It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping

March 15, 2024
Using her father's life as a point of departure, the South Africa-born author offers heartfelt, emotionally charged reflections on their apartheid-riven homeland. Baker, author of Never Unfriended and Surprised by Motherhood, writes that rage was in her father's DNA. Born into privilege, he descended from English and Dutch Afrikaner pioneers in Pretoria. Spending summers on the ancestral farm in Middelburg, the author was never sure when her father would explode with anger. "I remember growing up like a teenage munitions expert who traveled unpredictable roads," she writes, "never sure when her foot would hit an IED planted by my father....I never could quite pin it down. Our house had holes in the walls. I don't mean metaphorically." The author recounts other bursts of anger via her father's memories of her grandfather--e.g., setting the dogs on baboons or punishing a pair of servants caught stealing horses. The death of her mother, when Baker was 18, shook the family deeply, propelling her to seek higher education in the U.S., as her father had two decades before. The author traveled to Boston for her undergraduate degree, Indiana for law school, and Maryland for work, and she married an American. Throughout, Baker seeks to understand the many sins of both her homeland and her adopted land, and she makes a tender effort to forgive her father. "Looking back, I want to pick up shovels, trowels, spades, brushes, sieves, and buckets, the full archaeologist's toolbox, and hammer at the inside of my mind," she writes. "I don't want to be gentle; I want to excavate my own willful ignorance--terrifying as it emerges--fact by fact, from the sediment inside the deep caves of my mind." A painful, lyrical, and bracing memoir.

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May 27, 2024
Baker (Never Unfriended) sets her painful family history against the backdrop of apartheid in this powerful memoir. Anchoring the narrative in her father’s South African upbringing, she describes how he grew up on a sheep farm in Karoo, where he witnessed racist family members abusing Black farmhands. After he became a doctor, his faith led him to treat Black patients despite a lack of funding and government pressures. Yet he frequently lashed out at his children, and after Baker’s mother died of cancer, she was left at the mercy of his temper, his tempestuous second marriage, and her violent stepbrother. Baker eventually escaped to the U.S., where she attended college and law school, and settled in Washington, D.C.—where the city’s racial stratification opened her eyes to the “willful ignorance” that had insulated her from the struggles of Black South Africans: “ a daughter of White privilege and teenage pain who ran away before she ever clearly saw the world beyond her bedroom window.” Tracing the “apartheid roots” of her father’s family, she concludes by expressing hope for renewal that begins with acknowledging the difficult truths of the past and “the parts of history that put us on the wrong side of the equation.” Poignant and searching, this leaves a mark.