| dc.description.abstract | Let's Go Home encompasses thirteen short stories inspired by the Coloured fishing
community of Blompark in Gansbaai. These stories embody a range of voices and perspectives,
some contemporary, some set in the past thirty to forty years, each of which attempts to
represent the lives, loves and losses of a rural community that too often has found itself at the
margins of society and ignored by literary representations. Themes explored include traumaphysical,
psychological and spiritual. Some of these traumas are linked to the legacies of
Apartheid: For example, my story titled "Fraans‟ is about a man who struggles with alcohol
addiction and represents one of countless individuals within rural Coloured communities still
haunted by the inheritance of the dop system .
Other traumas in Let's Go Home represent more personal and private traumas. In "Secrets‟,
for instance, a young woman who finds out that the man she wishes to marry is in fact her
illegitimate brother. Such stories in rural communities are not uncommon because children born
out of wedlock are seen as sinful and thus many women keep quiet about illegitimate offspring.
Voice, (whether that of a narrator or in the form of the characters' dialogue) is also a central
concern, for as I have explained above, one of my chief preoccupations and inspirations for
writing this collection, has been the lack of texts giving voice to Coloured fishing communities. | en_US |
