Cry, the Beloved Country

"It’s a novel – I know that was sort of cheating a little bit. It’s one of my favourite books – there are very few books I’ve read more than once but this is one. I told my daughter yesterday that I was going to be talking about this book and she said, “I just finished it on the subway and I was so worried that people would see me crying, because it’s an incredibly moving book.” When I went to college I majored in history but I really kind of minored in agitating. The first big national campaign that I was involved in was getting Brown to divest their investments in South Africa. I missed the [Vietnam] anti-war movement, but for me and for young people who grew up when I did, that was Nelson Mandela, Robben Island. It was the first big national campaign that American students got involved in and of course was ultimately successful. “When I went to college, I majored in history but I really kind of minored in agitating” This book has always had a special place in my heart. It’s incredible to think that this book was written back in the 1940s but it has really stood the test of time, and captures the brutality of life in South Africa and also the incredible complexities of this really extraordinary country. I think it deals with issues of culture and race and rural/urban and generational divides in a way that is still true today. These are still issues that people in South Africa are dealing with and like every great novel it has all the wonderful elements of struggle, tragedy and reconciliation. Even though it’s a very sad book, it’s ultimately a very, very hopeful book. I was actually asking a couple of my friends who are South African where this book is in the current day, and I think people still respect it as an essential novel about how life was. Clearly, the whole theme of this is the struggle in South Africa. You look at the two families that play a central role and the divisions – the generational divisions and the racial divisions – and how these people’s lives, despite the divisions, become entwined. This is a country where people are living side by side – even in a divided country – and dealing with many of the same issues. I just think it’s a very poignant story but of course it is about injustice and the complexity of South Africa today, which is that ending apartheid was the first step on a very long march for true justice and democracy. There is nothing simple in a lot of these countries. You can’t ever solve one problem if there’s another one coming down the road."

"“Cry, the Beloved Country,” by Alan Paton … [affected me] that way."