 history and society of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, where from 1948 through 1994 a state-sanctioned system of racial categorization, segregation and violence more than equal to the Jim Crow laws of the U. S. South held swap, warping the lives of everyone who lived within it. Taylor would not be the first white person, and certainly not the first white person with ancestral ties to South Africa, to address the apartheid system, but what sets her and this book apart--for she, like her mother, a South African native, and yet differently from her, is both psychically and geographically apart and a part of (party to) that system--is that she did not grow up there, but primarily in the US, only spending extended stays during childhood, until the Soweto Uprising in 1976. Apart unfolds like a densely-packed archive, ordered along the axes of affect, memory and anecdote, unfolding not as conventional memoir might, chronologically or historically, but in six sometimes unruly sections, combining poetry, prose, theoretical musings, documentary material, archival images, and annotations.
This approach mostly succeeds in depicting and embodying the messiness--the contradictions, the complexities, the multiple ironies, the experiential limitations--of being white in South Africa, of being a white liberal, as was Taylor's mother, who as a student attended the Black Sash Advice Group, a women's anti-apartheid organization, and Taylor is. It portrays the challenges of attempting to engage with the power and capital apartheid accorded both, conferred on all white people whose lives it touched, whether they wanted it, accepted it, or rejected it. Taylor rightly and repeatedly notes black South Africans' criticisms of white liberals' attempts to determine the shape of black freedom, and also attends to apartheid's intersections with class and gender issues. Her aim is "resonance", which "evokes associations and emotions," but which also "can result in catastrophic failure of the vibrating structure." Apartheid did collapse and South Africa is hardly a catastrophe, and although Taylor can never fully grasp or know how horrifyingly destructive apartheid was and remains for South Africa's black and brown peoples, she accepts those limitations here, and lives, however uneasily, with the "wreckage." As with Collins's book whether the people who might especially benefit from this text will read it remains a question, but no matter what Taylor willing gives readers "the world and the void," this complex work, her "love."