Business Day‘s Sue Grant-Marshall has written a review of The Shouting in the Dark, praising the novel’s ‘subtle and haunting descriptive prose,’ and noting that ‘Resilience is at the heart of Boehmer’s work.’
The Southbank discussion of Elleke Boehmer’s The Shouting in the Dark on 11 October 2015 formed part of the ‘Tell Me Something I Don’t Know’ festival, and explored the topic of toxic secrets and forbidden love within families – here, the teenage character Ella’s infatuation with her parents’ African gardener, Phineas. The lively conversation with the audience shed light on some of the unspoken and now nearly forgotten aspects of apartheid, such as the ban on relations ‘across the colour bar’. We also celebrated how stories, and not history, take us inside the skin of another.
The inaugural discussion of the Dutch translation of The Shouting in the Dark – Op de veranda – was wide-ranging and stimulating and paid tribute to Joost Poort’s accomplished and sensitive translation. As well as Elleke Boehmer, the participants were the novelist Karin Amatmoekrim and public intellectual Naomi Wolf, and the session was chaired by cultural commentator Wim Manuhutu. After a short but impassioned introduction to this ‘life-changing’ novel by Naomi Wolf, Elleke kicked off the discussion with a reading from two sections of the novel in Netherlands. The conversation then covered a range of topics including how the novel worked as ‘crafted fury’, on white guilt against black belonging, on the lure of apartheid for post-war Netherlands immigrants to settlers, on how literature works against authoritarian systems of power, and on the novel as bio-fiction.
Later in the evening, Boehmer and Wolf again appeared on De Balie stage together, now to talk about what was billed Feminism 4.0 and about women’s post-millennial self-expression on various different platforms.
Elleke Boehmer, novelist and critic, confronts these questions in her new novel, Op de Veranda (English title: The Shouting in the Dark’). For main character Ella and her family these divisions are further complicated by the Second World War nightmares of her Netherlands father Har. Elleke Boehmer explores the effect of political change on an immigrant family and asks about growing up during apartheid, in the dying days of a colonial system. How is a child impacted by racism? How does she throw off the dead hand of her father’s control?
The writer Karin Amatmoekrim and the writer and public intellectual Naomi Wolf will join the conversation about memory, family, resisting oppression and writing fiction.
Wim Manuhutu, historian and heritage professional, will moderate the programme.