A dry white season
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A dry white season (1979) by Andre Brink The novel focuses on the death during detention of a man wrongly suspected of being a black activist.[2] The novel challenges apartheid, depicting the transformation of a ruling class Afrikaner's opposition to the governing white supremacist regime.
Quotes
[edit]- I had never been so close to death before.For a long time, as I lay there trying to clear my mind, I couldn't think coherently at all, conscious only of a terrible, blind bitterness. Why had they singled me out? Didn't they understand? Had everything I'd gone through on their behalf been utterly in vain? Did it really count for nothing? What had happened to logic, meaning and sense? But I feel much calmer now. It helps to discipline oneself like this, writing it down to see it set out on paper, to try and weigh it and find some significance in it.Prof Bruwer: There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.I wanted to help.Right I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to do it on my terms. And I am white, and they are black. I thought it was still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in this deranged, divided age. I can do all I can for Gordon or scores of others who have come to me; I can imagine myself in their shoes, I can project myself into their suffering. But I cannot, ever, live their lives for them. So what else could come of it but failure? Whether I like it or not, whether I feel like cursing my own condition or not and that would only serve to confirm my impotence I am white. This is the small, final, terrifying truth of my broken world. I am white. And because I am white I am born into a state of privilege. Even if I fight the system that has reduced us to this I remain white, and favored by the very circumstances I abhor. Even if I'm hated, and ostracized, and persecuted, and in the end destroyed, nothing can make me black. And so those who are cannot but remain suspicious of me. In their eyes my very efforts to identify myself with Gordon, whit all the Gordons, would be obscene. Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption? On the other hand: what can I do but what I have done? I cannot choose not to intervene: that would be a denial and a mockery not only of everything I believe in, but of the hope that compassion may survive among men. By not acting as I did I would deny the very possibility of that gulf to be bridged.If I act, I cannot but lose. But if I do not act, it is a different kind of defeat, equally decisive and maybe worse. Because then I will not even have a conscience left.The end seems ineluctable: failure, defeat, loss. The only choice I have left is whether I am prepared to salvage a little honour, a little decency, a little humanity -- or nothing. It seems as if a sacrifice is impossible to avoid, whatever way one looks at it. But at least one has the choice between a wholly futile sacrifice and one that might, in the long run, open up a possibility, however negligible or dubious, of something better, less sordid and more noble, for our children.They live on. We, the fathers,have lost.
- How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.Alone. Alone to the very end. I… every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?
- Happiness? It was one of the saddest nights of my life, an ageless sadness that insinuated itself into the very heart of this new world and deepened slowly into anguish and agony. There she was sleeping, closer to me than anyone had ever been to me, exposed and available, utterly trusting, at my disposal to love, to look at, to touch, to explore, to enter: and yet, in that peaceful deep sleep more remote than any star, ungraspable, forever, apart. I knew her eyes and the inside of her mouth, her nipples in rest and arousal, every limb of her slight smooth body, every individual finger and toe; I could examine if I wished each secret hair. And yet it amounted to nothing, nothing at all. Our bodies had joined and turned and clasped, and shared the spasms of pleasure and of pain. But having touched, we were again separate; and in her sleep, as she smiled, or whimpered, or lay breathing quietly, she was as far from me as if we'd never met. I wanted to cry. But the ache was too deep to be relieved by tears.
- Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption.
- Then, one day, you discover that life itself is slipping past and you’re just a bloody parasite, something white and maggot-like, not really a human being, just a thing, a sweet and ineffectual thing. And even if you try to call for help, they don’t understand you. They don’t even hear you. Or they think it’s just a new craze and start doing their best to humour you
- [7/22, 7:03 AM] Grace Carrier: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
[7/22, 7:03 AM] Grace Carrier: To take no part in the running of the world is to give the power to others [7/22, 7:03 AM] Grace Carrier: Power can be wielded by the righteous as well as the wicked. [7/22, 7:04 AM] Grace Carrier: We all have the capacity to become monsters, given the right circumstances [7/22, 7:04 AM] Grace Carrier: It is easier to turn a blind eye to injustice than to confront it [7/22, 7:04 AM] Grace Carrier: The truth often comes at a high price. [7/22, 7:04 AM] Grace Carrier: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. [7/22, 7:05 AM] Grace Carrier: Silence in the face of injustice is complicity. [7/22, 7:05 AM] Grace Carrier: The greatest threat to freedom is the silence of good people [7/22, 7:05 AM] Grace Carrier: Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. [7/22, 7:05 AM] Grace Carrier: It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not [7/22, 7:05 AM] Grace Carrier: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. [7/22, 7:06 AM] Grace Carrier: Injustice thrives in the darkness, but cannot withstand the light of truth. [7/22, 7:06 AM] Grace Carrier: The only way to combat evil is to shine a light on it. [7/22, 7:06 AM] Grace Carrier: Loyalty to the truth is the highest form of loyalty. [7/22, 7:06 AM] Grace Carrier: The power of the people is greater than the people in power.
- When the law fails to protect the innocent, it becomes the duty of the people to rise up and demand justice.
- Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
- The time for silence is over. The time for action is now.
- greatest weapon against injustice is the courage to speak out.
- accept full responsibility
- page 55
- I have tried to accept that responsibility one owes to one’s society and one’s time
- Page 18
- an apparatus of laws, regulations and bureaucracies” that would develop into “the most elaborate racial edifice the world had ever witnessed
- Page 54
- Instructions have been given to maintain law and order at all costs,
- Page 19
- barely enough for a shake of the head
- Page 9
- they’ve taken it all from me. Nearly everything. Not much left. But they won’t get that. You hear me? If they get that there would have been no sense at all
- Page 13
- in the crowd surrounded and stormed by the police
- Age 41
- of natural causes
- Page 46
