Elsa Joubert’s Cul-de-sac: A disability politics reflection

Abstract

Elsa Joubert’s 1978 novel Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, translated into English and a number of other languages and adapted into a play and a film, is recognized as one of the 100 best African books of the twentieth century, a landmark in South African writing. The work and its reception have drawn heated criticism around the politics of race, gender, privilege, and voice. Critics have expressed discomfort at the popularity of the book with white readers during apartheid, when other books dealing so clearly with racial oppression and dispossession were vilified and even banned. In 2017, at the age of 95, Joubert published the third volume of her memoirs under the title Spertyd (later translated into English as Cul-de-sac). I suggest that this memoir fits into the categories both of the “Somebody memoir” and the “Some body memoir”, in the typology developed by G. T. Couser. Cul-de-sac is both the memoir of a famous person (a “somebody”) and an account of a life lived in a non-normative body, that of a very old and increasingly frail person. Cul-de-sac deals unflinchingly with highly personal issues to do with experiences related to incarceration and enfeeblement. I suggest that these issues, though personal, are also profoundly political, an issue which has been overlooked in the critical reception of the memoir. Furthermore, Joubert implicitly used the publication of the memoir as the basis for a platform on which to engage politically with South Africa’s leadership regarding the rights of very old people, like herself, during the Covid-19 lockdown. It is inevitable that in South Africa, issues of race and to some extent gender are predominant in discussions of the politics of writing, but to ignore the age and disability politics of Cul-de-sac is to lose an important aspect of the work’s significance.