I was a student at Syracuse University through the years of South Africa’s apartheid regime. Just a few tents had been arrange in protest on the quad outside the impossibly tall windows of my figure-drawing class—I think the plan was to sleep outside until the college divested from firms doing business in South Africa. I felt guilty for not joining them. By the third day the tents had disappeared. Maybe a number of signs were still there. I distinctly remember Stop Apartheid Now! spray-painted on a big white sheet.
Lisa-Jo Baker’s gorgeous memoir, It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping: Interpreting the Language of Our Fathers Without Repeating Their Stories, begins with a picture of her physician father in his office in Pretoria, South Africa. She describes his dress shirt and tie, the smell of his cologne, the precise crease of his slacks—his lean physician’s hands and the time he pulled a six-inch-long pick-up-stick from her foot. She remembers one time holding the surgical thread as he “stitch[ed] up a jagged cut in his left hand along with his right.” He’s a hero from the beginning, as is her beloved South Africa, the house of her birth.
It’s one thing to jot down a book concerning the hated or the loved, much harder to jot down one that features the broken details of a father and a rustic without trespassing on the resonant love one has for them. Baker’s homeland is deeply flawed, and her father is deeply flawed. She introduces to us a lovely South Africa scarred by apartheid and a father she greatly respects who passed on to her an inclination toward unpredictable anger. Neither of them is a caricature. They are real enough to like yet at times flawed enough to hate. It’s a beautifully complicated book, and it’s laid out skillfully.
Distance and intimacy
Baker uses two things specifically to full advantage, the primary being her own powers of language. On occasion, the memoir includes moments that may appear lower than consequential. But within the larger type of the book, Baker’s phrasing can carry prophetic weight.
One such passage occurs as she describes riding horses along with her father through their vast sheep farm: “On horseback, I’m this farmer’s daughter and the sunshine wind with its slight fragrance of manure seems to sing my name back to me.” The prophetic element lies within the coupling of fragrance and manure. Fragrant is a lovely word, hardly meant to explain something as base as sheep dung. South Africa, on this sense, is a stunning country that smells of centuries of downright evil.
Baker also employs the language of South Africa itself, conveying each the gap of unfamiliarity in addition to a certain intimacy. She writes lovingly of her father’s speech oscillating forwards and backwards between languages and dialects, and her prose sometimes incorporates Afrikaans, isiXhosa, and isiZulu (with English meanings included). For me, this had the effect of exclamation points, startling me with what sounded to my English ears like odd double vowels and excessive x’s, v’s, k’s, and y’s.
As the memoir’s subtitle makes clear, it’s crammed with language each literal and metaphorical. In a very sweet paragraph, Baker writes of the pleasure she feels when hearing her father speak:
We are a rustic of twelve national languages. On his tongue I catch the British English of his ancestors and the guttural Dutch Afrikaans of his childhood on the farm. My father speaks three or 4 languages, depending on how strictly you define “speaks,” and he can enunciate the elusive clicks of isiXhosa, but isiZulu is what he shrugs on when he’s going for quick connection since it’s where he’s most comfortable. He speaks within the language he happens to be pondering in, and it still fascinates me to hearken to him switch forwards and backwards without pausing to reorient his tongue.
She goes on to say that his voice feels like the “deep timbre of a Zulu choir, the cruel bark of the hyena, the ululation of joy, of grief, the cry of a beloved country.”
In light of the marked beauty that Baker captures, it could almost seem justifiable to melt the sides of South Africa, essentially to jot down Yes, apartheid existed, but and marginalize the cruelty. This would still make for an interesting and interesting book. However, Baker correctly chooses the other: Yes, South Africa is beautiful, but.
There are loads of opportunities for the narrative to drift toward the previous, contenting itself with the notion that South Africa is a lovely country that had some unlucky problems. Yet whilst Baker describes the jacaranda trees and the Karoo with its saltbush and Stradbroke, the family farm with its acres of land and Dutch Colonial farmhouse, and her physician father along with his buffed-to-a-shine shoes, she never gives in to that reflex.
She features a horrific scene when, a generation earlier, two staff members on the family farm were cruelly beaten for taking horses from the property. She also recalls a time when her father unleashed his anger toward her over a broken teacup. Whether her stories are uplifting or sorrowful, retelling them from a distance has the effect of giving the events more solemnity.
No opting out
While Baker may need inherited her father’s unpredictable anger, we fast understand that she inherited his fierce hatred for apartheid as well. Injustice is a powerful thread throughout the memoir, and Baker vulnerably shares her struggles—through childhood after which into maturity—to know the ramifications of apartheid in addition to her father’s irrational outbursts.
She appears determined to process at a deeper level the reality of the South Africa she grew up in, ultimately realizing there’s “no strategy to opt out of the parts of our history that put us on the mistaken side of the equation.” Her story is weighty and well value telling.
In one poignant passage, Baker describes attending summer camp as a grade schooler:
I used to be eleven and all fifth graders were sent to Veldskool (literally translated “bush school” in Afrikaans)—like summer camp, if summer camp took place through the public school term within the winter and was run by ex-military types who were raising up the following generation to have the option to acknowledge land mines, construct a shelter, and stand guard against the swart gevaar, or “Black danger,” they told us was creeping toward the White suburbs.
We were none of us quite ready for a training bra, and yet we spent seven days at a school-sanctioned wilderness camp being taught military discipline and the state religion of apartheid.
In reading It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping, I engaged South Africa as I never could have in college. In my youth and ignorance, I had assumed the unjust awfulness of it, but like a plane missing an airport, I had no experience throughout the country and nothing to attach it to my heart. My feelings about what was happening in South Africa prompted me only to half-heartedly commiserate from a window and ally myself with students on a quad in tents with indignant, spray-painted sheets.
Baker’s memoir is a soulful book that’s rife with tension and, like most fantastic books, shot through with mercy received. From page 1, we observe her love for her father in addition to her country and anticipate redemption, nonetheless it would come about. Repentance and forgiveness are the balm of Jesus, and reunification is its effect. It is a privilege to see the pin dot of each widen into something with the facility to usher in a complete recent era.
Katherine James is the writer of the novel Can You See Anything Now? in addition to a memoir, A Prayer for Orion: A Son’s Addiction and a Mother’s Love. She is working on a novel a couple of mute girl growing up within the Vietnam era.
