Mines and Mountains: Mine Dump Aesthetics, Marikana, and Contemporary South African Fiction

Abstract

The mine dump, long a useful metonym for South African writers, has receded from view in "Johannesburg fiction" of recent years. By contrast, in the visual arts, there has been a burgeoning of renewed engagement with mines and mine dumps. Does this tell us something about representation, and the unrepresentable, in these different creative forms? Mine dumps, urban mountains, are related to histories of oppression, to ongoing economic inequality, and to environmental degradation, but they are still visually impressive. For about a decade, South African novelists have tended to avoid this paradox. One might extrapolate such a trend to suggest that, while in the visual arts there is some level of continuity—the continuation of a tradition—when it comes to fiction there has been a rupture, or at least a disruption. Is it that mine dumps are too familiar, that it has become impossible to avoid cliché in literary evocations of them? Or is the rupture to some degree coterminous with the Marikana massacre of 2012? Marikana has been the subject of essays, poems, long form journalism, and nonfiction books, as well as documentary films, music, and theater. But it has not substantially or explicitly found its way into literary fiction. Like the artificial mine-mountains of the reef, Marikana's natural "mountain," Wonderkop, seems to remain out of the immediate purview of contemporary fiction. While Marikana might mark the end of one phase and the beginning of another in South African literary production, it is not (as yet) encompassed by or taken account of in the country's fiction.