Kevin Bloom Anatomizes Our Ways of Staying at His Book’s Launch

by Rene on May 21st, 2009

Kevin Bloom’s first book, Ways of Staying, has been hailed as an important read by a number of critics – including, most recently, Andie Miller – and so, the launch in Johannesburg drew a large and feistily intellectual crowd, many of whose members were intimately familiar with the subjects that Bloom grapples with in his book.

Deborah Posel, former director at the Wits WISER institute and one of the guest speakers at the launch, said the book’s underlying narrative draws on the feelings of fear, hope and dread experienced by many South Africans as a kind of low, minatory music in their daily lives.

Bloom gave us an anatomy of the grislier parts of this narrative, describing the shattering acts of violence and brutality experienced by some of the people he writes about. Many of those who had experienced these senseless acts were present in the audience – lending the event an air of catharsis.

The genesis of Bloom’s book was the murder of his cousin in Cape Town in 2006. “That event changed me as a person and as a journalist,” said the author of the brutal double killing of Brett Goldin and Richard Bloom. He had gained a reputation as an incisive writer on South Africa’s current affairs – but his cousin’s death necessitated a new way of thinking and writing.

Bloom, like others, was left with a burning question: “Why do I stay in South Africa, if this violence is so intrinsically part of the fabric of our lives?” He determined to lay bare the reasons and the means. His book is the result.

As many in the audience knew, one of the most powerful reasons to stay is because, in South Africa, there is beauty and there is hope – and it is not a sentimental hope, as Bloom pointed out. That said, he is unsure whether South Africa will be a place for him to stay forever; but – “For now I stay,” he concluded.

Gallery