“This Land South Africa”: Rewriting Time and Space in Postapartheid Poetry and Property

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The widespread concern in recent South African poetry with landscape and the question of what place the poet occupies in that landscape arises less as a response to the turn of the millennium than to the historical end of formal apartheid, but nonetheless marks an epochal shift in sensibility. Whereas much poetry of the 1980s evoked a sense of extreme dislocation in recent time and local space (marked by references to a precarious present of forced removal and migrancy, and unspecified, unsettled futures), some significant recent work has been marked by a desire to relocate the human presence in South Africa in terms of geological time and continental space. This generalization needs to be qualified by reference to racial and political positioning within South Africa, and in this paper I distinguish between the work of committed white writers such as ex-political-prisoner Jeremy Cronin (now Secretary of the South African Communist Party) and Barry Feinberg (now curator of the Mayibuye Centre), and the work of black writers such as Don Mattera, Seitlhamo Motsapi, Lesego Rampolokeng, and Daniel P Kunene. The regrounding of the human presence in South Africa by white writers such as Cronin and Feinberg attempts a radical remapping of South African cultural identity in utopianly unraced terms, while the reclamation of continental African and local South African place names by black writers such as Mattera, Motsapi, Rampolokeng, and Kunene draws attention to the material reality of a postapartheid heterotopia in which South Africa's postmodern landscape is being divided up and sold off in ways that combine a very old-fashioned rhetoric of class and space with a new/old racial coding.