{"id":4359,"date":"2019-07-30T22:55:07","date_gmt":"2019-07-30T21:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=4359"},"modified":"2021-01-16T22:59:16","modified_gmt":"2021-01-16T22:59:16","slug":"the-blackridge-house-laying-memory-to-rest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=4359","title":{"rendered":"The Blackridge House: Laying memory to rest"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\nThis is a book about death,\nand about dying. As much a meditation as a story. Not morbid though.\nFor death to occur, there must have been a life, and it is life that\nfills the pages of The Blackridge House<\/em>. The life of Julia\nMartins\u2019s mother, as well as the people who made it possible for\nher, and made it possible for the author, as well as the\ncircumstances that lead to particular people being in a particular\nplace at a particular time. It is also a quest, which is how the\nstory continues, and a memoir of that quest, which is a word that\nconjures ideas of dragons, horses, swords and swarthy characters.\nThere are not many of those, and only one swarthy character, who is a\nlibrarian. This a gentle quest, its departure a nursing home, one\nfrom which the room has a view of a syringa tree and the squirrels\nthat scurrel along its branches. It involves family, old photographs,\nand assistance from genteel strangers, such as librarians and\nretiring civil servants in the urban planning bureau. It is about\nunderstanding, coming-to-terms, awareness, which is what a good quest\nshould achieve. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julia\nis looking for a lost home, one that belonged to her mother, who is\nold and dying and suffering short term memory loss. Thus The\nBlackridge House <\/em>is also an ode\nto her. It is a slow read. It is also absorbing, and poetic; the\ngossamer threads of relationships based on natural curiosity, the\nsmall heroisms born of the inexplicable desire of strangers to assist\nswell in poignancy for actually haven taken place. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nAlthough the quest is personal, internal and with no aim or prospect\nof achieving any effect beyond that of discovering the genesis of a\nparent\u2019s memories and laying a second-hand nostalgia to rest, the\nsweep of history is found in the particular; a sincere attempt to\nunderstand a place involves consideration of the many who have\ninhabited it during the preceding aeons \u2013 its plants, its animals,\nits people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nBeing sincere, and not without a wry sense of humour, Julia journeys\nbeyond the previous generation, unearths deeper layers that consider\nhistory and conquest and inheritance. Her memoir, is also a work of\npsychospatiality \u2013 the intertwining influence between landscape and\npeople; how the natural world bears on the psychology of the people\nwho inhabit it, and in the context of the industrial age\u2019s\naccelerated movement of people, includes the baggage they bring along\nfrom other landscapes and the societies they have moulded, and how\nthis baggage of the psyche is repurposed or possibly abandoned in a\nnew reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIt comes about, this psychospatiality (for the term psychogeography\nis too rooted in the urban environment) effortlessly, through\nobservation and empathy rather than deliberate focus. Mention is\nmade, for instance, of the railway line, symbol and achievement of\nempire, a catalyst for industry, property ownership, the progression\nof engineering and civilisation, now torn up and abandoned, the\ncontour returned to the dominion of grasses and flowers, beetles,\nrodents, and birds. A place cattle graze once more, but no longer\nquite as they used to; history\u2019s full weight bears on the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like\na cartographer who is able to decode contours, lines, shadow and\nlight to create a three dimensional vision of kloofs, peaks,\nvegetation density and type, rock strata and watercourses, Julia uses\nher intuition and intelligence to provide a nuanced view of the\nstruggles, achievements, the hard-fought conquests over land and\npeople and nature that provide a moment untrammeled in the sun, as\nwell as the sorrow, dislocation, and violence these misguided\nill-conceived struggles wield even as joy was to be had in the fight.\nIn this sense, Julia Martins\u2019s book on the dying of her mother and\nher memories straddles the description of memoir and novel, for it is\nalso an epic journey across the bloodstained soil of Africa in the\nsouth, all of which blows through its homes. \n<\/p>\n\n\n

Julia\nMartin is a professor in the Department of English at the University\nof the Western Cape.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a book about death, and about dying. As much a meditation as a story. Not morbid though. For death to occur, there must have been a life, and … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4359"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4359"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4361,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4359\/revisions\/4361"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}