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White Chalk
White Chalk will blow you away by its honesty, depth and insightfulness. Terry Ann goes to places where others fear to tread. A memorable collection” – Lorraine SitholeThis fearless collection of stories takes the reader on an odyssey of love and grief.Terry-Ann Adam’s peerless writing brims with fire and wonder. You will be provoked and you will exult. Above all, you’ll remember where you were when you read White Chalk.
170 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 22, 2022
Terry-Ann has this incredible way of writing a people without telling their stories for them. A sublime way of amplifying existing voices, whether previously heard or not.
All the stories were sharp and shot from the hip. "What's This Now - the remix" was evocative; articulating one's felings in mother-tongue is so so powerful.
White Chalk will blow you away by its honesty, depth and insightfulness. Terry Ann goes to places where others fear to tread. A memorable collection.
I am incredibly humbled to have read an advanced copy of "White Chalk".
Terry's star is definitely on the rise.
All the stories were sharp and shot from the hip. "What's This Now - the remix" was evocative; articulating one's felings in mother-tongue is so so powerful.
White Chalk will blow you away by its honesty, depth and insightfulness. Terry Ann goes to places where others fear to tread. A memorable collection.
I am incredibly humbled to have read an advanced copy of "White Chalk".
Terry's star is definitely on the rise.
February 4, 2024
White Chalk is a collection of stories by Terry-Ann Adams first published by Jacana Media in 2022. I have never reviewed a collection of stories before. I thought it would be too different from what I have tried before and I was not sure how to go about it. I decided that I was going to list on a white sheet of paper the titles of all the stories in Terry-Ann Adams’ White Chalk. Thereafter, I was going to write what I thought/ felt/understood and/or experienced in each story. This is the outcome of that process.
______________
1. Rock a Bye, Baby
The collection opens with Rock a Bye, Baby, a story that is about what we go through when we are faced with what we have not planned for. The mixed feelings of uncertainty and fear, and the swell of expectation and hopefulness that comes with the uneasy acceptance of the situation. And we experience too, what we feel when we lose it all, anyway – the grief that comes and stays, and how it is crushing, nonetheless.
2. The Ouens
In The Ouens we meet the brasse who blom together and have each other’s backs: Brandon, Alroy, Jarred, Bones and Lucian. We learn of their bonds, what they are made of and what they mean. When reading The Ouens I experienced my first sadness and loudest laughter. We bear witness to the volatile conditions of Coloured boyhood. Here, we are reminded of how even the warm and stubborn embrace of the brasse cannot withstand the violence, of the guns that are at the ready, to go off, with bullets destined for the flesh, of the Ouens and other coloured boys like them.
3. Fight Club
This story takes the form of an Interview with Aunty Mabel. We experience here a different way of telling a story and we are made to realise how stories are central to our lives, how the happenings of life and the goings-on of the day are actually the unfolding of stories. We are inspired too by Aunty Mabel’s voice, assertive and confident, and her refusal to be silenced despite the repeated challenges and ‘interruptions’ by the interrogator. She insists on telling her story the best way she knows how because: “You can’t come and tell me how I must tell my story.” A point well-put.
4. Beaches
The humiliation of people with albinism is highlighted, and the shame and anxiety they go through daily in many spaces is brought to the fore. We are made to realise how the every-day discrimination hurts people with albinism. Here, Terry-Ann Adams challenges us to face ourselves and to think about what we take for granted. In the end, there’s nothing extraordinary to be said and done in treating anyone with respect and decency. From one person to another, it is as decent and ordinary as, “Hi my name is Amber. This place is very stuffy, do you like the beach?” Here, the empathy and the understanding of shared pain and experience comes through.
5. Matric Dance
“Don’t jella, vang tips” I think this line is so cool, full of drama and attitude. It captures the tone and atmosphere of planning for the Matric Dance. We get in this story the different tales of Matric students as they prepare for the Matric dance, their challenges and feelings, excitement and anxieties. It also speaks to the politics and struggles that impoverished matric students have to face just to make it to the Matric Dance; and those negotiations which non-binary persons have to have with themselves and their difficult families, so that they can go to the Matric Dance as themselves and have a meaningful experience that is worth remembering. In this story as in the entire collection, Adams is intentional about including a variety of experiences. It seems to me that according to Adams the story will be told in full or it will not be told at all. No tale which is a part of the whole story will be left untold.
6. Night Vigil
In the Night Vigil, the ‘odour of death‘ hangs in the air. We are in attendance to mourn with Nessa but also to journey back to a time before this moment of mourning, to learn of the birth before the death, the beginning before the end. The story, then, alternates between the events of the night vigil and and the life before. We read the alternating narratives with the knowledge that no matter what happens, it all ends here. It is a matter of finding out how everything leads to this moment of finality. I could relate to some frustrations in this story, especially around the costly rituals of night vigils. I felt the grief in this story, a deep sense of sympathy but also a great sense of closure.
7. Homecoming
The tensions of family and home, leaving and returning are revealed in Homecoming. For people estranged from their families, the thought of returning is often an intense struggle. This story made me think about what happens to people who leave home. And what do they go through when they choose to come back. When they see the words on the doormat or on the faces of those they left, “Welcome Home“, what happens to them and what comes after?
8. Locked Down
In Locked Down we get the tales of what life under lockdown meant — the anxieties, the madness, the insecurity, the distance, the masks and the curfews. In this story, we are reminded of what the lockdown did to us, never to forget the people we were and the stories we still carry.
9. Still Locked Down
Just when we think, the Locked Down story is over, we find ourselves (in) Still Locked Down. In Still Locked Down, we are more or less, moving on to the next part of the same conversation. I think this is a clever play on the protracted reality that was the lockdown experience, the unending sense of it all. One lockdown, after another. This is a reminder of the lingering sense of despair and frustration, of how the lockdown and the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t going to simply end and disappear on its own. In this story, the devastation of COVID-19 becomes all too real. Here, the sense – and reality- of impending loss awaits us.
10. What’s this now
What’s this now has surrealist elements that kept my imagination jumping here and there. Sometimes I felt unsure and somewhat lost in the details when I was reading this story, and in those moments the title of the story, what’s this now, would best describe my reading experience. The wild details and the theatrical descriptions are both believable and unbelievable. The narrator is one I can recognise in an uncle, an aunt or a cousin whose side I would not leave because of their unbelievable stories, which they tell with spellbinding narration, and a perfect mix of real and unreal detail.
11. Sunday Morning
Sunday Morning made me think of Take Me to Church by Hozier. I struggled a bit with Sunday Morning and had to read it more than once. To understand the story I turned to the song. And then back to the story again. Sunday Morning, like Take Me to Church, deals with the violence of the church and society against marginalized people; and the lengths people go to resist and claim their dignity. Sunday Morning opens with the Bible verse, Matthew 18 v 3-5, the last verse of which reads, “And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,” and the last lines of the Take Me to Church chorus read, “Offer me that deathless death/Good god, let me give you my life”. We see in the latter the way people rebel against shame and rejection when the call of the former is not honoured and realised. This connection manifests fully in Sunday Morning where we witness subtle and extraordinary acts of rebellion, against more suffering and humiliation, for dignity, for peace, for a true welcoming of god. I look at these and Sasha with a less judgemental and a more compassionate eye.
12. Ma’s House
This story made me think of my own mother, the warmth of her house and the familiarity of home. I thought too of all the women in my neighborhood who gather religiously every afternoon to play fahfee. This story, its originality and familiarity, impressed me. When I read it I felt like I know this place and I know the people who inhabit it. This is us.
13. What’s this now? – the remix
This story is an allegory, of our politics, government and the current state of injustice that defines our social relations. We see in this allegory the familiar story of how government and its failures manufacture desperation by deprivation, and demand celebration for doing the bare minimum, all the while displaying a brutal contempt for ordinary people and their acts of resistance. The sad reality is shown cleverly and without an awful sense of despair.
14. The Last Supper
In The Last Supper there is family, the hilarious stories of growing up, the fragile relations as those who held the family together grow old, die or are lost. It is about the big things not said. It’s also about what we do with the last we have of our loved ones, in time, in body and in mind — in memory. How do we face losing those who hold us together? How do we face losing the living? The shadow of grief, moves with the characters in this story, which means there’s love too.
15. Birthday Bash
In Birthday Bash, Adams describes the qualities of “real men”, and the sinister culture that shields them from accountability, with a scientific precision that would be groundbreaking if it wasn’t all too common. Here, Adams brilliantly demonstrates ‘the patriarchy’ as a systematic formula that produces the same outcome, same patterns of violence and evasion of accountability, no matter which ‘real man’. And there are several one can think of while reading this story. This story is a great achievement by Adams, impactful and memorable.
16. Red Roses
In Red Roses Adams explores the stigma and shame around menstruation. The practices of care, the mutual support and tenderness during this experience are given value too.
17. Operation Modderfontein
The woerwai of High School. The Sureness and determination. The fairness and the injustice. The drama and the politics. The reason and the irrationality. The genius and the foolishness. The youth. The youth. The youth. I remember high school and some of these memories came alive for me in Operation Modderfontein.
18. Madness and Civilization
Brilliantly crafted, we learn in Madness and Civilization of the heartbreak and suffering the characters go through in the world. We see too the shared vulnerability, empathy and understanding that is reminiscent of the late Indian Philosopher and writer, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s words, that “it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” There is as much consolation in these words as there is in the story. Adams leaves us with the image of a ‘bird that can fly far far away from here‘, conjuring a kind of an escape, a release, perhaps, into a kind of freedom, a launch into endless and exciting possibilities. Madness and Civilization is my favourite of all the stories in this brilliant collection.
_________
If the fullness of people’s lives — their pain and grief, love and laughter, flaws and faults, fears and fury, hopes and dreams — could be seen and captured, with dignity and grace, and then savoured, it would taste like White Chalk. Toni Morrison said in a 1981 speech to the Ohio Arts Council, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” If Morrison’s words are a prayer, then for me Adams’ White Chalk is the answer. And I dare say that White Chalk is a prayer answered for you too.
It is my hope that you are moved to get Terry-Ann Adams’ White Chalk collection, to read it and experience it for yourself.
Rating: 4.5 /5 ⭐
______________
1. Rock a Bye, Baby
The collection opens with Rock a Bye, Baby, a story that is about what we go through when we are faced with what we have not planned for. The mixed feelings of uncertainty and fear, and the swell of expectation and hopefulness that comes with the uneasy acceptance of the situation. And we experience too, what we feel when we lose it all, anyway – the grief that comes and stays, and how it is crushing, nonetheless.
2. The Ouens
In The Ouens we meet the brasse who blom together and have each other’s backs: Brandon, Alroy, Jarred, Bones and Lucian. We learn of their bonds, what they are made of and what they mean. When reading The Ouens I experienced my first sadness and loudest laughter. We bear witness to the volatile conditions of Coloured boyhood. Here, we are reminded of how even the warm and stubborn embrace of the brasse cannot withstand the violence, of the guns that are at the ready, to go off, with bullets destined for the flesh, of the Ouens and other coloured boys like them.
3. Fight Club
This story takes the form of an Interview with Aunty Mabel. We experience here a different way of telling a story and we are made to realise how stories are central to our lives, how the happenings of life and the goings-on of the day are actually the unfolding of stories. We are inspired too by Aunty Mabel’s voice, assertive and confident, and her refusal to be silenced despite the repeated challenges and ‘interruptions’ by the interrogator. She insists on telling her story the best way she knows how because: “You can’t come and tell me how I must tell my story.” A point well-put.
4. Beaches
The humiliation of people with albinism is highlighted, and the shame and anxiety they go through daily in many spaces is brought to the fore. We are made to realise how the every-day discrimination hurts people with albinism. Here, Terry-Ann Adams challenges us to face ourselves and to think about what we take for granted. In the end, there’s nothing extraordinary to be said and done in treating anyone with respect and decency. From one person to another, it is as decent and ordinary as, “Hi my name is Amber. This place is very stuffy, do you like the beach?” Here, the empathy and the understanding of shared pain and experience comes through.
5. Matric Dance
“Don’t jella, vang tips” I think this line is so cool, full of drama and attitude. It captures the tone and atmosphere of planning for the Matric Dance. We get in this story the different tales of Matric students as they prepare for the Matric dance, their challenges and feelings, excitement and anxieties. It also speaks to the politics and struggles that impoverished matric students have to face just to make it to the Matric Dance; and those negotiations which non-binary persons have to have with themselves and their difficult families, so that they can go to the Matric Dance as themselves and have a meaningful experience that is worth remembering. In this story as in the entire collection, Adams is intentional about including a variety of experiences. It seems to me that according to Adams the story will be told in full or it will not be told at all. No tale which is a part of the whole story will be left untold.
6. Night Vigil
In the Night Vigil, the ‘odour of death‘ hangs in the air. We are in attendance to mourn with Nessa but also to journey back to a time before this moment of mourning, to learn of the birth before the death, the beginning before the end. The story, then, alternates between the events of the night vigil and and the life before. We read the alternating narratives with the knowledge that no matter what happens, it all ends here. It is a matter of finding out how everything leads to this moment of finality. I could relate to some frustrations in this story, especially around the costly rituals of night vigils. I felt the grief in this story, a deep sense of sympathy but also a great sense of closure.
7. Homecoming
The tensions of family and home, leaving and returning are revealed in Homecoming. For people estranged from their families, the thought of returning is often an intense struggle. This story made me think about what happens to people who leave home. And what do they go through when they choose to come back. When they see the words on the doormat or on the faces of those they left, “Welcome Home“, what happens to them and what comes after?
8. Locked Down
In Locked Down we get the tales of what life under lockdown meant — the anxieties, the madness, the insecurity, the distance, the masks and the curfews. In this story, we are reminded of what the lockdown did to us, never to forget the people we were and the stories we still carry.
9. Still Locked Down
Just when we think, the Locked Down story is over, we find ourselves (in) Still Locked Down. In Still Locked Down, we are more or less, moving on to the next part of the same conversation. I think this is a clever play on the protracted reality that was the lockdown experience, the unending sense of it all. One lockdown, after another. This is a reminder of the lingering sense of despair and frustration, of how the lockdown and the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t going to simply end and disappear on its own. In this story, the devastation of COVID-19 becomes all too real. Here, the sense – and reality- of impending loss awaits us.
10. What’s this now
What’s this now has surrealist elements that kept my imagination jumping here and there. Sometimes I felt unsure and somewhat lost in the details when I was reading this story, and in those moments the title of the story, what’s this now, would best describe my reading experience. The wild details and the theatrical descriptions are both believable and unbelievable. The narrator is one I can recognise in an uncle, an aunt or a cousin whose side I would not leave because of their unbelievable stories, which they tell with spellbinding narration, and a perfect mix of real and unreal detail.
11. Sunday Morning
Sunday Morning made me think of Take Me to Church by Hozier. I struggled a bit with Sunday Morning and had to read it more than once. To understand the story I turned to the song. And then back to the story again. Sunday Morning, like Take Me to Church, deals with the violence of the church and society against marginalized people; and the lengths people go to resist and claim their dignity. Sunday Morning opens with the Bible verse, Matthew 18 v 3-5, the last verse of which reads, “And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,” and the last lines of the Take Me to Church chorus read, “Offer me that deathless death/Good god, let me give you my life”. We see in the latter the way people rebel against shame and rejection when the call of the former is not honoured and realised. This connection manifests fully in Sunday Morning where we witness subtle and extraordinary acts of rebellion, against more suffering and humiliation, for dignity, for peace, for a true welcoming of god. I look at these and Sasha with a less judgemental and a more compassionate eye.
12. Ma’s House
This story made me think of my own mother, the warmth of her house and the familiarity of home. I thought too of all the women in my neighborhood who gather religiously every afternoon to play fahfee. This story, its originality and familiarity, impressed me. When I read it I felt like I know this place and I know the people who inhabit it. This is us.
13. What’s this now? – the remix
This story is an allegory, of our politics, government and the current state of injustice that defines our social relations. We see in this allegory the familiar story of how government and its failures manufacture desperation by deprivation, and demand celebration for doing the bare minimum, all the while displaying a brutal contempt for ordinary people and their acts of resistance. The sad reality is shown cleverly and without an awful sense of despair.
14. The Last Supper
In The Last Supper there is family, the hilarious stories of growing up, the fragile relations as those who held the family together grow old, die or are lost. It is about the big things not said. It’s also about what we do with the last we have of our loved ones, in time, in body and in mind — in memory. How do we face losing those who hold us together? How do we face losing the living? The shadow of grief, moves with the characters in this story, which means there’s love too.
15. Birthday Bash
In Birthday Bash, Adams describes the qualities of “real men”, and the sinister culture that shields them from accountability, with a scientific precision that would be groundbreaking if it wasn’t all too common. Here, Adams brilliantly demonstrates ‘the patriarchy’ as a systematic formula that produces the same outcome, same patterns of violence and evasion of accountability, no matter which ‘real man’. And there are several one can think of while reading this story. This story is a great achievement by Adams, impactful and memorable.
16. Red Roses
In Red Roses Adams explores the stigma and shame around menstruation. The practices of care, the mutual support and tenderness during this experience are given value too.
17. Operation Modderfontein
The woerwai of High School. The Sureness and determination. The fairness and the injustice. The drama and the politics. The reason and the irrationality. The genius and the foolishness. The youth. The youth. The youth. I remember high school and some of these memories came alive for me in Operation Modderfontein.
18. Madness and Civilization
Brilliantly crafted, we learn in Madness and Civilization of the heartbreak and suffering the characters go through in the world. We see too the shared vulnerability, empathy and understanding that is reminiscent of the late Indian Philosopher and writer, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s words, that “it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” There is as much consolation in these words as there is in the story. Adams leaves us with the image of a ‘bird that can fly far far away from here‘, conjuring a kind of an escape, a release, perhaps, into a kind of freedom, a launch into endless and exciting possibilities. Madness and Civilization is my favourite of all the stories in this brilliant collection.
_________
If the fullness of people’s lives — their pain and grief, love and laughter, flaws and faults, fears and fury, hopes and dreams — could be seen and captured, with dignity and grace, and then savoured, it would taste like White Chalk. Toni Morrison said in a 1981 speech to the Ohio Arts Council, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” If Morrison’s words are a prayer, then for me Adams’ White Chalk is the answer. And I dare say that White Chalk is a prayer answered for you too.
It is my hope that you are moved to get Terry-Ann Adams’ White Chalk collection, to read it and experience it for yourself.
Rating: 4.5 /5 ⭐
June 4, 2025
My first time reading a collection of short stories & I absolutely loved it. I love Terry-Ann’s writing style & the purely South African narrative.
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