One of my high-school Afrikaans set works was a story about a morally upstanding family and their perfectly behaved daughter. I was too young to see this as yet another government attempt to manipulate my adolescent mind, but I didn’t know anyone like the heroine, Grietjie, and her sanctimonious parents either. As well as hating them with a passion, being forced to read and be examined on this work made me feel like an alien in the land of my birth.
When we pick up a book, we are invited to keep company with its progression, hopefully finding something familiar within the covers. Vanessa Mártir, of Afro-Honduran background but Brooklyn born and raised, has said it wasn’t until her junior high school year, when her English professor suggested she read ‘How the Garcia sisters lost their accents’, that she saw her experiences of trying to fit into a different cultural environment reflected in the similar experiences of others.
A few weeks ago, I devoured a friend’s 42,000-word memoir in an afternoon. Our fathers had been general practitioners in Cape Town at a time when sole practice was common, and our mothers worked behind the scenes to make the practices run smoothly. Her reminiscences about having to keep personal phone calls short – the landline was primarily for patients’ access – rekindled memories of all the conversations with friends I’d had to abort. I learned that the piano teacher who’d made my teenage years so miserable had also tormented my friend. And was there more than a coincidence in her mother having given birth to Brenda’s younger brother on my birthday, at the same age my mother was when she gave birth to me, also the youngest of three?
While few texts offer such intimate connections as my friend’s memoir, they are no less capable of striking a chord within us. Simon Tedeschi is a well-known Australian pianist who lives in Sydney. Until ten days ago, I did not know that his musical talent was matched by an equally prodigious wizardry with words. In May, Tedeschi’s award-winning essay, ‘This woman my grandmother’, won the 2022 Calibre Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious writing awards. The subject of Tedeschi’s essay, his maternal grandmother Lucy, spoke her memories onto tape ten years before she died; they were written up and copies given to her two daughters and five grandchildren, of whom Tedeschi is the eldest. While he dwells large on his grandmother’s Holocaust history, it is the cultural idiom in which he writes that provides parallels. Lucy was the same age as my mother, born during the Great War, and both fiercely proud of proclaiming their offspring as being better than anyone else’s. Lucy gave ‘Mrs Schmendrick’ – a Yiddish term connoting contempt – short shrift for having a son whose capabilities were well beneath those of her grandson, in the same way my mother would have taken down one of my peers. The podcast of Tedeschi reading ‘This woman my grandmother’ is here.
As a member of a writers group, I regularly hear others say ‘That scene is so true to life’ or ‘I’ve been in that position myself’ or ‘it made me think back to a time when I did (something)’. To paraphrase Mártir and others, literature that contextualises the events and people in readers’ lives provides the ‘anchor that moors us to the text’. When we see ourselves reflected in a story arc, it is at that point we can more readily engage with and enjoy what we read.
Someplace in Sydney 