back to this war.)

The suspense mounts, through skillful scene creation, making this part of the novel simply riveting. The arrival of a polite British soldier who shoots dead the family’s ancient horse; a Brigadier, “his breath rich with an officer’s diet,” who pressures Sarah to sign an Oath of Neutrality; the execution of livestock; the burning of treasured books and the final blowing-up of the farmhouse are a prelude to the grimness of Bloemfontein Camp where Sarah and Fred are sent in a boxcar.

What comes thereafter — starvation, typhoid, malaria, the impossible struggle to keep her young son alive — is horrific and heart-rending. Yet the narrative is never totally crushing. Awaiting the arrival of the enemy soldiers at the farm, Sarah writes with dry humour, “The English are, after all, the same race as us. They share our faith if not our faithfulness. Our Father is their Father.”

In the remainder of the novel, there is a shift in narrative voice from first person to an omniscient narrator. However, the second story is equally disturbing.

Set in 2010, it is about a different type of camp, but first, the reader is drawn into the life of a 16-year-old Afrikaner, Willem Brandt, a reserved, sensitive lad who loves reading. On a school trip to Bloemfontein museum, Willem learns about Sarah’s diary and her fate. In subsequent chapters the two story threads, historical and recent, are connected.

Mocked for being ‘soft’ by his peers, Willem is admitted by his mother and stepfather into New Dawn Safari Training Camp. Their expectation is that a military-style regimen will toughen him up. The ‘General’ who runs the camp is a textbook example of toxic masculinity, a white supremacist who seeks to recreate the past: “We brought light to darkness but now we’re the last white men in Africa.” What happens to Willem and his friend Geldenhuys in the camp draws heavily upon the recent tragic deaths of young white boys in similar camps in South Africa.

In the historical note at the end, the author writes, “Many black people were forced to work for the British in white camps as guards. This outraged the Boers and offended their natural sense of order. This and the immense suffering of the camps, helped drive the National Party to victory in 1948 and provide perceived justification for the Apartheid.”

While this may seem like an explanation, the novel itself is a powerful literary indictment of systemic or structural violence, wherein an entire people are brutalised for the crime of a few. Crimes, which may have been committed decades earlier under duress and cajolement from distant paymasters. A provocative tale told with compassion and finesse, this book needs to be read and discussed as widely as possible.