Home Away

HOME AWAY: 24 hours, 24 cities, 24 writers

Being South African isn’t as black and white as it used to be. People from all over the world make South Africa their home, while South Africans have more geographic freedom than ever before. This unique and captivating collection is a snapshot of South African writing today: emigrant and immigrant South Africans, living at home and away.

In Home Away, twenty-four chapters by twenty-four writers, set in cities all around the world, make up one global day, a mosaic reflecting on the nature of home. As the provocative stories in this collaboration suggest, often it’s when we are far away from home that we see it most clearly.

Read more and see a gallery of the contributors

Meet a number of the contributors at the launches:
Cape Town: Thursday, 15 April 2010, 5:30 pm, The Book Lounge
Johannesburg: Wednesday, 12 May 2010, 6 pm, Boekehuis

Seventh Street, Melville. The pavement outside Sam’s café. The area no more than about four square metres, like most of the photographs. The concrete bricks are stained with years of gum and spilled drinks, dropped plates of Thai duck salad, cigarette butts, the discarded clippings from the wire-sculptors’ informal factory. And dust, grains of sand, particles of scraped-away paper, dog droppings, leaves, skin and hair, all rendered into a fine, breathable talc. The angle of a protruding column from the wall of the restaurant is scuffed and marked by the daily rubbing of the sculptors’ and vendors’ pants and shoes. The FeastBurger bag is crumpled in its lee. The lid of a Junior CheesyFeast box pokes from the neck of the brown paper parcel. It’s an arm’s length away. Renée’s arm, as it lies, groping in a mixture of surprise, humiliation and jolting pain away from her. In the corner of the picture, her face lies flattened against the concrete bricks, blood trailing from her nose, making satisfactory mud with the pavement’s organic dust. In the other corner, the toe of a man’s worn black leather shoe. A hand-sized tin and wire mantis presses into her head, cutting, its foreleg perilously close to her brain. Renée on the pavement, in Melville, with her first FeastBurger bag, narrowly escaping an unintended death.

From The Beggars' Signwriters, now a collectors' item. Get it now!

The Owl House, Nieu-Bethesda. Even here, even here in the stark isolation of this arid Karoo village, probably three hundred kilometres from the nearest outlet, somebody has imported FeastBurger detritus. It’s a #4-size bag at the knees of a cement-clay pilgrim in a private ecstasy of adoration. The manger must lie to the right, to the East, outside of the picture. This single, rounded, inscrutable sculpture is the focus of the picture. Behind the pilgrim is an obsessive clutter of parts of camels and kings, peacocks, lambs, cats, owls and houses, sheds and shards of coloured glass. Arms, staffs, eyes and hooves. From the crumpled, discoloured tissue near the neck of the Feast Burger bag, the cigarette-end burned through its bottom, one could assume the bag was used to clean out a journeyed car. And the pilgrim looks unaware, over it and away, with half-closed eyes turned toward an East she’ll never reach.

From The Beggars' Signwriters, now a collectors' item. Get it now!