BRATTLEBORO — Activist and writer Glen Retief believes that homophobia and racism were joint tools that fueled the repressive system of apartheid in South Africa.
The South African author will read from his memoir and lead a workshop on memoir writing as part of Brattleboro's celebration of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month.
Retief's memoir, “The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood” (St. Martin's Press, 2011), describes his experiences growing up white and gay in apartheid South Africa. The book won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for memoir and was selected as a Book of the Year by the Africa Book Club.
Retief will give a free reading from “The Jack Bank” on Friday, June 14, at 7:30 p.m, at the Brattleboro Cheese Shop & Café on 39 Main St.
He will lead a workshop, “Turning Life into Art: The Craft & Healing of Literary Memoir” on Saturday, June 15, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Marlboro College Graduate Center, 28 Vernon St., room 2E.
Retief holds a B.A. in English and African studies from the University of Cape Town, an M.F.A. from the University of Miami, and a Ph.D. in English literature and creative writing from Florida State University. He teaches creative nonfiction writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania.
His short stories have appeared in numerous publications and journals, including The Greensboro Review and Tribune, a South African mass market glossy magazine comparable to Ebony and Essence.
His essay, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager,” appeared in the first-ever anthology of South African lesbian and gay writing, “Defiant Desire” (Routlege, 1995) edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron.
He has been featured on National Public Radio's “Writers on Writing” and on PBS's “Smart Talk” with Mark Wallace.
As an anti-apartheid and LGBT rights activist in the late 1980s and early 90s, he was part of the group that successfully lobbied for sexual orientation to be included in the Constitution of South Africa as a prohibited grounds of discrimination.
Retief has also worked as an instructor of homeless HIV-positive substance abusers, a needle exchange advocate, an English as a Second Language teacher, a teacher of high school students with learning disabilities, and a college professor of English.
He speaks English, Afrikaans, and Spanish, and he can say a few words in Xhosa and Zulu, including ones with some pretty interesting-sounding clicks.
“The Jack Bank” is the literary memoir of a gay white South African, coming of age - and realizing he's attracted to black men - at the end of apartheid in the late 1970s.
Apartheid, which in Afrikaans (one of 11 official languages of South Africa) means “the status of being apart,” was a system of racial segregation enforced through legislation by the National Party governments, who from 1948 to 1994 were the ruling party of South Africa, and under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed, and white supremacy and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained.
As is described on www.glenretief.com, Retief's childhood “was at once recognizably ordinary and brutally unusual. Raised in the middle of a game preserve where his father worked, Retief experienced his warm nuclear family as a preserve of its own, protection against chaotic forces working just outside its borders: a childhood contact who taught Retief how to use police lingo on walkie-talkies was also the leader of a death squad who killed human rights activists, and dumped their bodies in crocodile-infested rivers.”
Part of his unsettling youth was his close proximity to an often threatening natural world.
“I grew up in Kruger National Park, where my father worked as a conservation biologist for the government,” he says. “Impalas kept our lawn short. Once we had to chase a hippo out of the back yard by banging pots and pans. Another time a lion jumped over the neighbor's fence. This was just one memory of crazy and dangerous brushes with African wildlife.”
But it turned out that his brushes with wildlife were not the most hurtful part of his youth. He describes on his website how, in his time at boarding school, the 17-year-old prefects who ruled the dormitories were caught torturing the younger boys. But they didn't stop the hazing. Instead, they invented 'the jack bank,' where underclassman could save beatings safely dispensed when nobody was looking.”
Retief sees larger implications for this metaphor of banking. “You can make a deposit with violence and get interest with more violence,” he says. “But I believe the same is true for peace, kindness, and love. If you deposit these things, they too grow interest and can improve the society around us.”
He writes movingly of the complicated stew of emotions and politics that informed this punitive all-male world, and of how he navigated its shoals, sometimes identifying with his torturers himself even as he began to realize that his adult life and sexuality would be very different than theirs.
His memoir describes the way racism and homophobia worked together to oppress minorities in South Africa.
“I believe that message in my book is not explicit,” he says, “for I contend that the art is best when it is subtle. I came to learn as important what made me not fit in, which is something everyone probably feels at some time or another. Paradoxically, the things that make us feel less than human are what will make us the most human.”
Retief emigrated to the U.S. in 1994 when he was 24.
“I had mixed motives for leaving,” he says. “I wanted to travel and see the world, and I wanted to get away from the chaos of South Africa. I left in the time between when Nelson Mandela was released from jail and the establishment of democratic government. It was not clear what the future held for South Africa.”
Retief now has dual citizenship in South Africa and the United States, where he met his partner, Peterson Toscano, at a Quaker retreat.
“I grew up Catholic, but had conflicts with the church's repressive view of sexuality,” he says. However, when he was 30, Retief found himself missing the spiritual aspect in his life, and became attracted to the Quakers, where the non-hierarchal ceremonies seemed to him more like meditation than rigid dogma.
“Peterson and I had rooms next to each other at a retreat,” he said. “We discovered we had lot of experiences in common, that we liked similar things, and that both of us were committed to progressive politics.” Together since 2008, Retief and Toscano married in a 2012 Quaker ceremony.
Retief's reading and workshop are part of the month-long celebration of LGBTQ pride, held annually in June, memorializing the Stonewall Riots.
In addition to these literary events, Toscano will perform his new theater show, “Jesus Had Two Daddies,” on Saturday, June 15, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hooker-Dunham Theater.
Opening on Gallery Walk night on Friday, June 7 is an exhibit at the Hooker-Dunham Gallery by artists Sadelle Wiltshire and Ann Coakley, certified ZenTangle instructors, along with a number of their students and fellow ZenTangle instructors.
The CineSLAM LGBT Film Festival is Saturday, June 22, followed by the annual Pride Dance at the American Legion.