Off-Centre and Out of Focus: Growing up ‘Coloured’ in South Africa
Nadia Kamies
Fourthwall Books and ESI Press
Review: Andre Manuel
The question of coloured identity is explored in this part memoir, part historic reference text, which is both carefully factual and personally told for remembrance and preservation.
It is an intimate and warm family story, yet also tells us a lot about who we are, as a community and as a people.
It’s a tale of defiance and perseverance, and like a traditionally crocheted doilie with its intricately woven threads, takes us across time, from now, way back to the vague and intertwined origins of “who we are and where we are from”.
As the premise of the book, the author uses family photographs as a tool for revisiting her past, and through the act of analysing, decoding and interpreting these images through an academic lens, makes valuable community knowledge available and reopens the suppressed talk of the dark parts of our past.
Concepts like post-memory form the basis of Kamies’ thesis and, as explained in the book, “describes the relationship that the generation that comes after has with the one that came before, and the personal, cultural and collective trauma that they bear through stories, images and the behaviour of the people they grew up with”.
On this, she further writes, “I believe that the telling of stories through the photographs of the oppressed will raise awareness of a sense of loss and promote a desire for transformation and healing. The Apartheid walls tried to force us into being the same within our enclaves – we lived in the same areas, went to the same schools, married the same people according to their decree. We carried our sameness around like a security blanket and retreated within it, afraid of the other”.
As coloured people, our past may be badly off-centre and horribly out of focus, but with the right power to refocus and to recompose, we can make a better picture of the now..
