Towards Decolonising Poetry in Education: The ZAPP Project (original) (raw)
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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