What Hope Have You! by Elaine Bunbury

What Hope Have Youby Anonymous

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May 03, 2002: I read the novel, What Hope Have You! by Elaine Bunbury because I am attracted to stories about racial injustice. I had no idea what I was in for, though. Growing up in the United States I experienced race riots, interracial relationships, and have often wished I was African American because I am disgusted by the way many white people treat black people. This book opened my eyes to even greater injustices in the world, the history of South Africa. Bunbury has written a brilliant, literary masterpiece; historically revealing and in my mind socially relevant in a world of daily struggles between the races, still. The author's description of the landscape, the language, the emotions of the cast of literally colorful characters in her epic novel will take any reader's breath not only away but suck it out of their body. I will be affected by this reading of Bunbury's novel for some time. The ironies involved in the hate that often fosters man made rules about separating races (Apartheid) and the insulting consequences of in this book's case a white man raping a black woman and the resulting lineage is beautifully portrayed in this magnificent story. The absurdity down the family line, because the origins were carefully hidden (passing for white, in other words)a man in the story is suddenly faced with scandal and the man made laws ultimately rip the family apart: 'Hetty(the man's wife) and the (his)children will now be classified as coloured under the Population Registration Act. They'll have to leave my house!' The reality of the unfolding of the scandal of the woman who'd been raped being a relative smacks the man where he lives and what he'd been about; the laws, the separation. Bunbury wrote this story over twenty years and in a few days I read it; but it'll be years that I will be reliving it in my mind and will probably read it again some day. A treasure and a triumph! Outstanding!