Andre Brink Research Articles

The Persecution of ‘minority’ toward ‘majority’ and the Racial Plight of South Africa - Andre Brink’s A Dry White Season

본 논문은 안드레 브링크의 메마른 백색 계절 을 통해 남아공 정부가 비백인은 물론 심지어 곤경에 처한 비백인을 도운 백인까지 어떻게 조직적으로 감시하고 처벌하는가에 관한 문제를 논의의 중심에 두고 있다. 이 소설은 다수의 흑인들이 처참한 대우를 받는 상황에 이어 이들의 입장에 선 백인 역시 박해의 대상으로 포섭됨으로써흑백을 가리지 않는 전방위적인 폭력이 남아공에서 어떻게 자행되었는지를 전면으로 재현한다. 브링크가 인종차별에서 비롯된 흑인들의 비극을 쟁점화 한 과정은 아파르트헤이트 제도에 반기를 든 여느 남아공 작가들과 비슷하다. 그러나 작가는 이 소설에서 백인의 고난 역시 초점화 해 아프리카 문단의 정형화 된 주제였던 흑인에 대한 백인의 차별과 폭력이라는 이분화 된 주제로부터 벗어나 흑백 모두의 고난을 이야기 하고 있다. 이 논문이 강조하는 사안이 바로 이것이다.

From apartheid to Post-Apartheid: The Representational Trajectory to a Multiracial Nation in Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me, Andre Brink’s The Rights of Desire and Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior

This article, which draws inspiration from the literary works of three South African writers, focuses on the two (amongst many) major historic periods in the life of the present-day nation described as post-apartheid South Africa. The two periods, evident in the works of Andre Brink, Zakes Mda and Nadine Gordimer under review, are the reign of apartheid and the transition to a democratic multiracial society built on the principles of equality and the respect of the rights and freedoms of South Africans. From both historical and literary standpoints, the transition to multiracialism is the outcome of the struggle of the oppressed black population of South Africa against the oppressive monolithic racist regime which ruled the country on an official governance policy which it called ‘Apartheid’. In order to enforce this inhumane worldview, the said racist regime used means of brutality and savagery with the intention of transforming the country into a ‘white nation’ that would belong to a minority-turned majority known as the Afrikaners. The often callous and gruesome acts of inhumanity perpetrated by the different racist apartheid regimes (that ruled South Africa from 1948-1994) became a major concern to the world at large and South African anti-apartheid writers in particular. Thus this category of the country’s writers tended to use literature as an instrument of protest against racial discrimination, which brought untold hardship to the black population. Andre Brink, Zakes Mda, and Nadine Gordimer are among the writers whose works vividly trace the South African experience from apartheid to post-apartheid eras. Brink, Mda and Gordimer in their respective works attempt to portray the endeavours and challenges of reconstructing the new nation from the debris of close to four decades of the brutal regime. The main issues discussed in this article are analyzed from New Historicist and Postcolonial perspectives due to the peculiar postcolonial nature of South Africa.

Narrating Silence in André Brink's <em>The Other Side of Silence</em> (2002): A Performative Analysis

In the aftermath of colonization with its psychologically devastating impact on the colonized, narratives of trauma face the difficulty of describing the painful experience of the victimized due to the failure of the human language to depict the sweeping, unutterable feeling of pain experienced. Given this rhetorical incompetence, silence has become a legitimate response to trauma. In the postcolonial context, silence is mainly conceptualized from an ideological perspective as a deliberate tactic by the victim to subvert the techniques of hegemonic discourse. The paper presents a context of colonial violence by Andre Brink's On the Other Side of Silence, reconceptualizing silence as an instrument of empowerment, assertion, and recognition. However, the paper departs from presenting silence as a rhetorical device that can only be studied on semiotic premises. The study rather exploits silence as a mode of representation and a performative tool. The paper foregrounds the performative, nonverbal quality of silence as a more powerful strategy of lending voice to the powerless.

Slavery and Trauma in Andre Brink’s Philida

The present paper aims to examine the deep psychological and physical trauma that victims of slavery live with. The inhuman degradation that slaves are made to undergo underlines the aberration of this institutionalized evil. The essay will also highlight the sort of trauma that slave owners also live with. Andre Brink in the novel Philida was attempting to show the historical antecedents of South African slavery especially, in the Cape. He used his family historical documents to offer a close study of the trauma that slavery has caused millions over the centuries – from the mid seventeenth century to 1834 when slavery was abolished in South Africa. This makes the present study significant because it has delved into the physical and psychological cost of that evil. Philida is a recently published novel and eminent researchers have just started working on it. This work will analyze the novel using Trauma theory in order to underscore the debilitating effect that slavery has had on people in South Africa for more than three hundred years. Slavery has affected not only slaves but also their masters. The implication is that the feeling of trauma is felt both ways. Slavery has also put a lie to the feeling of white blood purity in South Africa. Philida had shown how slave masters sleep with their black slaves and thus have children through them. Cornelis Brink's mother Petronella, a former slave, was black. Philida's father was a white man. Philida's child Willempie has blue eyes.

Ingrid Jonker and Apartheid in South Africa

The article is devoted to the life and work of the South African poetess Ingrid Jonker. Jonker’s biography is viewed against the backdrop of historical events related to the establishment of the apartheid system in South Africa, increased censorship, the atmosphere of repression and despair, and increasingly tense relations between writers and authorities. Ingrid Jonker was part of a group of so-called “Sixties” (Sestigers), innovator writers who challenged existing literary canons and social norms. Ingrid Jonker 's opposition to the punitive policy of the apartheid, to the desire of Afrikaners to protect their identity by destroying the identity of other peoples, led to the breakdown of her relationship with her father, Member of Parliament and advocate of the apartheid. This tragedy was intensified by the excruciating "love triangle" with writers Andre Brink and Jack Cope, and the disappointment of travelling to Europe, where Jonker suffered from loneliness and longing for her homeland. But when she returned to South Africa, she failed to adapt to life in a society of total injustice, fear, despair, shame for the crimes of her own people and the impossibility of simply giving it up... Ingrid Jonker’s biography is also a story about the “disconnection” of the South African society of the 1950s — 1960s. About how the authoritarian regime leads to the development of a “sick” society, generates paranoia, madness, “doublethink”, dualism of the soul. It generates a poet for whom death becomes the only way to remain faithful to his conscience.

Negritude Rediscovered: A Reading of Andre Brink’s States of Emergency

-Negritude is a literary and ideological movement lead by francophone black intellectuals, writers and politicians. The doctrine of Negritude is the intellectual paraphrasing of the whole range of reactions of the world of black people against foreign oppression, against foreigner‟s dehumanising infliction of colourcomplex. It basically projects the essential human values of man, transcending all superficial barriers that divide human beings. Although there are acute national differences among the African nations, the spirit of Negritude cuts across the whole body of African literature. Andre Brink is acknowledged as one of the prominent novelists in South Africa. Through his work, he has prompted an awareness of the problems of his society, explored their roots and expressed opposition to repressive authorities. The present paper attempts to present Negritude as reflected in Andre Brink‟s novel,States of Emergency. In the novel, Brink attempts to subvert the repressive and oppressive apartheid system. It is a serious appeal to humanity for a reflection upon the marginalization of black as a racially discriminated class of second-rate citizens. As a white South African writer, the contribution of Brink to the liberation of the Blacks is remarkable.

Chains of Voices: Multiperspectivity and Historical ‘Truth’ in Three Novels by André Brink

The essay examines three novels by Andre Brink, A Chain of Voices (1982), Devil's Valley (1998) and Philida (2012), arguing that Brink uses the heteroglossia of various voices and their stories about the past to question and destabilize notions of historical truth. More specifically, the essay suggests that Brink presents an alternative past in A Chain of Voices, deconstructs the very notion of truth in Devil's Valley, but offers a more traditional historical novel in Philida.

Torture, violence and apartheid in André P. Brink’s A Dry White Season

The preoccupation with skin color and other physical qualities of black men to legitimize colonialism and imperialism were of significance in South African history. The implementation of racism, discrimination, and exploitation in South Africa was unprecedented because apartheid was employed to the majority of blacks systematically and institutionally by the colonizer countries. Apartheid regime, as an official policy of the Afrikaner government between 1948 and 1990, created huge disparity and discriminations between the whites and non-whites. Published in 1979, A Dry White Season is Andre Brink’s fifth novel and it presents the enigmatic events that happen to Ben Du Toit and other black characters. The novel is the account of subjugation, illegal detentions, and murders of black people under the custody of the security police during and after of the Soweto uprising in South Africa. Setting his novel within the backdrop of the Soweto riots, Brink chooses a nameless narrator to narrate the turbulent events which reflects the brutality of apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. Contented with his wife and his three children, Ben is killed mysteriously in a hit and run accident. The mysterious death of the protagonist and the events are narrated by a nameless narrator who was Ben’s former university roommate. By disregarding the intimidation and seizures, Ben assumes responsibility to research the illegal detentions and tortures individually. This study explores the issues of torture, state violence, and arbitrary arrests of black peoples during the apartheid years in South Africa.

Review Article : André Brink, Mevrou Sadie and Me: Reflections on and beyond <i>Contrary: Critical Responses to the Novels of André Brink</i>

When my matric Afrikaans teacher drank himself to death in March 1962, he was replaced for the remainder of the year by Mevrou Sadie. Although she held a position of sorts in the Kimberley branch of the National Party - dour in its Calvinism - Mev. Sadie was a free spirit, or seen so by us at our all-boys high school. She would have agreed with Andre Brink's own reflections on what motivated his early novel, Lobola vir die lewe (1962) [Bride Price for Life]: an Afrikaans literature that, at the time, was really in the doldrums. It was still carrying on with the old nineteenth-century naturalistic approach. It was all about droughts and locusts and poor whites (Brink, qtd. in Wroe, Contrary 31).

Tribute André Brink: In defiance of boundaries

With the death of the South African novelist, playwright, literary critic, translator and scholar, Andre Brink, on 6 February 2015, just seven months after Nadine Gordimer's on 13 July 2014, a crucial epoch of South African literature and history inexorably moves to a close. Like Gordimer, Brink had been among the few particularly distinguished white South African writers whose denunciation of white privilege and enunciation of enlightened humane values potentially applicable to all humankind did not only become the presiding concern of their art but was also expressed in their heretical association with the ANC (that is, rather than the National Party or better still the Broederbond). Brink apparently suffered an aneurism over Brazzaville on a KLM flight from Europe to South Africa. Perhaps, there could not have been a more emblematic way to die for a writer who envisaged all his life as a symbolic crossing of frontiers and saw the negotiation of the cultural and intellectual distance between Europe and Africa as the core of his life-long endeavour.

Ira e giustizia

This essays considers one of the aspects of anger by means of a philosophical analysis of three literary works written in different epochs: the Eumenides by Aeschilus from antiquity, Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist from the Romantic culture, and the contemporary work Chain of Voices by Andre Brink. Anger is interpreted here as an energy that compels to action and as a representation of a possible transition from a vengeance logic to a justice logic. This passion is not illustrated through its possible disruptive meaning, but as a force that supports some not jet legitimate instances.

The multiple possibilities of interpretation in products of bilingual writing: André Brink’s "Praying Mantis" and "Bidsprinkaan" as a total text

Normal 0 false false false EN-ZA X-NONE AR-SA This paper explores the concept of ‘bilingual writing’ by examining two products of Andre Brink’s bilingual writing process, namely Praying Mantis (2005) and Bidsprinkaan (2005). After a brief overview of Brink’s oeuvre, a theoretical perspective on bilingual writing is provided, along with a discussion of related concepts such as ‘translation’ and ‘self-translation’. Following the theoretical perspective, a stereoscopic reading of the two versions of the novel aims to show how multiple possibilities of interpretation are opened up by the use of two languages of production, and how the two versions, when read together, form a total text that travels beyond traditional conceptions of both writing and translating. In Praying Mantis and Bidsprinkaan , Brink employs magical realism to challenge various traditional boundaries, such as between reality and fiction, history and myth, etc. Situating both versions of the novel in a sphere of magical realism, where boundaries are constantly transgressed and where the even the ordinary is given “a sense of the extraordinary” (Brink 1998:31), Brink confronts his readers with different perspectives and provides them with an almost endless range of possibilities of interpretation that leads to various possible readings of the text. Not only is the magical as well as the real world opened up in the text, but also the magical and the real world as conceptualised in two different languages and cultural environments. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

Apartheid Spies: The Character, the Reader, and the Censor in André Brink’s A Dry White Season

A Dry White Season is no spy fiction in the strict sense of the word. Published in the late 1970s, at the beginning of the direst period in the history of apartheid South Africa, it depicts the struggle of a white family man and schoolteacher against the oppressive but elusive power of the Johannesburg Security Police. A politically committed novel, therefore, which is still shocking thirty-five years after its publication (1979) for its exposure of the brutalities of apartheid. Rather than focusing on intrigues involving major powers and international criminal networks, Andre Brink’s narrative touches the sore spot of the utter destruction of the ordinary life of individuals in the grip of power, and of the dissolution of their family bonds ‐ be they representatives of a black oppressed majority, or of a white indignant minority desperately trying to ‘put things right’. Ben Du Toit, the main character of A White Dry Season, is very far from the

Redefining ‘Worlds’: the writerly ethics in the trailing temporality of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

South Africa going to second democratic elections saw two path-breaking works exploring disgraceful crimes and emotional commotions in an intriguing era. One is J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Andre Brink’s The Rights of Desire (2000). The Protagonists of both the works are middle-aged caught in the noose of Eros and are seen resisting the change of tides and resigned to the fateful happenings in store for them. The novel portrays the transitional apprehensions of the whites, the power-wielders of the yester- years to adapt to the syndrome of power withdrawal and deprivation. The story depicts individual self-denigration in a changed political environment dictating a code of moral uprightness and ethics. The redeeming consolation of comic, grotesque and lunatic overtures that Beckett ingeniously provides in his fiction do not find a place in Coetzee. Instead Coetzee forces his readers to look into ineluctable gaps that mark the narration.

Black Death, White Writing: André Brink's The Wall of the Plague as a Narrative of National Reconciliation

Andre Brink's novel, The Wall of the Plague, published in 1984 in the midst of apartheid's state of emergency, is designed to contribute to the project of national reconciliation that would come to...

Was I Born a Golem?

In this essay, the author traces the personal background of her research on the Jewish golem legends that began with her PhD dissertation, The Golem as Metaphor for Jewish Women Writers. Drawing on diverse writers including Andre Brink, Eunice Lipton, Temple Grandin, Chava Rosenfarb and Cynthia Ozick, Yehuda explores the repercussions in her own life of the Talmudic statement, A woman [before marriage or childbirth] is a golem.

‘Translating' the Great Trek to the Twentieth Century: Re-interpretations of the Afrikaner Myth in Three South African Novels

The events that later became known as the Great Trek stand for a decisive phase in the colonial history southern Africa, a phase that led to a substantial increase the white presence in areas that were formerly controlled by blacks. Furthermore, the Trek has been presented as one the cornerstones on which the Afrikaner 'nation' was erected, and it features prominently in the literature South Africa, both in Afrikaans and English. In the following, I examine three English novels by South African authors which are - at least in part - concerned with 'translating' the Great Trek in two senses : they interpret the significance of the events, and they move or carry [them] from one place or position to another by recontextualizing them in the political situation that prevailed when they were written (Translate). As Edward Said has pointed out, literary texts are always worldly because they are influenced by the circumstantial reality the time their production (34). The three novels I discuss, Solomon Plaatje's Mhudi (1930), Peter Abrahams's Wild Conquest (1951) and Andre Brink's Imaginings Sand (1996), translate the events the 1830s into the temporal contexts their production, that is, the early, middle and late twentieth century respectively. This act translation results in statements about the relationships 'white' and 'black' people South Africa that gain in importance when related to the political debates current when the novels were written.

The Past in the Present: Personal and Collective Trauma in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

One might argue that narratives in fiction may ... involve truth claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into phenomena such as slavery and Holocaust, by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving an at least plausible feel for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods. Dominick LaCapra Unless enquiries of [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] are extended, complicated and intensified in imaginings of literature, society cannot sufficiently come to terms with its past to face future. Andre Brink The representation of personal and collective trauma in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2003) disrupts surface of reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa and works to foreground complex and enduring ramifications of apartheid. The novel represents interacting layers of trauma in South Africa arising from structural and symbolic racial oppression and acts of extreme violence under apartheid regime. Bitter Fruit casts doubt on ability of universalized Eurocentric models of trauma (located within a specific history and set of cultural practices) to account for South African trauma without suppressing heterogeneity of experiences and responses to trauma in that locale. Homogenizing accounts exclude particular historical, social, cultural, and personal contexts of trauma. Within postcolonial discourse, for example, Elleke Boehmer observes that there are those among once-colonised for whom silences of history have not ended (132). Boehmer pays particular attention to marginalization of gender in male-authored postcolonial theory and silencing of homosexuality in postcolonial and African writing (172). In a similar way, Ato Quayson emphasizes need to articulate postcolonial experiences from positions in order to include views that fall outside the perspectives of sanctioned historical tellings of nation (192). Bitter Fruit suggests importance of taking into account specific context in which individual and collective traumas unfold by representing voices and experiences that cannot be subsumed into generalized models of trauma. The novel indicates ways in which gender, race, sexuality, class, age, religion, and language constitute and differentiate South African identities and experiences, past and present; but it focuses particularly on two ex-centric positions in South African context. Bitter Fruit subverts Manichean representations that simplify South Africa's racial problems in terms of black and white (see Wicomb and Kruger) by representing colored experiences. In focusing on sexual (and racial) violence of Lydia's rape, Bitter Fruit addresses a widely known but often unspoken area of experience in South Africa. The novel also draws attention to violence against homosexuals within colored community as well as wider homophobia in apartheid and post-apartheid society. Bitter Fruit suggests that many traumas remain unspoken and invisible, eluding representation of a collective South African experience. In novel's central narrative, silenced memory of Lydia's rape by a white policeman nineteen years earlier (which her husband Silas was forced to listen to) erupts into post-apartheid present, forcing a confrontation with suppressed traumatic past. Following rape, Lydia and Silas have lived in a cold and non-communicative marriage, becoming increasingly isolated from each other as years have gone by. The unspoken trauma overshadows their relationship and also affects their child Mikey, who is unacknowledged product of Lydia's rape. Mikey is initially unaware of rape and his own embeddedness in this traumatic history. When reads Lydia's diary, is forced to confront fact that he is child of some murderous white man, ... a boer, ... who worked for old system, was old system (131) and has to readdress his past and reassess meaning of his life. …

Difference and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Summary In this essay, I would like to argue that Disgrace (1999) is part of a transition in South African writing,1 from the fictional representation of difference among people based on the biological notions of blood and genes to notions of difference based on culture and social origin. For South African writers after 1990, this shift signalled incorporation into the global order. Coetzee contemplates South Africa during its emergence from centuries of colonialism and settler racism and reflects on the notion of being in post-apartheid South Africa. As both an internationally recognised writer and a prominent South African academic, he inscribes a view of region and nation in his works that I would suggest is indebted to the cadastral gaze of Empire.2 In this novel, Coetzee's view is significantly marked by a postmodern appreciation of culture and society reflected in his extensive allusions to classical and modernist art and literature. In this essay I outline key shifts in postmodern racism and consider how a range of critics have responded to Disgrace. Following this I examine the way in which Coetzee circumvents typologies based on race by inscribing a more nuanced typology based on cultural difference and social history. Finally I look at how the violation of women and the consequences of such deeds are represented in this novel. 1Shared by Zakes Mda, Heart of Redness (2000); Breyten Breytenbach, Dog Heart (1999); and Andre Brink, Imaginings of Sand (1997) 2Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffen describe modern surveillance of imperial nation states, which implies a viewer with an elevated vantage point from which it objectifies and interpellates the colonised subject. Following Lacan, this gaze fixes the identification, objectification and subjection of a subject simultaneously within a system of power relations which confirms its subalterity and powerlessness (1998: 226). I suggest that the gaze of Empire, which views the world in a different way, has emerged. Since 1990 various forms of this media, history and political discourse have been reflecting the operation of the gaze of Empire no longer linked to the sovereignty of imperial nation states and colonies but to a cadastral network of surveillance which operates simultaneously across all borders. We have a deterritorialised compound eye of multinational corporations, nation states, the IMF, WTO and other institutions linked to the cybernetic chain of networks.

Judith Lütge Coullie and J. U. Jacobs, eds. a.k.a Breyten Breytenbach: Critical Approaches to His Writings and Paintings. (Cross/Cultures 75). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004. 337 pp. $94.00 Cloth. $36.00. Paper.

Judith Lutge Coullie and J. U. Jacobs, eds. a.k.a Breyten Breytenbach: Critical Approaches to His Writings and Paintings. (Cross/Cultures 75). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004. 337 pp. $94.00 Cloth. $36.00. Paper. The title of Coullie and Jacob's collection of essays on the contemporary South African poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, painter, and political activist Breyten makes primary reference to his self-constructed and self-deconstructing multiple narrative and authorial personae. As Lisbe Smuts observes, these personae-Galaska, Bengai Bird, and host of others-problematize a one-to-one relationship between the real person, Breytenbach, and the textual (57). But the essays also examine, on more implicit level, the always complex, often ambiguous, and multifaceted position of the reluctant colonizer and anti-apartheid Afrikaner who, according to Coullie, was born of the white (master) race... but as an albino with black heart (210). This sense of double-consciousness pervades the collection. On one hand, is depicted as kind of archetypal white artist in contemporary South Africa, an individual caught in the debate between the contention of authors like Andre Brink that art should be elevated above the political and the stance of writers like Nadine Gordimer, Steve Biko, and himself, whose first volume of poetry, Die ysterkoei moet sweet (The iron cow must sweat) (1964) took the position that artists ought to employ art in the fight for political freedom, human dignity and justice (xii). On the other hand, the critics whose essays make up this work seek to define what makes not only unique within this context, but also transcendent. In this quest, variety of themes and discourses emerge-multiplicity, mirroring, representation, African memory, metamorphosis, and regeneration, to name but few-and are threaded through chronological dialogue in which Breytenbach's critics speak with the artist (as in Marilet Sienaert's interview) and also with one another. On the matter of gender, Louise Viljoen examines Breytenbach's literal, literary, political, and poetic fathers in his early poetry; Judith Lutge Coullie questions the absence of the female subject in his critical writing; and Andries Visagie, in his examination of the masculine subject in Breytenbach's later works, seems to conclude that perhaps nothing definitive can be concluded: Breytenbach is likely to continue to revise his approach to masculinity, specifically in relation to women and sexuality (325). Many of the essays in this collection, in their attempts to distinguish from his fellow writers as postmodern, postcolonial, or South African, position him alternately within and outside of those aforementioned paradigms. …