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David Houze was twenty-six and living in a single room occupancy hotel in Atlanta when he discovered that three little girls in an old photo he'd seen years earlier were actually his sisters. The girls had been left behind in South Africa when Houze and his mother fled the country in 1966, at the height of apartheid, to start a new life in Meridian, Mississippi, with Houze's American father. This revelation triggers a journey of self-discovery and reconnection that ranges from the shores of South Africa to the dirt roads of Mississippi-and back. Gripping, vivid, and poignant, this deeply personal narrative uses the unraveling mystery of Houze's family and his quest for identity as a prism through which to view the tumultuous events of the civil rights movement in Mississippi and the rise and fall of apartheid in South Africa. Twilight People is a stirring memoir that grapples with issues of family, love, abandonment, and ultimately, forgiveness and reconciliation. It is also a spellbinding detective story-steeped in racial politics and the troubled history of two continents-of one man's search for the truth behind the enigmas of his, and his mother's, lives.… (meer)
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This book presents itself as the author's journey to define himself and answer questions having to do with the choices his mother made prior to bringing him to the United States while leaving three daughters behind in South Africa. Instead of following this interesting storyline, he launches into a rather dry historical treatise on the rationale and impact of apartheid in South Africa.
It is unfortunate that the author misleads the reader on the premise of the book and does not fully satisfy the questions he initially raises about his ethnicity and his quest to define his place in the world. The reasons behind his mother's actions were complicated, yet not unique to the choices mothers in America and South Africa have made for centuries. Further exploration of her mindset or writing a fictionalized version of his story exploring the psychological angst of his sisters would have made his story more satisfying. Instead, he has regurgitated hundreds of pages of statistics and South African historical data, much of which he read in an attempt to come to terms with his life.
Anyone seeking a condensed South African history lesson from a young man's perspective, this is your book. To say I still wish to know more about his mother and his sisters reveals even more about where the book falls short. ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Coloured people have been a twilight people for too long, and too long others have said what we are supposed to be, where we come from and where we should be politically. Nobody asks us where we want to be--Peter Marais, Cape Town legislator
We all live here now/in the twilight/where shadows and light bob and weave/twist and try to break each other's necks--Mongane Wally Serote, South African poet
Opdracht
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
For my mother, Yvonne, and my brother, Xavier
In memory of Robert "Robbie" Brooks and Nick Nicholas
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
To South Africans of color such as my mother, who came of age in the years after 1948, when the white minority government lauched the docial experiment known as apartheid, the United States beckoned as a country of promise and opportunity, a faraway place relatively free of the racialized degradation South Africa had come to epitomze.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
...it would seem, coloureds were nothing but the creation of and an extension of whites; they weren't quite white and they weren't quite black---they were, indeed, the nowhere people, the twilight people without a culture, stuck in the proverbial middle.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
On June 23, 2005, Circuit Court Judge Marcus Gordon sentenced Edgar Ray Killen to sixty years in prison for the manslaughter of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in 1964.
David Houze was twenty-six and living in a single room occupancy hotel in Atlanta when he discovered that three little girls in an old photo he'd seen years earlier were actually his sisters. The girls had been left behind in South Africa when Houze and his mother fled the country in 1966, at the height of apartheid, to start a new life in Meridian, Mississippi, with Houze's American father. This revelation triggers a journey of self-discovery and reconnection that ranges from the shores of South Africa to the dirt roads of Mississippi-and back. Gripping, vivid, and poignant, this deeply personal narrative uses the unraveling mystery of Houze's family and his quest for identity as a prism through which to view the tumultuous events of the civil rights movement in Mississippi and the rise and fall of apartheid in South Africa. Twilight People is a stirring memoir that grapples with issues of family, love, abandonment, and ultimately, forgiveness and reconciliation. It is also a spellbinding detective story-steeped in racial politics and the troubled history of two continents-of one man's search for the truth behind the enigmas of his, and his mother's, lives.
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(2.75)
1
It is unfortunate that the author misleads the reader on the premise of the book and does not fully satisfy the questions he initially raises about his ethnicity and his quest to define his place in the world. The reasons behind his mother's actions were complicated, yet not unique to the choices mothers in America and South Africa have made for centuries. Further exploration of her mindset or writing a fictionalized version of his story exploring the psychological angst of his sisters would have made his story more satisfying. Instead, he has regurgitated hundreds of pages of statistics and South African historical data, much of which he read in an attempt to come to terms with his life.
Anyone seeking a condensed South African history lesson from a young man's perspective, this is your book. To say I still wish to know more about his mother and his sisters reveals even more about where the book falls short. (