The Jack Bank
A Memoir of a South African Childhood
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An extraordinary, literary memoir from a gay white South African, coming of age at the end of apartheid in the late 1970s.
Glen Retief's childhood was at once recognizably ordinary--and brutally unusual. Raised in the middle of a game preserve where his father worked, Retief's warm nuclear family was a preserve of its own, against chaotic forces just outside its borders: a childhood friend whose uncle led a death squad, while his cultured grandfather quoted Shakespeare at barbecues and abused Glen's sister in an antique-filled, tobacco-scented living room.
But it was when Retief was sent to boarding school that he was truly exposed to human cruelty and frailty. When the prefects were caught torturing younger boys, they invented "the jack bank," where underclassmen could save beatings, earn interest on their deposits, and draw on them later to atone for their supposed infractions. Retief writes movingly of the complicated emotions and politics in this punitive all-male world, and of how he navigated them, even as he began to realize that his sexuality was different than his peers'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Probing deeply into his personal memories of race, sexuality, and violence, creative writing instructor Retief has written a potent, evocative chronicle of his youth, coming-of-age at the end of apartheid in the 1980s. He looks back at his comfortable idyllic childhood as a white South African in the unspoiled wilderness of Kruger National Park, where his father worked: "Could the Garden of Eden have been so abundant?" Leaving paradise, brutal reality came at age 12 when he was sent to a boarding school and experienced the torture of "jacks," sexually tinged hazings by 17-year-old dormitory prefects swinging cricket bats onto bare buttocks. Recalling the "jack bank" cricket bat strikes deposited in advance of future wrongs Retief reflects: "Put immature adolescents in charge of younger boys' discipline, and the results will tend to be Abu Ghraib, the Milgram and Stanford experiments, Lord of the Flies." Yet when he became a prefect, he found "enormous, surprising pleasure" delivering jacks himself. Because of the jack bank, "Sexuality is something dark and secret, imbued with shame and violence." During university years in Cape Town, he tried to confront his "one continuing dilemma: my erotic attraction to boys." The jack bank abuse remained "life's defining moment" for Retief, aware of its psychological scars as he moved toward adulthood, connected with the gay scene, and headed, eventually, for America.
