Sometimes my body reverberates with all the sensations from within, being bombarded with impressions of people and events. Last week provided ample opportunity to be overwhelmed.

I saw the film Kanarie (Afrikaans for Canary), described as “a coming-of-age musical war drama, set in South Africa in 1985, about a young boy who discovers how through hardship, camaraderie, first love, and the liberating freedom of music, the true self can be discovered”(www.kanariefilm.com ). The film itself is a form of purging that comes from storytelling, exploring the fragility and brutality of masculinities during Apartheid when the church, state and society did their utmost to uphold the ideology of racial superiority and the idea of a civilised, righteous people. What the film also does, is open up a space, especially on social media where people (mostly men – boys in the 1970s and 80s) can share snippets of their experiences during the so-called border war. This was however also a low-scale civil war fought in the townships against our own people, where your terrorist was my freedom fighter.

In the same week, I met Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, professor in psychology and author of “A human being died that night”. In this book she recounts her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the notorious commanding officer of the apartheid death squads. She also served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Human Rights Violations Committee. Now she is chair for Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University (www.sun.ac.za/english/faculty/arts/historical-trauma-transformation/overview) doing research on historical trauma, its expression in memory and its repercussions across generations. It is focused on the South African context, but it also speaks to questions worldwide of the transmission of traumatic memory in the aftermath of historical trauma, dealing with the past, and the possibility of breaking intergenerational cycles of historical trauma.

And this is why my body reverberates – deeply mindful of my own story in the grand narrative of power and oppression of subversive identities, be it political or sexual. And being acutely aware of the thousands of small stories still adrift in a sea of trauma. So – sing canary, sing.