Chapter Red: Re-membering as a Sacred Practice

The title of this chapter re-membering as a sacred practice comes from Barad (2017, p.76). I write a partial telling, a re-membering as a sacred practice because I am not going back in time but embodying and enacting a material reconfiguring of the life I lived as a child and an adult, in South Africa. This chapter is not a story or a sanitised history, but a re-membering of a life as a child of Apartheid, through and beyond that system in ‘post’-Apartheid South Africa, where the post is not past. Entangled in this chapter is how the concepts of child and childhood can be re-imagined through tracing the entanglements of the delicate complexity of a childhood that is not past or gone, and an adulthood that is not fixed or stable. I will use the method of “travel hopping” which can be understood as temporal diffraction (Barad, 2007, 2014, 2017) as opposed to a linear account of my schooling and Apartheid schooling including post-1994 to allow the entanglements to emerge. I think with and through the lines of childhood, colonisation, racism, militarism and Apartheid. The material-discursive entanglements of the human including child and the more-than-human encounters are traced through images, re-memberings, dates and numbers.