Scrutiny2 Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa " Conjuring up her wholeness " : Post-transitional black South African women's poetry and its restorative ethic (original) (raw)
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The twenty-first century has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of poetry being written and published by South African women writers. Unfortunately, this has not been matched by a corresponding increase in critical responses. This article attempts to address this situation through a discussion of the linguistic themes and strategies found in South African women’s poetry, seen within the artistic and socio-political context of post-apartheid South Africa. Nevertheless, South African women poets use poetry as a vehicle for defining identities within the contested postcolonial space. They also write in protest against their silencing by patriarchy and by colonial forces. They frequently use language to overcome the gendered binary opposition between private and public utterance. Finally, women poets engage productively with cultural, ethnic and gender difference. While it is not possible exhaustively to define the ways in which South African women poets use language, the article identifies significant trends and concerns in this area.
31st AIA conference “Future Horizons: New Beginnings in English Studies”. 13-16 September 2023. Università della Calabria, Rende (CO), 2023
As a space historically marked by a violent politics of segregation, South Africa has lived the experience of spatial, social, and temporal partition at every level of public and private life. From the thorough dissecting of the urban and rural spaces imposed by the Group Areas Act to the dismembering of the social body induced by the laws prohibiting all intimate interracial contact, the country has been shaped by the painful intersections of physical and virtual barriers of several kinds. The confines established among the different languages of the nation, endowed with varying degrees of legitimacy based on their standing in the colonial hierarchy, has further partitioned the everyday experiences of South Africans for a long time, leaving behind steep discursive edges and scars that often bleed, in plain sight or in the shadows. Critical of the violence of this regime of in/visibility and inspired by bell hooks’ claim that “language is also a place of struggle” (1989, p. 146), a new generation of women poets has recently accelerated the re-shaping of the public discourse over subjectivity and the body – both collective and individual – in South Africa. This paper will focus, in particular, on Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia (2017) and Gabeba Baderoon’s The History of Intimacy (2018) as works that helped to impose a political and poetical turn in the country’s consciousness. Variously dealing with bodily, discursive, and social intimacies, as well as with history, identity, and the nation, these collections of poems interrogate old and new boundaries, place themselves at the frontiers, and explore life in margins, on edges, and in borderlands.
This article examines creative agency in the lives of four black South African women writers during South African apartheid: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Gladys Thomas, and Sindiwe Magona. Drawing theoretically on Mamphela Ramphele's conceptualizations of space, it analyzes life review interviews with these writers, who were among the first black women to publish novels and poetry in apartheid South Africa, about the ways in which they came to understand themselves as writers and creative subjects within a political system that severely curtailed their political and creative expression. It considers agency a key tool for understanding how these authors transcended their received identities as laborers and reproducers of labor for the apartheid nation, to become authors of their own lives and works. In elucidating how writing increased personal agency for these writers, the article posits the concept of creative re-visioning -a subject's ability to re-envision what is possible for her to achieve beyond received expectations for her life. It theorizes such creative re-visioning as a strategy of resistance during apartheid and an additional dimension to feminist conceptualizations of human agency.
Using the deliberately provocative strategies of "essaying" and "error", which have become central to the poetry and poetics of women experimental writers such as Kathleen Fraser, Lyn Hejinian and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, this essay charts the writer's slow understanding that lyric voice and linguistic-formal experimentalism in writing by women poets form a problematic, yet productive, interrelation. Lyric, suggests Kinnahan, is at once an apparently unmarked, naturalized poetic mode and, for women poets, a curiously over-marked, gendered category. At the same time, female experimental poets have not found a comfortable space within the avant-garde poetics loosely derived from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The essay moves to explore the challenges of the lyric-language conjunction in relation to the writer's second collection, open season (2006), and suggests, through a method of trial and error, that a re-turn to lyric through the lens of international scholarship on contemporary experimental poetry by women writers can invigorate our take on the persistence of lyrical voice in poetry by South African women writers. scrutiny2 16(2) 2011: issues in english studies in southern africa ISSN: Print 1812-5441/Online 1753-5409
South African women poets article for GQ revised
Considerable theoretical and critical work has been done on the way British and American women poets re-vision (Rich 1976) male-centred myth. Some South African women poets have also used similar strategies. My article identifies a gap in the academy's reading of a significant, but somewhat neglected, body of poetry and begins to address this lack of scholarship. My article argues that South African women poets use their art to re-vision some of the central constructs of patriarchal mythology, including the association of women with the body and the irrational, and men with the mind and logic. These poems function on two levels: they demonstrate that the constructs they subvert are artificial; and they create new and empowering narratives for women in order to contribute to the re-imagining of gender relations.
Practicing Poetry in an Interregnum: Poets in Post-Liberation South Africa
In this absorbing series of twenty-one interviews, nineteen South African poets and four foreign guests discuss the starting points, stages, and seings of their personal, political, and poetical trajectories. Since the book's nine-year span coincides with the last two years of apartheid and with the first seven years of a post-apartheid dispensation, it is not surprising that the South African interviewees also register the exhilaration occasioned by the demise of the old order, as well as the uncertainty that stems from the contradictions of life under a new polity.
The Coloured Voice: Finding Its Place in South African Poetry
Education Journal, 2021
South African poetry has found its place in many parts of the world. Topics such as racism, discrimination and issues resulting from the past of South Africa, have all found themselves in South African literary journals and anthologies. One of the achievements of the South African poet has been finding a place for the disadvantaged group/s of South Africa, the group/s that have suffered through the past and present South Africa. However, through all the major South African journals and literary collections, the voice and life of the Coloured individual has been left out and overlooked. More importantly, this has resulted in the Coloured individuals of South Africa not knowing their place in the poetry world. More specifically, because they are not reading about their cultural power in poetry, they tend to believe that poetry is not for the Coloured culture and language. In this paper I intend to show that there has been a lack of place in poetry for the Coloured individual, and furthermore, to show that there is a place for the Coloured story and culture in poetry. As a result, what will be shown is the effect that the Coloured voice will have on South African poetry, and how it will benefit a large portion of the South African population.
2002
Without the search for meaning, the quest for vision, there can be no authentic movement towards liberation, no true identity or radical integration for an individual or a people. Above all, where there is no vision, we lose the sense of our great power to transcend history and creating a new future for ourselves with others,…(Harding 1983:xii) South African poetry, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, generally tended to be studied along racial, class and gender lines. The majority of the studies focused on the examination of ideological tendencies which permeated each writer's work, and showed the symbiotic interdependence between aesthetics and ideology. As a result thereof, and in view of the uniquely complex nature of South Africa's political, economic, ideological, social and cultural diversity-a diversity which for a long time was misrepresented by the powers that were for their own ideological ends of racial fragmentation and economic segregation-a pronounced division ensued between what came to be known as revolutionary poetic practice and reactionary poetic practice. Consequently the interaction between the two types of poetic practices was always seen only in terms of the binary opposition of the one against the other. The concept of aesthetics was generally regarded as a reactionary response of the privileged literary and political conservatives who strove to camouflage their ideological and social assumptions behind the guise of objective formalism. The validity of this so-called revolutionary interpretative approach to poetry was justified by the very real and urgent need of raising the readers' awareness to the socio-political and economic realities of the time. However, South Africa's dynamic socio-political diversity renders inoperative the many preconceived assumptions and notions about aesthetics and commitment in the negotiation, construction and articulation of cultural identity. The dynamism, which has become a characteristic part of South Africa's transformative process, virtually nullifies the pre-given conceptions about the binary opposition between revolutionary and reactionary poetic practice. In the final analysis the critical impact previously inherent within this conception is subverted by this new reality. Cultural identity is a mushrooming field of study devoted to the examination of how identity is negotiated, constructed and finally articulated within given cultural contexts. It is a field
New Myths, New Scripts: Revisionist Mythopoesis in Contemporary South African Women’s Poetry
Gender Questions
Considerable theoretical and critical work has been done on the way British and American women poets re-vision (Rich 1976) male-centred myth. Some South African women poets have also used similar strategies. My article identifies a gap in the academy’s reading of a significant, but somewhat neglected, body of poetry and begins to address this lack of scholarship. I argue that South African women poets use their art to re-vision some of the central constructs of patriarchal mythology, including the association of women with the body and the irrational, and men with the mind and logic. These poems function on two levels: They demonstrate that the constructs they subvert are artificial; and they create new and empowering narratives for women in order to contribute to the reimagining of gender relations.
Journal of Literary Studies, 1993
This essay focuses on the history of short stories by South African women of all races in an attempt to elucidate existing concepts pertaining to race, class and gender. It transpires that the first phase of modern feminist criticism was directed at exposing patriarchal tendencies prevalent in language and literature, while the second phase assessed the meaning and value of writing by women. The writer postulates that a perspective is imperative that both recognises and articulates intrinsic differentiation. Simultaneously, there should be an awareness of existing interrelationships allowing for different identities, divergent politics and dissimilar struggles. "Woman", per se, cannot be regarded as a stable identity because of diversification related to politics, culture and customs. The writer maintains that differences within ourselves have to be understood first before we can come to grips with differences inherent in others. Differentiation of identity is discussed with reference to three instances namely precolonial narrative art manifesting in historical documents, journals, letters, diaries and other forms. White Afrikaans-speaking women were, due to British imperialism, alienated from white English women and regarded as being superior to black South African women. This status quo was maintained until the fifties when black women began making themselves heard. Several examples of writing are cited leading to the conclusion that identity cannot be dealt with perfunctorily as it possesses both negative and positive facets to be explored by future feminist writers.