Review: 1947 - When Now Begins
by Elisabeth Åsbrink
Published, 15 October, 2019
On the eve of September 9th, 2019, Swedish Ambassador Ms Cecilia Julin in collaboration with the team of the poetry collective Hear My Voice, hosted a reception at the Swedish residency in honor of the Sweden_South Africa Literary Exchange. The evening featured a short reading, Q&A, and discussion with Swedish journalist and author Elisabeth Åsbrink who read from her historical novel 1947: When Now Begins (published by Scribe, 2016) .
Elisabeth Asbrink puts forth that the year, 1947 is grossly overlooked despite having played a tremendous role in the liberties we enjoy today. She opens her novel " On 1 January 1947" When, "The Times informs the people of Great Britain that they cannot rely on their clocks...Electric clocks are affected by the frequent power cuts. Mechanical ones also need overhauling." While this is both a literal reporting, reflecting her extensive research of the year 1947 as well as a quote from a news-paper extracted from the Times archives, it is also a metaphor for the year itself - Time is erupting. England has abdicated all responsibility for the State of Palestine, while an unprecedented movement of Jewish refugees after the second world war have set sail to what they believe to be their promised land. Meanwhile, Simone De Beavious has begun writing The Second Sex - a defining shift in the feminist agenda. And as Women are fighting to keep their jobs now that the men have returned home from the war, In Paris, Christian Dior has launched his first collection - The New Look, in the spring of 1947 - a flagrantly feminine look, with opulent material, wide skirts, and a slim waist (Supposed to be so thin a man's hands could wrap around it). Asbrink States, that "as we all know, 'that' requires a corset...but the times loved it, the people loved it, everyone loved Dior" His work, she admits, was ultimately a reflection of the time. The sudden push back of old ideals at the brink of a new world.
Over in New York, there is Theolonious Monk, pioneering what would later be known as Bebop. "He creates music that we call Jazz" Says Asbrink," but no one was supposed to dance to it...It was not meant to please anyone. Its nervous, edgy, and it is the foundation of Hip Hop."Monk hardly takes credit nor profits from his enormous contribution to the evolution of music. He is a ripple in an ocean of significant change in the year of 1947. The United States in particular, has made the witch hunt for communist propaganda its primary concern for which Hollywood will suffer the brunt. Herbert Biberman, Director of What would have been a film about Jazz starring Billy holiday called New Orleans, is prevented from airing his movie for fear that its content promotes communist sentiments. Biberman has already "caved in to pressure from the studio, RKO , which thinks there are far too many African Americans in the film. You might even get the impression that they were the ones who invented Jazz."
The playful irony Elisabeth Åsbrink employs as she strings together a series of monumental events in the year 1947 is not without consideration for the moral gravity they hold. The book is densely informative yet comprehensible, and reasonably bias. It is after all a personal story. She admits "Maybe it isn't the year I want to assemble. What I am assembling is myself. It is not time that must be held together, it is I, and the shattered grief that rises and rises." But perhaps its the more subtle, more heroic moments such as Rafael Lemkin's struggle to have genocide recognized as an international crime, or Elenor Rosefelt's declaration of human rights finding legal definition, which tug at the heart strings of the reader.
Asbrink notes that as a writer, she has always been inclined towards the past. Something of a strange Irony being the only child of a man who has suffered great personal affliction and loss on account of the genocide in Europe, who's resolve it was to look forward, move on, leave the tattered tormented past where it belonged. Her father, she says, always looked to the future, while she worked towards unveiling the past, and believes this to be a symbiosis which exists in many families which harbor trauma. "Parents keep quiet, look ahead, but the children pick this up. Take over, take responsibility for it"
Elisabeth Åsbrink concludes her discussion summarising that "we tend to think that history is a line. That over there. they started, and in the front, here we are. But I think that is an illusion. Of course. I think that being in South Africa supports that theory of mine, that history is actually in the same room as the present all the time." A theory beautifully conceived in the historic tapestry of her novel.
Written by Lethokuhle Msimang