Memoir
Amid the Alien Corn is a vivid, stylishly written memoir that takes its narrator from the bewilderment of childhood and youth towards the unfolding of a mother’s secrets, long suspected from a pervasive sense of something missing at the heart of his family.
The book charts the journey from personal and political disorientation in apartheid Cape Town to professional fulfilment in Britain, where the discovery of an identity framed by the author’s commitment to literary study prompts a quest to explore the relationship between the individual and their times.
To understand the roots of his mother Ruth’s emotional detachment, the writer pursues the truth about a family entwined within the systems of oppression that devastated the lives of Black Africans and European Jews throughout the 20th century.
'I read this memoir over Christmas and could not put it down. History with a capital H is ever present but never undermines what is at heart a family history. What a stunning read...' Jacob Dlamini, author of Native Nostalgia and Professor of History at Princeton University
'Amid the Alien Corn is an engaging and thoughtful memoir of growing up in apartheid South Africa. Its persistent investigations of family silences lead to unexpected and dramatic revelations.' Abdulrazak Gurnah, Winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature, 2021
'Perpetrator, victim: handy dandy, change places, which is the justice, which the thief?
Dennis Walder’s clear-eyed and compelling memoir tells of a boyhood and youth stretched taut between cities, countries and continents that is at the same time a complicated family story divided between Africa and Europe. Though the past may seem ‘faraway’, it is also always ‘here’, haunting the present, palpable in everything that is unsaid and hidden, in identities that switch unexpectedly between historical oppressor and victim. Amid the Alien Corn makes an intensely personal reckoning with some of the major atrocities and reconciliations of the twentieth century as they appear in his complicated family’s life.' Elleke Boehmer FRSL, author of The Shouting in the Dark and Professor of World Literatures in
English, University of Oxford.
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