Kopano Matlwa Research Articles

Trauma Ebbs and Flows in Kopano Matlwa’s Evening Primrose

Trauma Ebbs and Flows in Kopano Matlwa’s Evening Primrose

Multiple levels of literacy in Kopano Matlwa’s literature. The case of Evening Primrose (2018)

The paper explores distinctive ways in which Kopano Matlwa’s novel Evening Primrose (2018) employs continuities and discontinuities between surface-level literary expression and underlying identity and cultural literacy. It is a desktop study centred on Kopano Matlwa’s novel Evening Primrose (2018) as a primary text, as well as of secondary expository texts for theoretical and earlier literary commentary that constitute the article’s conceptual matrix. I demonstrate how the author’s thematic manoeuvring challenges notions of determinist culture and official mapping as fixed, as well as espouse conceptions of globalism that accommodate identity and cultural heterogeneity. As I discuss stylistic dimensions of the narrative from the vantage point of the theory of ecocriticism, I include the tenets of Es’kia Mphahlele’s concept of African humanism as well as the concepts of ‘borderland’, ‘code-switching’ and ‘integration literacy’. My findings have led to the conclusion that the novelist’s discourses are encoded in the texture of the novel in ways that portray the South African post-apartheid milieu as informed by an intricate intersection of distinctive identity and cultural literacies that the various characters display. My scrutiny of the environment-adoptive cognitive processes in the mind of Matlwa’s characters has led to a novel analogy between integration identity and cultural literacy and unitary grammar, reached psycholinguistically through code-switching.Contribution: This study provides new insights into how the novelist Kopano Matlwa employs literary discourse uniquely to explore South Africa’s post-apartheid, evolving social psyche in ways that diagnostically assert alternative cultural identity intersections, readings and articulation. The paper plumbs beneath surface-level characterisation to externalise how key character categories of the novel under discussion do practicalise the potency of the post-apartheid context to forge a composite heterogeneity of cohabiting and mutually respecting cultures that have entered it. In novel ways, the theoretical matrix applied in the analysis of the novel galvanises a recognition of commonalities hitherto unidentified, mainly between tenets of originally Eurocentric ecocriticism and those of an Afrocentric African humanism. I compare the characters’ successful creation of new cultural literacies, integrated with a new environment, to a successful integration of unitary grammar related to the linguistic process of code-switching. In this way, a new kind of relationship is projected between literary analysis and language learning.

Postapartheid Anti-blackness in Kopano Matlwa's Coconut

ABSTRACT: This paper reads Kopano Matlwa's debut novel, Coconut , as a critical reflection on the incomplete work of social, economic, and juridical inclusion. It outlines inconclusive episodes in the lives of two young black women: Ofilwe, a member of a rarified upper middle class, and Fikile, ensnared in grinding poverty. Drawing on Denise Ferreira Da Silva and Calvin Warren, the paper shows how Matlwa addresses the uncritical embrace of this racist and historically oppressive discourse among nominally free blacks, both among enduringly destitute slum dwellers and the emergent nouveau riche. In the novel, social death comes in the form of internalized anti-blackness as the two young black women featured in the novel doggedly pursue white identities as a means for successful existence in postapartheid South Africa.

Foregrounding the Amazonian Character against Androcentric Constructs: A Comparative Analysis of Selected Texts by Kopano Matlwa and Zakes Mda

This article compares and contrasts Amazonian characters in Kopano Matlwa’s selected texts with what appears to be androcentric female characters in Zakes Mda’s selected texts. Feminist theory, with its variants, particularly Amazon feminism, undergirded the study. Amazonian characters are female characters constructed from an Amazonian perspective. In ancient Greece, Amazon feminism typified warrior women as symbols of feminist empowerment emphasising women’s agency and capacity to achieve gender equality. In constructing her female characters, Matlwa has adopted the Amazonian perspective that radically departs from the stereotypic, patriarchal and negative depiction of women that perpetuates patriarchy, whereas Mda has adopted the androcentric and patriarchal stance, which contrasts sharply with the tenets of Amazon feminism. The article contributes to the ongoing discourse on gender and equality by highlighting the essence of Amazonian characters as required agents towards women’s liberation and empowerment in the post-apartheid context.

Xenophobia in Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog and Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain

Xenophobia has been thematized in South African literature by post-apartheid novelists, and they addressed it in different manners. Two post-apartheid authors who dealt with the issue of xenophobia are Niq Mhlongo and Kopano Matlwa in their novels Dog Eat Dog and Period Pain, respectively. This paper aims to examine how Mhlongo and Matlwa portray xenophobia in their novels and explore the ways they employ to neutralize xenophobia. The paper also discusses the causes of xenophobia pointed out in the novels. Therefore, a critical analysis of the novels has been made by the writer using detailed reading and textual evidence. The analysis indicates that South Africans view black foreigners as job stealers, criminals, drug dealers, witches, and bringers of disease. The writers infused the view of black foreign characters on xenophobia to debunk the negative stereotype and attempted to neutralize it by featuring non-xenophobic protagonists. The article also concludes that Mhlongo and Matlwa reveal the role of the media and the scapegoating hypothesis as the causes of xenophobia.

Attachment Trauma and the Role of A Secure Base in Kopano Matlwa’s Evening Primrose

Attachment Trauma and the Role of A Secure Base in Kopano Matlwa’s Evening Primrose

The (Ab)Use of Empathy in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain

Empathy and intimate exposure(s) that interweave micro relations with macro politics are literary tropes used in narrating and navigating postapartheid social formation and reimaging alternative ways of relationality that seek to normalise freedom(s). Bystrom and Coetzee use these reading practices to examine how contemporary artists yoke domesticity with national politics to discursively deconstruct narratives of (un)belonging that frame immigrant lived experiences in South Africa. This article seeks to extend the conversations further by examining how Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain (2017) interweaves female menstrual blood with precarity, intimate exposure and lack of empathy or intergroup biases to critique the (mis)use of narratives of black pain that deploy the language of apartheid to justify negrophobia and a growing anti-illegal foreigner sentiment in South Africa. This paper suggests that the use of anger, tropes of a South African black pain and its embodiment, and (anti)racist discourses impede the formation of an imagined, inclusive postapartheid South Africa. It concludes that Matlwa’s text suggests that a sense of a distinctly black South African identity which is limited to itself, yet hinged on a darker side of empathy, silences the Other’s modes of self-narration that seek to counter widely circulated narratives of queerness, lack and destitution that are used to cast the foreigner in the public imaginary. Consequently, the foreigner is coerced to mimic popularised discourses on race and gendered relations, thus recirculating and recycling discourses that embolden toxic masculinities and femininities in private and public cultures.

Delineation of Eurocentric Attitudes towards African Hairstyles as Catalysts for Identity Crisis in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut

Delineation of Eurocentric Attitudes towards African Hairstyles as Catalysts for Identity Crisis in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut

The (De)Colonial Praxis: Confronting Present-Day Dilemmas of Transforming Knowledges and Societies in Kopano Matlwa’s Spilt Milk

Contemporary South African campus fiction has always been concerned with questions of power, being, and knowledge production. Kopano Matlwa’s novel Spilt Milk, like most campus fiction, evokes and challenges the South African academy, and looks at ways of making the school and/or university a hospitable place. Unlike Matlwa’s sister novels Coconut and Period Pain, Spilt Milk has received few scholarly reviews. I examine how the novel reveals and can be read as a starting point in exploring the intellectual dimensions of colonialism. I investigate the decolonial concept of the coloniality of knowledge and Matlwa’s seeming quest for decolonial education by foregrounding the educational institution Sekolo sa Ditlhora as the prime setting of the novel. The argument around the coloniality of knowledge I advance here is akin to current debates seeking to decolonise (or Africanise) education in South African schools and universities. Theoretically, this article draws from the decolonial ideas on the coloniality of knowledge whose foundations were laid by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, who suggested that, for global domination, colonisers imposed their own modes of knowing and methods of producing knowledge. The concept of the coloniality of knowledge in Matlwa’s fiction is multifaceted since it speaks to the colonisation of space, education, languages, and the ways of life of the colonised people. Following the 2015 #RhodesMustFall protests at South African universities, I argue that the characterisation of Mohumagadi, and her foregrounding of Africa as an epistemic site from which she interprets the world, is an attempt at moving the centre.

REDEFINING PUNISHMENT AS A MEANS OF DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOLS: AN EXAMPLE FROM KOPANO MATLWA’S SPILT MILK

Purpose: Punishment has been used by authorities of schools as a means of instilling discipline in the school. The nature and type of punishment used vary from one school to another. Some are utilitarian while others are retributive. In most Nigerians schools, especially the public schools, the latter holds. As a result of this students have not shown any meaningful change in behaviour and this highlights the failure of the structure of discipline in our schools. This study aims to consider a redefinition of the nature of the punishment structure used in schools as presented in literary text.
 Methodology: The data for the study were gathered from Kopano Matlwa’s Spilt Milk. Instances of punishment meted out to erring students in a school were descriptively analysed with a view to determining the nature and informing philosophy behind them. The study also seeks to seek the gains or otherwise of the nature of punishment used to discipline students in the text.
 Findings: The study discovered that the nature of punishment given to students is reformative and utilitarian against the retributive nature of punishment used in the Nigerian structure. It is also more dignifying and less dehumanising for the student-offenders but of most importance is that students acquire more knowledge especially around the type of their offence. Parents are also more receptive of this type of punitive measures and encourage that it be used in the school.
 Unique Contribution to theory, practice and policy: The study recommended that government should legislate on the present structure of punishment in most Nigerian schools to allow for punishments that are more reformative and utilitarian in nature. School authorities should adopt the positive-oriented methods that are philosophically utilitarian.

Scrutinising Eurocentric stereotypes against Afrocentric underpinnings of beauty through Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut

This paper has probed into stereotypical attitudes towards Afrocentric underpinnings of beauty through Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut. The genesis of these stereotypes against African beauty could be traced from the colonisation of the African continent. It is the interface between Africa and the West that engendered a shift of identities, which resulted in many Afrocentric depictions assimilated d by Western influence. Despite the decolonisation attempts, the Eurocentric notions that had defined Africa during the colonial period persist in galvanising stereotypes that marginalise Africans, especially those that embrace Afrocentric ideas of beauty in the post-colonial age. Today, Africa is besieged with remnants of colonialism, which include Eurocentric ideals of beauty. This paper employed the qualitative method to scrutinise the stereotypes against Afrocentric beauty through the literary criticism of Matlwa’s novel, Coconut. It is undergirded by the theory of Afrocentricity, which has been utilised as a lens to crystalise the indigenous African identities and their relevance today. It finds that these Eurocentric notions have navigated through the peripheries of post-colonial Africa and influenced societal reactions, attitudes and perceptions of beauty. This is reflected in Matlwa’s Coconut where African beauty is stigmatised and disparaged whereas Eurocentric ideals of beauty are exalted.

National Identity and Xenophobia in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain

Sigmund Freud describes hate as an ego state that wishes to destroy the source of its unhappiness. Hatred is a form of animosity, frustration and hostility, often giving rise to a psychological descent into violence. This essay seeks to explore how Kopano Matlwa mediates notions of xenophobia in Period Pain to determine whether the narrative offers ways of reimagining relations between the “locals” and “outsiders” in South Africa. I am specifically interested in how Matlwa engages with the processes of othering in her third novel. I question how Matlwa employs language to “move people against other people.” I use the core concept of psychotraumatology to argue that the textures of hatred inscribed in Matlwa’s text are internalised echoes from apartheid culture and practices, which live out in the present social moment. Finally, I interrogate the extent to which Matlwa’s text might allow us to understand how she rewrites a new South Africa.

Against Financialization as Freedom: Errant Investments in Kopano Matlwa's Coconut and Rehad Desai's Everything Must Fall

This paper explores investment and inheritance across South Africa’s so-called Born Free generation and its transition into the protest cultures of the post-Fallism era. Positing that colonized worlds generate investments, financially and affectively, in whiteness and antiblackness, the analysis considers how various South African cultural texts perform labours of disinheritance and disinvestment against the limited legacies racial capitalism bequeaths on its subjects. The essay analyzes texts ranging from the online #Tipgate scandal of 2015, poetry by Lebogang Mashile, Kopano Matlwa’s novel, Coconut, and Rehad Desai’s film, Everything Must Fall. In the context of a post-apartheid discourse that has structured freedom around notions of financial mobility inherited from racial capitalism, the analysis argues that these texts refuse the lifelines afforded by Eurocentric market capital and errantly direct their worlds toward Afrocentric futures. These futures often involve rejecting the financial as the exclusive metric of social value within post-apartheid South Africa’s commodified worlds. The paper discusses the limits of financial freedoms in Born Free narratives at the site of family and collectivity, and in Fallist protest at the site of the wider publics enrolled in the Eurocentric legacies of the university, those Fallism explicitly sought to dismantle. Rejecting pejorative renderings of decolonial work in the Fallist period as essentially destructive—an allegation that, the paper suggests, derives from paradigms of inherited Eurocentric value—the paper emphasizes the way that its central texts participate in the labour of not only dismantling certain inheritances, but of cultivating alternate possible futures as well.

Deconstructing colonial influence on black South African youth in the post-apartheid era : an exploration of Kopano Matlwa's Coconut

Deconstructing colonial influence on black South African youth in the post-apartheid era : an exploration of Kopano Matlwa's Coconut

Coloniality and Identity in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2007)

ABSTRACT Africa in general and South Africa in particular remain entangled in colonial power matrices which some decolonial writers have described as “coloniality.” Coloniality refers to the perpetuation of quasi-colonial relations between the West and former colonized territories long after the official end of colonialism. Decoloniality is a theoretical paradigm that seeks to identify and critique legacies of colonialism that continue to influence the lived experiences of those who were formerly colonized. The production of knowledge and systems of knowing in former colonized territories remain trapped in erstwhile-colonial power structures in the same way that neocolonial global relations continue to influence postcolonial economies and livelihoods. Thus, coloniality encompasses the continued marginalization of non-Western peoples, cultures and knowledge systems. In this article, we read Kopano Matlwa’s debut novel Coconut, as a decolonial text that highlights the persistence of colonial matrices of power in the day to day lives of black South Africans. The novel deploys the metaphor of “coconut” to interrogate coloniality of being among young South Africans. We are particularly interested in the complexities and contradictions of negotiating new cultural identities in the context of a post-apartheid society that “breathes” coloniality.

Violence and the Gendered Shaming of Female Bodies and Women’s Sexuality: A Feminist Literary Analysis of Selected Fiction by South African Women Writers

This article analyses selected literary representations of the intersections of gender, violence and the dynamics of shaming female bodies and women’s sexuality to demonstrate how discursive and epistemological constructions of gender create an environment where gender violence becomes the norm rather than an aberration. I seek to unpack how selected authors represent the ways in which seemingly harmless assumptions about women’s bodies and sexualities form part of a much larger, insidious and profoundly misogynist system of gendered power inequalities. The analysis suggests that this is a social system in which all women are both vulnerable and acutely aware of their gendered vulnerability to violence. The primary texts that I will analyse are Period Pain (2016) by Kopano Matlwa and Broken Basket (2016) by Francine Mann. Both these novels represent how female characters, albeit ones who are differently situated, negotiate their lives against a backdrop of repeated references to the shame that is vested in their bodies and sexualities and how they must ultimately deal with the progression of violence from a discursive to a physical reality.

The Myth of the “Rainbow Nation”: Xenophobia, Sexual Violence, and Racial Tensions in Period Pain by Kopano Matlwa

The Myth of the “Rainbow Nation”: Xenophobia, Sexual Violence, and Racial Tensions in Period Pain by Kopano Matlwa

Black Youths’ Challenges in the “New” South Africa: Education, Language and Identity in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2007)

Those who were born after the demise of apartheid in South Africa are generally referred to as the “born frees” because 1994 is regarded as a nodal point in the emancipation of the oppressed, especially black people. South Africa was finally a unitary state that observed fundamental human rights such as the right to basic education. Interestingly, when Coconut was published in 2007, the “born-frees” would have been thirteen years old and a lucky few black youths would have been in grade seven at the so-called “former white schools”1. The lucky ones would have been ready to embark on their high school journeys which would determine a life trajectory to the promised land, while the majority black youths’ dreams would have been deferred or even destroyed. It is important to note that, as it was the case with the likes of Bloke Modisane, Peter Abrahams and Can Themba in apartheid South Africa, “whiteness” still plays a critical role in black youth’s aspirations and identity formation. For the lucky few, “whiteness” is still a tool to access white privilege, while for the less fortunate it is seen as a means to escape grinding poverty. However, as demonstrated in this paper, the black youths’ attempt to pass as white only succeeds in undermining and in some instances destroying their languages and identities. The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the root causes of the failure of social cohesion. In this regard the paper encourages honest dialogue around sensitive issues such as racism and discrimination in schools. This paper focuses on how institutionalised racism and discrimination affect black youth in the current dispensation. In this regard, the paper will analyse the experiences of the main characters, Ofilwe, Tshepo, Fikile and Silas Nyoni. Following Derrick Bell’s critical race theory, the paper interrogates the entrenched institutional racism and discrimination and the impact they have on the black youths’ internal constitution, identity and social inclusivity. Finally, it discusses the black youth’s rejection from the white world and their equal alienation from the black world. Clearly, while access to better education extended to all post 1994, the unintended consequences to black youth a far-reaching and devastating.

Post-apartheid transnationalism in black South African literature: a reality or a fallacy?

The quest of this paper is to probe whether globalising post-nationalism impacts on post- apartheid black South African English literature in a manner that suggests a blurring of distinctive African identities. This is done against the background that black South African literature right from its written beginnings in the early 19th century has coalesced into a taxonomically distinct entity forming a non-negligible component of South African literature written in English. I first analyse two post-apartheid novels written by the black writers Niq Mhlongo (Dog Eat Dog, 2004) and Sindiwe Magona (Beauty’s Gift, 2008). Secondly, I consider three post-apartheid novels by the black writers Phaswane Mpe (Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 2001), Kgebetli Moele (Room 207, 2009) and Kopano Matlwa (Coconut, 2007). I approach an examination of the five post-apartheid novels by separating them into two categories, as a way of indicating that black South African literature of this era remains as stylistically varied as that of earlier periods, albeit broadly within a mould continuing to characterise it as black. In order to justify an underlying common allegiance to localised identity cutting across the two categories in which I place these five post-apartheid novels, evidence of such a pervasively black feature is explained inter-categorically, even as intra-categorical affinities are demonstrated. I trace these two levels of typology within the conceptual framework of two main groups of theorists. The first group consists of commentators such as Carrol Clarkson in her assertion that the identity of black Africans in the post-apartheid era as portrayed in the fiction of writers such as Phaswane Mpe is such that “educated and urbanised individuals should no longer identify” with and share beliefs having to do with African identity and “a common and accountable response to that which the community represents.” The attitude of these critics has led to Leon de Kock seeing both black and white post-apartheid literature warranting interpretation with a “sense of a post-national configuration—indeed, now a transnational constellation.” I demonstrate in this paper that post-apartheid fiction written by blacks not only defies theorists’ subordination of imaginative writers’ centrality in social discourse, but goes further specifically to chafe against normative characterisation as transnational. The second main category constituting the theoretical matrix within which I examine the discourses of the five selected novels includes theorists such as Rob Gaylard, in his observation that Es’kia Mphahlele “can be seen as the founder of a tradition of black writing that runs through writers like Miriam Tlali, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Njabulo Ndebele and Zakes Mda to Phaswane Mpe,” with the thread splicing them together being a grounding of these authors’ writings in the philosophy or worldview of Afrikan Humanism.

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. …