White Schooldays: Coming-of-Age In Apartheid South Africa White Schooldays<\/em>, portions of which were previously published in Maple Tree Literary<\/em> Supplement<\/em>, is Isme Bennie\u2019s public offering of her personal story and contributes to our understanding of a troubled country. Don\u2019t expect a thorough reckoning of the sins and scars of South African society in the 1940s and 50s however. Instead the author, a white Jewish South African, presents a realistic, sometimes apologetic and often sentimental memoir. Comprised of a collection of short chapters covering a litany of topics, from neighbourhood activities to fashion, food and friends, Bennie frequently acknowledges the privilege she and other white people experienced under the apartheid regime. Black South Africans are depicted as existing in the shadows, living \u2018elsewhere\u2019 and only appearing among whites in subservient positions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The author\u2019s occasional poems lift her straight-forward rendering to a lyrical sphere: \u201cMonday is washing day\/Emily arrives\/Baby tied to her back\/She sorts the clothes\/White\/Coloured\/Black\/She hangs them in the sun to dry\/They do not touch\/The colours must not run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Several of Bennie\u2019s anecdotes point to the irrational rules of a racist regime. It was illegal for her parents to allow servants\u2019 children to live with them, for instance, though they ignored this law without paying a penalty. Chinese residents were considered \u2018colored\u2019 and Japanese residents were not. Even a foot bridge was subject to segregation as \u2018whites only\u2019 tread across the stream on a designated bridge, while blacks crossed on another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the first three years of high school, we were taught the basics of managing servants,\u201d Bennie also remembers. \u201cAs most white South African families had at least one, even at age thirteen or so.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Life in Vereeniging, Bennie\u2019s hometown, is nevertheless described with a deep affection, despite the injustices swirling around its inhabitants. Bennie remembers the town\u2019s fish-and-chips shops, Greek cafes and food such as Pannekoek\u2014<\/em>very thin crepes served with sugar and cinnamon. She remembers a car trip with family to nearby town to see England\u2019s touring Royal Family in 1947. Bennie also recounts kind teachers who inspired her and others who hit students with rulers. Attending an English language school, she still learned the second official language, Afrikaans, permitted after the British defeated the Dutch colonists many decades ago in the Boer War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The author awakened to apartheid through reading books, travel to England, and studies at University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Bennie embarks on an career as a librarian and later in the media, her broader understanding of racism also informed by her minority status as a Jew and the fact her ancestors immigrated from East Europe to escape pogroms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually Bennie moved to Canada, as did many of her white co-patriots. She maintained strong ties to old friends and family, some still living in South Africa and has a keen interest in coming of age stories among her generation. In closing Bennie applauds an apartheid-free South Africa, but is also concerned about the on-going social violence. She regrets the deprivations the majority black population have endured and wishes they had always had equal opportunities. Most significantly, Bennie values her past and in doing so, has woven her own stories in to South Africa\u2019s history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Bastard of Fort Stikine: The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Murder of John McLoughlin, Jr. Who knew the history of the North America fur trade could be so riveting? In the hands of former forensic anthropologist Debra Komar, readers will be spellbound as the author unravels an unsolved murder case occurring at a Hudson\u2019s Bay Company post in 1842.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is Komar\u2019s third true crime book and hopefully not her last. Her winning formula involves searching for a long forgotten cold case with plenty of historical documentation. This book has over 200 footnotes, her research benefiting from the rich archives of the HBC. After presenting the evidence in compelling story-form, Komar invites the reader to consider her theories as to \u2018who did it\u2019 and why. Expect her keen social justice lens in the story\u2019s telling too. In this case Komar describes the rough justice of frontier society in the 1840s, as the British-based capitalist fur company, established in 1670, continued to dominate regions of North America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The murder of chief factor John McLoughlin Jr. at Fort Stikine has been mentioned in academic accounts, highlighting the lawlessness of remote regions and as part of a profile of the victim\u2019s father, of the same name, who was a long-serving, influential HBC chief factor. No author has provided a critical and detailed examination of the criminal incident however\u2014until now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The actual murder of John McLoughlin Jr. is a compelling and relatively brief tale, which Komar reveals in small portions at the beginning of chapters, while telling a larger story. She describes McLoughlin Jr.\u2019s tumultuous early years. His British-born father took a \u2018country wife,\u2019 as female indigenous partners were referred to, and so McLoughlin Jr. was of mixed ancestry. McLoughlin Sr. rarely spent time with his son, due to his HBC work. His paternal neglect would come to haunt him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n McLoughlin Jr. eventually finds his way, after several years of irresponsible behavior, when given employment in the HBC, culminating in a position as chief factor at Fort Stikine. The Alaskan-based fort\u2014which no longer exists\u2014was situated along the \u2018panhandle,\u2019 on a muddy shoreline and under Russian rule. It\u2019s wood-built interior takes on gloomy cast as the author describes the claustrophobic conditions of the men and the remoteness of the location. These factors as well as the racial and social inequities experienced by the HBC staff, play a role in the ensuing murder. Add to this toxic mix, an HBC stock room full of liquor and men with criminal pasts permitted in to HBC\u2019s employ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Night had fallen on the fort when shots rang out on April 21, 1842. McLoughlin Jr. was killed by a single bullet in the back. HBC Governor John Simpson, known for his rigid command, happened to arrive to the fort soon after, as part of his routine inspections. He conducted a cursory inquiry of the incident and pronounced McLoughlin Jr.\u2019s death a \u2018justifiable homicide.\u2019 Simpson\u2019s findings would be strenuously challenged by the victim\u2019s father in the years to come. A trial never occurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Komar\u2019s evidence includes critical eyewitnesses accounts. She concludes by reconstructing the events, along with peoples\u2019 motives, on that fateful night. At narration\u2019s end, the reader is left with some closure and some loose ends. We are also left to ponder timeless themes, such as the power of the grief a father holds over losing his son, compounded by the tragic circumstances of the offspring\u2019s death. The roots of modern Canada and the people who built this country are presented with a realistic\u2014sometimes chilling\u2014perspective too. Readers may never regard the history of the fur trade as \u201cstuffy\u201d again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Where the nights are twice as long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets<\/em>, 1883-2014 Expect love described in all its variations in this luminous collection of letters and letter-poems from 130 Canadian poets. An eclectic collection of voices representing several generations, the book includes Louis Riel writing about his love of God in letters to his wife Marguerite, Ivan E. Cayote informing her former lover she has no regrets despite heart-break, and Bliss Carmen confessing he can\u2019t sleep or eat when Kate Eastman is away. Editors David Eso and Jeanette Lynes, both poets and academics, have skillfully combed through the \u201cpublic domain\u201d of archives and anthologies, selecting love letters dating back to 1883\u2014as well as gathering submissions and permissions from living poets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malcolm Lowry\u2019s letter to Carol Brown, written when he is 16, introduces the opening \u201cteens and twenties\u201d chapter, followed by four chapters of letters from poets writing in their thirties, forties, fifties and finally, their \u201csixties, seventies and beyond.\u201d The aging process does not seem to reduce the writers\u2019 passion, one of many mysteries of romantic love to consider when reading through these epistles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Poet-lover writes poet-lover in the case of Gwendolyn MacEwen and Milton Acorn. MacEwen is only 19 when she tries to extricate herself from the older Acorn. She does so gently, with much self-examination. \u201cI believe everything I do, think, or feel is touched off by love,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meantime Pat Lowther, aged 39, is trying to extricate herself from her husband, as indicated in a letter to her (anonymous) lover. \u201cAlways when I wake my first consciousness is of your face, inside me, as if it were under my own, as if my features overlay yours.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Robert Service makes desperate pleas to Constance MacLean throughout his youthful letter-writing years. \u201cThis is only a scap, a fragment, a mood if you will, but one of those sacred, vital records of a moment when a man forgets everything else\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n P.K. Page was 28 when she wrote to (married) lover F.R. Scott during a geographic separation: \u201cdarling, darling. Your wonderful red-letter letter has just arrived. All outflowingness & now I am a mass of you\u2014veins full, head full. There is hardly any me left. And that is happiness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dennis Lee is the ripe old age of 46, writing an erotic poem-letter entitled \u201cComing Becomes You\u201d to his beloved. Penning images of \u2018coming,\u2019 he then describes the aftermath, when: \u201cyou nestle and noodle and nest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Susan Musgrave was in her thirties when she began writing to Stephen Reid while he was in prison. Some of their correspondence is included in the \u2018thirties\u2019 section of the book. Following Reid\u2019s release, they raised two children. When Reid was incarcerated again, Musgrave began letter writing once more. \u201cI so prefer letters where I can be reflective instead of reactive,\u201d she writes at age 56. If I didn\u2019t need the phone line for email I might chuck the thing into the sea.\u201d And later, \u201cI love you Stephen. That doesn\u2019t change. If only I wasn\u2019t me, I would be so much happier.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Di Brandt is 51 when she wisely looks back on love after divorce, in this letter-poem. \u201cLoving each other\/beautifully\/we thought\/ would, grandly\/and single-handedly,\/take on\/ our unreasonable fathers,\/our helpless mothers,\/the war,\/the Capitalist System\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Howard White ponders the stages of love and marriage in a poem letter to his wife: then came the kids\/and our mornings were gone\/our delicate and sustaining love\/moved over\/and another kind took its place\u2026 An index of the poets\u2019 names and published letters, along with short biographies of their work, accompanies the book. While the editors have declined to give context to the letters (for example, which poets are having affairs, which poets are gay or straight, and so on), they succeed to whet our appetite to find out more about the authors\u2019 lives and relationships\u2014and poems. This collection a wonderful gift on many levels, including for those of us\u2014past and present\u2014tangled up in romantic love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Will Starling Prepare for a wild ride back in time to Regency England in this second work of fiction by BC based author Ian Weir. The story\u2019s hero Will Starling is an impoverished orphan and self-educated surgeon\u2019s assistant. He works at a time when medical surgery is still in the early stages, and experimentation on cadavers\u2014not always legally obtained\u2014is practised. Herein lies rich material for a plot, and the book\u2019s narration through Starling\u2019s rough yet lyrical \u2018voice\u2019 succeeds in delivering a lively and suspenseful tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starling finds his talent as a healer on the battlefields of Napoleon\u2019s Europe, assisting his employer, \u201cMr. Cromrie,\u201d an unflinching British surgeon who is forced to spend much of his time sawing off the limbs of injured soldiers. When Mr. Cromrie asks Starling about his past, he is told to mind his own business. \u201cI said it with a careless shrug,\u201d Starling admits, \u201cthe sort that marks out a London lad, tough as nails\u2014and not at all the other sort of lad. The sort who\u2019d find himself sobbing on the road to Southampton, with a sense that the world was much too large, with no one in it who\u2019d care if he expired in the nearest ditch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As it happens, Mr. Cromrie does care about Starling. Romantic love finds it\u2019s way into Starling\u2019s heart too. All the while \u201cYour Wery Umble\u201d as Starling refers to himself, keeps his sights on arch-nemesis, Dionysus Atherton, an ambitious surgeon willing to cross ethical and moral boundaries to advance medical science. As Starling takes us through the crowded, impoverished streets of London in 1816, in the decades before Victorian author Charles Dickens does the same, we glimpse the city\u2019s underbelly, replete with desperate crimes, biased legal trials and swift executions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unravelling the truth about Atherton takes Starling to graveyards and taverns, prison dungeons and medical lecture halls. The reader is introduced to London\u2019s thespians, (including the very \u2018real\u2019 Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean) grave robbers, servants, medical students (among them \u2018true character\u2019 and poet John Keats), as the author provides the story with a fascinating layer of social history. Scenes are richly and sometimes humorously painted. Consider when Meg Nancarrow, the true love of grave robber Jemmy Cheese, has an ominous encounter with Atherton on Ludgate Hill. \u201cThere is certainly fog,\u201d Starling narrates, as he sets the scene, \u201con the night I am conceiving. Oh, we must have fog, for such a meeting, a true London Partic\u2019lar, slithering up from the Thames like the ominous creep of a cello.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary Shelley\u2019s highly popular Frankenstein<\/em> first appears in this period and her novel\u2019s theme of resurrection is also at the core of this story. Newspaper accounts of sightings and assaults by freakish \u2018creatures\u2019 (such as \u201cBoggle-Eyed Bob\u201d with \u201chair standing on end and mouth smeared with gore\u201d) are added to Starling\u2019s narration. While these stories put Londoners on edge, Starling is haunted by his own demons previously encountered on Europe\u2019s battlefields and has painful flashbacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the story\u2019s end, all the various threads come together. Once shadows of truth begin to take shape, \u201clike the ghostly ship at sea,\u201d Starling is able to see the whole truth about his nemesis and himself. Most notable about this satisfying historical fiction is the author\u2019s masterful depiction of Starling, a \u2018common\u2019 narrator with a scholar\u2019s perception who finds a way to achieve what he pursued, despite great odds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction and Nonfiction Reviews White Schooldays: Coming-of-Age In Apartheid South Africa by Isme Bennie. South Carolina, USA: CreateSpace, 2014 166 pp, $26.00 White Schooldays, portions of which were previously published in Maple Tree Literary Supplement, is Isme Bennie\u2019s public offering of her personal story and contributes to our understanding of a troubled country. Don\u2019t expect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":970,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions\/970"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>by Isme Bennie.
\nSouth Carolina, USA: CreateSpace, 2014
\n166 pp, $26.00<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/em>by Debra Komar
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2015
\n288 pages, $19.95<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/em>edited by David Eso and Jeanette Lynes
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2015
\n432 pp, $22.95<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/em>by Ian Weir.
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2014
\n483 pp, $32.95<\/p>\n\n\n\n