Granta 126: do you remember (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing) Paperback – Illustrated, 23 Jan. 2014

Perhaps the most affecting and effective piece of writing in this issue concerns the death of a young man in South Africa in the KwaZulu-Natal province. The young white man was on his way to tend his father's cabbages when he was shot as a result of a land dispute his father was having with some of the native people who lived on his father's land. As the writer Jonny Steinberg finds out, the story is not straightforward. The Zulu people on his land had been refused access to water supplies and restrictions had been made on how many cattle they could keep. Mitchell was a new owner and the hardships he imposed upon the Zulus had made existence untenable for them. In other words he was trying to force them off the land they had lived on for many years. As Steinberg investigates he comes to see there are two sides to this story. Steinberg writes: "When apartheid ended in 1994, some two million black South African labour tenants were living under the proprietorship of 50,000 or so white farmers. What was to become of their relationship now that apartheid was over?" Steinberg's exemplary investigation tells the history of both sides of the dilemma. Olivia Laing's piece co-opts Rimbaud to his imaginary apotheosis in New York via the Wojnarowicz archive at Fales Library, housed inside the Bobst Library in New York. This consists of journals, Audio and photographs, films and a series of objects such as Halloween masks, model guns, toy dinosaurs and armadillos; much of these reliqueries representing and concerned with victims of the AIDs epidemic. Laing writes of the attitudes of politicians, blocking funding and education while public figures called for those with Aids to be tattooed with infection status or quarantined on islands. Among their many actions ACT UP, established in New York in 1987 (standing for Aides Coalition to Unleash Power) "... tackled multiple aspects of the crisis." Such as, Laing tells us, "... protesting the Catholic Church's stand against safe sex education in New York Public Schools, using sit ins to force pharmaceutical companies to make medication affordable and to open clinical trials to drug addicts and women." There are a number of very good short stories in this issue, including a story by the wonderful Lorrie Moore and a piece on Aysèn in Chile, one of the most remote and undisturbed areas of the world. It may well not remain that way as the current Government wants to create five dams and hydroelectric plants, flooding ranching land and homes and requiring 1,600 kilometres of forest to be cleared. The destruction of this beautiful area would be a wholly wicked abomination.