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'.
{"itemData":[{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":18.33,"ASIN":"0312590938","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":12.55,"ASIN":"0307238024","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":25.8,"ASIN":"0870138804","isPreorder":0}],"shippingId":"0312590938::KAK4jQTZlKfgwUlARqStbMRJg4tBnHJ3rkkFeFBZ93aECXUZeK%2BY9hoK0D3xoMAWPfOsBYm%2Bvn3rkkfESL4duDyiQRl5AdDDtiQzzwH45TcPhPR52WpJaQ%3D%3D,0307238024::g9gGh6NPun2gyM4g%2BfsLQDNzctj9jDe5kvWFxZ9aBN%2FBPpptNAY%2FtNR%2BRvXOZQiXhd0mmhtyg%2Bo4lHq5UILO0lCdsTolCSv7JY4S6vuT38%2BYALv%2FXvwgAQ%3D%3D,0870138804::93UVNADIO%2Bl3SYQidPOf2tq2gLIiN7iyKLLN4jCjUeFaz6Jccd7bZpOrjGm%2BW5U5S1aOyzjaJ3zhn8LfZHA30P5V3SdIyi4omG7iTs4ooqSeRhSDhG5w%2BA%3D%3D","sprites":{"addToWishlist":["wl_one","wl_two","wl_three"],"addToCart":["s_addToCart","s_addBothToCart","s_add3ToCart"],"preorder":["s_preorderThis","s_preorderBoth","s_preorderAll3"]},"currenyCode":"USD","shippingDetails":{"xz":"same","yz":"same","xy":"same","xyz":"same"},"tags":["x","y","z"],"strings":{"addToWishlist":["add to wishlist","Add both to Wish List","Add all three to Wish List"],"addToCart":["Add to Cart","Add both to Cart","Add all three to Cart"],"showDetailsDefault":"Show availability and shipping details","shippingError":"An error occurred, please try again","hideDetailsDefault":"Hide availability and shipping details","priceLabel":["Price:","Price for both:","Price for all three:"],"preorder":["Pre-order this item","Pre-order both items","Pre-order all three items"]}}
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. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
"If it only dealt with his growing up against the harrowing backdrop of apartheid in a South African military boarding school trained to groom privileged white boys like him into violent oppressors — “jacks” are beatings — then this would be a riveting memoir; the fact that Retief was also coming of age as a gay man makes it essential reading."--Advocate
"Probing deeply into his personal memories of race, sexuality, and violence, creative writing instructor Retief has written a potent, evocative chronicle of his youth."--Publishers Weekly
"Eloquent...readers everywhere will be caught by the searing detail about family, friendship, sex and love."--Booklist
"Visceral and emotionally complex--an impressive first book."--Kirkus Reviews
"Retief has a subtle, skillful style."--Library Journal
“A remarkable memoir with the deeply resonant literary power of the finest fiction. The Jack Bank is an important book by a supremely gifted writer.”—Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain
“This moving book explores the emotions of exile as few stories about leaving home do. A passionate writer, Retief turns his tale from attachment to detachment, from letting go to letting be.”—Thomas Larson, author of The Saddest Music Ever Written
“One of those books that you never forget and never stop talking about. Retief belongs in the pantheon of white African writers Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Coetzee, and Gordimer.”—Bob Shacochis, National Book Award-winning author of The Immaculate Invasion
“Glen Retief’s Jack Bank is a transgressive, harrowing and illuminating work of literary art. In a language marked by a brutal childhood in the last years of the apartheid regime, and with uncommon wisdom, Retief’s epiphanic narrative draws us into regions of cultural importance beyond the scope of traditional memoir. Thus, he changes what we imagine this genre to be, allowing it to become something truer.”—Carolyn Forché, author of The Country Between Us
"This is one of the best memoirs I've read in years, difficult to put down, riveting... Unforgettable, lyrical and beautifully written... I'll be shocked if The Jack Bank is not hailed as one of the best books of the year."—Steve Yarbrough, author of Safe from the Neighbors
Glen Retief is a South African memoirist and fiction writer. His first book, The Jack Bank, was described by Pulitzer Prize Winner Robert Olen Butler as "an important book by a supremely gifted writer."
Glen Retief's personal essay, "The Jack Bank" appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review. Before that, his personal essay/memoir "Saudade" appeared in New Contrast, South Africa's premier literary journal. His personal essay "The Chameleon's Home Country" won the AWP Intro Journal Award for Creative Nonfiction and appeared in Puerto del Sol. He has also published personal essays in Fugue and The Massachusetts Review.
Glen's short stories have appeared in numerous publications and journals, including The Greensboro Review, New Contrast, The James White Review, donga, Mangrove and Tribute, a South African mass market glossy magazine roughly equivalent to Ebony or Essence.
Glen grew up in a South African game park during the apartheid era, but emigrated to the USA in 1994. His essay, "Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager," appeared in the first-ever anthology of South African lesbian and gay writing, entitled Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron. He now teaches creative nonfiction at Susquehanna University.
Occasionally Glen publishes newspaper columns and op-ed pieces in, among others, The Harrisburg Patriot-News, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,The Cape Times, The Star (Johannesburg), The Tallahassee Democrat, and the U.S. online magazine InsideHigherEd.com. His literary criticism has appeared in Research in African Literatures, English Studies in Africa, and Conradiana.
Glen holds a B.A. in English and African Studies from the University of Cape Town, an MFA from the University of Miami, and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Florida State University. He has held numerous fellowships and awards, including a James Michener Writing Fellowship and Florida State University Fellowship--that university's most prestigious award for graduate students.
He loves to hike, canoe, and go camping in the woods. Before landing in academia, he worked as an instructor of homeless HIV-positive substance abusers, a needle exchange advocate, an English Second Language teacher, a teacher of high school students with learning disabilities, and a college professor of English. He has lived in Cape Town, South Africa; New York, New York; Tallahassee, Florida; Miami, Florida; London, England; Madrid, Spain; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Richmond, Kentucky. 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.
He lives in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, with his partner, Peterson Toscano.
The importance of this work is summed up in Retief's final sentence: If no one is ever willing to break the protective silence of what goes on in individual lives, how will we ever learn from each other? (Retief, 270.)
The story of growing up on a game reserve in South Africa would be enough to enthrall readers, but Retief goes further. Through stories of boarding school, activist work, and the turbulence of tribal wars, Mr. Retief weaves a tale that is at once incredible and approachable. The timeline progresses at a pace that keeps the reader engaged and covers the details that create a rich array of Mr. Retief's early life.
Most impressive is Mr. Retief's command of language. Retief's sublime prose creates pictures in the mind and has a texture that cradles the reader. His word choice is near perfection; I found myself wanting to read every word.
Mixed with the fine writing style is vocabulary from Mr. Retief's life in South Africa. This is not, as one might think, distracting. Mr. Retief aptly creates a context for the vocabulary used; the reader need not struggle for understanding. In addition, Mr. Retief has taken the time to provide a thorough glossary.
The Jack Bank should become a required text for understanding the intersections of privilege, for a fine example of memoir, for a depiction of the damage violence can cause, and for understanding how we move forward through those things that threaten to destroy our world.
Memoirs are hot right now as they have been for the part few years. They flood the market. Sometimes it seems like every person who grew up in somewhat unique circumstances is eager to capitalize on this trend. But often those books are nothing more than a relating of events. The reader takes nothing away. Reading them is like eating a rice cake.
The Jack Bank is different. Glen Retief offers a full-course meal of stories, lessons, loves and fears that any reader can learn from even if they didn't begin life in Kruger National Park. Yes, Retief's story is unique. But he frames his journey in the context of a movement, a country, a growing sense of humanity's capabilities, and a need to understand what any one person can and should do in this life.
Retief's intelligence is both subtle and obvious in the way it drives the reader through the narrative. The stories of his life are littered with honest analysis and critiqued in a way that makes the work thought-provoking without hitting you over the head with a direct message. Initially, I was disappointed at the end of the book, because I wasn't sure if I could put my finger on exactly what Retief wants the reader to get out of reading it. When I recommend it and people ask "what's the book about?" I'm still sure how to answer. In the days since I finished, I can't stop thinking about it. My brain is still cooking. I keep drawing more and more conclusions from what I've read. And I'm sure my ideas will keep changing as time progresses. This is exactly what a book should do.
Glen Retief brings the reader into his childhood and early adult years with this memoir that is powerful, heartwarming, tragic and hopeful. It tells the story of a boy isolated from so many things in the world who, oftentimes unwillingly, faces the hard realities of life. It tells of a young man who has to face himself and come to terms with who he is.
This book will touch your heart and will be one that you will remember after other stories fade from memory.
