The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs

I was back in a white hospital bed, with a doctor sitting beside me. ‘Try to describe how you feel,’ he said.

‘I feel dislocated,’ I told him. ‘Not part of life.’

‘Whose life?’

‘Mine. Everybody’s. Life.’

And the familiar sensation started up in my belly, the shaking spread into my arms. I covered my face with my hands, but I couldn’t block out what I saw.

 

A year ago Patrick Winter, a young South African, was sent to Namibia to complete his military service and to defend his country against ‘terrorism’. Now he is back, to meet Godfrey, his mother’s freedom-fighter boyfriend, and to witness the country’s first free elections. But Patrick needs to confront and process much more than a country in transition, and in doing so he is forced to revisit his past and to face the pain and the demons that haunt him.

 

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