A powerful novel about the 1901 Boer War and Johannesburg on 2010 with the focus on 2 “ concentration camps. In 2901 British soldiers moved hundreds is women and children into camps. This novel tells us about Sarah and her son Fred who live in horrid conditions . The novel also follows Willem who doesn’t fit in and only has his grandmother’s support. Willem gets sent to “ New Dawn” boys camp where he experiences horrible abuse. A interesting twist brings these two stories together . ( )

I couldn't figure out what his book was about. There are two entirely separate stories which the author seems to imply are connected, but apart from a couple of coincidences I couldn't see much connection.

The first section is somewhat awkwardly written. It's a letter from a wife to her husband, but includes sentences like this one when describing the mulberry tree the grows next the their family home, "Now its branches hold our home and its big heart-shaped leaves give us shade." That's a comically odd thing to write to your husband who left two weeks ago. Gradually it becomes clear that the letter is a diary, but as long as it's written in the second person, addressing the absent husband, the tone is confusing. The rest of that section is just an account of misery, not particularly vivid nor with any great sense of redemption, hope or insight.

The middle of the book connects the first story with the second, at least temporally. Once again I couldn't really find any unifying theme or emotional, social or spiritual lesson. The characters are not particularly engaging - they struggle through life without particularly learning or growing.

The final story is the most powerful and coherent - if I had to guess I would say this was written and then the rest was constructed around it to flesh it out into a novel. However, I'm not sure it justifies the brutality and misery it exposes the reader to. There needs to be something higher - humour, hope, meaning, redemption, insight - to make it worthwhile reading about someone's abject misery. This story didn't offer that.

And, well, race. Apart from the final story, every character's "struggle" is cast in stark relief by their maids (and other black workers, but particularly the maids). I just can't get too upset about a character who is too sad to lift their feet for the maid's vacuum cleaner. The black characters are not just servants, but second class citizens, with no chance for better employment in a system designed to dehumanise them. That was a huge obstacle to making the characters relatable.

The prose is fairly flat - neither elegant nor lyrical - and the characters are also pretty dull, on the whole. ( )

Cultural warning: a part of this review uses racial slurs when quoting text from the novel.
***
This is another book that I became aware of through the release of the Adelaide Writers' Week program. It's an ambitious book, with a big story to tell, but the link between its two competing narratives is IMO tenuous. Both narratives are set in camps which promise to keep their charges safe, and neither of them do. That seems a thin thread to connect them, and I'm a bit bemused by the conflation of the suffering of internees in a concentration camp a century ago with present-day homophobic brutality towards boys struggling with their sexual identity. However, while one needs to read between the lines, the novel — by being written mainly from the perspective of White South Africans — exposes some attitudes which show that South Africa has a long way to go before being a Rainbow Nation at peace with itself and the world.
Part 1 is the story of the Boer Sarah van der Watt and her treatment at the hands of the British during the Boer War (1899-1902). It is often said that the British were the first to use concentration camps as a weapon of war, but it's not actually true. Wikipedia (lightly edited to remove links and footnotes) tells us otherwise:

Although the first example of civilian internment may date as far back as the 1830s, the English term concentration camp was first used in order to refer to the reconcentrados (reconcentration camps) which were set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–78), and similar camps were set up by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). The term concentration camp saw wider use as the British set up camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa for interning Boers.

But there is no doubt that the Brits used the brutal internment of civilians including women and children together with a scorched earth policy in their campaign against the Boers. Barr, using the device of a diary written by his character Sarah van der Watt, takes the narrative from her dread of what was coming, to the grim reality of being used as punishment for the military activities of her husband Sam, and to her terror that her small son Fred might die. The conditions were terrible, and, as in real life, thousands of people died from malnutrition and disease. In the modern era in South Africa, hostility to British people can be traced to this history of concentration camps during the Second Boer War.

(Abhorrent as this war crime was, it needs to be differentiated from the Holocaust because the intent was not genocidal: it was not intended to exterminate an entire race of innocent people, their religion and their culture. Concentration camps began in South Africa in response to the introduction of guerrilla warfare by the Boers, and was intended to pressure their fighters to surrender by cutting off their support and breaking their morale. And unlike German public opinion demonstrated by their acquiescence to the persecution, deportation and murder of six millions Jews in World War II, British public opinion deplored the emergence of concentration camps in the Boer War under Lord Kitchener. There was strong censure by MPs in the British Parliament, notably by David Lloyd George, and opposition to the war itself was stoked by condemnation of these tactics by the British public, due in part to the efforts of Englishwoman Emily Hobhouse who campaigned against the camps.)

Sarah's diary is used to convey the terrible suffering within the camp. It is addressed to her husband, and somehow kept, surreptitiously, throughout the internment. Most readers will, I hope, notice amongst the depiction of the atrocious conditions, the casual and not-so-casual racism against Black South Africans. Black servants are not differentiated as Zulu or Xhosa or anything else, just labelled by an offensive term. That is, of course, authentic. The dismissive attitudes towards their greater suffering are, no doubt, a valid representation of how Afrikaners like Sarah would have spoken and behaved. She records without a word of compassion that her servant Jakob [was] laid out on the stoep, his hands bound behind his back, rolled to one side so they wouldn't have to step over him. Lettie is also trussed like Jakob tying a pig and dragged onto the stoep. Later she notes that at least they were in the shade, though they don't suffer the sun like us. Even in the camp, Mrs Kriel's little Kaffir girl sleeps right outside.

“The final indignity is the Khaki Kaffirs set to spy on us. I grieve to see them turn against the people who gave them shelter and work. We are all sons and daughters of the same soil. It is a sin that will not quickly be forgiven.”

However, in a contemporary novel, one might expect that author acknowledgements or a preface would address the question of representing the racism that undoubtedly occurred, to ensure that readers understand its purpose. There is a risk that not everyone will recognise the irony in that excerpt, and I think it's important that they do.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/02/09/you-will-be-safe-here-by-damien-barr/ ( )

This book is a haunting beauty. It’s about the present and the past of the Boer states of South Africa. It’s about discrimination of different sorts that the humans have shamelessly devised – skin colour, sexual orientation, marital status of women. Based on some true events, this book can leave you dazed. This one is undoubtedly a full 5 Stars.

There were instances when I was scared of reading what was about to happen, some parts when I wanted to stop reading due to the horrors inflicted on the characters. But I could not stop reading and crying and consoling myself. This book draws a poignant reminder of the hideous society that we live in!

It’s 1901, the British have come. They have a plan – the “scorched-earth” policy. Everything useful to the Boers is burned down. The whole population is made to move in concentration camps. The blacks and the whites in their separate camps respectively. Mrs Sarah Van der Watt and her son have been put on a train for the “camp”. Of the few things she can manage, she smuggles a diary with her, writing down her experiences and observations in the camp. They have been made refugees in their own country. Their ration supply is minimal, they are exploited and left to starve. Malaria, typhoid and other diseases are spreading fast. Hospitals are no longer the recovery rooms. They are just places where the sick are dying every day. There are rules set and a torture prison for those who don’t amend to those rules.

2010 – Willem is a little odd, they say. At 15, he sometimes wets his bed. They call him names. They bully him. His mother and her boyfriend decide to send him to a camp. The General of the camp claims he makes men out of boys. His mother signs him up. At least he would be getting a job as a ranger, she thinks. But this camp is more than meets the eye.

The story moves to and fro 1901 and 2010. The author has managed these transitions brilliantly in the book. This book inspired me to do more reading on the Boer wars. I could visualise the description that the author has given of the camps, the people, the farms burned down. Everything has been so accurate that one feels themselves inside the story – sometimes Willem and then suddenly becoming Sarah wishing for the war to end.

The second Boer War was fought between the British Empire and the Boer states. The war went on for two and a half years doing much harm to the Boers. The impact of the war on the survivors and their descendants has been dreadful. There are many from the families of the survivors, who still live with the hate burning fresh. ( )

No. ( )