South African War Poetry of the Twentieth Century: Poetic Bodies Flexing “Muscular Demonstrations”

Abstract

War poetry by South Africans represents the embodiment of angry poetic bodies. These bodies are conduits for Fanonian “muscular demonstrations”. They embody reaction and resistance to world conflicts and colonial oppression of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and carry textual traces of intergenerational memory construction and trauma. The construct of poetic bodies serves as a conceptual framework through which to analyse the war experiences of civilians and soldiers. In this article, the major forms and themes of South African war poetry are discussed as embodiments of these poetic bodies, which consist of language and memory traces within various historical milieus. These contexts include the South African War (1899–1902), the 1906 Zulu rebellion, the First World War (1914–1918), the Second World War (1939–1945), the civil war in the townships (ca 1961–1994), and the Angolan/Namibian Border War (ca 1966–1989).