Apart

The pendulum image, from the prologue to Catherine Taylor’s Apart, could swing neatly between “prose and verse” or between “faith and doubt, black and white, change and stasis, self and other, amnesty and retribution . . . poverty and wealth . . . alien and citizen” in a book that investigates the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. Instead, in a hybrid work that fuses the lyric, the documentary, and the memoir genres with Taylor’s scholarly inquisition, Taylor tells us that the pendulum system “doesn’t just swing back and forth . . . inscribing simple opposites” but that “it leaves a trail of ever-shifting ellipses.” Like the periodic sentence, the people of her country “move forward, want resolution, seek conclusions, note parallels, but they, of course, reach no final revelations, no concluding periods—no time with an end, no discrete clause of history, no full stop.”

The pendulum image, from the prologue to Catherine Taylor’s Apart, could swing neatly between “prose and verse” or between “faith and doubt, black and white, change and stasis, self and other, amnesty and retribution . . . poverty and wealth . . . alien and citizen” in a book that investigates the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. Instead, in a hybrid work that fuses the lyric, the documentary, and the memoir genres with Taylor’s scholarly inquisition, Taylor tells us that the pendulum system “doesn’t just swing back and forth . . . inscribing simple opposites” but that “it leaves a trail of ever-shifting ellipses.” Like the periodic sentence, the people of her country “move forward, want resolution, seek conclusions, note parallels, but they, of course, reach no final revelations, no concluding periods—no time with an end, no discrete clause of history, no full stop.”

Apart begins in “jet-lag dreaminess” upon Taylor’s return to South Africa after an absence of twenty-eight years. Traveling with her son, who has been raised largely in the United States, and leaving behind her lover, known as “A” in the book, Taylor wants to believe in “the fantasy” of Desmond Tutu’s “rainbow nation.” In the marketplace, amid the blooms plucked from a landscape of “sick, visual abundance,” Taylor seeks, along with some of the sellers at the flower-stalls, a common identity within the country’s new power structure (“We are all black,” one black seller proclaims to a colored woman’s derision). To Taylor, “this seems like a good slogan. I’m getting ready to raise my little white black power fist in the air when, without hesitating, [the woman] says, Oh. How about we’re all colored. . . . No? How about we’re all white? . . . See. We can all be black, but not all colored or all white.” Taylor continues: “the categories unravel and resolidify. The power of claiming black clear for him and maybe for her, but troubling when it comes to white me.” So begins a pattern in a book where there are neither uncomplicated truths nor clear victories, where history does not conclude: “A constant oscillation: ecstasy, shame, ecstasy, shame.”

“Apart,” for Taylor, can mean exclusion; it can mean complicity. The title alludes to her family that lived in relative comfort in the beautiful country of “corpses.” It alludes to Taylor’s childhood memories, which often circle around her mother, a sometime member of an anti-apartheid women’s organization the Black Sash. The group’s activities again enact Taylor’s pendulum (“at once ineffectual and humane, complicit and resistant, irrelevant and necessary”). “Apart” can refer to Taylor’s mother who fled her homeland with Taylor in tow shortly before the 1976 Soweto protests, or to Taylor’s choice to remain in the United States, separated from her cousins, her aunts and uncles. The title can refer to Taylor’s subsequent homecomings to South Africa, to her acts of reportage, and to her present separation from her beloved “A.” The title can refer to the ideology of “truth and reconciliation” removed from present-day reality (“the end of race as the legal category of exploitation—but the abysmal material conditions of the majority of people living in South Africa” left “untouched”). “Apart” can refer to Taylor’s mother living as a child of privilege under the apartheid regime: “Sheltered. Not sheltered. I wonder when the innocence of those white childhoods ended and when denial or complicity or escape or resistance became choice.”

Taylor questions throughout the work how to tell this story. What grammars and structures are at her disposal? Her own reminiscences are vivid yet incomplete (“A tipping in my head; everything in my story slides down the shelf of memory”). Taylor challenges the arc of storytelling down to the sentence level: “Grammar may be a structure of domination’s nation, but just because it sutures subject to object or predicate or property doesn’t mean disruptions jump the fence without any consequence.” Conscious of “narrative exclusion” on the part of the storyteller, Taylor lingers over the selection and arrangement of her materials (archival text, landmarks, repurposed lines by George Oppen or Rosmarie Waldrop): “How my mother’s life looks one way when I think of her as the girl in our family photo albums. And another in the light of history. And how I always see that history in the light of my mother.” As she writes to “A”: “This week, I wrote you an essay that can’t seem to come together. I wrote another, more unified, version, it felt like all that integration was a lie. So, here’s a piece that perversely insists on keeping worlds apart.”

Ultimately, Apart is a book of glances (“A glance is all we’ll get of moments far apart”). Taylor seems to favor the haibun form and often caps her essays and letters with dreamy prose poems that repeat and reinterpret words and phrases plucked from the preceding text. Taylor ends a letter about a visit to the University of Cape Town Archives with a prose poem: “in the archives, boxed documents. Acid-free or not. . . . Paper, tissue, ash. Come for me at closing. Cover me with clippings.” The raw beauty of her country is a constant touchstone for Taylor as the pendulum swings: “Look how we have learned to love the wreckage.”