Mark Behr
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Mark Behr is a South African author. He has written two books, both dealing in some way with apartheid and the history of South Africa.
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[edit] Biography
Mark Behr (b. October 19, 1963) is a Tanzanian-born writer who grew up in South Africa. His novels are The Smell of Apples and Embrace. He is currently associate professor of World Literature and Fiction Writing at the College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work is extensively translated and has received awards from the Los Angeles Times, the British Society of Authors and the South African Academy of Sciences and the Arts. He travels regularly between the USA and South Africa.
[edit] Early Life
Behr was born in the district of Oljorro, Arusha, Tanzania, then still Tanganyika. After the Behr farms, Mbuyu Estates, were nationalized during the implementation of President Julius Nyere’s Ujamaa Policy of African Socialism in 1964, the family immigrated to South Africa. Here the family defined themselves as Afrikaners with the Behr children attending Afrikaans language schools and the conservative Dutch Reformed church. Behr’s father became a game ranger in the game parks of KwaZulu-Natal, where Behr spent his early youth. Between ages ten and twelve Behr attended the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir School, a private music academy in the Drakensberg Mountains of KwaZulu-Natal. After matriculation from Port Natal High School, an Afrikaans language school in Durban, he was, like most other young white South African men of his age, conscripted into the South African Defense Force, and he served in the Angolan War, becoming a junior officer in the Marine Corps.
[edit] Academic Study and Political Development
After leaving the South African Defense Force, Behr attended Stellenbosch University in the Western-Cape Province of South Africa. It was during this period (1985-1989) that Behr's creative work was first published –several poems appeared in the university's annual magazine, Die Stellenbosse Student. While a student there, Behr became an agent for the South African apartheid government, which was committed to monitoring the activities of students on university campuses in order to prevent political insurrection. Undergoing a process of political radicalization himself, he later turned double agent and spied on the South African government on behalf of the African National Congress, one of the major anti-apartheid organizations (and, since the 1994 elections, the governing party of the new multiracial democracy). Having graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in English and Politics, Behr proceeded to read for an Honors degree in Politics. After a year with IDASA (the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa) Behr became a Research Fellow and lecturer at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, and began to travel between Europe, South Africa, and the United States. He enrolled at the University of Notre Dame in the US where he studied with Joseph Buttigieg, the translator of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Behr emerged from Notre Dame with Master’s degrees in International Peace Studies (1993), Fiction Writing (1998), and English Literature (2000).
[edit] Writing
Behr’s first published novel, The Smell of Apples (1995), appeared first in Afrikaans in 1993 (as Die Reuk van Appels). The book garnered significant recognition in the form of the M-Net Award, one of South Africa’s most prestigious literary prizes, as well as the Eugene Marais and the CNA Debut Literary Awards in South Africa, and the Betty Trask Award for the best first novel published in the United Kingdom in 1996. The novel was also short-listed for both the Steinbeck and Guardian Literary Awards. In 1997 the novel received the Art Seidenbaum Award from the Los Angeles Times. The attention attracted by the success of this book compelled Behr to speak publicly to his spying. In 1996, at a Cape Town conference on Truth and Reconciliation, he used his podium as keynote speaker to discuss his history in the South African military and his campus spy and double agent status; this confused the perceived integrity and ethos of his first book. In 2000, Behr’s second novel, Embrace, was published. Its mixed reviews may reflect enduring anxieties regarding Behr’s student political activities. Praised by Felice Picano in the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide (July 2001) for its epic quality, universal reach and insistence on complexity it was reviled in The Sunday Times (May 2000) by Tim Trengrove Jones as a “baggy monster of overstated anxiety.” Embrace was short-listed for The Sunday Times Award in South Africa and the Encore Award in the United Kingdom. Behr has also written short stories and essays. The short story “Die Boer en die Swaan” (The Boer and the Swan) appeared in Die Suid-Afrikaan, November 1993. “Cape Town, My Love” appeared in 2006 in Cape Town: A City Imagined, edited by Steven Watson (Penguin). Also in 2006, “Socrates, Miss Celie and Me” was published in Gesprek Sonder Grense: Johan Degenaar Word 80 (Stellenbosch: H&R Publishers). In Spring 2007, the journal The Truth About the Fact published “People Like Us,” which is an extract from a lecture Behr gave at Wilfred Laurier University in Canada in 2003, “A Tale of Two Towers: Language, Terrorism and Another Moment in History.” Behr’s work has, to date, been published in ten languages.
[edit] Thematic Concerns and Intellectual Influences
The theme of identity construction through the impact of language, nationalism, gender, and militarization are consistent in this author’s published works—in this his concerns may be viewed as similar to those of other South African writers of his generation, like Damon Galgut. Biographical experience and Behr’s identification as gay/queer appear to have strongly influenced the content and nature of his work. He has written of the early influence of The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Traces of other influence may be found in the work of South-African poets Breyten Breytenbach and Antjie Krog. Key theoretical influences in Behr's writing may come from selected texts of Antonio Gramsci, Judith Butler and Richard Rorty. The Smell of Apples, set in Cape Town during the 1970s, is the story of eleven-year old Marnus, only son in an elite, privileged, and powerful Afrikaner family. Narrated in the first-person, the child blithely relates his (and other children’s) witnessing of, participation in, and damage from the mechanisms of apartheid, especially its methods of ideological conscription. Interspersed with the boy Marnus’s story are narrative flash forwards to his participation as an adult soldier in the Angolan War. More various in writing style and, in places, more experimental than the first novel, Embrace complicates the themes of The Smell of Apples. In an April 2000 Op-Ed piece for South Africa's Sunday Times, Behr refers to the following quote from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks as motivation for the writing of Embrace as a kind of political inventory of youthful white consciousness: "The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is knowing yourself as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory. It is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” More epic in form, and set mostly in KwaZulu-Natal Embrace relates the formative experiences of an adolescent boy, Karl De Man. Class, gender, race, an increasingly militarized society as well as literary theoretical issues intersect in this text in more challenging and provocative ways than they did in the first novel. Here the De Man family (the name possibly asking to be read in relation to Deconstruction and the life of Paul de Man) is less affluent and powerful than the Erasmus clan and, while Marnus’s sexuality appears to conform to the heteronormative masculinity demanded by apartheid ideology, Karl is gay—this leads to his society’s and his own doubt with regard his political interpellation and to the boy’s destructive repression of his more complex identities. In several places in this work, characters and situations from The Smell of Apples appear, reinforcing Behr's interest in language and intertexuality. The recently published essays, rich in social and political history as well as in biographical detail, also take up Behr’s concerns regarding the relationships between war and violence, physical and ideological conscription, and gender identity.
[edit] External Links
College of Santa Fe [ http://csf.edu// ]
International Peace Research Institute of Oslo [ http://www.prio.no// ]
