OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Coates-Muller, Christine"

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The shape of shadows
(2005) Coates-Muller, Christine
This is a woman's journey backwards to her people and her place, taking her into deep memory and reconstruction of memory; and yielding moments of darkness she knows she must face, though she is hardly able. It is focused on her need to know her grandmother, and to understand her father's suicide and be reconciled to it. The narrator/protagonist, Catrina, artist and poet, writes a poem raising questions about her family: her grandfather who 'wears his face like blank feathers, night in his throat', her khaki father, her grandmother silently kneading bread. Sensing the presence of her grandmother, Nella, Catrina, keeps receiving small prompts which, because she is open to suggestion, draw her always towards family and home. She is encouraged in this task by Flame, erstwhile TRC Councillor and psychologist practising in London - where Catrina is on a year's sabbatical - to respond to these calls from 'the ancestors', the import of which Flame is fully aware. 'Stories may not be literally or historically true but they could be emotionally true,' Flame tells her. Catrina resists going back, but Flame says that the struggle is now, the past continues in the present and what you do with it, how you use your history, is really about today, not yesterday.