Summary
Josie Long presents audio adventures and short documentaries about what’s gone before. A daughter’s decades-long search for her father who went missing as a political prisoner in South Africa, a poem by the German-American poet Lisel Mueller listing the parts that make up our memories, and the writer and comedian Heidi O’Loughlin untangles the stories woven into and around her Polynesian identity.
Nombulelo Booi Featuring Nombulelo Booi and Madeleine Fullard, with translation by Thenjiwe Kona. Produced by Catherine Boulle and Bongani Kona This piece is part of a larger, ongoing documentary project by Catherine and Bongani titled Time, Paper, Bone about the work of the Missing Persons Task Team, and the exhumation of James Booi’s remains. The project won the 2021 Whickers Radio and Audio Funding Award.
Necessities Written by Lisel Mueller Read by Lisel Mueller and Studs Terkel and from a conversation originally broadcast in January 1987. Courtesy of the Studs Terkel Radio Archive
From the South Pacific Written and read by Heidi O’Loughlin
Curatorial team: Alia Cassam and Eleanor McDowall Producer: Andrea Rangecroft Executive Producer: Axel Kacoutié A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.4 | Hello, welcome to the podcast of Shortcuts. |
| 0:07.9 | I'm Josie Long. |
| 0:09.1 | And today's episode is about the past and how it affects the present and the future. |
| 0:14.6 | And I am currently bringing up a three-year-old and she's learning about the past. |
| 0:19.6 | So very often she'll say, a long, long time ago |
| 0:22.6 | when I was a baby and then just invent something that never happened. Or yesterday, when she means |
| 0:28.7 | six months ago. So I'm very much enjoying the fluidity of past as a presence in my life. And the best |
| 0:35.9 | thing about the podcast is this is fully on brand for the podcast |
| 0:39.5 | because you didn't hear the program as it came out on the day it was broadcast. You heard it |
| 0:47.0 | at some point in the future. So greetings from the near or distant past. |
| 1:06.5 | Yeah. the near or distant past. This is Shortcuts, |
| 1:09.6 | Brief Encounters, True Stories, radio adventures and found sound. Today, past tense. |
| 1:20.3 | The careful boundaries we draw and erase, and always around the edges, the opaque wash of blue, concealing the drop-off they have stepped |
| 1:33.1 | into before us, singly, mapless, not looking back. |
| 1:40.3 | I will finally be at peace when he's returned to us. That's when I'll believe that he's really no more, and my soul will be at rest. |
| 1:49.0 | Trying to assimilate into a new culture, I can understand the survival instinct of his father and his grandfather Pepe to behave as white as possible. |
| 1:59.0 | It's what I spent my childhood doing in order to fit in, |
| 2:01.9 | and spent my adulthood trying to unpick. |
| 2:05.2 | To be a bit... South Africa's missing person's task team, team were set up 11 years after the end of apartheid. |
| 2:40.0 | Its aim is to find the remains of people who disappeared under political circumstances between 1960 and 1994. |
| 2:49.0 | Our first story is about the team's ongoing investigation into the case of a political prisoner named James Boy. |
... |
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