Product Description
In this evocative and hard-hitting memoir, Marcelle Freiman depicts her gradual awakening to a country in the grip of Apartheid. Through recurrent images of dislocation and loss, sequences of lyrical poems reveal the elusive nature of time and memory in facing it. Dislocations is a tour de force.
~Margaret Bradstock
Marcelle Freiman’s achievement with this memoir is compelling, complex and extraordinary. To be the child of a multi-generational Jewish family escaped from European prejudice only to be faced with Afrikaner Nationalist hate in South Africa becomes one vivid foundation for her poems of memory. But added to this is the ethical accounting she demands of herself and her family who managed and prospered in Apartheid South Africa through the 1960s up to that regime’s demise and beyond. Her near-perfect poems—true as ‘bullet holes in whitewashed walls’—face squarely, slantly, eloquently and crazily the ‘frayed moral stitching’ from years of white privilege and shame.
~Kevin Brophy.
Poetry is the perfect medium for Marcelle Freiman’s beautiful and sometimes harrowing memoir. Through her family’s story Freiman examines the intersections of migration, identity, and the struggle for justice. Her reflections on figures like Father Trevor Huddleston and Nelson Mandela, as well as references to historical events like the Rivonia Trial and the Bantu Education Act, further ground the book in the political and social upheavals of the time while providing a powerful and deeply lyrical meditation on the intersections of personal and collective memory, privilege, trauma, complicity, identity and displacement.
~Magdalena Ball, Compulsive Reader
