The Shouting in the Dark begins with an actual door opening into Ella's mother's apartment in the Netherlands, where she had returned after living in apartheid South Africa: ‘The door slams closed and the crash sparks in her memory an echo pattern of noises that has followed her across the day, doors upon doors falling behind her.’ But that door opening might just as well be a metaphorical devise of the story, of the door opening into the consciousness of the protagonist, and guiding us very carefully into the inner spaces of the narrator's mind. It is the end of a journey, which in itself marks the break with her past, and with the turbulent ties of her ambivalent ancestry with the Dutch, the Netherlands, and Europe, as well indeed as a revelation of her uncertain and ambiguous place or status in Africa, and as an African. Ella has just returned from the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs where she has gone to register her bid for Dutch citizenship, only to find out that her own father did not register her name in the Volksregister as a citizen. ‘There is no name, no date, no details’ and she is compelled to leave the Netherlands, and return to her own roots in Durban, South Africa. Devastated by the discovery, Ella returns to her mother's apartment, and takes a full measure of things, and wonders if her father's failure to register her ancestry is an omission or a fact of his despise of his daughter. But we know soon enough that this is merely the opening; a foreground to the story, and that the matter is not quite as simple as that.

In ample and sometimes harrowing detail, Elleke Boehmer stages the life of this young woman, Ella, and makes her carry the burden of a terrible and complicated history of settler colonialism, apartheid, displacement, and of the impact on the most ordinary of lives, of the policies that shaped South African citizenship and nation-hood for generations. Ella is caught in the cobwebs of the uncertainties of the meaning of nation. Is she Dutch, shaped by her own mother's powerful longing for her ancestral home, or is she African, shaped by her own father's powerfully ironic disavowal of his own European past and ancestry? It is complicated.