Achmat Dangor Research Articles

Inequality, legitimacy and disidentification: From South African to global modernism

AbstractEntrenched inequality within South African society has led to a notable focus within literary criticism on the subject of legitimacy. The perennial question of who has access to narrative representation and how this authority is wielded has informed literary production itself—with some writers, invariably emerging from the elite, attempting to circumvent or undermine the assumed claims of legitimacy which attend the novel. This article discusses how a particular modernist form, narratorial disidentification, coheres around this preoccupation with inequality and legitimacy, overturning idealist accounts of moral agency in history through an emphasis on the determination of the material environment. Narratorial disidentification subverts the normative structure of the novel, assuming that the legitimate subject of society is not narratable within the novel form. Drawing on the work of Warwick Research Collective (WReC), in particular their expanded sense of modernism, this article argues that experiences of social bifurcation in semi‐peripheral locations are translated into this form of narrative coldness which seeks to undermine readerly identification and emphasize externality. It indicates how Camus'sThe Strangercan be productively re‐read by considering the employment of this form by a number of South African novelists—from Nadine Gordimer'sThe Late Bourgeois Worldunder apartheid, to postapartheid with Zoë Wicomb'sPlaying in The Lightand Achmat Dangor'sBitter Fruit. This allows not only for formal continuities across apartheid‐postapartheid to be historicized, but offers a comparative lens for approaching novelistic form within global contexts of inequality.

Lydia’s silence: Representation of trauma from an ex-centric position in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

South Africa, a place long caught in the crosshairs of hegemonic violence and racism, provides a fitting case study for the imbalance and marginalization of the traumatized individuals who lived through the fascist apartheid regime. Achmat Dangor’s celebrated novel Bitter Fruit (2001) is a tragic story of the coloured family of Silas Ali set during 1998; when Nelson Mandela’s presidency was gaining momentum in South Africa. It was a period when the violent and discriminatory apartheid regime was coming to an end and a fledgling democracy was still testing its wings in South Africa. The narrative of Bitter Fruit is centred around the silenced memory of Lydia’s rape, Silas’s wife, by a white security policeman called Francois du Boise. The novel begins with Lydia’s suppressed traumatic past erupting into the post-apartheid present when Silas accidentally encounters his wife’s rapist at a mall in Johannesburg thereby bringing back the traumatic memories of the past. Nineteen-year-old Mikey Ali, who is a child conceived in shame and terror, is the figurative ‘bitter fruit’ in the novel born of miscegenation and apartheid abuse. Lydia’s trauma haunts the family in complex ways ultimately leading to the disintegration of familial bonds. These personal experiences of trauma take place against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a famous but controversial reparative model of justice. The proposed research article aims to understand trauma from the ex-centric position of a coloured woman who refuses to allow her personal experiences of trauma to be undermined and defined as merely wartime ‘collateral damage’. Lydia resists the reductionist approach that the members of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had adopted while dealing with cases related to violence and human rights abuses. In the beginning, dialogue and discourses on trauma centred mainly around extremely unusual events but now trauma theories have infiltrated co

The 'Cockroach' Waste and Wasted Life in World Literatures in English

In this essay I intend to pursue a comparative reading of three postcolonial texts – in their intertextual and counter-canonical relationship with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) – that deal with the ethics, but also the aesthetics, of the relationship between humans and animals. By doing so, and with the help of the Kafkian critical apparatuses, particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s critical contribution (1986), which will be the core of this study, I will also examine the nexus between literature and the environment, with particular emphasis on waste, also taking into consideration the paradigms of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) and of écart (Jullien 2012). Kafka’s Curse (1997), by South African writer Achmat Dangor, Cockroach (2008) by Canadian-Lebanese Rawi Hage, and Blackass (2015) by Nigerian Igoni Barrett will be here analysed and scrutinised.

City Profile: Cape Town, South Africa

city profile Cape Town, South Africa by SarahBelle Selig THE WIND KEEPS THE CITYinmotion. The pine trees grow sideways away from the peaks, bowed seaward by the southeasterly. It snaps you to attention, pushes you onward, opens your mind. If it’s not the wind, it’s the brandy or good Shiraz. Perched on barstools, the people seem to vibrate. The clouds pour over the mountains thick as cream and then shyly roll into themselves, the city a stovetop too hot to touch. The whole place has a sense of sway. On pleasant afternoons, the twentysomethings run trails; in the evening they drink sundowners on Clifton Beach or in Church Street’s art galleries; by midnight they flock to Long Street bars and smoke in alleyways with dilated pupils. The port is restless, too, boats ushered in and departing like visiting bees. It’s not uncommon to have three friends emigrate in a month, and three others return. The European swallows and vaalie tourists from Johannesburg gather in summer, gone again before the end of lychee season. Protest , queer, and coffee cultures keep the city buzzed, change its aesthetics overnight. The literary world is solid ground, a way to orient oneself in the din. After less than eighteen months, I know most publishers, writers, and critics by name and count many of them as friends. I can tell you how they prefer their tea, the marathons they’ve run, the names of their ex-husbands and children. They greet me barefoot at the door. Many of us mourned Elsa Joubert and Achmat Dangor as fans, yes, but as family, too. Clarke’s Bookshop is a testament to that intimacy, an indie that exclusively sells local authors—and yet, somehow, thrives. My bookish colleagues have always lived here and always will, because this country is a fruitful milieu for storytellers. Each day spent out is a series of inimitable episodes. Sitting downtown, one could hear isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, or German while eating a miscellany of “Tex-Mex,” ramen, focaccia, schnitzel, bobotie, boerewors. Cape Town is nonbinary, microcosmic. Eachneighborhoodisaplanetinorbitaround Table Mountain, our sun. Sea Point is white: the apartments, the restaurant chairs, the cappuccino froth, the wave caps, the people. In Woodstock, the streets bleed with color. The landscape looks different from Blouberg or Camps Bay; we each see a different city. And if one considers its surrounds—the bohemia of Scarborough and wealth of Llandudno, the horses of Constantia and fish of Kalk Bay, the cinderblock of Mitchell’s Plain and vineyards of Stellenbosch, the corrugated iron of Khayelitsha and dunes of Muizenberg, the Afrikaaner suburbs to the north—the solar system expands still. These orbits do not intersect but watch each other from behind Vibracrete walls, moving in parallel through space and time but separate. Proteas, the country’s national flower, rely on wildfires to propagate. As the soft green of fresh growth begins, the petrified proteas remain, otherworldly, like spray-painted metal. They are scars on the hill of the country ’s past, proof of a former life and the great fire that engulfed it. Same too, in South Africa, a country born of sun and soil and salt and rebirthed of fire and endurance and time. The saplings are still young and vulnerable to those who would prey on them with greedy hands, yet they persist, lay down roots, demand sunlight. South Africa is a young country with old country blues. Here, poverty and privilege dance an eternal sokkie; one knocks on the gate of the other. Apartheid and democracy remain at twenty paces. Muggings, corruption , and racial partitions are as indigenous as its spekboom bushes, hadeda birds, and the Southern Cross constellation on the horizon. As an expat, I am as alien to this place as the eucalyptus trees, but like them—despite two wrong hemispheres and 7,901 miles between myself and my childhood bed—I am blood in its veins. SarahBelle Selig is a freelance writer living in Cape Town and a first-year in the MFA in creative writing program at University of Cape Town. She freelances for Catalyst Press, an independent publisher out of California, and is the publicity writer for the South...

Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works from the Holocaust to Postmodernism ed. by Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber

Reviewed by: Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works from the Holocaust to Postmodernism ed. by Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber Abigail Gillman Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber, eds., Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works fr om the Holocaust to Postmodernism. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 231 pp. Kafka After Kafka contains eleven remarkably productive and thoughtful essays by a mix of well-known and younger Kafka scholars. The introduction opens by cataloguing the global artistic reception of Kafka, from the Japanese Kōbō Abe, to South Africa's Achmat Dangor, to dramatic works by Alan Bennett (Kafka's Dick) and Sally Clark (The Trial of Judith K.). The editors claim that much recent art inspired by Kafka is about "violence and humiliation" at the expense of the "modest, elegant, playful, ironic Kafka of real life" (3). Not so in these pages, where the "dialogical engagement" promised in the title prevails. The chapters open up fruitful new connections and perspectives, which yield original interpretations of works we thought we already knew. The volume began as a conference at Ben-Gurion University, and the section devoted to "Kafka in the Israeli Cultural Space"—an exciting new avenue of Kafka research—is a highlight. Like all the excellent volumes in this Camden House series, the book is carefully researched and well ommitted, with detailed footnotes and an index. A strength of the collection is the authors' recounting of postwar cultural and intellectual history. Caroline Jessen's essay on Werner Kraft's 1968 Franz Kafka: Durchdringung und Geheimnis recounts the career of this German Jewish man of letters. Like Scholem and Benjamin (whom he knew), Kraft viewed Kafka as a writer of parables, and so he sought to "wrest Kafka away from literature." Jessen calls the book "an itinerary of reading" (19) that takes the form of "interweaving of literary text and commentary" (20)—a style evocative of rabbinical writing but also of great works of retrieval motivated by loss, such as Benjamin's Passagenwerk. Amir Engel analyzes Hannah Arendt's lesser-known Kafka essay ("Franz Kafka: A Revaluation," in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954)—one of the first she published in German after World War II. Arendt finds in Kafka a source of optimism: Even as The Trial and The Castle depict totalitarian societies, worlds of "made-up necessity," the two protagonists are "truth-tellers," who resist simply by asserting their humanity. [End Page 133] Two chapters make critical contributions to Kafka's contemporary reception in Israel. As an Israeli Arab writer, journalist, and television writer who writes in Hebrew (now living in the United States), Sayed Kashua is the quintessential insider/outsider. As Iris Bruce demonstrates, Kashua incorporates many of Kafka's themes, both in the novel Second Person Singular (the basis of the film A Borrowed Identity) and in "Herzl Disappears at Midnight," which features an Arab-Israeli, Gregor Samsa. Bruce proposes, "Kashua's postmodern metamorphoses are fluid, predictable, humorous, and ultimately have a didactic function" (126). Mark H. Gelber offers a new perspective on the trial to determine the fate of newly discovered Max Brod's Nachlass. Moving beyond the question of whether the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to award the collection to the Israeli National Library is just, Gelber wonders whether there is also "poetic justice" in retaining Kafka's manuscripts in the Jewish State rather than in Marbach. The question becomes an occasion to reassess Kafka's Zionism or, more exactly, the numerous aspects of Zionism with which Kafka did connect. Two chapters break new ground by opening up Kafka's influence on lyric poetry. Poet Tali Latowicki examines the Kafkan sensibilities of two challenging Hebrew poets, the modernist Ya'akov Steinberg and the postmodern Hezy Leskly, neither of whom is well known in translation. In this series of powerful close readings, Latowicki finds that the three writers "share the same suspicion toward 'natural' symbolic expression. They also share the same wish [ … ] to create an antilanguage, a language that is united with the concrete. As part of this utopian project, the writer himself must undergo a metamorphosis of some sort. He has to die in...

City Profile: Cape Town, South Africa

city profile Cape Town, South Africa by SarahBelle Selig THE WIND KEEPS THE CITYinmotion. The pine trees grow sideways away from the peaks, bowed seaward by the southeasterly. It snaps you to attention, pushes you onward, opens your mind. If it’s not the wind, it’s the brandy or good Shiraz. Perched on barstools, the people seem to vibrate. The clouds pour over the mountains thick as cream and then shyly roll into themselves, the city a stovetop too hot to touch. The whole place has a sense of sway. On pleasant afternoons, the twentysomethings run trails; in the evening they drink sundowners on Clifton Beach or in Church Street’s art galleries; by midnight they flock to Long Street bars and smoke in alleyways with dilated pupils. The port is restless, too, boats ushered in and departing like visiting bees. It’s not uncommon to have three friends emigrate in a month, and three others return. The European swallows and vaalie tourists from Johannesburg gather in summer, gone again before the end of lychee season. Protest , queer, and coffee cultures keep the city buzzed, change its aesthetics overnight. The literary world is solid ground, a way to orient oneself in the din. After less than eighteen months, I know most publishers, writers, and critics by name and count many of them as friends. I can tell you how they prefer their tea, the marathons they’ve run, the names of their ex-husbands and children. They greet me barefoot at the door. Many of us mourned Elsa Joubert and Achmat Dangor as fans, yes, but as family, too. Clarke’s Bookshop is a testament to that intimacy, an indie that exclusively sells local authors—and yet, somehow, thrives. My bookish colleagues have always lived here and always will, because this country is a fruitful milieu for storytellers. Each day spent out is a series of inimitable episodes. Sitting downtown, one could hear isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, or German while eating a miscellany of “Tex-Mex,” ramen, focaccia, schnitzel, bobotie, boerewors. Cape Town is nonbinary, microcosmic. Eachneighborhoodisaplanetinorbitaround Table Mountain, our sun. Sea Point is white: the apartments, the restaurant chairs, the cappuccino froth, the wave caps, the people. In Woodstock, the streets bleed with color. The landscape looks different from Blouberg or Camps Bay; we each see a different city. And if one considers its surrounds—the bohemia of Scarborough and wealth of Llandudno, the horses of Constantia and fish of Kalk Bay, the cinderblock of Mitchell’s Plain and vineyards of Stellenbosch, the corrugated iron of Khayelitsha and dunes of Muizenberg, the Afrikaaner suburbs to the north—the solar system expands still. These orbits do not intersect but watch each other from behind Vibracrete walls, moving in parallel through space and time but separate. Proteas, the country’s national flower, rely on wildfires to propagate. As the soft green of fresh growth begins, the petrified proteas remain, otherworldly, like spray-painted metal. They are scars on the hill of the country ’s past, proof of a former life and the great fire that engulfed it. Same too, in South Africa, a country born of sun and soil and salt and rebirthed of fire and endurance and time. The saplings are still young and vulnerable to those who would prey on them with greedy hands, yet they persist, lay down roots, demand sunlight. South Africa is a young country with old country blues. Here, poverty and privilege dance an eternal sokkie; one knocks on the gate of the other. Apartheid and democracy remain at twenty paces. Muggings, corruption , and racial partitions are as indigenous as its spekboom bushes, hadeda birds, and the Southern Cross constellation on the horizon. As an expat, I am as alien to this place as the eucalyptus trees, but like them—despite two wrong hemispheres and 7,901 miles between myself and my childhood bed—I am blood in its veins. SarahBelle Selig is a freelance writer living in Cape Town and a first-year in the MFA in creative writing program at University of Cape Town. She freelances for Catalyst Press, an independent publisher out of California, and is the publicity writer for the South...

Achmat Dangor (1948-2020) and M.G. Vassanji (1950-): The Reception of Two Afrindian Voices in Spain

Dangor (Johannesburg, 1948-2020) and Vassanji (Nairobi, b1950) are two contemporary Indian-African (“Afrindian”) diasporic writers who share a hybrid combination of Indianness and Africanness. Both writers have been translated into Spanish and, in the case of Vassanji, Catalan. The number of translations is rich enough to establish many description-based contrasts, and the proposal of future guidelines for translating Afrindian writers. The description takes into account the powerful autobiographical overtones typical of African writing, and describes how they have been made available to Spanish readers. A representative sample of exoticizing textual units from the original texts will be compared with their translation solutions in order to explore if exoticizing is the right method for this kind of postcolonial African Indian literature. The results indicate that exoticizing has been clearly favoured by the translators

‘It may have seemed personal but it wasn’t’: The Person(al) as Nation(al) in Post-Apartheid Literary Representations of Retribution

Crime fiction has experienced a boom in popularity in South Africa in recent years. While some critics argue over the high- or lowbrow status of the genre, a more fruitful approach may be to consider how fiction about crime addresses particular themes in order to negotiate contested ideas of nation-ness. This article will first assess how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the osmosis between creative non-fiction and crime fiction have laid the foundations for a discourse whereby personal narratives of justice and victimhood are transposed to a level of national significance. Narratives of revenge are a key route by which authors of crime fiction tackle a sense of unfulfilled justice. Violent crimes in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Deon Meyer’s Devil’s Peak are narrated from differing perspectives, portrayed variously as acts of disproportionate revenge or violently just retribution. In these novels, the characters impart wider significance to their own violence and victimhood, tying themselves to the failures of the TRC and the new nation’s supposed inability to deliver justice. In Bitter Fruit, Disgrace, and Margie Oford’s Daddy’s Girl, sexual violence is portrayed as a weapon to right historic grievances. Contemporary crime fiction both reinforces and challenges popular misconceptions about rape, encouraging audiences to reassess notions regarding the post-colonial state. With familial metaphors for the nation prevalent in post-apartheid South Africa, narratives of intra-familial sexual violence highlight issues surrounding inter-generational responsibility and the recurrence of a violent past.

Winnie Mandela: Homophobia and Dystopia in One of Achmat Dangor’s Forgotten Short Stories

This article focuses on a transition-era short story by Achmat Dangor, “Mama & Kid Freedom” (1995, Index on Censorship 24 [3]: 108–13), which has thus far been wholly overlooked by literary scholars. The story depicts a political dystopia that is characterised by assassinations, arbitrary violence, and the mass incarceration of those deemed to be homosexual. There are also clear overlaps between the eponymous character Mama and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The story reproduces the binary tropes that surround Madikizela-Mandela and her then estranged husband, Nelson Mandela: whereas he is cast as the hero of the narrative of nation-building, she is cast as its villain. In this article, I argue that Dangor weaves a story that pulls together two particularly salient transition-era political discourses: Madikizela-Mandela as a homophobic and violent woman, and sexual rights as a bellwether of the country’s project of democratic modernity. The story evidences a homonationalist logic in which the recognition or non-recognition of sexual rights comes to be read as the axis on which post- apartheid democracy and human rights depend.

Cavafy, Vos, Dangor: A belated reply to Phil van Schalkwyk

The influence of the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantin Cavafy on South African literature in English has received some attention, but his impact on Afrikaans letters merits further investigation. The present article partly fills that gap by examining a small body of poetry and fiction by Cas Vos and Achmat Dangor. It draws on an article by Phil van Schalkwyk to show what it might mean to write in the manner of Cavafy. Thereafter, it discusses Vos’s translations into Standard Afrikaans within his context. Achmat Dangor wrote his Cavafian poetry in a Vernacular Afrikaans. The article considers how writers and poets such as Mark Twain, David Dabydeen, Richard Rive and Adam Small have responded to the challenges and implications of writing in non-standard varieties of English and Afrikaans. Because irony and parody characterise Dangor’s initial debt to Cavafy, this piece also considers these devices. It then moves to a detailed analysis of the relevant poems by Dangor, including comparisons with the poems by Cavafy they evoke, and then to work by Dangor on Cavafy in Standard English in which he reflects on why Cavafy has influenced him. It argues that Dangor discarded a literary vernacular medium for Standard English because of the former’s implicit distinction between ‘ordinary’ (inarticulate, authentic) and ‘extra-ordinary’ (articulate, unauthentic) patois speakers. It concludes that Dangor’s switch to Standard English may have resolved a personal dilemma, but leaves unanswered many questions about the literary use of a patois.

Child and youth protagonists in Habila’s Measuring Time and Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

Helon Habila’s Measuring Time and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit deploy child and youth protagonists to offer nuanced perspectives on contemporary nationhood in Nigeria and South Africa respectively, displacing the adult, and mostly male viewpoints that have dominated novelistic portrayals of postcolonial nationhood for decades. These protagonists are portrayed symbolically in the context of the biological family, which can be read in allegorical and metonymic ways to represent the nation as a social unit. This article explores the portrayal of these protagonists and their families for the ways in which they may reflect national anxieties in general, and the problems of recent socio-political transition in particular. It also highlights how the breakdown of the family, as well as the different pathways undertaken by characters may represent simultaneously dystopian and auspicious futures for Nigeria and South Africa.

Multiple Twilights: Narrating Transition in Achmat Dangor’s <i>Bitter Fruit</i>

This article explores the thematisation of contemporary socio-political transition in South Africa in Achmat Dangor’s award-winning novel, Bitter Fruit (2001). I argue that the novel can be read as a palimpsest of overlapping twilights and liminal states that simultaneously operate as tropes of the country’s transition. In this regard, I interrogate Dangor’s use of the in-between and/or fluid subject positions of characters – in terms of race, youthfulness and sexual orientation – to problematise post-TRC social affiliation in metonymic ways. I also demonstrate how Dangor’s portrayal of the figure of the family, its disintegration and the transformation of individual members (especially of the main protagonists – Michael, Silas and Lydia) can be read in allegorical ways for the changes and possibilities of South Africa’s post-1994 transition. Keywords : South Africa post-TRC transition, palimpsest, Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit

The classics, African literature, and the critics

Faced with the criticism that myth and epic poetry have no place in contemporary South African literature departments, there is no point in defending the material on the grounds of intrinsic worth. No text can claim this privilege. Instead, students and lecturers alike may find value and relevance for these works if they explore a range of aesthetic, conceptual, cultural, and political issues that close readings may precipitate. After analysing a fictional demonstration of how not to teach The Odyssey, the article surveys a range of writers and cultural critics who identify as African or African-American, and whose work comments directly and indirectly on the history of the meaning, purpose and value of selected ancient and classical Greek texts. This spectrum stretches from defensive cultural nationalism to an open-ended combination of the cosmopolitan and the vernacular. The article concludes that a combination of resistance and appropriation is the best way to make new and local these canonical texts.Keywords: Homer, African literature, Hellenism, Postcolonial criticism, Achmat Dangor, Constantin Cavafy

Risking intimacy in contemporary South African fiction

ABSTRACTIntimacy remains under-theorised in South African fiction. This essay therefore focuses on selected works which all have in common a re-imagining of risk and intimacy in post-apartheid fiction: Achmat Dangor’s Strange Pilgrimages: Short Stories (2013), Makhosazana Xaba’s Running and Other Stories (2013), Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), S.J. Naudé’s The Alphabet of Birds (2014) and Stacy Hardy’s Because the Night (2015). Masande Ntshanga radically reconsiders the risk of HIV infection and its relationship to intimacy. In Achmat Dangor’s short stories, the refuge originally offered by exile is transferred to the transient refuge provided by the bodies of others. Makhosazana Xaba and S.J. Naudé consider same-sex intimacy. Stacy Hardy’s short stories explore sex, longing and alienation. Both Hardy and Xaba in different ways celebrate female sexuality. In reading these works, I investigate whether there is an ‘ethics of risk1’ at work. Risk is not tied to crime, violence, sexually transmitted diseases – although these are all present. Rather risk occurs in the sphere of relationships, of encounters with others, where intimacy itself is a somatic risk which potentially threatens the identity of the protagonists but also offers refuge.

Reconciliation and the “self-in-community” in post-transitional South African fiction

Since the end of apartheid and South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, efforts at reconciliation have been dramatic, most notably in the form of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as well as deeply incomplete. In response, a great deal of post-transitional South African literature and criticism has taken up the question of how to effect reconciliation, particularly outside institutional forums like the TRC. A prominent strand of South African literary studies insists that reconciliation rests on a form of ethical responsibility in which the individual is displaced from him- or herself in order to enact hospitality toward others. This view draws on a Levinasian conception of ethics whereby responsibility entails radical vulnerability with no assurance of reciprocation. Yet a growing corpus of fiction complicates this vision of reconciliation, recognizing that for many South Africans, the violations of apartheid gave rise to what Annie Coombes refers to as a “dissolution of [the] self”, and any effort at building a more inclusive society must redress that dissolution. This article argues that Jo-Anne Richards’ My Brother’s Book (2008) and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001) present reconciliation as a product of two opposing endeavours. On the one hand, it involves the willingness to give up a sense of self in taking on responsibilities for others. On the other hand, it requires reclaiming a sense of self by asserting one’s right to make affiliative choices and actively construct new spaces of belonging.

La violence et la culpabilité en partage : le destin national du thème de l’inceste dans la fiction sud-africaine

Twenty years after the end of Apartheid, violence is still a serious problem in South Africa, despite the prosperity and democratic stability of the state. Sexual violence, in particular, has become a major concern. During the decades of transition, secrets of sexual crimes were disclosed more than ever, and it was made patent that they were intertwined with political violence. Incest thus became a new important fictional theme in South African literature. Actually, the issue was already a tacit burning question for politicians and scientists at the end of the 20th century. Given the racist and eugenist background of the country, incest has long been written in the gothic mode to express White communities’ anxieties, until Doris Lessing, Reza de Wet and Marlene van Niekerk came along. They integrated irony into the gothic and rethought the question of taboo in such a way that it was made available for critical thinking beyond local or racial boundaries. Since the end of the 90s, writing fictions involving incest contributes more than ever to reflect on the possibility or the impossibility of strengthening an extended national community against violence, which I demonstrate through my reading of the novels by Achmat Dangor and of a recent play by Paul Grootboom and Presley Chweneyagae.

Redefining Shared Narrative in Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Questions of ownership occupy a central place in recent South African fiction. On one hand, novelists seek ways to develop a new sense of ownership for those dispossessed by racism and poverty. Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006), Kopano Matlwa's Coconut (2007), and Sifiso Mzobe's Young Blood (2010) exemplify this concern. On other hand, numerous writers struggle to own up to history of apartheid in face of denials that characterized apartheid system. Thus, while literary critics have celebrated freedom to explore a broader range of subjects than apartheid and its legacies (see, for example, Chapman; Frenkel and MacKenzie), a dominant strain in fiction of past fifteen years has nevertheless returned to violence of past in order to analyze nuances of guilt and responsibility. Yet paradoxically, such efforts to confront a history of violence often end in reinscribing a desire for control over that history. Emphasizing a commonality of experience, many of these novels deflect attention from different ways of experiencing same events and ongoing inequalities that underlie such differences. In 2000, Michiel Heyns analyzed how several confessional narratives by white writers, including Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples (1993) and Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1998), exculpated their protagonists--and by extension white beneficiaries of apartheid-while seemingly acknowledging varied forms of complicity apartheid had engendered. Novels with more complex approaches to guilt and responsibility have sometimes left same blind spots. Published in first decade of new millennium, Jann Turner's Southern Cross (2002), Sarah Penny's The Beneficiaries (2002), which was well reviewed by Heyns, and Rachel Zadok's highly praised debut Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005) explore interconnections between privilege, oppression, and culpability as a means of taking ownership for authors' own complicities. But each ultimately relegates questions of responsibility to past. These texts illustrate a pervasive desire to reclaim individual and collective feelings of belonging through shared narratives of past and its implications; yet they also reveal how that desire for belonging can entrench further divisions. Lisa Fugard's Skinner's Drift and Zoe Wicomb's Playing in Light, both published in 2006 by expatriate South African writers, explore alternatives to this quandary. This is not to suggest that Fugard and Wicomb are only South African writers to grapple with importance and risks of shared narrative as a foundation for reconciliation. Their approaches to this issue position them within a literary community that includes authors such as J. M. Coetzee and Achmat Dangor, who interrogate the idea that past trauma may be wrapped up and put to rest and acknowledge that remembered violence does not necessarily lead to reconciliation (Barnard 659-60). Like their contemporaries, Fugard and Wicomb insist on importance of excavating traces of past in order to create new narratives for future. But they consider how predicating reconciliations on shared accounts of past can oversimplify complexities of present. Taken together, novels intimate that shared narratives with power to build new relationships require ceding control over limits of one's story in a necessarily incomplete responsibility for voices of others--the stories they have to tell, experiences they have undergone, and conditions in which they live. At same time, Wicomb complicates this vision. She explores ways in which an ethics of self-dispropriation, whereby a person is dispossessed of his or her identity in order to enact hospitality toward someone else, wars with need for those who still face unequal opportunities to reappropriate their identities and surroundings. …

Ominous Inevitabilities: Reflecting on South Africa's Post-Transition Aporia in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit

Achmat Dangor's novel Bitter Fruit (2001), nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2004, is one of several important works of fiction that comment on the imperfections of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), offering a polemical critique of South Africa's on-going transition. In this article, I examine two significant ways in which Dangor's novel questions the work of the TRC. First, I posit that the story represents the TRC's model of transitional justice as being too determined by a “forgive and forget” approach that is inadequate as a means of providing reconciliation and thus fundamentally flawed. Second, I argue that, overall, the novel depicts the national reconciliation project as a mission that has in a way resulted in the appropriation of justice from – instead of its delivery to – some victims of Apartheid-era crimes. The aim of this article is not to present Dangor's fictional text as a one-dimensional reflection of complex social realities, but rather to foreground the practical and imaginative means that his inspired realist narrative offers for dealing with the aftermath of the massive social injustices perpetrated in South Africa during the Apartheid era.

<em>The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing</em> by Dobrota Pucherová

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing Vincent van Bever Donker The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing By Dobrota Pucherová Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011. 169 pp. ISBN 9783868213379 paper. In her book The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing, Dobrota Pucherová brings together ethical and postcolonial criticism in an analysis of desire in the literature of South Africa and Zimbabwe after 1960. Taking her lead from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, desire is calibrated as an ethical movement toward the other that renders one’s self and identity vulnerable. Privileging Levinas’s early understanding of eros, or erotic desire, but defined broadly to also include longing, yearning, friendship, and hospitality for the other, desire is understood to welcome the other within the self; rather than resulting in the epistemological violence of comprehension or objectification that characterized the functioning of desire in colonial discourse, it propels one toward the other’s ungraspable and inviolable alterity. As such, it can disrupt the binaries of identity politics and is presented as containing a profoundly ethical “revolutionary potential” (9), a potential that is traced in the work of Bessie Head, Dambudzo Marechera, and Yvonne Vera as well as in several more recent South African novels by Achmat Dangor, K. Sello Duiker, and Ishtiyaq Shukri. Although Pucherová’s working definition of desire is perhaps wanting in relation to the theorization of the other, and in particular the differentiation between the Levinasian other and the other of identity politics, it is nevertheless forceful in reading the interventions offered by her selected authors. That the operation of desire in these works is dissident becomes clear in the context of southern Africa after 1960. The year of the Sharpeville Massacre (1960), in which the apartheid police killed 69 protestors, saw the rise of virulent, polemical identity politics in resistance to the minority governments in both South Africa and Zimbabwe. One of the most significant movements of the period, an account of which delineates the political and discursive context of the book’s main authors, is Black Consciousness. Formulated by Steve Biko and others in the late [End Page 206] 1960s and 70s, Black Consciousness was importantly developed by a number of poets, such as Mongane Serote, Ingoapele Madingoane, and Mafika Gwala, whose work is illuminated by Pucherová in establishing the main divisions that ethical desire can be seen to transgress: categories of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and ancestry. Through mapping the prominent motifs in black consciousness poetry—particularly the recurring image of “Mother Africa” and imagery of black versus white—Pucherová shows that it successfully affirms black selfhood, but simultaneously constitutes the position of resistance to apartheid as essentially black, heterosexual, and male. As such, both women and white people are denied a position from which to speak, a difficulty that is emphasized and nuanced through a reading of the successful resistance poetry of two white authors, Wopko Jensma and Ingrid Jonker. Both of these poets’ work, although facing different challenges, most notably due to gender, is characterized not only by the movement of desire toward the other, but also a painful, schizophrenic splitting and self-alienation due to the lack of an appropriable speaking position. An important argument that arises from this is the interrelation of all forms of othering. Going beyond positing the simultaneity of the binaries of race, gender, and sexuality, what is revealed by the analysis is the mutual constitution of these categories of othering. Thus in black consciousness poetry, the black, male, strong, creative, and virtuous speaking position emerges in opposition to the white oppressor and through the vehicle of the feminine, represented either as “Mother Africa”—passive, violated, and “the medium of male creativity” (32)—or as “treacherous, morally corrupt, and promiscuous” (33). The interconnections of these binaries are subsequently skillfully traced in their various forms throughout the rest of the book. In each work considered, the author is shown to resist and transgress the dominant identity politics, which replicates what it is meant to resist, through the diverse mechanism of desire disrupting oppositional identity formation. As a result, identity is seen as hybrid, complex, and coalescing through...

The Indian Ocean travels of Sheikh Yusuf and Imam Ali Ali: literary representations in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

This article investigates the narrative function of prominent Muslim travellers (both historical and fictional) across the Indian Ocean to South Africa in the seventeenth and nineteenth century respectively. Ishtiyaq Shukri, author of The Silent Minaret, juxtaposes the figure of Sheikh Yusuf with the protagonist Issa Shamsuddin of the narrative present to critique contemporary politics, both in post-apartheid South Africa and in the global North and its ‘war on terror’. Similarly, Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit sheds light on the difficult choices faced by the main protagonist, Michael Ali, by drawing on the migration narrative of the Sufi Imam Ali Ali from India to South Africa in the 1890s. Both authors highlight the continuous history of imperial pursuits in the Indian Ocean world and their devastating effects in the past and the narrative present.