Catherine Taylor is a writer and editor who works in a wide range of nonfiction forms—from documentary and literary journalism to lyric essays, hybrid-genre writing, critical theory, and poetics. She is the author of Apart, a hybrid-genre book of memoir and political history about South Africa (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Giving Birth: A Journey into the World of Mothers and Midwives (Penguin Putnam); her newest work, "Inanimate Subjects," considers attack operations by U.S. Military drones as extensions of traditions in puppetry and performance. With Eula Biss and Stephen Cope, she founded Essay Press, where Renee Gladman is the guest editor this year.
“Apartheid” means “separateness” or “aparthood” in Afrikaans and was the prevailing system of segregation in South Africa and Namibia from 1948-1991. According to this system of social stratification, white citizens had the highest status, followed by Asians (Indians) and Coloureds (mixed-race people), then black Africans. The legacy of apartheid is still very much in effect today.
For precursors to apartheid, see Willem Anker’s brutal novel Red Dog translated by Michiel Heyns. For fiction set during apartheid, see Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. For after apartheid, see 2021 Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut’s The Promise. For a South-African-American novel on contemporary questions of race, see Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose.
Pendulum vs. dizziness
Karla Kelsey in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “this short ‘lyric documentary,’ as Taylor dubs it, defies generic description — moving not seamlessly but seam-fully between prose, poetry, documentary, memoir, biography, archival report, photography exhibit, testimony, theoretical musing, epistolary, flâneur’s diary, and travelogue.”
“Taylor wonders what an adequate white anti-racist response might be. She looks to her mother’s apartheid-era experience for answers, but finds herself on ever more unstable ground. According to Taylor, white South African youth had four possible avenues they might take when they were forced to shed their innocent ignorance of racial violence in South Africa: they could choose “denial or complicity or escape or resistance.” In the very moments when real action can be taken to challenge racial segregation and oppression in Taylor’s narrative, these are the tropes of white privilege that erupt from the text: barely graspable positions that constantly overlap and fold back on one another, so that the escapist is always complicit and the resistor is always in denial.”
Maggie Nelson:
"Catherine Taylor's APART offers an intimate and sweeping look at the legacy of apartheid, while performing an altogether rare balance of 'lyric seduction' against 'the ugliness of corpses.' Taylor refreshingly treats white guilt and the self-conscious recognition of privilege as starting points rather than conclusions, as she plumbs the depths of history, from which, as she reminds us, 'no one is excused.' The result is edifying, original, and critically rigorous—a poetic and political vibration between 'ecstasy, shame, ecstasy, shame.'"
Maggie Nelson in “All That Is the Case: Some Thoughts on Fact in Nonfiction and Documentary Poetry”:
Writing from “fact” means becoming a better vessel to apprehend these states of affairs in all their complexity, and learning how to get that down.
To be honest, I don’t really know what else there is, save imagination, which—although the holy grail for many writers—has never been of particular interest or availability to me. This lack of interest may be a form of self-protection, a case of exaggerating a deficiency into a virtue. Or it may be plain old sanity producing self-limitation in the face of an overwhelming void. I don’t really think so, however. I think of it more as related to a radical trust, that the most seemingly immaterial forces are, in fact, material. “Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!” wrote Emerson. In any event, I haven’t yet tired of fact, in this expansive sense, as a homeland for writing.
Whether I am writing something that could be termed “documentary poetics” or more straightforward nonfiction prose, my interest stays with “fact” over “truth”—two terms which often get treated as synonyms, but which have totally distinct valences, histories, and implications. I never disregard truth (truth as in honesty, not truth as in a universal, absolute, moral, or religious truth). Nor do I deny that there may exist “truths” which are somehow greater than the sum of sublunary facts, or that a piece of art may provide momentary access to them. I’m just saying I don’t go out in pursuit of such a thing. I aim to plumb that which can be sounded, even if it’s a fool’s errand. At the moment—or at least in my last few books—I don’t want to “do” anything to facts, save apprehend, collect, articulate, arrange, and rearrange them. (Of course, this can be quite a lot!)
So, what do you do when you hit one of fact’s many aporias? What do you do when you want to know something, or articulate something, that you simply cannot know? My rule to date—which is, of course, subject to change—has been that when I hit a place like this, I have to make the not-knowing part of the fabric. I mean, if it’s that important to the piece and you can’t figure it out, then you should probably just incorporate the confusion, and trust that the universe is retaining this navel of not-knowing for a reason.