Apart

by Catherine Taylor

Literary Nonfiction. APART grew out of Taylor's memories of visiting her family in South Africa as a child and her later curiosity about her (white) mother's involvement in early anti-apartheid women's groups. Mixing narrative prose, poems, social and political theory, and found texts culled from years of visiting South African archives and libraries, APART navigates the difficult landscapes of history, shame, privilege, and grief.

"Catherine Taylor's APART offers an intimate and sweeping look at the legacy of apartheid, while performing an altogether rare balance of 'lyric seduction' against 'the ugliness of corpses.' Taylor refreshingly treats white guilt and the self-conscious recognition of privilege as starting points rather than conclusions, as she plumbs the depths of history, from which, as she reminds us, 'no one is excused.' The result is edifying, original, and critically rigorous—a poetic and political vibration between 'ecstasy, shame, ecstasy, shame.'"—Maggie Nelson

"Catherine Taylor's APART is neither journalism nor memoir nor documentary poem nor lyric essay nor jeremiad—though it contains elements of them all—but a brilliant and relentless examination of conscience always in search of a literary form adequate to its mission. Embarked on the 'search for a common name' in the aftermath of South African Apartheid, Taylor's takes care on her way to gather an archive of feelings, 'signs of struggle, boredom, hope, effort, fatigue, tedium, privilege, its lack, brutality, tyranny, complicity, despair, and resistance.' If APART renders in language the affect of having an ethics, what makes Taylor's writing ultimately so persuasive as a politics is its portrait of the private citizen as 'at once ineffectual and humane, complicit and resistant, irrelevant and necessary.' Deeply attentive to the contradictory ideologies that structure our lives as historical subjects, Taylor's vision of conscientious citizenship demands that we recognize subjectivity's intrinsic subjection to power without ever losing sight of our individual agency and the necessity for independent action and inquiry. Thinking its way through the insidious, tragic inequalities of globalization, capitalism, and democracy's alleged freedoms, APART indeed succeeds in persuading its readers to disavow 'a cynicism we can't afford.'"—Brian Teare

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

168 pages, Paperback

First published May 8, 2012

Reviews

[Literary Review The · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherine Taylor
Apart
(Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012)

By Sarah Barber

"Apart" was reviewed in The Literary Review
"Loss Control" Fall 2012, The Shortlist
www.theliteraryreview.org

Documentary poetics can break your heart, and Catherine Taylor’s first book of poems, Apart, certainly will. Part lyric essay, part verse memoir, the book explores the lasting impacts of apartheid in South Africa through archival research and, bravely, through family history, turning up startling images like “doodles of flowers and pretty little tea cups” in the margins of records of violence. Nothing is simple: “Everything outside is obscenely gorgeous” on the road to Robben Island. Taylor cautions that “the lyric’s past seductions make a pretty mirror for the ugliness of corpses,” but her assessment of identity, both national and familial, is inspirational and reminds us that “there’s a gullet full of others to be loved including strangers.”

[Nathaniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The shift from the individual to the collective, or the nation, means that we have to reconsider the meaning and possibilities of shame. Individuals can feel shame (or not) for acts they have committed and individuals can feel shame (or not) at acts committed by their collective, and each trajectory will shape their possible responses, but they will, necessarily, be individual responses. But can the collective, the nation, feel shame? Is the polis truly like a public body? Collectives exist and certainly condition individual responses, but at what point [d]o we choose to name something a ‘collective action’?”

more like 3.5 — I wanted to like this, and I don’t think it’s bad; it just didn’t really work for me personally.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended last minute summer reading: Catherine Taylor's Apart. It's a mixed-genre mash-up of reflections on her experience as a white South African growing up and growing older in the US (though most of the text is spent in SAf and its archives). It's filled with the kind of thoughtful engagement with white privilege that we all need to have articulated for us this rawly and that we need to provide to our students. I know I'll have it on my next African lit reading list, even though I typically don't include white authors (students read enough white authors in college and high school!!!). But it's such a powerful confrontation of privilege that I think my students will benefit from it enormously. I know I have. And it's grounded in compelling historical documents and super hot theory. On top of all that, it's a quick read, which is good since school is almost starting. BUT BUT BUT it's so brilliant that I hesitate to even say that. BUY IT NOW!!!!

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

APART by Catherine Taylor is about a divided nation, a divided childhood, a divided adulthood. It’s about divided allegiances and divided methods of processing them. Having grown up in South Africa and leaving when still young as the antiapartheid movement gained traction, Taylor’s book digests her memories and her mother’s action as part of a bourgeois white antiapartheid protest movement. She mixes in history, original documents, pictures and cites works of literature and minstrel in a kaleidoscopic view of a recent time that feels as if it existed in a heavy-handedly moral sci-fi novel. But it was real, is real, and continues to warp the reality of the writer and the lucky reader for whom Taylor as a thoughtful questioner of a past that isn’t past.

[Miriam Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

gorgeously written (lyrical, poetic, robust) and touches on unwieldy ideas of history, both personal and national, but just misses the opportunity to tie it all into a satisfying arc with a thesis

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a little hesitant to start this when I saw the back cover list this as poetry / nonfiction, but Taylor mixes memoir and history together and finds the lyrical in the chaos of race. Apart is about South Africans, today and yesterday. It is about the guilt and the scars that a nation carries. It recognizes how white privilege limits true understanding as a starting point and tries to get beyond it for a clearer understanding of history.