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That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
(WB Yeats, ``Easter 1916'')
The events that inform Bloodlines ± the Boer War and
the early 1990s of a transforming South Africa ± stand
(rather asymmetrically, it is true) on either side of the
famous Easter uprising in Ireland of 1916. But both
Yeats's poem and the history of the Irish struggles are
central to this remarkable novel about the emotional
economies upon which the desire for reconciliation is
built.
The novel's plot is complex, and almost impossible
to render adequately in a review. It pivots around four
women for whom sacrifice threatens to ``make a stone
of the heart''. Firstly, there is Anthea, neophyte
jounalist for the Natal Times whose fiance is killed in
a bomb blast in South Clacton, Natal; and Dora,
mother of Joseph Makken, the man who planted the
bomb. Anthea, in an attempt to make sense of the
senselessness of her fiance 's death, rather blunderingly
seeks to establish connections with Dora, who is
herself emotionally felled by her son's actions and
subsequent imprisonment. Hesistantly, the two women
become engaged in an increasingly mutual and
difficult journey into Dora's past, in which they
discover and rewrite the history of the ``bloodlines''
that connect them and, in so doing, make equally
hesitant and flawed, but nonetheless meaningful
progress towards reconciliation. This process, in turn,
both introduces and is shaped by the story of Dollie, a
Boer war meid, and Kathleen, the Irish nurse who
introduces her story.
Elleke Boehmer. 2000. Bloodlines. Cape Town:
David Philip.
KAREN SCHERZINGER
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
Boehmer draws Irish history into her novel, both as
a direct influence on the lives of the protagonists and,
perhaps more intriguingly, as a counterpoint for the
acts of rage and their consequences which South
Africa's past has elicited. The connection between
South Africa and Ireland ranges from the particular
to the general. The bomb blast that sparks off the
events of the novel is intended to take place at a time
(Easter) and a place (the post office) strongly
reminiscent of Dublin's Easter uprising. The support
of the Irish Republic for the Boers is central, as is the
role of the Irish Brigaders during the Boer War itself.
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