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Cargando... The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhoodpor Glen Retief
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Glen Retief's childhood was at once recognizably ordinary and brutally unusual. Raised in the middle of a game preserve where his father worked, Retief's warm nuclear family was a preserve of its own, against chaotic forces just outside its borders: a childhood friend's uncle was also the leader of a death squad, while his cultured grandfather quoted Shakespeare over sodas and abused Glen's sister in his antique Victorian living room. But it was when Retief was sent to boarding school, at age twelve, that he was truly exposed to human cruelty and frailty. When the prefects were caught torturing younger boys, they invented "the jack bank," where underclassmen could save beatings and draw on them later to atone for their supposed infractions. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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This system becomes a recurring motif as Glen navigates his way, as a gay man, within the homophobic power systems of South Africa. Racism and homophobia mingle within the apartheid-era South African society, and the same dynamic takes place outside the boarding school as within it: the victim blaming and internalization of power disparity allows corrupt systems to remain in place, with a self-perpetuating stronghold on their authority. But that authority is not completely beyond confrontation, and Glen's eventual work in combating homophobic legislation in the post-apartheid government becomes a reversal of the powerlessness of his boarding school experiences. (