Print head: Jacket Notes: Hannah Botsis on writing ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter: A Memoir’
Sub-head: The memoir, blending biography and social history, reflects on her father’s 42-year tenure in a church, highlighting the tension between community care and institutional exclusion.
Quote: I wanted to draw attention to the moral complexity of being part of a church – something often overlooked by Christians.
My father worked in the same church for 42 years in Bellville, in the northern suburbs of Cape Town. This gave me the opportunity to observe a very ordinary South African community from the 1980s to the 2000s. But obviously this was also within the context of South Africa’s particular racialised history.
I wanted to draw attention to the moral complexity of being part of a church – something often overlooked by Christians. There is a tension between a church community’s beautiful ability to construct architectures of care, while at the same time the institution can be painfully exclusionary. I wanted to tell the story of this microcosm of South African life; one that had all the beauty of us as South Africans, but one with all the scars too.
The book is also a love letter to my parents, who taught me that love and critique are not opposites. I think this is a deeply valuable moral posture because being in community does sometimes require being in relationship with people you don’t like, who aren’t like you, who you disagree with, who you find irritating. And in our contemporary cultural moment, characterised by a deep divisiveness, we’ve lost the capacity to do this.
I had a long term desire to write about the community I grew up in. At first I thought this might be an academic project. But when my father retired, I decided to interview him and the manuscript blossomed from that starting point. It became a mixture of memoir, biography and social history. It was fascinating to have my own memories recast in the language of my father. Obviously, there were deviations in our accounts, and the book is my interpretation of his account.
I didn’t intend for this to be a book for religious people, but I did want it to challenge those who feel morally comfortable when they proudly call themselves Christian. So in that sense, the book did become for people of faith.
But I’ve been surprised by how these themes have resonated with the non-religious. I wanted non-religious people to have an insider look at what being part of this kind of community could mean. That we are not all religious wackos.
But I think what it’s also tapped into is the epidemic of loneliness we are facing as a broader society. We are alienated from each other, and the balm for this is supposedly self-care. Another demand being placed on an individual’s shoulders. People are tired. I think people are craving the type of connection that used to be facilitated by community institutions like the church in previous years.
I think the main difficulty was that I wanted to be respectful but not sentimental. I tried to stay close to ordinary moments: family dinners, church gatherings, the slow changes in a neighbourhood. Those details allowed me to explore difficult questions without slipping into accusation or nostalgia.
A Clergyman’s Daughter: A Memoir by Hannah Botsis is published by Modjaji Books
