Editor Co-editor Associate Editors Editorial Board - University of ...

Editor
...............................................
Leon de Kock
Co-editor
................................................
Deirdre Byrne
Associate Editors
................................................
Gwen Kane
David Levey (Reviews)
Khombe Mangwanda
Therona Moodley
Zodwa Motsa
Karen Scherzinger
Ivan Rabinowitz (Poetry)
Editorial Board
...............................................
David Attwell (UNP); Louise Bethlehem (Hebrew University, Jerusalem);
Mathew Blatchford (Fort Hare); Elleke Boehmer (Nottingham Trent); Duncan Brown (UND);
Dennis Brutus (Franklin Pierce College, New Hampshire);
Laura Chrisman (Stanford); Cherry Clayton (Guelph); Stephen Clingman (Amherst, Massachusetts);
Ampie Coetzee (UWC); Annette Combrink (Potch); MJ Daymond (UND); Christo Doherty (Rhodes);
Carisma Dreyer (Potch); Miki Flockeman (UWC); Andrew Foley (JCE); Michael Green (UND);
Michiel Heyns (Stellenbosch); Myrtle Hooper (Unizul); Hilton Hubbard (Unisa);
Ronel Johl (RAU); Dirk Klopper (RAU); Loren Kruger (Chicago); Alan Lawson (Queensland); Craig Mackenzie (RAU);
Julia Martin (UWC); Sikhumbuzo Mngadi (RAU); Tony Morphet (Freelance); Sarah Murray (Stellenbosch);
Lewis Nkosi (Wyoming); Laraine O'Connell (Timbuveni College of Education); Andries Oliphant (Unisa);
Kole Omotoso (Stellenbosch); Martin Orkin (Haifa); Tony Parr (UWC); Mzo Sirayi (Unisa); Jane Starfield (Vista);
Sue Starfield (Wits); Michael Titlestad (Wits); Keyan Tomaselli (UND); Joanne Tompkins (Queensland);
Jean-Philippe Wade (UDW); Dennis Walder (Open University); Dan Wylie (Rhodes).
ISSN 0041±5359
Cover illustration by JuÈ rg Ludwig
Editorial Policy: The journal places emphasis on theoretical and practical concerns in English studies in southern Africa.
Uniquely southern African approaches to southern African problems are sought, although topics of a more general
nature will also be considered. While the dominant style will be of a scholarly nature, the journal will also publish some
poetry, as well as other forms of writing such as the interview, essay, review essay, conference report and polemical
position.
Submissions should be presented in Harvard style and be sent on paper as well as disk (WordPerfect), or e-mail
attachment to the Editor, Department of English, University of South Africa, PO Box 392, Pretoria 0001. E-mail:
dkockl@unisa.ac.za. Letters to the Editor will be published. Articles should not exceed 20 pages, including endnotes and
bibliography. Subscriptions: R50,00 (US$30,00) for two issues a year. Write to the Business Section, Unisa Press, PO Box
392, Pretoria, 0003. Subscription information by e-mail: delpoa@unisa.ac.za

scrutiny2 issues in english studies in southern africa vol 7 no 2 2002
Articles
STEPHAN MEYER
`the only truth stands skinned in sound': Antjie Krog as translator 3
DIANE SIMMONS
A passion for Africans: psychoanalyzing Karen Blixen's neo-feudal Kenya 19
LOREN KRUGER
`Black Atlantics', `White Indians', and `Jews': locations, locutions, and syncretic identities in
the fiction of Achmat Dangor and others 34
..................................................................................
Poetry and short fiction
Poems by Don Maclennan and Stephan Meyer; short fiction by PP Fourie 51
..................................................................................
Review essay
NICK MEIHUIZEN
A troubled sense of belonging: private and public histories in the poetry of Isobel Dixon,
John Eppel and Don Maclennan 63
..................................................................................
Letter to the Editor
ELWYN JENKINS
With this kind of record, how can we be sure? 71
..................................................................................
~1 ....

Reviews
MICHIEL HEYNS
Not yet time to despair (review of IvanVladisavic¨ and Nadine Gordimer) 74
IAN TROMP
Running Zen into postmodernism (review of Marilet Sienaert) 77
GARETH CORNWELL
Ruled by his dark side (review of Arthur Nortje) 78
..................................................................................
Notes on contributors 81
~2 ....

`the only truth stands skinned in sound' 1
......................................................
ANTJIE KROG AS TRANSLATOR
Translation is a key strategy
for survival Ð not only for
writers and publishers,
but for a language itself.
If it does not develop a
strong tradition of
translation, it may as well
shut its doors
ranslation, as critics and
literary historians of various ~T. ......
persuasions have remarked, is both an
established practice in South African
literature and one which still needs to
be developed. This seemingly contradictory
observation is easily resolved.
There are, in fact, at least two general
local approaches to translation and its
role in the republic of letters and
society at large. The more established
practice, which goes back in print to
the first publications by travellers and
missionaries, is the rendering in Dutch
or English of literature from indigenous
South African languages. In this
case, as with Lloyd and Bleek's
famous texts, the translators had a
European audience in mind. More
recently however, translations into
English have also been undertaken for
the benefit of South Africans who do
not understand the original but who
also do not generally use English as a
first language. 2 English is likely to
STEPHAN MEYER
continue in this role as master language,
and as the greatest common
denominator in which strangers meet
in a shared, ``neutral'' public sphere.
The second category of translations,
the one still in its infancy, is the
translation of selected key texts into
all the official languages of South
Africa. Zakes Mda's Ways of dying
was the first to receive this honour.
Another, which is currently in progress,
is Nelson Mandela's Long walk
to freedom. Here the intention is a
different one, more suited to some of
the strands in Michael Chapman's
Southern African literatures and the
proposed South African Languages
Bill. 3 The effect, if not already the
aim, is to create a single South African
text which most of us have read ±
albeit in different languages. In this
case, selected stories held in common
(rather than one unifying national
language which establishes a common
national ground) become the basis of
an imagined community. Instead of
leaving behind our private languages
to communicate in the public sphere
of English, these texts help us to
establish a community in languages
which permeate our own immediate,
everyday, linguistically structured
lifeworlds, which are in turn enriched
by these texts.
These two general categories have,
inevitably, found themselves challenged,
both in practice and in theory.
So, for example, translations and
transliterations from various languages
into just one other language of
the region also abound. These range
from the Xhosa translations of The
pilgrim's progress by Tiyo Soga and
John Henderson Soga, Sol T Plaatje's
Sotho translations of Shakespeare,
EugeÁ ne N Marais's Dwaalstories, AC
Jordan's English recreation of Xhosa
Tales from Southern Africa and Uys
Krige's Afrikaans translations from
the romance languages. Translations
into English, after publication (for
example, Wilma StockenstroÈ m's The
Expedition to the boabab tree, John
Miles's Deafening silence and Marlene
van Niekerk's Triomf), or even before
publication in Afrikaans (as in Brink's
dual-language writing), have long
been characteristic of Afrikaans literature.
Within this evolving third tradition
of translation and transliteration,
Antjie Krog has rapidly become an
established figure. In her Langenhoven
memorial lecture held at the
University of Port Elizabeth (Krog
2001), she reflects on some of the
translation projects into Afrikaans in
which she has been involved. Her
~3 .... ARTICLES

lecture clearly locates translation within a political
context in which the power of different languages, as
well as the historical moment of liberation, are
crucial. Concurring with Es'kia Mphahlele and
Frantz Fanon, she points out the importance ``after
liberation, [of] rethinking a community and innovatively
renaming, so as to prevent the persistence of old
concepts and ideologies under the cover of the new''
(Krog 2001:np; own translation). Translation as an
activity of transformation, Krog implies, often occurs
in what might be described as the right moment. But
describing such right moments as if they have an
existence independent of the act of translation is
misleading. The right moment, we might argue, is as
much constituted by the act of translation as it is an
enabling condition for the translation. A case in point
is Krog's and Gerrit Olivier's translation of Sontonga
and Mqhayi's Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika into Afrikaans in
the late 1980s. While the political climate of the
eighties facilitated the translation of the anthem, the
very act of its translation and publication in
Afrikaans also constitutes a moment of change for
both Afrikaans, the text itself, and the public among
whom it circulates. These moments have personal, as
well as national trajectories, which may intersect in
various ways. Shifting power relations which result in
changes in language policy and practice have, for
example, forced many previously sheltered individuals
to come to terms with the difficulties of working in
second and third languages. This is of course a
situation long familiar to those whose mother tongue
is not one of the hegemonic languages, those who
``must learn the language of the masters, of capital
and machines; [who] must lose their idiom in order to
survive or live better'' (Derrida 1998:30).
For Antjie Krog, who was born and bred in the
Free State, and who could ``do, say, and achieve
everything in Afrikaans'' for the first forty years of
her life, this moment came when she relocated to
Cape Town in the early 1990s and covered the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission for the South African
Broadcasting Corporation (Krog 2001:np). These
shifts in power and language policy, which are
arguably more intensely felt by native Afrikaans
speakers than many other South Africans, elicit a
significant response from her. While she finds English
valuable as a language in which authors ``meet,
measure each other, enter debate or conversation'',
she feels that many non-English writers are tempted
by its power to commit the error of writing in it. The
problem with writing directly in a second or third
language, Krog says, is that it is like expressing
oneself on a ``toy piano'' (``popklaviertjie''), which
usually results in inferior work (Krog 2001:np). One
can distinguish clearly, according to Krog, between
``two poetry `sounds' in a language: that of the
`mother tongue' poets who are born with the poetics
of that language in their bones, who drank it with
their milk, and those who participate as `sharers' of
that language'' (2000b:14). Thus, she asserts that ``you
can only really contribute (in the sense of changing
tradition and boundaries) to the literature of a
language if you have grown up in that language.
Only if you know that house can you revolutionize the
plan'' (2000b:14).
Attractive as it may seem, with its evocation of a
rejuvenating urpower of origin and its image of
fecundity, Krog's view in this instance is limited. It
is premised on the assumption of a monolingual
identity which is belied by the modern cosmopolitanism
in which many people actually grow up bi- or
multilingually, drinking from two breasts, so to speak.
For them there is no one original. For them originals
are always multiple, and the originality (in the sense
of inventiveness) that they bring to language derives
from their hybrid origins. Krog's claim thus reveal
itself as a false universalization of her own particular
situation ± one which may be shared by predominantly
monolingual speakers, but not by all. Furthermore,
Krog's claim fails to see the special value of a
layered use of languages so common to multilingual
societies such as South Africa. Sticking to Krog's
metaphor ± used by Lorde as well (1984:110ff) ± many
cathedrals, like literary texts as diverse as Romeo and
Juliet and Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, are hybrids of some
kind. They are revolutionary not despite, but because
of this feature.
A recent example of the latter is Johan van Wyk's
Man-bitch (2001), which constitutes an incisive
~4 .... ARTICLES

comparison, as Van Wyk, like Krog,
has written all his poetry in Afrikaans.
Man-bitch, his first venture into both
prose and English, has been criticised
for its ``bad'' editing. 4 But, what some
may see as bad editing, others might
regard as revolutionizing the plan of a
house which, already, consists of
mixed styles. In that sense Van Wyk's
book would fall in the tradition of
Adam Small's Afrikaans writing or
Achmat Dangor's English writing, in
which the presence of the ``other
language'' is always felt. Van Wyk's
book thus (unintentionally?) achieves
what Krog herself has in mind in her
own translation of her poems
(2000a:3), and what Karen Press
(2000b:14), one of Krog's translators,
draws our attention to, namely that it
is an English which has not unmoored
itself from its Afrikaans origins. South
African English in its many nonmetropolitan
variants has a distinct
flavour, and the revolutionary power
of books such as Man-bitch is a direct
effect of the fact that, in a very
significant way, it is a bilingual text
which bears this flavour. It is a book
in which the Afrikaans, clothed in
English, shines through the English
and is not masked by it. It is an
Afrikaans English, but not a simulated
or affected one. And if it is read
with bifocals, it becomes an Afrikaans
book in English which, precisely
because of that, contributes to both
languages, not as separate entities, but
in their intermingling.
It is important to note though that
Krog's appeal to write in the native
tongue is not motivated by a laager
mentality nor by a desire for ``purity''.
This would have been the case if she
had simply advocated mother-tongue
writing and left it at that. But her
appeal for mother-tongue writing exists
in conjunction with her advocacy
of translation and multilingualism,
which, in the words of Khethiwe
Marais, ``is a concrete way of showing
acceptance of other peoples' humanity.
Accepting other peoples' languages
means accepting their equality
and cultures. It is in essence accepting
and practising the principle of democracy,
giving people their right to
hear and to be heard in their languages.''
5 Krog (2001:np) notes:
``When shifts in power necessitate
authors to manage in other languages,
one should not only stand on one's
right to write in your mother-tongue,
but also to be translated from your
mother-tongue and thus properly become
part of the voices in your
country.'' In other words, the constraining
effect of writing in a second
or third language results in both the
right to write in the native tongue and
the right to be translated.
But the matter does not end with
the imperative to write in the native
tongue and the right to translation
into other languages ± in Krog's case
from Afrikaans into English or Xhosa.
In addition, there is an imperative
to have things translated into the
native tongue ± in her case from
/Xam, Dutch, or Sepedi into Afrikaans.
This is so because ``translation
is one of the key strategies for survival
± not only for writers and publishers,
but for a language itself. If it does not
develop a strong tradition of translation,
`kan hy maar sy deure toemaak'
[it may as well shut its doors]'' (Krog
2001:np). This explains her many
efforts in this direction. Krog's translations
into Afrikaans include Henk
van Woerden's autobiographical biography
of Dimitri Tsafendas, Domein
van glas, from Dutch into Afrikaans
(the English translation, A mouthful of
glass, is by Dan Jacobson); Mandela's
Lang pad na vryheid; and the translation
of poetry from other South
Africa languages into Afrikaans
(Krog:2002). Krog undertakes translation
in the belief, shared with Salman
Rushdie, that it need not
constitute only a loss, but that something
can also be gained, both for
Afrikaans and the languages from
which the poems are translated (Krog
2001).
In addition, her insistence on
mother-tongue writing is also based
on her epistemology, her belief that
``there is an irrefutable knowledge
within a poet's language'' (2000b:14).
If one relies on her creative writing to
form an idea of what her notions of
knowledge and truth are, the picture is
rather vague, possibly inconsistent.
But then it may not be a fair
expectation that poetry should be
philosophically comprehensive or coherent.
Nevertheless, one indication of
how she may see truth is intimated in
her ``poet becoming'' (2000a:59)
where she asserts a relationship between
truth, meaning, and sound:
when the meaning of a word yields,
slips
and then surrenders into tone ±
from then
the blood yearns for that infinite
pitch of a word
because: the only truth stands
skinned in sound
Here we need to distinguish a
weaker from a stronger claim. The
~5 .... ARTICLES

weaker claim (which would be shared by most
linguistic-turn theories of truth), is that truth is
expressed in language, that is, only utterances (and
not perceptions) are possible candidates for truth. 6
The stronger claim is that truth arises when semantics
and phonics stand in a particular relationship to each
other. In this generalization, the reply from theorists
of truth would be the rather mild one, namely that
sound does not add anything to the truth value of an
utterance. But Krog, who herself has a musical
background, makes a stronger claim (at least here),
namely that truth arises when semantics yields to
phonics. Truth is not only a matter of meaning but,
more accurately, a matter meaning moulded by
sound. The force of language (even its illocutionary
force, Krog seems to suggest) lies in its combination
of incantation and propositional truth. This is a claim
which would elicit as loud a rejection from most
contemporary philosophical theories of truth as it
would be embraced by imbongis, medieval bards and
modern priests. 7
Like Adorno, Krog subscribes to what may be
called an aesthetic theory of truth. This view is
underscored by her emphasis on the value of
ideophones (Krog 2001:np). The poet who writes in
her native tongue, Krog's argument seems to go, gets
closer to the truth because she has a better ear for the
sounds of her native tongue (the instrument she plays
best) than for other languages. The poet's technical
skill, namely of speaking the truth by shaping
semantics into phonics, is best practised in the mother
tongue. This claim consists of various parts, each with
its own problems. The one claim is that the poet
should stick to the instrument she knows best. The
second claim is that authors are best in their mother
tongue. The third claim asserts that truth arises in the
immanent connection between semantics and phonics,
or even the yielding of semantics to phonics. The first
claim refuses to see the particular aesthetic achievement
of authors who do not write in their mother
tongue (for example, Joseph Conrad). The second is
blind to the achievements of authors such as Samuel
Beckett, who are equally skilled in more than one
language. The third claim has radical implications for
the practice of translation. My question here is not
whether Krog's claim about the union of semantics
and phonics is correct, but what its implications are
for translation ± in which the union of semantics and
phonics achieved in the original is rent asunder ± and
whether the semantic-phonics view is compatible with
Krog's stated goal of translation, namely to retain the
echoes of the original in the translation.
It is also unclear how far Krog would go in her
assertion of a connection between the sounds of a
language and the truth claims that can be made in it.
Two possible positions can be discerned. The first
would hold that the many sounds in different
languages lead to the same truth, along similar lines
to the many religions leading to the same god. The
second view ± which has its modern ancestors in the
German Romantics Humboldt and Herder 8 and its
local representative in WH Bleek (whose transformations
of /Xam Krog has translated into Afrikaans) ±
holds that each language discloses the world differently
and that we can never step out of a particular
language into a prelinguistic world (Humboldt 1996
20). 9 There are some indications from her response to
working on the translation of poems from other
native languages into Afrikaans that Krog shares this
view. She asserts that she sometimes found herself
confronted by a phrase which changes her whole
perception in that moment, with the result that she
``will always think differently about this'' (Krog
2001:np).
If different languages disclose the world differently,
offer different world-views or conceptual schemes,
and even different truths, this raises the spectre of
relativism when it comes to truth, and the problem of
incommensurability when it comes to translation.
Both these consequences create problems for the
possibility of translation. As we see from Krog's
introduction to the collection of English translations
of her poems, Down to my last skin (2000a:3), she is
extremely sensitive to the possibilities of the onceforged
union of meaning and sound falling apart in
translation. Given the specific cadences of, say
English, translation necessarily requires establishing
a new union between meaning and sound. But, Krog
notes, this may force choices on the translator in
~6 .... ARTICLES

favour of the one over the other.
Given the notion of truth implied in
her ``poet becoming'', this means that
``new'' poems arise in the process of
translation which are quite different
from the originals. If translations are
to achieve the union of meaning and
sound that merge in a specific truth, it
is hard to see how the ``original''
Afrikaans can echo in the ``derivative''
as Krog would like it to
(2000a:3).
Krog's requirement that translation
should occur in various directions also
informs her translation of her own
work into English. 10 Before Down to
my last skin, she had rendered her bilingual
Aardklop play, Waarom is die
wat voor Toyi-Toyi altyd vet? [Why is
it that those who Toyi-Toyi in front are
always so fat?] into English for the
Market Theatre. Country of my skull,
too, was written in Afrikaans and
simultaneously translated into English.
Krog would compose it in
Afrikaans during the first part of the
week, and then, working on a split
screen, translate it into English during
the second half of the week, ``because
Afrikaans didn't want that book''
(2000b:15).
One can only speculate what effect
Country of my skull might have had
on Afrikaans readers and Afrikaans
literature had it been published in
Afrikaans. Even a cursory look at an
extract from the Afrikaans manuscript
reveals the ways in which the
medium of Afrikaans foregrounds
certain themes which recede in the
English publication. Krog dedicates
Country of my skull to ``every victim
who had an Afrikaner surname on her
lips'', making the book, to some
extent, a reckoning with Afrikaans
men who committed atrocities. This
feature stands out clearly in the
Afrikaans manuscript. The show of
power by Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging
(AWB) men, with which the
book opens, has in the Afrikaans
manuscript a harshness which fades
somewhat in the English. Even where
the content of the Afrikaans version
remains largely the same, the mere
fact that this reckoning takes place in
Afrikaans means that Krog's goal is
achieved more fully, since it constitutes
an act of wresting Afrikaans from
the hands of those who claimed it
solely as theirs and then sullied it with
their deeds. Were Country of my skull
to have been published in Afrikaans,
it may to some extent have restored
Afrikaans as the language of people
who suffer and dispense justice rather
than injustice, and this in turn may
have contributed to reforming the
language from the inside.
What the English publication gains,
though, is that it forcefully underlines
the necessity of translation in a
multilingual society such as South
Africa. In the English publication ± in
contrast to the Afrikaans manuscript
± Eugene Terreblanche's words during
his appearance before the justice
commission are rendered in Afrikaans,
followed by English. An early
excerpt from his speech is followed in
the English by the important,
``Translation! Members of Parliament,
especially the exiles, ransack
desks for translation equipment''
(Krog 1998:2). Significantly, the single-word
explicative sentence,
``Translation!'', is missing from the
Afrikaans manuscript in which the
translation itself is omitted because it
is redundant.
The second theme which recedes
behind the English is the relationship
between Afrikaans and English in the
struggle for domination and liberation.
Krog depicts the queen's English
as ``'n Gewone toespraak, maar met
Die Aksent wat ander bevolkingsgroepe
vir eeue al intimideer''
(Manuscript 20.3.95; hereafter Afr
ms). In English, the sentence reads,
``the content may be ordinary, but it is
delivered in the Accent, which has
intimidated half the earth for centuries''
(1998:8). But by satirically describing,
in Afrikaans, the queen's
elevated speech, Krog is implicitly
suggesting that it should be resisted or
undermined. She thereby restores
Afrikaans as a language of the oppressed,
and of resistance, in its
relation to English as a medium of
colonization and domination. What is
at stake though is not to claim
Afrikaans for the white victims of the
Anglo-Boer war. Rather, it is to
reassert Afrikaans's roots in the
speech and writing of Cape slaves ± of
colonized people. This paves the way
for a theme which recurs throughout
Country of my skull, for example in
the sentiments of the young comrade
who refuses to enter Krog's class: ``He
called Afrikaans a colonial language.
`What is English then?' I asked.
`English was born in the centre of
Africa,' he said with great conviction.
`It was brought here by Umkhonto we
Sizwe' (Krog 1998:15±16). 11
Some valuable insights can be
gained by reading an excerpt of the
Afrikaans manuscript dealing with the
queen's visit to Cape Town against
the English publication. The Afrikaans
version is mainly based on
Krog's radio reports for the SABC,
~7 .... ARTICLES

with sections dated accordingly, thus accounting for a
certain immediacy of content. In the Afrikaans
manuscript, the text of Krog's Afrikaans radio report
is given in inverted commas and in the past tense, as
would be appropriate for a report broadcast after the
event. This contrasts with the English (1998:7±9) in
which the inverted commas are erased so that Krog is
no longer quoting herself, and her relationship to the
narrated events is adjusted. The English is rendered in
a dramatic present tense as if it were a live, internal
narration. In addition, it contains a significant
insertion in which her and her colleague's rush across
the city in a taxi to the Britannia, where they are to
meet the queen, is given.
This autobiographical insertion is significant on
several levels. One of its effects is to alter the pace of
the telling, creating an effect of narrative suspense.
The autobiographical insertion changes the mood
from the tragic feel which enfolds the book, to bathos,
thus pulling the queen down to the narrator's and
(possibly also) the reader's level. The queen's mythical
aura is debunked when the taxi driver refers to her as
the ``one who wears lead in her seams'' and the
author-narrator describes her own act of getting
dressed in the taxi (Krog 1998:8). This underscores
the earlier description of the queen as someone who
``looks like anybody's auntie from PE'' (1988:7) [``sy
lyk soos iemand se Engelse tannie uit PE'' (Afr ms)]
and whose speech ``sounds like something one would
find at any small-town women's society meeting''
[``Toe sy haar toespraak maak is dit so half bekend
soos die van 'n VLU (Vroue Landbou Unie)
voorsitter'' (Afr ms)]. While one of the effects is to
assert similarity and thus flatten the hierarchy
between the queen and mere mortals such as Krog,
another is to assert the difference and distance
between the compulsory femininity of the handbagcarrying
auntie and Krog's own feminism.
Generally the discretion (one may even argue
prudence) evident in the Afrikaans broadcast has
made way, in the English publication three years later,
for more critical cynicism. The Afrikaans radio
report, for example, reads: ``Binne die groot saal
was die atmosfeer opvallend ... nou hoe sal 'n mens dit
stel ... een van: opdress vir die Queen ... veral 'n
geleentheid om met jou groep se tradisionele drag te
spog'' (Afr ms) [``Inside the Assembly Hall the
atmosphere is predominantly that of ... how shall
one put it? ... dressing up for the Queen'' (Krog
1998:7)]. The English then makes the same comment
about the politician's mixture of posturing (``spog''),
but appends, after the phrase ``[a]n opportunity to
show off your traditional dress ...'', the scathing
addition, ``... your designer contacts and your gravytrain
menu''.
This going to and fro from the one text to the other
in the writing of Country of my skull, the one feeding
and changing the other, led Krog to discover a way of
reappropriating her own poems in translation. Until
then she had felt alienated from her own poems
translated by others, because the translators generally
selected love and political poems, bracketing off those
``dealing with the issues of being a woman and being
an Afrikaner woman'' in particular (2000b:13). The
personal choice of translators began to make her feel
``skeef'' [skewed] (2000b:13). Two issues are at stake
here: the first is to correct the skewed representation
of oneself by filling in the gaps left by erratic and
selective representation. The second is to overcome
the alienation of having words ascribed to one, words
with which one cannot quite associate onself but
which one cannot disclaim as one's own either. Down
to my last skin aims to overcome both hurdles in one
and the same act of writing.
By making her own selection Krog seeks to fill the
gaps and adjust the partial representation of her work
in English. But to do this she cannot simply add
variants to the images in existing translations. Rather,
she must add poems which offer new and different
dimensions. Critics should therefore pay careful
attention to her selection of poems for translation
and to the shifts in self-representation which her
choices constitute. However, while Down to my last
skin may help to amend Krog's skewed image to the
author's own liking, it cannot fully overcome the
fragmentary nature of her self-representation. It
remains a selection, and as such it is an incomplete
translation of her work as a whole. It is only through
the selection's composition that the volume can, to
~8 .... ARTICLES

some degree, compensate for the
fragmentary and dispersed nature of
Krog's presence in English. In addition
to the selection, therefore, the
composition (the sequencing and
groupings) of Down to my last skin
needs to be considered.
Krog's translation also has a psychological
dimension, namely the desire
to feel that she can associate
herself with the words ascribed to her.
Through translating the poems herself,
she has lived through them
herself, in the same way that Krog
``wanted to live a second life through
you / Lady Anne Barnard'', infusing
them with her spirit so that she is not
``opposite but together in this verse''
(Krog 2000a; ``Lady Anne as guide'').
But it is questionable to what extent
this oneness with her own words is
possible. One might argue that one of
Krog's motives for this translation of
her poems was to revisit the Afrikaans
originals. It was perhaps not only the
alienation from her own words rendered
by others into English that she
wanted to resist, but also a sense of
alienation from her Afrikaans poems
brought about by the passage of time
and the nature of print. Krog's
translations into English thus constitute
a legible trace of the poet's selfreflexive
revision of her own work in
Afrikaans. But this argument implies
that even her own translations into
English may, in time, meet the same
fate: their moorings to her will surely
also be severed by the alienating
forces of time and print. In the final
analysis, the extent to which language
speaks us as much as we speak it
raises questions about achieving
agency over the medium such that one
may overcome its alienating power.
Paradoxically, another source of
unease arises from the recuperation of
her poetry (and herself) in English,
and the status of English already
alluded to with regard to Country of
my skull. Krog admits that she
``sometimes feels ashamed that [she]
wanted to be read in English''
(2000b:13). She questions her own
motives, which, she speculates, may
be inferiority, arrogance, or simply
the desire ``to be read by people whom
you like'' (2000b:15). Such uneasiness
does not only appear in the form of
shame. It also has to do with a certain
``resistance to colonization, giving in
to the power, being owned by the
colonizer, being accepted, accessed
only through the colonized hand''
(2000b:13). Krog's uneasiness is evident
in her awareness of the relationship
between the power of the state
and language. Always aware of the
fact that Afrikaans was the language
of the powerful, and of ``how much
Afrikaans writing is concerned with
writing towards the ear of power'', she
asks ± with characteristic self-criticism
± whether she yielded to the temptation
of translation into the new master
language because she again wants ``to
be close to that language of power, to
speak to the ear of power'' (2000b:17).
Thus, although Down to my last skin is
written in the English language, Krog
insists that she does ``not want to
belong to English'' (2000b:13) and
that this volume ``should always form
part of Afrikaans literature''
(2000b:14).
Be that as it may, Krog and her
poetry are no newcomers to the
business of establishing a conversation
among citizens at large. The
poem with which Down to My Last
Skin opens, ``my beautiful land'' (``My
mooi land'', 1969), appeared in English
in the ANC's Dar es Salaam
mouthpiece a few months after it was
written in Afrikaans. Not surprisingly,
it did not make its way into her
first volume of poetry, published
when she was barely eighteen, for
reasons which have no bearing on its
literary quality (Krog 2000a:5).
Opening the volume with this poem is
more than just a politically correct
retrieval of a once-suppressed text. It
is an act of retrieval which, while
doomed to flounder in one respect, is
extremely powerful in another. Part of
the original force of the poem lay
exactly in the fact that it expressed an
interracial sexual transgression in the
heyday of apartheid by a young
Afrikaner woman, written in Afrikaans.
But the transgressive nature of
the poem has been vitiated by the
scrapping of the Immorality Act and
of statutory apartheid. In addition,
the poem's transgression is further
weakened because it takes place in
English rather than Afrikaans. In a
kind of inversion of the usual relationship
between original and translation,
it is only as a shadow of the
translation that the original survives.
One may even argue that the original
is overshadowed by the context of its
translation. Written in 1969, the poem
is a critical utopian fantasy: critical in
the sense that it sketches an anticipated
utopian racial harmony ``where
black and white hand in hand / can
bring peace and love / in my beautiful
land''. It is a fantasy, in the sense that
the narrator builds herself an imagined
land (``look, I build myself a
land / where skin colour doesn't
count''). But the poem is reinserted
into the active literary and social
~9 .... ARTICLES

context at a time when this fantasy has become the
reality of nation-building, when in reality people are
building a land ``where no goat face in parliament /
can keep things permanently verkramp'' (Krog
2000a:11). Although the transgressive power of the
original has faded, the opportunity of republication
afforded by translation revives the original critical/
utopian yearning. The value of recontextualisation
created by the translation thus resides in the
revitalisation of this yearning, rather than the original
transgression.
A second reason for opening the collection with
``my beautiful land'' lies in the construction of the
collection. The opening poem expresses a hope for
more liberal and just gender relations. This hope is (at
least partly) fulfilled in the last poem, ``paternoster'',
which, by acclaiming women's power, serves as an
appropriate endpiece. In ``my beautiful land'' the
narrator imagines a place where love does not mean
sacrificing one's freedom to the other through the
constraints of hegemonically imposed marriage vows
± ``where I can love you, / [...] without saying `I do' ''.
The volume leads us through the vagaries of marriage,
motherhood, political and social oppression, and the
``I'' in ``paternoster'' then proudly asserts a freedom
achieved. One can thus see in the selection and
composition of the volume an affirmation of Krog's
point that translation is inevitably interpretation, and
that she was guided as much by her present
perspective as by the forces which directed the
original Afrikaans (2000a:3±4).
Being her own translator gave Krog the liberty to
chop and change, something a translator of someone
else's work cannot do. Thus she ``changed as much as
[she] wanted, 12 [she] cut poems up ... shortened them
... gave some new titles ... constructed new cycles'' 13
(2000b:18). As her own translator she did not have to
defer to the authority of the original text or the
original author, as she did with Lang pad na vryheid.
Her question regarding Long walk to freedom,
whether ``one sticks to Mandela's judgement on the
word'' (Krog 2001:np) or follows one's own interpretation
in the translation, is indicative of her
awareness of the problem of deviations between the
authority of the author and the authority of the
translator, and how both of these are compromised by
the constraints of the respective languages in which
they write. 14 Even if the problem of authorial
authority is resolved by the author becoming her
own translator, the problems arising from the
constraints of the languages themselves persist.
One of these constraints posed by language upon
which Krog remarks is the loss of the oral quality
which informs her Afrikaans poems. This constraint
in rendering Afrikaans into English is indeed hardfelt.
The distinctions Krog draws between formal,
academic, received (``algemeen beskaafde''), high,
friendly, alternative, ``loslit'', mixed, slang and
kitchen Afrikaans fall into two modes: the formal
mode, which operates in the various domains of
power (the scientific treatise, high art, the address to
the nation and the congregation, the plea to a higher
authority); and the colloquial mode, which operates in
the domains of the intimate and private, the playful,
the subversive, but also the brutal. Many of the
distinctions she draws are related to the distinctions
between the spoken and the written word. There is, I
would like to suggest, very little middle ground in
written Afrikaans. One effect of the translation into
written English of spoken and colloquial Afrikaans is
that the translated text often falls into precisely that
middle ground which contains so much of the English
register. In consequence, the robustness and subversiveness
of the original poems are severely tempered.
The resistance of language to the translator's
agency is also evident in the absence of poems which
Krog abandoned for translation. The impossibility of
translating one colloquialism into another meant that
whole poems had to be left out, primarily for this
reason. Striking examples of this are ``man ek lus 'n
twakkie'' from Gedigte 1989±1995 and the six
narratives from the Richtersveld which open Kleur
kom nooit alleen nie. According to Krog, Jerusalemgangers
posed particular difficulty. As a volume
working with haplology, it at the same time ``works
as a complete entity'' (2000b:19), so that only a few
poems could survive the excision from the original
``like a bead in a necklace'' (2000b:19), and even they
~10 .... ARTICLES

were not able to carry all the layers of
meaning once they dropped out of
their context. Even among the poems
which are included, the resistance of
English to the translator's agency is
evident. One such an example is
``nightmare of A Samuel born Krog''.
There is no doubt about the loss of
sound quality, a loss which must be
heartfelt by Krog, for whom sound is
such a crucial part of a poem. And
this must be even more so in view of
the fact that the poem deals with, and
opens the section on, poetic composition.
If we compare the first line of the
Afrikaans, ``die lessenaar is warm en
bloederig soos 'n pasgeslagte karkas''
with the English ``the desk is warm
and bloody like a newly slaughtered
carcass'', the loss is evident.
But, whereas some poems pay the
price of translation primarily with a
loss in sound quality, ``paternoster''
(the poem with which Krog closes her
selection) testifies to an even greater
loss, namely the union of semantic
and phonic values which in Krog's
terms constitute the innate truth of
the poem. A comparison of the
Afrikaans original and the English
translation makes this clear:
I would like to suggest that Krog's
comment on the difficulty of retaining
the quality of spoken Afrikaans in the
translations (2000a:4) and her translation
of ``paternoster'' prove the
point that if truth consists in the
union of meaning and sound, the
translation of this poem has shattered
much of its truth. One of the ways in
which the Afrikaans poem counters
the patriarchy alluded to in the title is
by undermining sacred and poetic
language with the colloquial, a strategy
largely imperceptible in the
translation. The loss of both the oral
and colloquial quality (which have
been a feature of her writing since her
first volume and evident in a poem
dedicated to her mother, which she
describes as ``sommer / a barefoot
poem'' (2000a:12)) are inevitable. For
example: The Afrikaans ``moerse''
(line 1) is a rather common colloquialism
for ``groot'' (big). It also has a
second meaning, namely ``womb''
(which for some would verge on the
vulgar, as in ``gaan na jou moer''), on
which Krog plays in this poem celebrating
women's power and liberty.
This multivalency is sanitised in the
English ``massive'' (probably chosen
because it phonically echoes ``stand'')
which is closer to the academic
``massiewe'' and the received ``groot''
than to the original ``moerse''. Similarly
``slat'' (line 2) is the colloquial
spoken for ``slaan''; a distinction
which vanishes in the English ``beats''.
And ``smyt'' (line 8), which is considerably
less ``poetic'' and uncommon
in landscape poetry or less
``civilised'' than ``werp'' loses these
qualities in the English ``casts'' (which
however captures the image of casting
a line). The Afrikaans ``pak'' (line 11),
gives way to a comparatively tamer,
even refined or effeminate ``clasp'',
thus contradicting the whole tone of
the poem. 15 The fact that ``gut'' (line
5) already appears in English in the
original (``in sy gut'') is erased in
translation, which once again dilutes
the break with the purified ``literary''
language used here to refute the
effeminate ideal of woman, a theme
we have already seen occupying Krog
in Country of my skull. It is an added
pity, given the poem's position in the
collection as a closing piece, that its
original forcefulness could not be
retained to the same extent in the
translation. On the other hand, despite
these losses, one could hardly
paternoster
ek staan op 'n moerse rots langs die see by Paternoster
die see slat slingers in die lug
lig groen skuim
onverskrokke kyk ek elke donnerse brander
in sy gut voor hy breek
die rots sidder onder my sole
my bo-beenspiere bult
my bekken smyt die aangeleerde knak uit haar uit
se moer ek is rots ek is klip ek is duin
helder sing my tiete 'n koperklepgeluid
my hande pak Moordbaai en Bekbaai
my arms skeur ekstaties bo my kop:
ek is
ek is
die here hoor my
'n vry fokken vrou
paternoster
I stand on a massive rock in the sea at Paternoster
theseabeatsstripsoflightgreenfoam
into the air
fearless I stare down every bloody damn wave
in the gut as it breaks
therockquakesundermysoles
my upper leg muscles bulge
my pelvis casts out its acquired resigned tilt
like hell! I am a rock I am a stone I am a dune
distinct my tits hiss a copper kettle sound
my hands clasp Moordbaai and Bekbaai
my arms tear ecstatically past my head:
Iam
Iam
god hears me
afreefuckingwoman
~11 .... ARTICLES

imagine a more appropriate and assertive poem with
which to conclude the selection.
Besides the loss of colloquialisms and the effect this
has on the poem's rewriting of women and their place
in society and nature, the other loss to which Krog
refers and which is evident here too, is the way in
which the echoes of a literary tradition, the literary
history of a word and the aura this brings into the
original version of a poem are lost in translation
(2000a:3). The word ``sidder'' in the phrase ``die rots
sidder'' is a case in point. It echoes the Afrikaner
nationalist song ``Die lied van jong Suid-Afrika''
which begins, ``En hoor jy die magtige dreuning? /
Oor die veld kom dit wyd gesweef / Die lied van 'n
volk se ontwaking / Wat harte laat sidder en beef' (Do
you hear the powerful roar / It comes roaming widely
across the veld / The song of a volk's awakening /
That makes hearts quake and tremble'' (own translation).
Reinscribed into the Afrikaans version of this
poem, ``sidder'' poses a counterforce to Afrikaner
patriarchy and nationalism which does not echo
equally in the English version simply because the
presence of the force to be resisted is not equally felt.
Yet, this phrase, along with ``se moer ek is 'n rots''
(line 9), affirms Krog and Rushdie's assertion that
translation does not only constitute loss but can also
proffer some gain. Whereas the countering of the
``Die lied van jong Suid-Afrika'' in the Afrikaans is
lost, what is gained is the English echo of another
symbolic tradition, namely that of the political slogan.
The unmistakable reference to the slogan, ``You strike
a woman, you strike a rock!'' of the 1956 women's
march on the Union Building is immediately apparent
in the English in a way it is not in the Afrikaans. But
once these Afrikaans and English phrases are placed
alongside each other, Krog's translation has the effect
of tying the Afrikaans original more tightly into
democratic resistance politics, thereby inserting into
Afrikaans literature an important radical gain.
Another loss already touched on with reference to
Country of my skull and ``my beautiful land'' is
evident in the cycle ``Country of grief and grace'',
which pays heavily for translation simply because the
poems are not in Afrikaans. These poems, which
speak ``of pain that did not want to become language
/ of pain that could not become language'' and the
question ``how do you get released into understanding''
stem from Krog's work on the TRC. Read in
English, they veer towards reflections on the need for,
and difficulty of, putting the horrors of the South
African past into language as such. In the Afrikaans
(``land van genade en verdriet'' 2000c:37±44) they are
this and more. They are her contribution to a
resistance tradition in Afrikaans in which those who
suffered at the hands of Afrikaners speak back. 16
What comes through strongly in the Afrikaans
version is the specific position of Afrikaans and
Afrikaners (victims, perpetrators and profiteers) in
coming to terms with the past. In the original, the
specific guilt of Afrikaners is at one with the language
in which it is spoken. Thus, in the third poem in the
cycle, (``woordeloos staan ek''; ``speechless I stand'')
the indexical ``ons'' (we), while unspecified, achieves
an allusion to Afrikaners by virtue of the fact that it is
in Afrikaans:
woordeloos staan ek
waar sal my woorde vandaan kom?
vir die doeners
die huiweraars
die banges
wat bewend-siek hang
aan die geluidlose ruimte van ons;
onherbergsame verlede.
(Krog 2000c:38; my emphasis)
Any doubt as to the referent of the ``ons'' is
forestalled in the translation, in which the last two
lines are rendered
we who hang quivering and ill
from this soundless space of an Afrikaner past.
(Krog 2000a:96)
Because the utterance is no longer in Afrikaans, the
danger of the ``we'' being taken as another or a larger
group has to be curtailed by specifying the referent of
the indexical pronoun. But at the same time, the
critique of the Afrikaner past is now no longer as
internal, as it was before, no longer in the language of
the Afrikaner, but in English, a language which for
long has been the medium of critique of the
Afrikaner. Consequently, these poems are in an
important sense not so much speech acts which reenact
the transgressive force of the original Afrikaans
~12 .... ARTICLES

as they are referents which point to
those transgressive speech acts. Put
simply, they are translations best
understood to refer to the original
rather than re-enacting them in another
language.
Krog's specification of the ``ons'' as
``Afrikaner'' is an unusually clear case
of how the poet's translation can serve
as an interpretation of her own work.
(Whether we want to stick to it, is of
course another question, as Krog
herself notes with reference to Mandela's
interpretation of his own
words.) Another example comes from
the seventh poem in the cycle (``this
body bereft''). In the Afrikaans, the
speaker says,
mag ek jou vashou my suster
in die¨ brose oopvou van 'n nuwe, enkele
medewoord.
(Krog; 2000c:41)
This is rendered,
may I hold you my sister
in this warm fragile unfolding of the word
humane.
(Krog 2000a:99)
Wheres Krog's translation of ``ons''
as ``Afrikaner'' discussed in the previous
example specifies and thereby
narrows the reference of the word
``we'' in the poem ``speechless I
stand'', her translation of ``humane''
for ``medewoord'' adds depth rather
than specificity to the original. What
it means to be humane, Krog tells us if
we refer to both the English and the
Afrikaans, is to recognize each other
in and through language.
Such a conclusion makes this particular
cycle significant for (South
African) social theory. By reflecting
on the conditions of possibility for
achieving understanding through language
within the context of the TRC,
Krog is in effect establishing a linguistic
turn in resistance poetry and
social theory away from the paradigm
of work. In classic Marxist and
workerist thought, work constitutes
the central medium of social action.
The assertion in the Freedom Charter
that the land belongs to those who
work it falls within this tradition,
which paradoxically also has roots in
Locke's liberal theory of property
(Locke 1952). Krog carries this
transformation of Marxist theory 17 ±
that work and production as a central
social category should make space for
communication and understanding ±
into the South African context. In the
intersubjectivist, linguistic-turn view,
the prime medium of social action is
no longer the subject working upon
the object, but the subject communicating
with the subject. In Krog's
words:
hear oh hear
the voices all the voices of the land 18
all baptised in syllables of blood and
belonging
this country belongs to the voices of those
who live in it. (Krog 2000a:96)
By transferring terms that are current
in the materialist sphere of
economic production to the sphere of
symbolic interaction, Krog asserts
that ``country / land'' has at least two
meanings. As a material piece of
nature which is distributed according
to principles of economic justice, it
can be distinguished from the people
who form an imagined community in
which belonging is the result of
participation in symbolically mediated
acts of understanding and recognition.
Krog implies that both these
domains require attention, underscoring
the fact that social reproduction
and justice are matters of both
redistribution and recognition, of
participating in the creation of justly
distributed wealth and participating in
the social reproduction of the lifeworld
based on fair access to the
symbolic media of interpretation and
communication. 19 With this emphasis
on language as a medium of intersubjective
recognition, Krog makes an
important contribution to the postmetaphysical
transformation of traditional
concepts of ubuntu, a process
initiated by the law bringing the TRC
into being. 20
I have reached a point in my
discussion where matters of translation
shade over into the themes Krog
wishes to highlight via her selection. I
would now like to pursue matter of
theme on its own in order to determine
to what extent Down to my last
skin constitutes an act of self-reflection
on an oeuvre in which the author
takes control of her public image and
her relation to the canon. In this
regard, Krog's use of thematic focalizers
is significant, as they underline
what she considers important in her
writing. The most prominent of these
focalizers is the (biblical) seven thematic
clusters into which the collection
is divided. Except for the first
section, the poems are arranged thematically,
rather than chronologically,
although all the poems breathe a
thick sense of personal and public
history. 21
The first section, simply entitled
``First poems'', includes poems from
Krog's first and second volumes,
Dogter van Jefta and Januarie-suite.
They give an account of a young girl's
~13 .... ARTICLES

emergence into womanhood and the awareness of
tenuous, complex relations with a mother and a lover.
Strong allusions to the biblical in the sonorous praises
of Psalm 23 (``ma''), which recur in her later erotic
poetry (``marital psalm''), are palpable. The section
also introduces a trend which endures in Krog's work
over the years ± the insurgence of the secular, the
immanent, and the colloquial to debunk pretensions
to the transcendental and to high art. The second
section, ``Love is all I know'', shows further evidence
of this. It also deals deftly with the gendered
intricacies of desire, love, dependence, passion, and
control in marriage (``the way we make a double bed /
shows an undivided indestructible pact'') within
which it is possible to fight the ``man who makes me
possible [...] spectacularly''. When the speaker-author
sees ``my monthly allowance'' put on the bedside table
she can ``see how the word finance also breathes the
word violence''. Turning the mother-daughter relations
of her early poem ``ma'' around, Krog enters the
theme of motherhood from the other side in part
three, ``Dear child of the lean flank''. What remains
constant though, is the ambivalence of care and
individuation, love and appropriation, between parents
and children. The mother, ``full of foreboding /
[...] sewing name tags / on clothes'', who is both
``revolted and flattered'' by her daughter's affection,
warns her to ``resist my understanding'', to simply let
her mother's words ``wash down your back / soft
trusting''.
Aesthetic and existential concerns of writing are
prominent in the fourth section, ``To breathe''. Krog,
the poet who ``writes poetry with her tongue'',
declares her unadulterated pleasure in finding herself
``suddenly kneeling at the audible / palpable outline of
a word''. But, as the poem ``parole'' indicates, she is
not impervious to the theoretical debates on the
efficacy of poetry in political struggle. This poem
makes it clear that for her poetic and political
discourses are not mutually exclusive. Both poetic
and political language require strenuous reflection to
ward of the threat of cliche s typical to a language in
the service of injustice. In addition, the political is
extended to what is traditionally assigned to the
private and then seeps into the poetic:
things of course about which one would never write a poem
force their way into the territory of poetic themes
such as changing tampon and pad to pee in toilets
of townships where one comes. 22
These questions also affect the way one deals with
aspects of style and form. While Krog questions her
own concern with ``useless eras'' such as those
entailed in Lady Anne Barnard's letters, or the
aesthetic ``in the face of so much injustice'', she takes
her stand in the ``crossfire of pencil and paper'', in
which she pays diligent attention to the relations
between words. In a ``text-tortured land'' ruled by
ideologues who contort language to legitimate injury,
analysis and creation of the symbolic is already a
political act.
Particularly significant for English writing in South
Africa is the cycle ``Lady Anne Barnard at the Cape'',
in which Krog first worked out her complex relations
to Barnard's (1750±1825) letters in the 1983 Afrikaans
collection Lady Anne. In this critical archaeological
appropriation of early literary figures she joins the
ranks of Anthony Delius (``Lady Anne Bathing'') and
JM Coetzee. Rewriting parts of the letters from
Barnard's first-person perspective, she undercuts the
self-censure which lends them their sanitised socially
acceptability. One way in which this is achieved is by
taking the mask off the sexual desire in the very act of
mentioning its curtailing force, thereby transgressing
received female strictures. Here too, things traditionally
censored by taboo enter the canon and the Castle:
it is midnight and pewter
outside from the balcony
the stained gardens breathe
around me I hear the garrison
and lust after you
already two weeks since you left
at the Imari basin
I imagine you shaving
from behind I burrow into the softer
tack how robust the seam virulently
you shirt swells out glides from
ashamed am I of my desire: to grab you by the hips
from behind grow male
not to ride a broomstick but
to bloody fuck you between tincool buttocks into
phenomenon.
(``Lady Anne alone at the Castle'', Krog 2000a:64)
~14 .... ARTICLES

This poem illuminates Krog's skill
in undermining the distinction between
the erotic poem and the sublimated
love letter by writing elements
of her own erotic poetry into Barnard's
letters (``you hold me, prick in
the back, on the straight and narrow''
± from the poem ``my words of love'').
But Krog also uses the appropriation
of Barnard's letters as an archaeological
salvaging of what is useful from
the historical text. Thus Krog speaks
the names of the `` `free blacks' [who]
were executed this morning / for being
`rebellious' '' (``my dear Dundas'') in
ways similar to the records of the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
and the praise-poem litany with
which Chief Anderson Joyi opened his
testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (Krog 1998:136).
Flattening the distance between the
past and the present (``Cape of Good
Hope''), speaker-author Krog locates
herself in the persistent power struggles
of modern Cape Town, pointing
to the continuities in the discontinuities
which link the last decades of the
twentieth century to the colonial
period, in particular the last decades
of the eighteenth century.
With Krog's hope shattered that
Barnard may serve as a guide to her as
a South African author ± ``show it
would be possible / to hone the truth
by pen / to live an honourable life in
an era of horror'' (``Lady Anne as
guide'') ± the speaker-author does not
mince words about her interlocutor
when she concludes, ``you never had
real pluck / now that your whole
frivolous life has arrived / on my desk,
I go berserk: as a metaphor, my Lady,
you're not worth a fuck''. As Barnard
the speaker merges into Krog the
author, she realises that there is also
the option (although Krog would
rather see it as an imperative) to ``do /
differently''. ``Tired of white coinage'',
and using the analogy to Barnard's
watercolour paintings, Krog pleads
for a change in perspective within the
artwork. But going beyond this, she
also recasts the relationship between
art and its object. In the place of the
picturesque depiction of the landscape
which JM Coetzee analyses in settler
writing (1988), Krog notes the alternative:
``I could slowly pull back my
hand and pick up a stone.'' Up to this
point the relationship to the landscape
is still congruent with the lady who
closely observes the objects she paints
or describes in her letters. But the
relationship between subject and the
land changes as the sphere of action
shifts from the representative painter
to the participant in an uprising: ``I
could throw it, / shatter the glass / to
gasp, to thaw retchingly in this hiphigh
landscape / at last''. Transformation,
Krog suggests, is thus required
in both spheres. In the poeticsymbolic
sphere, a change of language
from the picturesque to ``new words
for survival'', in politics, from quietism
to participation in resistance.
The penultimate section (``The
house of sweets'') foregrounds this
political aspect. Read as a companion
to Country of my skull, it is Krog's
poetic (as opposed to prose) account
of the ``negotiated settlement'' in
which she vents her anger at the
``generals and brigadiers and ministers
/ and headmen-generals'' who sit
``cuddling their cocks / plaiting their
penises''. It records a tussle over a
``country held bleeding between us'' in
which ``everybody wants to have / and
everybody wants to keep'', and in
which voices separated from each
other need to traverse great distances
in order to reach their addressees.
``The house of sweets'' also deals with
Adorno's question, with which Krog
grapples in Country of my skull
(1998:237ff), namely the possibility of
writing poetry after genocide. On the
one hand there are the Afrikaner
perpetrators and audience, shocked
into silence. On the other there is the
transition of testimony-giving witnesses
from seeing to speaking as the
``eye plunges into wounds of anger /
seizing the surge of language by its
soft bare skull''. Krog reminds us that
it is because of these testimonies of the
victims and their acts of reconciliation
that the ``country no longer lies /
between us but within'', and in adding
her voice to that of these witnesses, by
participating in this symbolic interaction,
the speaker-author experiences
``for one brief shimmering moment''
that ``this country is also truly mine''.
But, as Krog suggests in ``Living
the landscape'' (the title given to the
collection's last section), such a sense
of belonging need not turn into a new
act of appropriation of the land, its
people, and its history. Acutely aware
of the history of objectification in the
distancing gaze between the subject
and the landscape in writing, and the
appropriation of space (``under orders
from my ancestors you were occupied''),
Krog's distraught attachment
to the land takes the form of commitment
to it: ``now you are fought
over / negotiated divided paddocked
sold stolen mortgaged / I want to go
underground with you land / land that
would not have me / land that never
belonged to me / land that I love more
~15 .... ARTICLES

fruitlessly than before''. Unabashedly anti-idealistic,
she declares her adoration of the red grass Themeda
triandra (which is illustrated on the cover and section
pages of the book), the way other people adore god.
Thus she breaks with the tradition in South African
writing going back to Pringle, who not only clears the
landscape of people (``man is distant''), but also fills it
with transcendence (``but God is near!'' ± Pringle
1981:35). 23
This brings us, finally, to the question whether the
range, and the arrangement of, themes in Down to my
last skin succeed in straightening the skewed representation
of Krog and her poems, as the author hoped
it would. It is difficult to say whether the poems give a
more faithful picture of Krog. This is as difficult as
saying whether the Afrikaans poems represent her
properly, and in what terms such a ``proper''
representation would be expressed. And, as with all
self-portraits, two questions need to be distinguished:
whether she feels properly reflected in these poems
(which is a subjective but not an unimportant
question); and whether in the judgement of others, the
collection squares with the images they have of her.
Of the eighty-odd poems, twelve had already been
translated, which means that this collection multiplies
the number of her poems available in English sixfold.
But poems translated here for the first time do not
merely reiterate the ones already available in translation.
They constitute a significant exploration and a
deepening, which gives a complex and detailed
expression of her concerns developed over thirty years
of writing. This in itself must already constitute a
certain ``straightening''. In this regard, the fact that
she chose not to include any of her children's verses
(which may have added yet a further dimension to the
section ``Dear child of the lean flank''), constitutes a
striking absence. As far as an accurate representation
of Krog's poetry (rather than her person) is concerned,
a further source of complexity springs from
the fact that, despite the separations into sections
which foregrounds her various themes, they do not
exist in isolation from each other. The interrelationship
of gender issues, national politics and landscape
(discussed with reference to ``paternoster'') emerge
consciously right from the outset of Krog's work.
Finally, the bringing together of these poems in a
single collection allows one to read them in their
unfolding relationship to one another. In this sense
the book reads like a crafted piece in which the parts
and the whole dialectically enrich each other. By
committing to paper her own interpretations of her
writing, Krog makes significant suggestions about
how her work can be read. Her self-interpretation can
be discerned in the choices she makes in the
translation of actual words; her selection of poems to
be translated; her thematic focalization; and the
composition of the collection as a whole. This makes
Down to my last skin valuable to those who can only
read her in English ± and at the same time invaluable
to Afrikaans.
Endnotes
1 I am grateful to Antjie Krog for making unpublished
manuscripts available to me, without which this paper
could not have been written.
2 The translation series of the Centre for the Study of
Southern African Literature and Languages at the University
of Durban-Westville and Essen University falls
into this category. The first publication in this series is
Usukabekhuluma and the Bhambatha rebellion, an
orally-derived history by Andreas Z. Zungu, translated
by ACT Mayekiso.
3 Section three of the Bill reads:
(1) The guiding principles of this Act are as follows ^
(a) The promotion and accommodation of linguistic
diversity must be pursued in accordance with the
provisions of the Constitution and relevant international
law.
(b) The marginalisation of the indigenous languages
and South African Sign Language/s must be progressively
eliminated.
(c) The entrenchment of language equity and language
rights must be pursued in such a way that
both national unity and democracy are promoted.
(d) The learning of South African languages, especially
the indigenous languages, must be encouraged.
(e) Measures for the implementation of multilingualism
must take into account the interests, needs and aspirations
of all affected parties and their participation
in language matters must be promoted.
4 See Judith LÏtge Coullie's interview with Johan van
Wyk in Telling lives: interviews on southern African
auto/biography (Coullie, Ngwenya, Meyer: forthcoming).
5 Why the necessity for multilingualism? (www.mweb.-
co.za/litnet/taaldebat/kmarais.asp)
6 Contrast with ``waarheid trap nooit in die slagyster van
~16 .... ARTICLES

taal nie'' [truth never steps into the trap of language]
(Krog 2000e:1).
7 For example, those using the early medieval pagan
Merseburger ZaubersprÏche, whose healing power
was considered to lie partly in its sound and which
was appropriated into the liturgy in the course of Christianization.
8 Presumably she does not subscribe to the nationalist
conclusions Herder draws from this. For a critique of
the connection between Herder's notion of language
and national identity, see``Topologies of nativism'' in Appiah
(1992).
9 Donald Davidson (1984:183) summarises this position
(which he rejects) as follows: ``Philosophers of many
persuasions are prone to talk of conceptual schemes.
Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing
experience; they are systems of categories that give
form to the data of sensation; they are points of view
from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the
passing scene. There may be no translating from one
scheme to another, in which case the beliefs, desires,
hopes, and bits of knowledge that characterize one
person have no true counterparts for the subscriber
to another scheme. Reality itself is relative to a scheme:
what counts as real in one system may not in another.''
10 Her novella, Relaas van 'n moord, was translated in
1995 by Karen Press into English as Account of a murder.
11 A related point is made in Waarom is die wat voorToyi-
Toyi altyd vet?
Trudie:
Gugu:
Trudie:
Gugu:
Engels is so 'n nonsens taal weet jy Gugu, jy
kan enige stront in Engels seª en dit klink altydnaiets.UysKrige,so'nAfrikaansepoet
van ons, het geseª : Engels is 'n advertensie
taal.
I don't experience it like that. English has become
a language in which I am free.
Free!
I can say things in English that I will not dare
say in my own ... the people who think like
me,mysortofsoulmates,theyfunctionin
English. It has become the language where
we link ... English has no culture breathing
down its hairy nostrils. (Krog 2000e:6)
12 Compare the Afrikaans ``jy met 'n borskas van koejawel
en heliotroop / en die roeserige skubbe van pynappel /
jy met jou verwaande verdriete / vlek die hoeke blou''
(Krog 1995b:25) with the following: ``with your chest of
guava and grape / your hands cool as spoons / your
haughtygriefsstaineverycornerblue''(Krog2000a;
``latin-american love song'').
13 Notably ``Country of grief and grace'' in which the order
of the poems (f) and (g) is inverted and the fifth poem in
the original cycle taken from Kleur kom nooit alleen nie
is left out.
14 These are problems familiar to translators, but also to
oral historians and those working in oral literature. A
comparison of the transcriptions of, for example, Margaret
McCord's interviews with Katie Makanya, and
Elsa Joubert's interviews with``Poppie''and their rendering
in The calling of Katie Makanya and Die swerfjare
van Poppie Nongena respectively, testify to this.
15 We are reminded here that that the queen was described
in Country of my skull as follows: ``She looks like
anybody's auntie from PE, complete with a clasp handbag
from John Orrs and skoentjies from Stuttafords''
(Krog 1998:7).
16 For a discussion of both these aspects, see Snyman
(1999:155-164).
17 On the transformation of Marxism from the paradigm of
work to the paradigm of communication, see JÏrgen
Habermas (1987:vol II 332ff), Seyla Benhabib (1986)
and Axel Honneth (1992:230ff).
18 The intersubjective and caring quality of language is
especially evident in the Afrikaans ``hoor! Hoor die opwel
van medemenslike taal'' (emphasis added). Implied
in ``medemenslike taal'' may also be an imperative for
translation. Compare also the version in Waarom is die
wat voor toyi-toyi altyd vet?:
Gugu:
Trudie:
Gugu:
if you cut yourself off / from the voices of the
land / you will wake up in another country ^
die land behoort aan die stemme /aan al die
stemme wat daarin woon
you will wake up in another country / A
country that you don't know and that you
will never understand. (Krog 2000e:14)
19 For the connection between the material and the symbolic,
between redistribution and recognition, see
NancyFraser(1989:161-187and1997:11-39).
20 For the post-traditional use of ubuntu in the TRC, see
note about the law in the publisher's note (Krog
1998:vi). For traditional notions of ubuntu, see Makgoba
(1999).
21 Only the poems in this section bear dates ^ as if to set
them apart as dated by being first poems. Unfortunately
the book does not have a list mentioning original
places and dates of publication. This would have
helped readers to reconstruct both a chronology and
an original context, allowing for added interpretation. It
would also have made comparisons to the original
poems easier, thereby retaining the link to the Afrikaans
and underlining the fact that the poems belong to Afrikaans.
22 That the tampon should make its way into the poem
here raises the question why it was sanitised out of
Country of my skull. In the Afrikaans manuscript of
Country of my skull (section 1.10) Krog describes a
scene where she and a colleague are forced to get
dressed in the shrubs of the president's garden before
a reception. There too she had to change pads. In the
English publication (Krog 1998:19) this scene is replaced
with the much more harmless washing of her
~17 .... ARTICLES

armpits in the rain. On the matter of drawing a line between
public writing and private intimacy, see ``marital
psalm'' (Krog 2000a:30).
23 This becomes a trope carried to Canada by Pringle's
prote¨ ge¨ , Susanna Moodie ^ for example, her poem on
Grosse Island (Moodie 1989:28).
References
Appiah, Kwame Anthony.1992. In my father's house: Africa in
the philosophy of culture.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Benhabib, Seyla.1986. Critique, norm, and utopia: a study of
the foundations of critical theory. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Coetzee, JM.1988.White writing. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Coullie, Ngwenya, Meyer. Forthcoming. Telling lives: interviews
on southern African auto/biography.
Davidson, Donald. 1984. Inquiries into truth and interpretation.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Derrida, Jacques.1998. Monolingualism of the other or the
prothesis of origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly practices: power, discourse and
gender in contemporary social theory. Routledge: New
York and London.
_______ .1997. Justice interruptus: critical reflections on the `postsocialist'condition.
New York and London: Routledge.
Habermas, JÏrgen. 1987. The theory of communicative action.
Cambridge: Polity.
Honneth, Axel.1994. Kampf um anerkennung. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.
Humboldt, Wilhelm.1996. Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie.
Werke Band 3. Stuttgart: JG Cotta'sche Buchhandlung.
Joubert, Elsa. 1978. Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena.
Kaapstad: Tafelberg.
Krog, Antjie. 1995a. Unpublished Afrikaans manuscript of
Country of my skull.
_______ .1995b.Gedigte 1989^1995. Groenkloof: Hond.
_______ .1995c. Account of a murder. Johannesburg: Heinemann.
_______ .2000a. Down to my last skin. Parktown: Random House
_______ .2000b. Down to my last skin: a conversation with Antjie
Krog. Interview with Yvette Christianse« and Karen Press.
In: Connect: art politics, theory, practice. Issue on Translation.
Fall:11^20.
_______ .2000c. Kleur kom nooit alleen nie. CapeTown: Kwela.
_______ .2000d. Why is Antjie still on top. Interview article with Michael
Rautenbach. Mail & Guardian 31 March; http://
www.sn.apc.org/wmail/issues/000331/ARTS57.html
_______ .2000e. Waarom is dië wat voor toyi-toyi altyd vet? Unpublished
play performed at the Aardklop festival, Potchefstroom,
and the Market Theatre.
_______ .2001. moet hierie woorde soes moet kerse ^ vertaling
van die afwesiges in Afrikaans: 'n oorsig oor verskeie
vertalingsprojekte. Unpublished Langenhoven memorial
lecture. University of Port Elizabeth.
_______ .2002 (forthcoming). Met woorde soos met kerse. Cape
Town: Kwela.
Locke, John.1952. Thesecondtreatiseofgovernment.New
York: Liberal Arts Press.
Lorde, Audre.1984.The master's tools will neverdismantle the
master's house. In: Sister outsider: essays and speeches.
New York: Crossing Press.
Makgoba, Malegapuru William (ed). 1999. African renaissance:
the new struggle. Sandton and Cape Town: Mafube
and Tafelberg.
Marais, Khethiwe. Why the necessity for multilingualism?
www.mweb.co.za/litnet/taaldebat/kmarais.asp
McCord, Margaret.1995 The calling of Katie Makanya. New
York: John Wiley & Sons.
Moodie, Susanna. 1989. Roughing it in the bush. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart.
Pringle,Thomas.1981. `Àfar in the Desert''. In: Michael Chapman
(ed). A century of South African Poetry. Johannesburg:
AD Donker.
Snyman, Johan. 1999. Bevry my tot berou. Fragmente: tydskrif
vir filosofie en kultuurkritiek 3:155^164.
South African Languages Bill. www.mweb.co.za/litnet/taaldebat/pers5.asp
Van Wyk, Johan. 2001. Man-Bitch. Durban: Published by the
author.
Zungu, Andreas Z. 1998. Usukabekhuluma and the Bhambatha
Rebellion.Transl. AC T Mayekiso.
University of Durban-Westville: Centre for the Study of
Southern African Literatures and Languages.
~18 .... ARTICLES

A Passion for Africans
...........................................................
PSYCHOANALYZING KAREN BLIXEN'S NEO-FEUDAL KENYA
DIANE SIMMONS
Recently scholars have
begun to read imperialist
literature as a portrait
of psychological need on
the part of those wielding
or imagining imperial power.
Often, the literature of
empire reorganizes
the materiality of
colonialisation into a
narrative of perpetual
longing and perpetual loss
To us, the man who adores the Negro is as
sick as the man who abominates him.
Frantz Fanon, Black skin, white masks
~I
n recent years there has been a
great deal of work which
.......
invites us to explore the psychology
fueling European imperialism and the
racist attitudes which accompanied it.
In the years after World War II, postcolonial
writers have portrayed European
imperialists as psychically empty
and lost, clinging desperately to the
pedestals of grandiosity they had built
for themselves. As early as 1963,
Albert Memmi in The colonizer and
the colonized painted the European
ruler in North Africa as a person at
home nowhere, deeply conflicted in
the role of colonial master, knowing
within himself that the superiority he
claimed was a sham (1967:58). Ngugi
wa Thiong'o has portrayed the English
in Kenya as similarly displaced,
alienated from home and god, sustained
only by their ability to dominate
others (1983:76). More recently,
West Indian writer Jamaica Kincaid
has described the imperialist as one
who may have ``fashioned for himself
a body of steel'', but whose hard shell
conceals an interior that is dead and
decaying (1989:76).
Recently scholars have begun to read
imperialist literature as a portrait of
psychological need on the part of those
wielding or imagining imperial power.
Often, as Sara Suleri writes of Rudyard
Kipling in The rhetoric of English India,
literature of empire reorganizes the
materiality of colonialism into a narrative
of perpetual longing and perpetual
loss (1992:10). Elleke Boemer (1995:63),
in Colonial and post-colonial literature:
migrant metaphors, shows that even as
the European imperialist rejects the
native, ``he also requires the native's
presence in order to experience to the
full his own being''. These studies
suggest, as Homi Bhabha (1994:61) has
written, that the politics of race ``will not
be entirely contained within the
humanist myth of man or economic
necessity or historical progress, for its
psychic affects question such forms of
determinism ... social sovereignty and
human subjectivity are only realizable in
the order of otherness''.
It is not my intention to deny the
material aspect of imperialism. As
Eric Hobsbawm has shown, privileged
access to colonies was seen by many in
Europe as a matter of economic life
and death, as, after 1880, British
manufacturing became increasingly
less competitive (1989:74). But economic
gain was not the only advantage
to be had, as Hobsbawm also
notes. Even among those not profiting
economically from imperialism, the
project was ``genuinely popular'' as
the ``idea of superiority to and domination
over a world of dark skins in
remote places'' had wide appeal (70).
And it is this appeal of the ``idea of
superiority'' over a ``world of dark
skins'' that psychologists and students
of psychoanalytic theory have become
increasingly interested in examining.
As early as 1950, Octave Mannoni, an
Italian psychiatrist working in Madagascar,
wrote that part of the lure of
the colonies was the ability to leave
one's surroundings for a world in
which the reality of other human
beings does not intrude upon one's
fantasies, where one may see others in
terms of one's subjective needs. ``If we
are to achieve a complete and adult
personality,'' Mannoni writes, ``it is
~19 .... ARTICLES

essential that we should make the images of the
unconscious tally, more or less, with real people; flight
into solitude shows that we have failed to do so'' 1
(1956:101). Joel Kovel, in his psychohistory of white
racism, has shown the way in which the racist uses the
object of his prejudice to exteriorize guilt. And in a recent
work, The psychoanalysis of race, Christopher Lane
(1998:5) writes that, while racism and imperial domination
are often attributed to an array of economic and
political factors, it remains an unpleasant ``psychological
truth'' that not all gains are tangible: ``For instance, a
group's `gain' might consist in the pleasure received in
depleting another's freedom ... if we ignore these psychic
issues, we promulgate fables about human nature,
maintaining idealistic assumptions while unexamined
psychic factors fuel acrimony, resentment and hatred''.
Similarly, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1996:96), in her
recent The anatomy of prejudices, insists that we recognize
that our attitudes toward racial others are ``organized
from their start by fantasies, not by ... reality factors''.
Finally, though she is writing about the portrayal of
``Africanist'' figures in American literature, Toni
Morrison, in her critical work,
Playing in the dark, provides a
powerful incentive for examining
the use white writers make of their
black characters and considering
what this use teaches us about the
psychology of racism and domination.
While it is important to
look at what oppression does to
the mind and imagination of the
oppressed, Morrison (1985:11)
writes: ``Equally valuable is a
serious intellectual effort to see
what racial ideology does to the
imagination and behaviour of
masters''. In a discussion of Willa
Cather's Sapphira and the slave
girl, for example, Morrison shows that Cather uses the
relationships she sets up between white and black
characters to ``[dream and redeem] her problematic
relationship with her own mother'' (27). For, Morrison
writes, ``the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive;
an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful
Africa works for both
Karen and Bror as a
magic kingdom in which
each may play out
fantasy roles, Karen
as lady of the manor,
and Bror as hard-drinking
white hunter
exploration of fears and desires that reside in the
writerly unconscious'' (17).
Danish memoirist Karen Blixen, writing under the
pen name of Isak Dinesen, presents us with such a
meditation on the inner life of the imperialist, and the
``fears and desires'' that propel one well-known figure
into the imperialist project. In her best-known book,
Out of Africa, Blixen describes her farm in the ``white
highlands'' of Kenya between 1913 and 1931 as an
intoxicating world of air and light at six thousand feet.
In this exhilarating setting Blixen portrays herself as
the benevolent and amused mistress of a six thousandacre
coffee plantation. The land has been purchased
for her by wealthy Danish relatives and is worked by
Africans who have been displaced by the arrival of the
Europeans. The African workers survive by ``squatting''
on her vast acreage, and they must pay for this
privilege by working for her half the year. In addition
to losing their lands, the Africans have been prohibited
from growing cash crops so that their only means of
paying the taxes levied by the British government,
which held that the natives should help pay costs of
administration, was to work for
whites. Though she is the beneficiary
of cheap, stolen land and
virtual slave labour, getting rich is
not the chief aim of Blixen, who
has come to Africa with her new
husband, Baron Bror Blixen, the
son of Swedish aristocrats; the
couple never manage to make a
profit on the farm, which ultimately
goes bankrupt. Rather,
Africa works for both Karen and
Bror as a magic kingdom in which
each may play out fantasy roles,
Karen as lady of the manor, and
Bror, who is said to have been the
model for the guide in Ernest
Hemingway's story, ``The short happy life of Francis
Macomber'', as hard-drinking white hunter.
In describing her life in Africa, Karen Blixen shows
herself as surrounded by adoring Africans with whom
she lives in reciprocal harmony. And in her memoirs,
~20 .... ARTICLES

oth in Out of Africa and the later
Shadows on the grass, we see Blixen
using the Africans in a variety of ways
to repair her own psychological damage.
Casting the Africans in the role
of loyal feudal retainers to her white
queen, she uses them to create for
herself the grandiose self-image so
necessary to a person suffering from
narcissistic disturbance. Paradoxically,
she also casts the Africans as
adoring parents to her own needy
childlike nature, showing them as
figures who are always there to tend
and admire her and to love her
unconditionally. And Blixen has one
last contradictory role for the natives
of Kenya: that of nature's aristocrats,
possessed of a natural ``right'' to
existence. In all of these scenarios,
Blixen appears never to see the Africans
themselves as beings with lives of
their own, separate from herself.
Rather, she uses them as screens upon
which to project her own infantile
yearning to be the omnipotent centre
of the world, her intense need for love
and approval and her desire for a sense
of natural entitlement.
Blixen is by no means alone in her
desire to create a romanticized vision
of pre-modern simplicity and harmony
far from industrialized Europe.
Literature of European imperialism
frequently reveals the sense that Europe's
forays into the rest of the world
allow one to escape the conflicts of
modernity, and to return to a time
when ruler and ruled were more
clearly defined. Indeed, as John M
MacKenzie (1986:3) writes, a ``perverted''
form of medieval chivalry
had, by the mid-nineteenth century,
become a part of the ``British imperial
cult''. While most educated Europeans
ridiculed medieval beliefs
during the rationalist eighteenth century,
a desire to return to a past of
great lords and loving serfs arose in
the mid-nineteenth century, seeming
to represent, according to Mark Girouard
(1981:222), an anxious response
to the egalitarian ideas set in motion
by Enlightenment rationalism and to
betray the fear that the rising tide of
democracy would swamp European
culture as the upper middle class had
known it. Though neo-chivalric ideas
of inherent nobility and the right to
rule may have been formulated to
control new ``internal barbarians'',
such ideas were also, as is readily
apparent, of great use to those ``bitten
by the imperialist bug''.
The notion that European imperialists,
threatened by democracy and
the attendant ills of socialism and
trade unionism, use conquered peoples
to recreate a fantasy of the past, a
time when methods of ``ensuring
subordination, obedience and loyalty''
had not yet eroded (Hobsbawm
1989:105), supports the frequently
expressed idea that the imperial relationship
was a narcissistic one. Despite
the obvious material advantages
of imperial domination, Europeans
are also shown as needing conquered
subjects to maintain an essential selfimage.
``By subjugating the native,''
Abdul R JanMohamed (1983:86) has
written, the European is ``able to
compel the Other's recognition of him
... This enforced recognition from the
Other in fact amounts to the European's
narcissistic self-recognition
since the native, who is considered too
degraded and inhuman to be credited
with any specific subjectivity, is cast as
no more than a recipient of the
negative elements of the self that the
European projects onto him''.
~21 .... ARTICLES
The portrayal of Europeans ± and
of Karen Blixen in particular ± as
``narcissistic'' myth-makers, seeking
to re-create themselves as feudal lords,
is a useful one as we try to establish
the psychological underpinnings of
imperialism. But to make use of this
portrait, we must first examine what is
meant in psychoanalytic theory by
``narcissism'', a term which is perhaps
too easily offered as a synonym for
selfishness, and frequently, as Christopher
Lasch (1979:31) writes,
``drain[ed]'' of its ``clinical meaning''
and ``expand[ed] to cover all forms of
vanity, self-admiration, self-satisfaction,
and self-glorification''. This
popular view of the self-gazing Narcissist
is similar to the Freudian
narcissist, a figure who suffers from
too much self-involvement. But both
are quite the opposite of the narcissist
as posited in modern psychoanalytic
theory by Heinz Kohut and others,
for whom the narcissist is a figure who
suffers from precisely too little selflove.
It is this last, modern theory of
narcissism which is, I believe, most
useful in reading the neo-feudalism of
Karen Blixen. And while we cannot
link individual psychology to social
processes with any precision, it is still
possible to learn from a case study. As
psychologist Erik Erikson (1993:336)
writes, the human psyche is organized
in part as a response to social
influences; and ``it frequently happens
in history that an extreme and even
atypical personal experience fits a
universal latent conflict''. Further, if
students of imperialism and postcolonialism
are to rely on psychoanalytic
theory as a tool ± and the
frequent use of terms such as ``narcissist''
in the context of imperialism
shows that such a use is being made ±

we must accept that this theory is compiled through a
study of individual psyches. It is individuals who
make up and propel social movements, and, as
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1996:342) argues, there are
situations that privilege particular psychological
characteristics: ``At particular historical moments ±
especially moments of crisis, a dominating set of
social character traits may emerge affecting the whole
society ... in times of change individuals of these
character types have more chance to flourish, to
organize groups, to gain power, and to exercise
influence''.
The relationship Karen Blixen set up with the
Africans under her control was, I will suggest, a
narcissistic one as defined by Heinz Kohut. 2 For
Kohut, the human infant is not, like the Freudian
infant, driven by sexual and aggressive pressures;
these are secondary productions of disruption in the
formation of the self. Rather, the child is driven by a
desire for relationship with others. The child, born
into a state of primary narcissism, needs others to
reflect his own sense of infantile perfection back to
him. With time and with the loving and attentive
mediation of caregivers, this infantile narcissism with
its ``inflated sense of the self ... can be whittled down''
to more realistic proportions, as the grandiose self
repeatedly but gently and manageably encounters the
reality that one is not the perfect centre of the
universe. If, however, the grandiosity of normal infant
narcissism is subjected to traumatic onslaughts to its
self-esteem, these grandiose fantasies will be driven
into repression, with the result that infant narcissism
cannot be gradually modified into a realistic assessment
of the self vis-aÁ -vis the outer world. Rather,
narcissistic desires will remain intact and ``the adult
ego will tend to vacillate between an irrational
overestimation of the self'' and (when this inflated
view of the self is inevitably punctured) ``feelings of
inferiority'' (Kohut in Morrison 1985:69).
Narcissistic need, psychologist Otto Kernberg has
written, produces a typical set of personality characteristics.
Such people
experience little empathy forothers, they obtain very little enjoyment
from life except for the tributes they receive from
others or from their own grandiose fantasies. In general, their
relationships with others are clearly exploitive and sometimes
parasitic. It is as if they feel they have the right to control
and possess others and to exploit them without guilt feelings
^ and behind a surface which is very often charming and
engaging, one senses coldness and ruthlessness (Kernberg
in Morrison1985:214).
It is not hard to see how the narcissist, as here
described, would find the presence of hundreds of
people dependent upon him or her for livelihood and
preferment an ideal opportunity to exploit others, not
only for economic gain, but also to sustain essential
grandiose fantasies.
Narcissists, according to Kohut and others, are not
born. Rather, they are created both by their families
and their societies, and if we look at the early life of
Karen Blixen, we may explore how this creation takes
place in one instance. In Blixen's case, the thwarted
yearning for acceptance and approval, and a sustained,
if masked, assault upon self-esteem that mark
the narcissist, is well-documented in the author's early
life. Karen Blixen ± ``Tanne'' to her family ± was the
second of three girls born in rapid succession to
Ingeborg Westenholtz, daughter of a family of selfmade
millionaires, and Wilhelm Dinesen, son of a
country family with connections to the greatest
noblemen in Denmark. Wilhelm was a man described
as in search of ``a more intense experience of his
being'' (Thurman 1995:13), an army officer in the
Dano-Prussian War, who later voyaged to America
where he explored the wilderness (1995:15). Though
she was brought up among the powerful, puritanical
bourgeois women of her mother's family, Tanne still
felt herself to be her father's favourite, defining herself
``by opposition to the plebeians of her surroundings.
She and her father made an aristocracy of two, and
her greatest pride was that she was his and not
`theirs' '' (1995:26).
When Wilhelm committed suicide in Karen's tenth
year, however, this aristocracy was destroyed. The
young girl's loss was intense, and, Karen Blixen
would come to feel later in life, crippling, delivering
her back into the powerfully controlling arms of the
Westenholzes. Among them the sense of a separate,
~22 .... ARTICLES

special self, nurtured by her father,
would be repeatedly crushed, a ripe
condition, as Kohut claims, for the
creation of an adult ego that alternates
between grandiose fantasies, on
one hand, and feelings of helplessness
and inferiority on the other. As
Blixen's letters from Africa show, the
Westenholzes, for all their intense
closeness, viewed their children more
as family assets than as separate
individuals entitled to lives of their
own. Her letters to her ``own beloved,
beloved wonderful little mother'' are
thick with phrases of love and longing
and are endlessly apologetic for causing
so much trouble. But Blixen also
begins to express, as affairs at the
farm worsen and as the family begins
to pressure her, much against her will,
to divorce the improvident Bror, the
sense that in losing her father she lost
the one person who was not bent
upon changing her, controlling her or
disciplining every impulse: ``I think
my greatest misfortune was Father's
death,'' she writes in 1921. ``Father
understood me as I was, although I
was so young, and loved me for
myself ...'' By contrast she writes of
the Westenholzes: ``If they do care for
me at all, they do so in spite of my
being as I am. They are always trying
to change me into something quite
different; they do not like the parts of
me that I believe to be good'' (Lasson
1978:110). And Blixen reproaches
herself bitterly for ``the one great
mistake'' of accepting family financing
for the African venture, declaring
that if she manages to hold on in
Africa it will be no thanks to the
Westenholzes, but rather ``father who
had done it for me. It is his blood and
his mind that will bring me through''
(1978:110).
In her sense of failed parental
nurture, her desire to escape into an
idealized setting, Blixen is hardly alone
among imperialists. In his analysis of
the private lives of key imperialists in
Empire and sexuality, Ronald Hyam
shows that these figures frequently
exhibit a high degree of immaturity,
never outgrowing the fantasies and
romantic ideals of childhood. Those at
the forefront of imperial operations
were often, Hyam writes, searching for
stand-ins for missing or inadequate
parents, and he offers the example of
Rudyard Kipling and his search for
``mother substitutes''. Further, many
of the ``imperial elite'', Hyam writes
(1990:49), such as ``Rhodes, Livingstone
and Stanley, Curzon and
Nathan, Henry Lawrence and FD
Lugard, Kitchener and Montgomery
substituted careers in empire for private
life''. Similarly, Jonathan
Rutherford (1997:7) writes that ``the
primary impetus behind ... commitments
to Empire'' for many figures,
such as Rupert Brooke, TE Lawrence
and Enoch Powell, lay in ``their
ambivalent relations with their
mothers''. And while Hyam acknowledges
that the imperial enterprise is
generally viewed as masculine, he
notes that ``the handful of women who
contributed something notable to it
seems also to confirm the thesis of
emotional deprivation''. It is possible,
he writes, ``to see a basic truth in the
contention that `love's loss was empire's
gain' '' (1990:47, 49).
Blixen, then, is not an uncommon
imperialist in her desire to use Africa
to replay childhood fantasies, to seek
in the imperial relationship a return to
a thwarted, infantile perfection. In
this search, Blixen sought to ally
~23 .... ARTICLES
herself with those whom she believed
embodied the aristocratic freedom,
entitlement and reckless disdain of
society's rules that she associated with
her adventurer father. All of her life
Karen was drawn to aristocrats,
becoming a hanger-on in the circle of
her noble cousin Daisy Frijs; marrying
Baron Bror Blixen after failing to
attract his twin brother, Hans; allying
herself with the English aristocrats in
East Africa against the bourgeois
settlers who disgusted her; and falling
in love with the elusive son of a British
lord, Denys Finch Hatton, to whom
she struggled not to cling.
Not only did Blixen seek out
aristocrats in real life, but much of her
creative work, especially in the short
story collection, Seven Gothic tales, is
devoted to an often tortured elaboration
of the aristocratic personality as
she envisions it. In these stories,
written immediately after her return
from Africa and published three years
before Out of Africa, Blixen repeatedly
portrays characters who demonstrate
both sides of the narcissistic
coin, grandiose desires for freedom,
power and adoration, which are only
briefly sustained before a plunge into
loss, emptiness and death. As Sara
Suleri sees in the works of Rudyard
Kipling a ``brilliant literalization of
the colonial movement'', Blixen's
Tales literalize one version of the
imperial psyche, as her characters are
often tortured by the sense that they
are created by the gaze of others, and
they struggle, in their turn, to create
others. One such figure, the charlatan
Kasparson in ``The deluge at Norderney'',
succinctly expresses both a
grandiose sense of omnipotence on
one hand, and a nagging fear of

falseness and emptiness on the other. In doing so he is
reminiscent of the attitudes of Karen Blixen in Africa
and gives us a psychological context out of which to
read the glowing portrait of her relationship with
Africans: ``Nothing in the world have I ever loved,
except the peasants,'' Kasparson says. ``If they would
have made me their master I would have served them
all my life. If they would only have fallen down and
worshipped me I would have died for them. But they
would not'' (1934:76).
These fantasies contain the tortured sense that the
attempt to live in freedom and disdain for convention
will always be engulfed by cataclysm. Even those who
appear to exhibit the wild disdain for convention that
only aristocrats, in Blixen's view, can maintain, often
must do so in a masquerade. In what amounts to a
portrait of the divided self of narcissistic disorder,
with its oscillations between grandiosity and tortured
emptiness, these figures, faced with the powerful
constraints of society, can only be their wild, free
selves when masked. The desire for the freedom to be
one's rightful self has been perverted into the need to
play a part, and in accepting their roles, the characters
seem to acknowledge their inner emptiness.
``The deluge at Norderney,'' for example, in which
one nearly fantastic story opens into the next in the
manner of Arabian nights, features several characters
of noble blood who attempt to escape intensely
controlling backgrounds, in which a separate and
strong sense of self has not been allowed to develop.
The central figure, Miss Malen Nat-og-Dag, is the last
member of an old aristocratic family, but was
nevertheless brought up in a repressive environment
reminiscent of the puritanical Westenholzes, in which
she was taught to value chastity above all else
(1934:17). As a result, her sexual life has been limited
to sinful fantasy. In slightly mad old age, and thanks
to the ``wildness'' of her aristocratic blood, she has
come to believe that her fantasies were real and that
she has actually lived a life of sexual debauchery.
Masquerade, she argues, is not only noble as it frees
one from the pettiness of reality, but it even makes
one like a god: ``Truth is for tailors and shoemakers,''
she remarks. ``I on the contrary have always held that
the Lord had a penchant for masquerades ... the Lord
himself masqueraded pretty freely ... when he came to
earth'' (1934:24). Here Blixen paints freedom and
``wildness'' as, ultimately, an act, since her protagonist
has actually lived the chaste life she was taught to
revere, only pretending to have escaped its repressive
hold. For Blixen, however, this pretence is heroic, and
at the end of the story the old woman is likened to
Scheherazade, spinning fantasies to keep death at bay,
even though this strategy fails in the end.
Another character, the young countess Calypso von
Platen Hallermund, is shown struggling and ultimately
failing to escape a background in which a
strong sense of selfhood was brutally suppressed.
Calypso is brought up by an uncle who detests
women, preferring the company of young boys. This
reminds us of Wilhelm Dinesen and his passionate
love for his soldiers as an officer in the Danish and
French armies. This was a love, he wrote in a letter,
which was similar to the love of women, except that it
was not limited to one person. ``It was the same
thing,'' Blixen writes, ``with the Natives and me''
(1985:19). Calypso's uncle tries to solve the problem
of her gender by dressing her and treating her like a
boy. But when it became clear she was a girl, he
``turned his eyes away from her forever and annihilated
her ... Her girl's beauty was her death sentence
... Since then she has not existed'' (1934:44). Calypso
too bears some resemblance to the author, since
Blixen felt herself as a small girl to have been created
as someone different from her sisters by the companionship
of her father. Wilhelm Dinesen's suicide
occurred when his daughter was ten, the age at which
girls often exhibit the first visible signs of puberty, and
the young girl may have believed, as does Calypso,
that her impending womanhood was in some way
connected to her abandonment. Calypso feels that, no
longer boyish, she does not exist, ``for nobody ever
looked at her'' (1934:45). And, as Karen Blixen
sought relationships with profoundly unreliable aristocratic
men ± the father who committed suicide, the
uninterested Hans Blixen, the reckless womanizer
Bror Blixen and the elusive Denys Finch Hatton ± so
Calypso is drawn to the suits of armour that stand in
the castle corridors. These ``looked like real men'',
and she feels they would have supported her,
~24 .... ARTICLES

``had they not been all hollow''
(1934:45). In the sad world that Blixen
portrays in these stories, not only is
one's felt identity suppressed, but
those who might come to one's aid are
themselves only attractive masks.
Two other figures should be noted
from ``The deluge at Norderney,''
both of whom struggle to transcend
identities thrust upon them. Jonathan,
the bastard son of a great nobleman,
is taken up in adulthood by his father,
who declares that the son will inherit
his riches and his name if the father
can see that his ``soul'' is ``showing
itself'' in the young man. Suddenly the
eyes of the fashionable world are on
the young man, who abhors his new
situation. Now his every attitude,
including his melancholy and his
contempt for his father's offerings, are
taken as representations of the ``soul''
of his father. As such, they become
fashion statements to be imitated by
all the elegant young men of Copenhagen,
and lovely women beg to join
him if he decides upon suicide. There
is nothing he can do, Blixen shows, to
escape the controlling, creating hand
of the parent.
Finally, perhaps the greatest effort
at transcendence is made by a man
introduced as the aristocratic Cardinal
von Sehestedt, son of ``an old and
noble race'', a man of such impressiveness
that people believed he could
work miracles, even walk on water.
When the dikes break in Norderney,
the cardinal is among the rescuers
who boat out into the flood to take
survivors to safe ground. He, along
with Miss Nat-og-Dag, the Countess
Calypso and Jonathan, are moved by
the nobility of their blood to give their
places in the boat to a family of
peasants and remain in the hayloft of
a barn that could give way to the
flood at any moment. The cardinal,
who opines that all artists, kings and
gods have a bit of ``charlantry'' in
them, reveals at the end of an evening
of storytelling that he is not actually
the cardinal at all, but the cardinal's
valet, Kasparson, the bastard son of a
French duke. Kasparson has murdered
the cardinal and assumed his
identity because, as a bastard, he has
been forced to take refuge in a wide
variety of identities and, having become
a connoisseur of appropriated
identities, he has craved the fine role
of the heroic, miracle-working cardinal.
Further, he desires the acclaim of
the common people from whom his
mother came, acclaim which the
cardinal easily garnered.
In the end, all of these desperate
figures come together in the precarious
loft as the flood waters rise, all
expressing both the desire to be free of
roles thrust upon them, as well as the
sense that there is finally no inner
authenticity to be found, that the self
must constantly be created and nourished
through play-acting and the
homage of others. At the close of the
evening the hayloft is engulfed; the
four have fled convention, but their
escape has ended in annihilation.
In a short story called ``The
dreamers,'' one can see not only
Blixen's sense of what her life must
become after returning, but one also
sees a portrayal, striking in its
grandiosity, of how Blixen viewed
herself in relation to her humble but
admiring ``public'', the Africans on
her farm. The story is the first Blixen
wrote after the loss of the African
farm and her return to her mother's
house in Denmark, and, as she
acknowledged to her friend Thorkild
Bjornvig, the protagonist was modeled
upon herself (Bjornvig 1985:211).
At first Blixen's protagonist, a young
woman named Pellegrina, seems to
have achieved the transcendence so
desired by the characters in ``The
deluge at Norderney.'' A fabulous
opera singer, Pellegrina makes her
hearers understand ``the meaning of
heaven and earth, of the stars, life and
death and eternity'', and for her
greatness she is adored by her public
(1934:331). She has two great passions
in her life. One passion is for herself as
a great soprano. This love for herself
as a great singer is compared to the
love of a priest for the image of the
Virgin. In this passion, she is fierce
and jealous, furious that she cannot
sing all the parts on stage at once. The
other passion is for her audience,
especially the poor people who sit in
the galleries; even her desire for the
applause of the connoisseurs is for the
sake of the poor people. When she
sang, she muses, they ``stamped ...
shrieked, and wept over her'' and she
``loved them beyond anything in the
world''. Her love for the poor people
was ``mighty'' but at the same time
``as gentle as the love of God'' (334).
She grieved for them, gave them
money, ``even sold her clothes for
them''. They, for their part, knew she
was giving them her all and ``never
begged much'' (334). Pellegrina has
love affairs, but they are disappointing,
making her feel that the world of
real relationships is a shabby place
compared to the brilliant dramas of
the stage: that is, to her own fantasies.
A more satisfying relationship is that
with an adoring and wealthy father
~25 .... ARTICLES

figure, who devotes his life to her service, and to
whom she turns ``as a child to its mother'' (332).
Then, in a horrible fire that destroys the magical
world of the stage, with its cardboard houses and
streets, Pellegrina is badly injured, so that her voice is
irreparably damaged. This destruction, Blixen told
Bjornvig, corresponds to her loss of the farm and
Africa. So immense is Pellegrina's loss that it seems
that she herself has been burned up, left ``immovable,
black and charred'' (339). She grieves for her lost
grandeur but especially for the sorrow of the poor
people, for whom, she believes, she has been the one
shining light in an otherwise bleak existence: ``Their
one star had fallen; they were left in the dark of the
night ± the galleries which had laughed and wept with
her'' (341).
Pellegrina's response to this loss is striking. So
bound up is her sense of herself with the grandeur of
her role as diva and with the adoration of her ``poor
people'', that she does not even try to maintain a
stable sense of identity without these attributes.
Though she continues to live ± like Karen Blixen
she survives a suicide attempt ± she determines that
she will ``not be one person again ... I will always be
many persons now. Never again will I have my heart
and my whole life bound up with one woman, to
suffer so much'' (345). She feels that in this decision
she has finally discovered the secret of human
happiness: ``Is it not strange that no philosopher has
thought of this, and that I should hit upon it?'' (346). 3
But splitting oneself into a number of identities does
not bring her happiness, only fiery destruction. In her
various guises ± a prostitute, a revolutionary, and a
saintly rich young woman ± Pellegrina wins the
passionate love of men, but always disappears at the
height of their devotion, leaving, I think, before she
can be left. Even a self that is consciously false is still,
it seems, vulnerable to destruction. Pellegrina, pursued
by her admirers, is finally apprehended in a
mountain pass. In one final gesture, she unites the
desire for transcendence with the certainty of destruction.
Seeing that her pursuers are upon her she
``spread out her wings and flew away'', but her flight
is really a plunge into an abyss, and she falls to her
death (327).
In these stories, begun in Africa and completed in
Denmark after the loss of the African farm, we see the
yearning to transcend the strictures of an upbringing
in which one is required to mirror others' needs, the
desire to achieve wild-hearted greatness and to be
worshipped by those who can never approach or
challenge one's own glory. Blixen's characters, most
of whom are emboldened to rebel against their lot by
virtue of a touch of noble blood, usually can be traced
to the author herself. Their sense of self is so
disastrously intertwined with the attitudes of others,
so precariously alternating between narcissistic
grandiosity and loss, that it is permanently at risk of
destruction. So harrowing is this existence that one
must escape into disguise, and through her character,
Pellegrina, Blixen tries to imagine giving up entirely
on the attempt to form a coherent self. In both Deluge
and Dreamers, the struggle to find a place where the
self can rest, even temporarily, ends in violent death.
In these stories, with their tortured grandiosity and
annihilation in mind, Blixen helps us see Europe's
late-nineteenth-century re-invention of chivalry in
another light. Not only has this re-invention been
seen as a way to reassert elitist values and roles in a
time of encroaching democracy and as a valuable
mind-set for those engaged in the imperial endeavour,
but it has also been seen as a kind of death wish, in
which Enlightenment ideals of ``peace, reason and
progress'' were replaced with ideals of ``violence,
instinct and explosion'' as ``the middle classes of
Europe had lost their historic mission''. As Blixen's
characters are propelled toward grandiosity and
death, so, Eric Hobsbawm (1989:190) argues, did a
significant portion of Europe's youth ``plunge willingly,
even enthusiastically, into the abyss [of World
War I, hailing its outbreak] like people who had fallen
in love''. The recreation of chivalric attitudes comes to
resemble a sort of group narcissism, fuelled by
cultural insecurity and a sense of displacement,
alternating between domineering grandiosity and a
feeling of cataclysmic loss. An examination of Blixen's
stories, with their fantasies of dominance, adoration
and annihilation, prepares us to understand the
psychological underpinnings of Blixen's portrait of
~26 .... ARTICLES

her life in Africa and to consider the
complex way in which at least one
European imperialist made use of
Africans who have been made dependent
upon her.
First, we must examine the most
obvious use, Africans as feudal retainers
to Blixen's great lord: her use of
colonized subjects as the ``supporting
cast'' of empire, a group frequently
seen in imperialist literature, as Kathryn
Castle (1996:8) has written, and
without whom ``assumptions of
superiority would be meaningless.'' In
Out of Africa, Blixen writes, ``everything
you saw made for greatness and
freedom, and unequalled nobility''
(1937:4), and it is the perfect stage for
Blixen to play her grand role. As
props, Blixen acquires Scottish deerhounds,
which bring with them, she
believes, a ``feudal atmosphere''
(1937:72). She dresses her servants in
livery and has them stand behind her
at the table, portraying her home as a
feudal court where she and her aristocratic
friends, in contrast to the
cautious bourgeois settlers, hunt, tell
heroic stories and ``risk [their] lives
unnecessarily'' in pursuit of glory and
excitement (242). Blixen sometimes
laments the hard lot of the natives, but
such remarks are almost always made
in the context of criticism of the lower
class of settlers who lack the quality of
noblesse oblige, who do not understand
the reciprocal bond between
master and servant through which,
Blixen believes, tellingly, each becomes
more himself: the servant
``needs a master in order to know
himself'' (499) 4 . In her understanding
and love of the natives, Blixen allies
herself with Denys Finch Hatton and
the other English aristocrats of East
Africa who are shown to have close
relationships with Africans. One sign
of these relationships is the affectionate
nickname, and Blixen, who is
known as Baroness Blixen, reports
herself to have been given such a
name, ``Lioness Blixen'', by some of
her servants.
Further, Blixen shows herself as
performing a variety of paternalistic
roles, acting as judge to the people on
her farm, taking it as her role to keep
the peace, though she knows nothing
of their law. Like a medieval king, she
recognizes the need occasionally to
humble her nobles, walking out on the
elders who seem to ignore her in a legal
assembly and enjoying their subsequent
dismay: ``They then stumbled
on their old legs in great haste and
began to flap their arms at me. I waved
my hand to them in return, and rode
off'' (102). In addition to serving as
judge, she doctors the people and
teaches them, though her instruction is
limited to culinary arts and other
aspects of service.
The reciprocal relationship is
further portrayed when Blixen must
sell the farm. The Africans are shown
to be nearly disbelieving that she could
actually be leaving, and desperately
dependent upon her to settle their
future. In this Blixen attributes to the
natives a grasp of the medieval European
notion that the noble lord holds
his position by divine right, that he is a
kind of lesser god. Writing about the
African's response to the catastrophe
that befalls the farm, she reports that
they see it as a sort of ``act of god'', for
``in some respects ... the white men fill
in the mind of the Natives the place
that is, in the mind of the white men,
filled by the idea of God'' (386). 5
The role that Blixen intends to
create is of herself as feudal lord, but
there are times, even in both selfmythologizing
memoirs, Out of Africa
and Shadow on the grass, when the
mask slips and we are allowed to
glimpse Blixen as the lost child,
standing not as lord to the Africans,
but as child to their parents, relying
upon them for patient and consistent
support and affection, needing them
to believe in her greatness, as her own
family ± at least since her father's
death ± has never done. In this desire
to be re-parented by those she dominates,
Blixen is not alone. Fanon has
shown how literature reveals the
desire of whites to be re-parented by
blacks whom they perceive to be
especially warm and gentle. This
desire is revealed in Joel Chandler
Harris, for example, who created the
Uncle Remus stories, and whom
Fanon, quoting Bernard Wolfe, describes
as the ``archetype of [white
American] southerner''. Harris, Fanon
(1967:175) writes, ``went in search
of the Negro's love and claimed he
had won it''. A similar desire can be
seen in Kipling's The light that failed,
as the protagonist, Dick, yearns to
escape to an exotic land where he may
be rocked to sleep by a gentle native
who will ``sling you a long yellow
hammock with tassels on it like ripe
maize, and you put up your feet and
hear the bees hum and the water fall
till you go to sleep'' (77).
In Out of Africa, Blixen shows the
Africans as constituting a kind of
loving background to her life, allowing
her to feel again the centrality of
primary narcissism, as the infant is
encircled by an adoring world that
seems to be focused entirely on him or
~27 .... ARTICLES

her. ``From my first weeks in Africa'', Blixen writes,
``I had felt a great affection for the Natives. The
discovery of the dark races was to me a magnificent
enlargement of my world ... if someone with an ear for
music had happened to hear music for the first time
when he was already grown up; their case might have
been similar to mine. After I had met with the
Natives, I set out the routine of my daily life to the
Orchestra'' (1937:18).
The love that Blixen feels for the Africans is shown
to be reciprocated in both Out of Africa and Shadows
on the grass, and she portrays herself, as Robert
Langbaum (1964:40) wrote in an early study of her
work, ``surrounded by a circle of adoration''.
Throughout the book her ``boys'', as she calls the
men who work the farm, are shown in the role of
doting parents, taking an interest in all of her affairs,
from her attempt to write a book to her wearing
apparel and her finances. And the Africans are shown
displaying a tender concern for their mistress's
feelings. In garnering this affection, Blixen portrays
herself as unusual in her relationship with Africans.
Like Tanne, the favoured child, she alone is the apple
of their eye. Late in life, she would tell a magazine
interviewer: ``I am the only white person the Natives
really love'' (Thurman 1995:437).
Much of this surrogate parenting is performed by
the servant Farah, the Somali man who attended her
throughout her stay in Kenya, and whom, she writes
home, ``I care for almost as much as anyone in the
world'' (124). Like a firm but loving parent, Farah is
always there, and in the section devoted to him in
Shadows on the grass, Farah is shown believing in and
supporting her own vision of herself as a greathearted
lady. As her chief servant he demands that her
house be run in a grand style, ``insisting that she offer
champagne when the importance of the guests calls
for it, scouring Nairobi to find an ingredient for a
special dish to be served a visiting prince'' (420±421).
Blixen was not able to depend upon Bror to play an
adult role in financial matters; at the time of their
divorce he was ``wanted by the police [for debts] and
hiding out in the Masai Reserve without a tent or
shoes'' (Lasson 1978:124). Her family, of course,
supported her financially, but over the years it grew
increasingly clear that the money was to be used to
further their aims of profit, not her aim of building a
grand life for herself in Africa and the support was
finally withdrawn. Her lover, Denys Finch Hatton,
who is remembered by those who knew him as more
inclined toward love affairs with boys than with
women (Boyles 1988:24), was, in any case, clearly
commitment-phobic. But in Farah she had someone
she believed she could rely upon. He is shown as
managing her financial affairs properly, and to be
even more concerned about her dignity and well-being
than she is herself. On one occasion he is shown
declining to give her money she has asked for to buy a
pair of new slacks, as he believed the money should be
saved for something she needed even more, an item
essential to her image ± riding-boots sent from
England: ``Farah had good knowledge of riding-boots
and felt it to be below my dignity to walk about in
boots made by the Indians of Nairobi'' (421). And
when Blixen receives a new evening dress from
France, and is modeling it for the other servants
who are full of admiration, Farah, like a careful
parent, decides when enough praise is enough. He
watches the proceedings, ``not insensitive to popularity''
but ``stern'' and, at the right moment, brings out
the bowl of tobacco that signals the end of the session.
Blixen, portraying herself as basking childishly in the
praise, asks him to let her hear a little more, but he
responds firmly, ``No, Memsahib ... No. Now these
Kikuyus have said enough about this frock. Now it is
time that they have this tobacco'' (435).
One of the moments of life in Africa depicted as
most joyous is a time when Blixen shows herself to be
entirely in the care of Farah and other servants on the
three-month safari she takes alone with them during
World War I. Here there is the delicious danger of
lions and other animals, but she is safe among her
men, and in the evenings they entertain her with
stories, ``strange happenings in Somaliland, or tales
out of the Koran and the Arabian Nights'' (279). Here
too, the servants stand in as good parents, unconditional
in their admiration and tender in their care:
``My people showed great forbearance with my
ignorance of oxen, harness and Safari ways; they
~28 .... ARTICLES

were indeed as keen to cover it up as I
was myself.'' And the men pamper her
as if she were a delicate child: ``They
carried bath-water for me on their
heads a long way across the plain, and
when we outspanned at noon, they
constructed a canopy against the sun,
made out of spears and blankets for
me to rest under'' (242). Cared for like
a precious infant, Blixen seems to
regress to a state of primary narcissism,
in which she and the world are
blissfully one:
How beautiful were the evenings of the
Masai Reserve when after sunset we arrived
at the riveror the water-hole...The air
was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping
wet, and the herbs on it gave out their
spiced astringent scent. In a little while on
all sides the Cicada would begin to sing.
The grass was me, and the air, the distant
invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen
were me. I breathed with the slight nightwind
in the thorn trees. (283)
Indeed, Blixen often ascribes to the
natives the magical all-seeing-ness
that small children assume of their
parents, and she sees them as existing
to reflect her own desires back to her,
indeed as teaching her her desires
through this reflection: ``They knew
me through and through and were
conscious of decisions I was going to
take before I was certain of them
myself'' (20). Here the natives function
in a way that is similar to that of
DW Winnicott's attentive mother,
who, in her responsiveness to her
baby's physical and emotional needs,
allows him to learn and value his own
subjectivity (Mitchell and Black
1995:125). In Denmark, Blixen was
required to be concerned with the
requirements of others, a situation
which, Winnicott believed, ``impedes
the development and consolidation of
the child's own subjectivity'' (128),
but in Africa, the focus is entirely
upon her own, still infantile needs.
And as the infant sees the parent as a
part of herself, Blixen sees that upon
coming to know Africans, a ``unity''
has been created in her life, that of
master and servant: for each, ``the
play of colours would fade and his
timbre abate were he to stand alone''
(Dinesen 1937:409).
Blixen describes this love most
urgently when writing about the dark
time during which she fights to hold
the farm after her relatives indicate
unwillingness to continue underwriting
its losses. For several years she
struggled alone to hold onto the farm,
and in letters home she describes the
land as her ``child'', the ``only one I
have in this life'' (Lasson 1978:125).
The farm is all that makes her who she
is, she cries in these frantic letters, and
without it she feels she will die. But
bankruptcy looms and the family
withdraws its support. In this crisis,
depressed, ill and sleepless, Blixen feels
she has no one to rely on except the
loyal Africans. As she is being forced
off the farm she compares herself to
Napoleon retreating from Moscow
and her ``squatters'', who will also be
evicted, to his soldiers. While it is
generally thought that Napoleon
``went through agonies'' at seeing his
army ``suffering and dying'' around
him, Blixen writes, she feels that ``he
would have dropped down dead on the
spot if he had not had them. In the
night, I counted the hours till the time
when the Kikuyus should turn up
again by the house'' (Dinesen
1937:344).
Finally, if Blixen portrays the Africans
as serfs to her as lord, and
simultaneously as parents to her infant,
I believe she also uses them as
other Europeans have used ``natives'',
by projecting upon them, as Wilhelm
Dinesen projected upon the American
Indians, her own desire for a transcendent
freedom, the perfect state of
primary narcissism. Blixen's desire to
partake of the freedom of the ``noble
savage'' is particularly intense, as she
sees in the Africans a kind of natural
aristocracy for which she has yearned
all her life. Blixen's constant likening
of the Africans to animals, particularly
domestic animals, undoubtedly has a
dehumanizing effect, as has been
shown by Ngugi. But I believe it is also
true that the comparison of Africans
to wild animals also, contradictorily,
reflects Blixen's wish for a natural
entitlement, a sense of one's rightness
in nature that cannot be undone by
society's criticisms or demands. Blixen's
views of animals, as reported by
Thorkild Bjornvig (1985:203), is of
creatures that ``conform exactly to
God's ideas and become what he
means them to be. They do not
interfere with God's plan as humans
do.'' The wild animal, then, is like the
aristocrat, granted his place by god,
always secure in his ancient name; he
need not clamber and strive like the
bourgeois businessmen of the Westenholz
family, but may roam freely
without cares or responsibilities as do
Wilhelm Dinesen, Bror Blixen and
Denys Finch Hatton. Nature's aristocrats
do not have to worry about who
and what they are; they just are:
``When a creature on this earth is
fulfilling God's plan,'' Bjornvig writes
in describing Blixen's view, ``identity is
no problem ... [the human] can use the
wild animal in its integrity as an
example [and] he can identify with it''
(1985:203). Bjornvig shows that this
understanding of the wild animal
~29 .... ARTICLES

parallels Blixen's understanding of Africans. Her
servant Farah was, as she writes in Shadows on the
grass, a ``wild animal'' and as such, ``nothing in the
world would ever stand between him and God''
(1937:418).
This understanding of the African as having a place
in nature that the European in general, and Blixen in
particular, can never attain, may also illuminate
Blixen's account of the death of Kitosch. Blixen
describes this death, following a beating given to
Kitosch by his master for riding a horse home instead
of walking it, as resulting from the man's own will to
die. This death appears to occur at a time when Blixen
herself feels figuratively beaten and abused by the
backers of the farm, who are forcing her to sell the
farm and to give up her African existence, describing
her in letters as a horse that needs the whip. As the
financial crisis closes in, Blixen repeatedly hints of
suicide, making one failed attempt. Finally she
returned to her mother's home in Denmark, where
she lived out her remaining thirty years, though she
had asserted that she would die if this were her fate. In
this context, we can see that Blixen has drawn Kitosch
as achieving what she herself failed to achieve. In
causing his own death through his wish to die, as
Blixen claims he does, he escapes the ``humiliation'' of
being ``thrown out of existence'' by Europeans, a
humiliation that Blixen, who is being thrown out of
her African existence by her Danish backers, does not
escape. Blixen allows herself to be controlled, and
returns meekly, like a tamed animal, but Kitosch, as
she imagines him, cannot be so controlled: ``This
strong sense in him of what is right and decorous,'' she
writes of Kitosch, ``with his firm will to die ... stands
out with a beauty of its own. In it is embodied the
fugitiveness of the wild things who are, in the hour of
need, conscious of a refuge somewhere in existence,
who go when they like; of whom we can never get
hold'' (1937:294). Blixen's description of Kitosch
willing his own death, rather than submitting to
others, is reminiscent of a similar fantasy, the belief of
the title character of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 play Hedda
Gabler that the unconventional Eilert Lovborg has
committed suicide in a last great act ``that shimmers
with spontaneous beauty'', that he has had ``the
courage to live life after his own mind''. Hedda clings
to this belief, even though the fact is that Lovborg has
actually been shot in the stomach during a fight by a
pistol given to him by Hedda herself (Ibsen 1965:298).
As Ngugi has suggested, Blixen's portrayal of Kitosch
has everything to do with European attitudes and
desires, and nothing to do with the lives of Africans, as
it ``ascribed to Kitosch the aesthetic pose of transcendence,
ignoring the political and human consequences
of the beating'' (Pelensky 1993:97). Such a portrayal
demonstrates Blixen's utter failure to grasp both the
horror of a man being brutally beaten to death for a
petty infraction of his master's orders and her own
complicity in the death. Here, as elsewhere, the
Africans are not really themselves; rather, they
function as a screen upon which Blixen, like Hedda
Gabler, projects her own intense need to believe that
there could be a ``refuge somewhere in existence''.
It is striking that so many who have written about
Blixen have accepted her portrayal of loving reciprocity
between herself and the Africans and her sense that
her presence is beneficial to them. Blixen's selfportrayal
as the loving and beloved mistress of the
Africans on her farm was generally taken for fact
when her book was published, according to her
biographer Judith Thurman, and continues to be
accepted, as evidenced by the glowing film version of
Out of Africa (made in the 1980s). Abdul R
JanMohamed, who writes frequently about colonial
relationships, sees Blixen as a ``major exception to the
... pattern of conquest and irresponsible exploitation''
in noting her ``largess toward her squatters'', which he
finds ``not consciously or deliberately humane'', but
``based on an implicit trust and affection. She has
genuine respect for all her servants, particularly for
their pride'' (Pelensky 1983:147).
But not everyone believes Blixen's account of the
love she and the Africans shared. As mentioned
earlier, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1983:63)
has expressed outrage that Blixen could be ``canonized''
for her writing on Africa, even as she describes
Kenyans as ``dogs, hyenas, jackals and the like''. And
Olga Anastasia Pelensky, another Blixen biographer,
further complicates the picture of a loving relationship
between Blixen and the Africans who worked on
~30 .... ARTICLES

her farm by noting that in unpublished
papers Blixen lists the people on
her farm as ``slaves'' and herself as
``owner''. Later, Pelensky (1993:95)
writes: ``Blixen caused a stir by an
interview with Life magazine when
she claimed she wouldn't mind owning
slaves''. The wish was ``fanciful'',
Pelensky explains, as Blixen was
``thinking of the slavery in the Arabian
nights, a glamorous and exotic phenomenon''.
Despite her passion for the Africans,
Blixen's work lacks any acknowledgment
of what the Africans,
her ``boys'', have lost as a result of the
presence of her and people like her.
When Blixen's farm was sold, her
squatters too were forced to leave.
Here, for the first time, Blixen appears
to recognize what it must be for them
to leave their ancestral land. She puts
their case feelingly: ``It is more than
their land that you take away from the
people, whose Native land you take. It
is their past as well, their roots and
their identity.'' They face, she writes,
``the shame of extinction'' (1937:387).
Despite this understanding, Blixen
never takes the next step, recognizing
that Europeans like herself have been
responsible for driving millions of
people from the land that has contained
their past, roots and identity,
not just for a period of seventeen
years but for generations past and to
come. Rather, the Africans' identification
with the land seems to date
only from her arrival on the farm; it is
only as ``her people'', as residents of
her domain, that their loss can be
recognized. Before that, they appear
to have had no roots, no identity, no
existence. Finally, one suspects that
Blixen, who feels she can't survive
without the farm, is writing so feelingly
not of the Africans' ``extinction''
but her own.
Perhaps it is in this light that we
may best view Blixen's writing on
Africa. Her great work, Out of Africa,
was written after she had been utterly
defeated in her bid to escape the
control of her family and the narrow
existence of bourgeois Denmark, and
in the awareness that even her years of
apparent escape were in fact allowed
and controlled by her family from the
beginning. Looking back, she writes
of Africa as a doomed dream of
power and brilliance, with the Africans
playing a cast of fantasy figures ±
the loyal serfs, the adoring parents,
the natural aristocrats who dare what
she does not. She does not grasp what
has been done to Africans ± what she
herself has done to them ± because her
entire attention is taken up, obsessively,
with what has been done to
herself.
This examination of the psychological
roots of imperialism is not meant
to, and does not, excuse or render
any more acceptable the domination
by one group or another, just as
probing the causes of a terrible
disease does not make the disease
anylessgrievousoranylesshateful
for the sufferer. Rather, one examines
causes in the hopes of working
toward a cure. Further, we should
not be afraid to examine the psyche
of imperialists in our desire to avoid
seeing the world from a European
perspective. Rather, we should desire
to avoid a much greater ill, the subtle
tendency found in most responses to
trauma, according to Judith Herman
(1997:116), to ``seek an explanation
for the perpetrator's crimes in the
character of the victim''. The place to
seek such an explanation is in the
character of the perpetrator. The
evidence shows that failed nurture
results in eternally hungry psyches,
who seek to nourish themselves by
exploiting others. A reading of Blixen's
writings reveals the author as
someone who is never conscious of
the contradictory ways in which she
uses the Africans to bolster her own
fragile psyche. So out of touch with
the reality of the situation is Blixen
that we might be tempted to dismiss
her as an isolated case, a damaged
person, someone who made extreme
and unusual use of the imperial
scene. But, as Ronald Hyam and
Jonathan Rutherford have suggested,
an examination of individual
lives shows that empire is full of such
cases. Further, the popularity of
Blixen's works in her time and in our
own make such a dismissal impossible.
Millions of people have read and
``canonized'' Blixen's work on Africa,
have seen her characters portrayed
on screen and have found
nothing amiss. Indeed, millions of
people have undoubtedly arrived at
an understanding of Europeans in
Africa as a result of these works,
causing Blixen to play an important
role in the history of imperialism.
The ``subject of the dream is the
dreamer'', Toni Morrison has written;
Erik Erikson (1963) puts it
slightly differently: the performances
which audiences approve, he has
written in an essay on Adolph Hitler,
reveal as much about the audience as
the performer (1993:330).
~31 .... ARTICLES

Notes
1 Mannoni has been reviled by Martinican writer and
Marxist political leader Aime Cesaire as an apologist
for colonialism; Cesaire implies that the use of psychoanalytic
theory is a way to whitewash and restate racist
beliefs in the fundamental superiority of Europe. While
both Cesaire and Frantz Fanon dispute some parts of
Mannoni's work, however ö Fanon objecting to Mannoni's
thesis that colonized peoples are more dependent
than Europeans ö Fanon does in Black Skin,
white masks subscribe to the part of Mannoni's work
which shows that imperialism is often the result of ``infantile''desire
to flee the adult world and to find a setting
of `òthers'' in which the imperialist can be dominant.
2 Narcissism is a term that is used quite differently by different
theorists. They mythical Narcissus, whose problem
is too much self-love, is not quite the Feudian
narcissist, though this figure too suffers from too much
self-involvement and both are quite the opposite of the
modern theory of narcissism as expounded by Kohut
and others, who see the narcisst as suffering from precisely
too little self-love. Nor is Kohut's view the same as
Lacan's concept of the subject who is bombarded by
alienating images and who finally is nothing but those
images. For Lacan, the self is necessarily an expression
of alienation while for Kohut, alienation is the result
of failed nurturing relationships in early years.
3 Blixen was ten years older than Mikhail Bakhtin, and
Seven Gothic tales was written in the early 1930s, ten
years before Bakhtin submitted a doctoral thesis on
Rabelais in which he focuses on carnival masking. Blixen's
intention in her use of the mask is in some ways similar,
to defy power through masking, but Blixen's
sense that disaster invariably befalls those who seek
freedom through masks does not suggest the ``merry
negation of uniformity and similarity'' that Bakhtin sees
in the ``hilarity'' of carnival masking. For Blixen, it is not
authority that prevents the self from being revealed,
but the fact that no coherent self can be located.
4 Many of those who had come to British East Africa
were taking advantage of a British scheme to settle
Kenya with Europeans as a way of recouping British investment
in a Mombasa-to-Kisume railroad, built to
clear a strategic passage to the headwaters of the Nile,
thus protecting the Suez Canal and access to the jewel
in the British imperial crown, India.To entice Europeans
to Africa, prices were kept low and immense amounts
of land were sold to investors ``as if it had been vacant''
(Thurman 1995:19). The area tended to attract a betterheeled
class of immigrant, as a result, as a relatively
high level of capitalization was needed to work such
vast tracts of land.
5 Dinesen is not, of course, alone in imagining that the
natives see the conquering Europeans as gods. But
as Caroline Martin Shaw has shown in Colonial inscriptions:
race, sex and class in Kenya, the Africans
may have viewed the Europeans differently. ``Getting a
sense of what Africans thought of the early colonialists
is not easy,'' she writes, as ``histories and ethnographies
are obsessed with what happened rather than with the
constitution of African subjectivity and the production
of colonial discourse through African representation of
the other.'' Shaw's own research, however, gathered by
taking life histories of old Kikuyu men and women in
Kenya, provides some evidence as she found that ``the
coming of the white people was that the colonialists
brought chiggers'' [11].
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~33 .... ARTICLES

`Black Atlantics', `White Indians'
and `Jews'
...........................
LOCATIONS, LOCUTIONS, AND SYNCRETIC IDENTITIES IN THE FICTION OF
ACHMAT DANGOR AND OTHERS
Narratives of migration,
diaspora, settlement and
naming on and around
the `Cape of Storms'
burst the bounds
of apartheid racial
classifications or, indeed,
of anti-apartheid
categories
When Ratunya Mochi opened her eyes on
the second day ^ still wracked with cholera
and a disease of scabs on her arms and
legs ^ she had no idea that where she lay
was Africa ... She had barely survived a
forced journey of six months from ... a village
near Hyderabad ... She looked into
the faces of the family crowded around her,
sold also into sugar slavery... and murmured
that she had decided to die. ^ A
Desai
I am Majiet from Ahmedabbat, a prince
among princely people. But through our
land strut soldiers of the BRITISH RAJ ...
They burnt my home down. Ransacked
the mosque in my village. And searched,
even under the fallen folds of Indian women
... I shipped out on a Portuguese trader.
Goa, Cairo, Delagoa Bay. Until one
winter morning we arrived at the Cape of
Good Hope ... I came as a slave. ^ Achmat
Dangor
LOREN KRUGER
hese two vignettes ± of
Indians in slavery in South ~T. ......
Africa ± are striking for several
reasons. In the first place, they depict
slaves in South Africa, still a rare
occurrence in fictional, historiographical
narratives and popular accounts.
1 In the second place, these
vignettes portray Indians as slaves,
whose journey to the place navigators
called the ``Cape of Storms'' followed
what might be called a ``Black Indian''
route ± with ports of call from Madras
and Goa in India to Mauritius and
Madagascar in the Indian Ocean ±
and leading ultimately to the collision
of Indian and Atlantic Oceans at the
Cape of Storms (or of Good Hope).
The first scene, a fictionalized moment
that opens an otherwise nonfiction
account of Indians in South
Africa, takes as its point of reference
the standard account of arrival, in
which Indians were brought as indentured
labourers by the British to
Natal, as they were to the British
``West Indies'', but departs from that
account by calling the workers slaves,
arguing that many were captured
rather than came of their own accord.
2 The second scene, from a play
by Achmat Dangor named for a
Muslim Indian slave, juxtaposes present-day
homeless people with slaves
owned by the Dutch East India
Company in the seventeenth century;
it debunks what one Cape Muslim
historian has called the ``myth of the
1860 settlers'' ± the presumption that
there were no Indians in South Africa
before the SS Truro arrived at Durban
Harbour in 1860, carrying mostly
Tamil- and Telugu-speaking Hindus. 3
These indentured labourers were followed
by ``passenger Indians'', Muslim
and some Hindu traders who, like
similar migrants to British East Africa
and the island of Mauritius, had the
means to pay their way and the desire
to attain middle-class, even white,
status through capital investment and
self-representation as ``Arabs''. 4 The
notion of a clearly demarcated arrival
of an intact body of Indians has been
matched by an almost wilful silence
on the fact that the majority of firstgeneration
slaves brought by the
Dutch to the Cape Colony were from
Bengal and Madras.
The setting of the scene in Dangor's
play also challenges an equally pervasive
myth from the Cape, which
holds that present-day Cape Muslims
are the descendants of ``Malay'' slaves
and exiles, and which reinforces the
historical differences between Muslims
in the Cape and Indian Muslims
as well as Hindus in Natal and the
interior. 5 Although Indians, Malays,
coloureds (and some Eastern and
Southern European immigrants, such
as Jews) shared inner-city neighbourhoods
such as District Six in Cape
Town, and Fordsburg and Fietas
(Pageview) in Johannesburg, apart-
~34 .... ARTICLES

heid policy mandated the separation of ``coloured''
from ``Indian,'' ``removing'' the ``non-white'' population
of Fordsburg (in the 1950s), District Six (1960s)
and Fietas/Pageview (1970s). 6 In time, activists in the
Black Consciousness movement responded to racial
classification and to the middle-class ``white'' aspirations
of the older generation by asserting a broader
black identity, incorporating Indians and coloureds as
well as Africans. This solidarity has waned, however,
as its chief antagonist, white supremacism, lost official
sanction in the post-apartheid or, more accurately,
post-anti-apartheid period of the 1990s ± post-antiapartheid
because the moral conviction and commitment
of anti-apartheid solidarity have waned, while in
its place has come postcolonial uneven development
rather than radical social transformation.
As even this brief gloss indicates, narratives of
migration, diaspora, settlement and naming on and
around the ``Cape of Storms'' burst the bounds of
apartheid racial classifications or, indeed, of antiapartheid
categories. These narratives do not fit
neatly into accounts of Atlantic migration, black or
otherwise, which largely ignore the Indian Ocean. 7
Nor, apparently, do they belong in accounts of South
Asian diasporas, which largely omit Indians in South
Africa, although these communities form the largest
Indian diaspora outside Asia. 8 Atlantic migration,
especially the Black Atlantics of Stuart Hall and
Houston Baker, as well as Paul Gilroy's Black
Atlantic, largely focus on North Atlantic traffic
between the black diasporas of the United States
and Britain, or, in Joseph Roach's account, ``circum-
Atlantic'' routes that take in the Caribbean and West
Africa but not the continent south of the equator.
South Asian diasporas tend to retrace the usual axes
of postcolonial studies, which run North-South (from
the Northern centre to the Southern periphery), and
to focus on first- and second-generation Indian
migrants to Northern destinations, especially Britain
and North America (the time/space horizon of many
of the researchers, perhaps). Black Indian narratives
demand instead a reconfiguration of the axes of
postcolonial studies to accommodate the South-South
nodes of circum-Indian Ocean routes, including those
travelled by Muslims, traders, slaves and chroniclers.
May Joseph's essays on South Asians in East Africa,
especially those on the precarious citizenship of the
East African Asian and the affiliation of Asian youth
in Dar-es-Salaam with the urban savvy of African-
American soul alongside the rural asceticism of
Tanzanian ujamaa (collective self-reliance), do much
to talk back to the black Atlantic from the black
Indian, but still allow the eye of the metropolitan
reader to favour the Northern routes of diaspora and
the postcolonial intellectual, rather than the Southern
routes, around the Cape of Storms, the multiple
constellations along the Indian oceans, and the
localized axes of postcolonial displacement in the
apartheid city and its ruins. 9
This essay offers a sketch of routes of cultural as
well as human traffic around the Cape of Storms,
where black and white Atlantics collide with Indians
that may be black or white or neither. It traces fictions
that weave across the gaps in South African history
left not only by apartheid but also by influential antiapartheid
narratives, including a recent magisterial
attempt to create a ``single literature'' out of multiple
``smaller stories'' underneath the grand narrative of
struggle. 10 I focus on the fiction of Achmat Dangor,
whose person and texts inhabit and interpret these inbetween
spaces in exemplary ways. Although (mis)-
represented as an ``Indian poet'' by the authors of a
``contemporary profile'' of ``Indian South Africans'',
Dangor and his family were expelled from Fordsburg
in the 1950s for being ``Malay'' in an ``Indian group
area''. 11 Moreover, the spelling of Achmat (rather
than the usual transliteration of the Muslim Ahmed)
and the Afrikaans speech that stamps Dangor's
characters, even the ``Indian'' Majiet, signify the
trajectory of the earlier and unacknowledged ``Indian''
forced migration and its contribution to a
syncretic South African identity, masked as well as
marked by the term coloured. Only in a recent story,
``Lost'' (1997:175±91), does Dangor draw explicitly
from his autobiography to depict a protagonist,
Arwan Asvat, a South African teaching in New York,
whose ``Arabic'' name and ``bastard brown'' colour
(from the perspective of his Somali lover) represent an
inheritance both black and Indian, but his earlier
fictions also explore this terrain. To call ``coloured''
~35 .... ARTICLES

identity syncretic and to allow its
subjects volition to shape that identity
does not, of course, erase the history
of forced migration and a decidedly
unchosen inheritance of slavery, but it
does grant author and protagonists, in
a way that the biologistic metaphor
``hybridity'' does not, a certain performative
agency to appropriate and
transform subaltern personas; roles;
languages such as the language of
black solidarity; the Indian diaspora;
or international Islam. It also challenges
readers to think beyond the
binary black/white opposition that
has structured anti-apartheid as well
as apartheid discourse.
While the poetry inspired by the
Black Consciousness Movement endorsed
an inclusive black liberation
movement against apartheid's ``nonwhite''
stigma, Dangor's fiction portrays
protagonists sustained ± or
destroyed ± by the act of embodying
multiple identities in a society in
which turbulence can no longer be
blamed solely on apartheid, that
monstrosity whose apparently monolithic
evil power focused the anger of
much anti-apartheid writing and elicited
a form of moral certainty in
outside spectators and readers as well
as agents in the struggle. 12 The performance
of ambiguous identities
does not discard critical politics,
however. On the contrary, it challenges
the fatalist treatments of failed
performances of identity, encapsulated
in the standard term for this
trope, passing, or the historically
prevalent genre, the miscegenation
melodrama. The miscegenation melodramas
that (dis)graced the South
African literary scene in mid-twentieth
century were usually written by
whites, from the novel that established
the genre, God's step-children (1925)
by Sarah Gertrude Millin, to plays
such as Lewis Sowden's The Kimberley
train (1958), Basil Warner's Try
for white, Bartho Smit's Die verminktes
[``The maimed] (1961), or
even Athol Fugard's The blood knot
(1962), and tended, to a greater or
lesser degree, to express the anxieties
of white minority culture about socalled
play-whites. 13 Dangor's narratives
highlight the pragmatic social
motivations of characters wishing to
pass into hitherto white spaces,
alongside the psychological effects of
passing as white. He situates characters
within and against the demands
of affiliation with a range of communities,
and locates them in particular
places, whether racially mixed and
relatively stable if poor neighbourhoods
such as District Six, or racially
homogenous but chronically destabilized
townships such as Hanover
Park. While affiliation with white
prestige is a fraught object of desire in
the miscegenation melodrama, and
conflict between black and white the
core of anti-apartheid fiction, both
issues appear in Dangor's fiction in
the margins of conflicts between
people in communities left out of the
grander struggle. Although the privileges
associated with passing into
white space are not immaterial to the
``passing'' protagonists, Jane Kock
and Yusuf (Joe) Malik in The Z Town
trilogy or Omar Khan/Oscar Kahn in
Kafka's curse, they take second place
to the artefacts, languages and histories
that link these characters to the
families and locations they are trying
to escape or desperately to maintain.
Before we look more at these narratives
of passing and migration away
from the Cape of Storms, however, we
should begin with Dangor's treatment
of a protagonist unable to escape the
place that has provided a reference
point for social hybridity: District Six.
It was winter.There were clouds gathering
onTable Mountain. He knew that the night
was going to be very cold.
Brrat-a-tat-brrr.The jackhammers picking
like crows at his guts. All around him
they were breaking down his city, brick by
brick, stone for stone.
District Six ^ Rock of My History!
[...]
Soon it will be dark and the jackhammers
will stop. And the bulldozer-driver will
go home and make love to his wife and
tumble into a dreamless sleep.The banjos
will trill and the people will sing.Then the
wind like some skollie-god will come and
drive everything before it.The streets will
be empty and quiet.The darkness will unleash
all the mordant passions of my dark
earth.The souls of legions of rats will rise,
and protect with their stench the sanctity of
our haven.Then the breath of some bedonderde
bogger, full of love and hope, will
thaw the earth and bring forth the day.
And start the whole blerry process over
again. (Dangor 1995:1,16)
An interested reader of this account of
the destruction of District Six which
opens Dangor's 1981 novella might
want to place Waiting for Leila in a
line of texts that could be called antiapartheid
elegies, lamenting the destruction
of mixed city neighbourhoods
and with them, the crucible for
a syncretic, urban South African
identity that the elegist feels is his
own. In this tradition, the above
passage would take its place alongside
William ``Bloke'' Modisane's and
Lewis Nkosi's elegies for Sophiatown,
the Johannesburg neighbourhood that
housed jazz musicians and journalists,
politicians and pickpockets, until it
was partly destroyed and wholly
whitewashed as Triomf in the late
~36 .... ARTICLES

1950s. However, this tradition is only retrospective;
Modisane's memoir, Blame me on history (1963),
Nkosi's collection of essays, Home and exile (1964),
and the work of other exiles were published abroad
and banned at home, to be revived only in the mid-
1980s. Writing his novella in the late 1970s during a
five-year banning order, Dangor could not take for
granted what might have been in different historical
circumstances an acknowledged literary legacy. Even
if this tradition had been intact, Dangor's novella
would still differ from the anti-apartheid memoirs in
another important respect. Blame me on history and
its successors in the 1980s, such as Don Mattera's
Memory is a weapon (1986) or Richard Rive's
`Buckingham Palace', District Six (1986), combine
personal memoir and historical testimony or, in the
case of Mattera (to whom Dangor dedicates his
book), a call to arms. They write for themselves and
other displaced insiders but the detailed description of
familiar neighbourhood landmarks and especially of
the government's use of the law and police to remove
long-term residents of Sophiatown and District Six,
suggest that they are also writing to enlighten an
outside metropolitan audience largely ignorant of the
impact of the displacement. 14
Like Mattera's memoir of Sophiatown, Rive's
sketches of denizens in Caledon Road, District Six,
are explicitly linked to the larger history by dates
(1955, 1960 and, after most of the destruction, 1970),
by a detailed explanation, at a protest meeting, of the
government's attempts to get the inhabitants to put
their signatures to their own deportation (1996:145±
8), and by autobiographical comment opening each
section. These comments move from childhood
memories of ``characters and incidents'', the relative
peace between Christian and Muslim, poor and
middling classes, the smell of koeksisters, and the
``mouldy'' but ``brightly painted'' cottages of a
bustling if dilapidated neighbourhood (1±7) to a
blistering indictment of apartheid social engineering
and the bleak townships it created: 15
They had taken our past away and left the rubble.They had
demolished our spirits and left broken bricks. They had destroyed
our community and left dust and memories ... They
had sought to regulate our present in order to control our
future.And,asIstoodthere,Iwasoverwhelmedbytheenormity
of it all. And I asked aloud: ``What men have the right
to take away a people's past? How will they answer when
they have to account for this? ... The southeaster swept the
voices of accusation into all the houses into which the people
had been driven, into the matchboxes of Hanover Park
and the concrete slabs of Bonteheuvel and Manenberg.
(128)
The authorial frame lends the story as a whole the
authority of anti-apartheid defiance without, however,
succumbing to a standard formula. The sketches
that follow each comment offer a range of responses
rather than a simple opposition between collaboration
and resistance, and include characters who do
capitulate, those who do not, and those who evade
the order, such as Mary Brown (formerly Bruintjies),
pastor's daughter and brothel madam; Milton ``Zoot''
September, street poet, petty thief and faithful friend
of the neighbourhood; and Katzen, Jewish landlord
known initially by his last name only, a refugee from
Nazi Germany and finally neighbourhood stalwart;
all of whose shifting names mark the hybridity of the
District and the specific histories behind each
character.
Waiting for Leila, in contrast, eludes the grasp of
the outside reader looking to identify with the moral
certainties of anti-apartheid feeling or even for the
bearings of specific location and agency. The opening
passage may set the time and place in District Six
during the period of its destruction, and the narrative
certainly encompasses characters displaced to other
parts of Cape Town and/or to Johannesburg, and
hailing from as far away as Alexandria, on the other
end of Africa, but neither the disjointed narrative nor
the dislocated narrator, Samad, offers anything like
the community spokesperson or the specific location
so vividly conveyed in `Buckingham Palace'. Dangor's
story invokes not only District Six and the antiapartheid
biography, but also the older, international
tale of MajnuÂn va Layli [``The madman and Leila''],
an Arabic, possibly pre-Islamic tale of a man driven
mad for love of a woman, whose name means
``night'', married to another, a tale composed more
than a millennium ago and rewritten by authors
across the Muslim world several times since. 16 Crazed,
perhaps, by Leila's desertion, the destruction of
~37 .... ARTICLES

District Six, or his failure to become
an intellectual, Samad wanders drunk
and ranting through the streets of
District Six in search of Leila, who
moved to Hanover Park with her
respectable husband Gamat, nicknamed
``Arapie''. On the way, he
exploits several reluctant patrons
from the ageing prostitute, Calypso,
in the District, to the dandy, Giordes,
from Alexandria, and his coloured
drag queen, Honey, from District Six,
in a villa called Ithaca after the island
of the wanderer Odysseus, in St
James, where he browses through
Giordes's library, only to piss on his
treasured stone phallus. The novella
ends when Samad shoots Felix
(Giordes's white companion who had
just killed Honey in Calypso's room),
returns to set fire to Ithaca, and lands
in jail to face capital punishment for
killing a white man.
Samad resembles Bloke, deÂracineÂ
black intellectual, subject and narrator,
of Blame me on history more than
the engage activist of Memory is a
weapon or the analytical witness of
`Buckingham Palace' but, even more
than the disaffected, cynical Bloke, he
is not a suitable anti-apartheid subject,
neither worthy victim of apartheid
violence nor activist against it.
Both Blame me on history and Waiting
for Leila depict opaque, self-reflexive
protagonists that lack the transparent
agency of the activist. Like Bloke,
Samad complains at length about
white abuse of power and the destruction
of a neighbourhood that had
nourished ``the mordant passions of
[his] dark self'' (Dangor 1995:16), but
takes no part in organized political
action against that power. He both
resents and exploits white charity,
especially the intellectual charity that
Bloke (Modisane 1986:94) ironically
describes as ``divine tolerance'' for the
non-native English and intellectual
hunger of the native. 17 He is also
doubly disaffected in the manner that
Mark Sandler (1994:55±8) attributes
to Bloke; he disdains the affection of
his family, especially his father whose
resignation to apartheid he despises,
who have left the District for Johannesburg,
yet he yearns for a woman
beyond his reach and for an intellectual
status he might have had.
Although the woman in these scenarios
of impossible desire is usually
white (as in Bloke's fleeting affairs),
Leila's marriage to a man described as
an ``Arapie'', a Muslim with ``Arab''
aspirations, makes her affectively
white, respectable and remote from
Samad, who is, in turn, dismissed as a
``dronk skollie bastard'' even as he
mimics respectability by crashing the
wedding in his father's suit, raging like
an anti-Odysseus cast in the role of
the drunken suitor rather than the
returning hero.
However, Modisane's account attempts
to authorize Bloke's lament of
exile and his own emphatic appeal to
European readers by giving his persona
the status of a historical witness,
while Dangor's narrative, although
written in the internal exile of the
banning order, does not make his
protagonist a witness or an object of
charity. Bloke (Modisane 1986:218)
not only laments his disaffection, as
``the eternal alien between two
worlds'', desiring the pleasures of
European culture while forced to live
a precarious existence as a black
intellectual, ``uneducated by Western
standards'', but also attempts to
authorize his alienation by ``blaming''
history, from the ``dying of Sophiatown''
that made ``something in
[him]'' die (5) to the African National
Congress (ANC) party card that he
tears up in exasperation (55) to the
postscript that lists the apartheid laws
that restricted his movements and
prompted him to leave South Africa
(299±311), or the shadow of a historical
model he has failed to match, in
the person of Sol Plaatje, father of
black South African writing in English
and his wife's grandfather (45).
Samad's disaffection remains disconnected
from a consistent persona. He
is not so much an intellectual as a
wreck of one, a ``situation'' (the term
used by township toughs to mock the
white-collar aspirations of educated
blacks), and a ``fugitive from ashfilled
backyards ... from the homely
warmth of my brother'' (Dangor
1995:39); he has only the remnants of
a bookish life gleaned from ``three
years at the university'' (41) scattered
in the house vacated by his unnamed
parents. The ``inventory of my riches''
includes James Joyce's Ulysses as well
as ``[black Cape poet] James Matthews
lying on top of TS Eliot, in an
obscene embrace'' in his father's
house (16). Fragments of these
authors and of apparently authorless
accounts of rebel slaves at the colonial
Cape of Storms, whom Samad appears
to take as his forefathers, colour
the narrative, as do outbursts of fear
and loathing at the bodies of ``manbitches''
such as Honey (30±2, 59±60),
as against the grudging acknowledgment
of that body's ``excruciating
perfection'' (26) if not of his place in
the sexual economy of Cape Town.
But these fragments do not coalesce
around the narrator firmly enough to
~38 .... ARTICLES

motivate his acts of violence or to tie him to historical
contexts that might grant this splintered subject the
status of an exemplary victim of systemic apartheid
violence. 18
It is this absence of what might be called antiapartheid
pathos that makes Waiting for Leila a postanti-apartheid
text and thus oddly contemporary with
the fiction of the transitional 1990s. The life and death
of Samad cannot be ``blamed'' on history ± or on any
single oppressor identified with apartheid ± but they
are nonetheless connected to it. Samad's allusions to a
slave rebel ancestor, Benjamin of Mallaca, like his
appeals to Leila, flicker across the narrative like
screen memories or ``cover stories'', masking more
than they might explain about this character, but their
very elusiveness evokes a history that has yet to be
written and that may yet ground, if not justify, the
flights of rage and fantasy in this story. 19
In Z Town, very little else had changed. It was winter and
the wind, merciless and dry because of the drought, drove
clouds of white dust from the mine dumps through the
streets of the township.
And a new Representative had been sent by the `Coloured
Parliament' to administer the township ... Paulus Samson
stood at the window and observed the crowd milling
around the notice-board. Some stared with blind, illiterate
eys at the bright sheets of paper. Even those who could read
were puzzled by the pronouncements. But now was not the
right time to go out and explain the new rules and regulations
to them. He would wait until the wind had become unbearable,
so that his arrival would provide a respite from the
cold. (Dangor1990:3, 6)
If Waiting for Leila refuses to give anti-apartheid
readers an identifiable oppressor, The Z Town trilogy
(1990) appears to oblige them, although the oppressor
in question is not a white supremacist but a coloured
representative. The work is set in the ``emergency'' in
the mid-1980s, when the government responded to
rebellion in the townships by installing loyal ``Representatives''
whose kinship with the locals did not
mitigate their harsh rule. ``The Representative'', the
first part of the trilogy, begins as the representative
establishes his power over the peri- or even anti-urban
environment of the township, in which social space,
made social and habitable by its residents, is stripped
away by apartheid social engineering to create what
might be called, modifying Henri Lefebvre, representational
or abstracted space, designed for social
control through military, authoritarian or juridical
means. 20 As Dangor would write about township
planning nearly ten years later:
In the new racial group areas to which people were relocated,
social amenities were concentrated at central points.
These became the nerve centres of the separate local governments.
Euphemistically called ``community centres'', they
housed the bureaucrats who controlled the lives of local residents,
determining who was `legal' and who not. What followed
was corruption and patronage on a scale
comparable only to the ``old'' Soviet Union (I am told). 21
(1999:360)
The dry, windswept highveld location of this ``coloured
group area'' outside Johannesburg is a
thousand or so miles from the Cape, the apartheid
regime's official ``coloured preference area''. Nonetheless,
its matchbox houses, which eliminated or
``abolished'' interior fittings and the protective cover
or liminal space of a stoep, an essential feature of
personalized houses in city neighbourhoods such as
Fordsburg or District Six, were built to prototypes
developed for Native/Bantu Affairs-administered
townships or ``locations'' from the 1930s and reproduced
across the country, including Q-Town or
Hanover Park on the Cape Flats, the latter cruelly
named for the main street of District Six it was
supposed to replace. 22 Unable to own property in the
``location'', tenants in places like Q-Town (gentrified
as Kew Town) in the Cape or Eldorado Park near
Soweto (both likely models for Z Town) became
``temporary sojourners'' at the whim of the government
and its Representatives.
The power of the Representative over his subjects
in Z Town is thus cast, as it were, in ``national
standard'' bricks and mortar. Paulus Samson may
have grown up in the township, but he represents the
apartheid state and inhabits and manipulates its
architecture. It is his presence rather than the absent
activist, Georgie da Silva ± whose departure opens the
trilogy and who returns only at the end ± which
dominates the scene. Where Da Silva's diminutive
first name marks him as his mother's son and,
implicitly, as an adolescent, Samson has apparently
~39 .... ARTICLES

lost his family and, with it, any
kinship with the township. The house/
office from which he surveys the
crowd reading his new curfew regulations
is separated from that crowd by
a raised stoep, while the ``national
standard'' houses of the others have
none. This exposure kills the informal
public space that activity on the stoep
might have encouraged, leaving the
streets deserted at night and the
inhabitants shut in behind ``heavy
curtains'' and ``many latches'' (Dangor
1990:11). The abolition of informal
public space as well as possession
of an official Occupants' Register
allows the Representative to violate
others' interior space as and when he
chooses.
This violation takes a sexual form
when Samson blackmails and beds
Muriel Meraai and both her daughters
Jane and Dorothy, who run an
(inevitably illegal) shebeen in the
house in which he grew up. Yet the
peculiar character of this sexual exploitation
and the women's different
ways of negotiating and resisting it
can be understood only, as it were, on
location, in relation to struggles of
public and private space, migration
and settlement. Samson blackmails
Muriel effectively to buy her ``exceptionally
beautiful, exotic'' daughter,
Jane (16), whose father may have been
a Xhosa chief who abandoned his
``half-caste'' wife to return to his land
(24); these transactions depend on
Samson's power as apartheid Representative
able to offer Jane the comforts
of the official house as well as
the ``protection'' of the army. 23 When
he bargains with Muriel for Jane in
return for permission to run the
shebeen, his (white) soldiers remain
stationed outside the house, and later
serve to shield him from the anger of
the people, after he shoots Jane's exboyfriend,
John, in the back for
allegedly threatening him with a knife
outside the Catholic Church. When
Samson himself dies, however, it is
out in the veld, with a clean bullet
wound in his forehead and his pants
down, during a tryst with Dorothy.
Rumors circulate that the assassin was
Georgie da Silva, a member of the
outlawed ANC, implying vengeance
not just for John's death, but for
Samson's contribution to counterterrorist
attacks on an ANC camp he
had infiltrated in Tanzania, including
a bomb that killed a woman with
whom he was living. The avenger's
escape, despite roadblocks and surveillance,
and the state's defensive
verdict that ``it is unlikely that Paulus
Samson was killed for political reasons''
(41) prefigure the failure of
apartheid (anti-)urban planning if not,
as yet, the apartheid state.
The second and third parts of Z
Town, ``Birds of prey'' and ``Ordinary
people'', contrast Jane's migration to
the inner city, from which the previous
generation had been expelled,
with Dorothy's insistence on staying
in the township and making the
family house effectively, if not officially,
her own domain. Instead of the
older neighbourhoods of Fordsburg
and Fietas, officially white but reverting
in the late 1980s to their
historical diversity, Jane goes to the
high-rise anonymity of Hillbrow,
which at this time accommodated
blacks with enough money and
gumption to dodge the Group Areas
Acts, as well as white ``expatriates
from Mozambique and Angola'' or
young white rebels ± ``refugees from
the rich, who smoked dagga on the
pavements and decried the wealth of
their parents'' (48). 24 Subsidized by
the state pension given her as Samson's
widow, she settles in an older
apartment building, occupied mostly
by white women, ``divorcees or young
widows'' separated from their children
(48), but also by Yusuf ``Joe''
Malik, an Indian doctor turned Black
Consciousness poet, who desires Jane,
but can neither fully conquer her
``sensuous enigma'' (59), which in his
view places her in the Cape despite her
``township-accented Afrikaans'' (54),
nor persuade her to share his politics.
Dangor highlights the enigma by
wrapping Jane in several guises; she
arrives in Hillbrow in a drab black
dress and stockings, which she wears
again only to visit her ill mother,
changes into cheap but sexy dresses
that match the promiscuous flux of
life in Hillbrow, but also dons traditional
Muslim garb lent by Malik's
mother when they visit his family. She
answers to the epithet ``black'' but
without the political bluster of Malik
and his cohorts, one of whom dismisses
her as a ``product of nonracialism''
(70), as a bastard who does
not know her father's language, while
their wives, ``stricken shadows alongside
their active ... husbands'', silently
compare their ``activists' uniforms'' of
``fastidious'' dowdiness with her natural
flair (71). Most enigmatic, however,
is Jane's association with a flock
of birds living on the roof of her
building, in which guise as a ``brightly
coloured bird with white wings'' (86)
she visits the cell in police headquarters
where Malik is briefly detained
and voids herself on a
~40 .... ARTICLES

policeman parading outside. This transformation and
visitation, recognized only by Jacob, the Zulu caretaker
of the apartment building, appear to offset the
charges of some of Jane's neighbours, who think that
her monthly government check is pay for spying, but
resist a reading that would give Jane's desire for
freedom a political slant. She may be a ``free woman''
in sexual terms, but this freedom does not translate
into autonomous agency. Jane, the bird in free flight,
is twinned with Malik, who is fond of citing the
Gujarati poet, Iqbal, whose poem about the agony of
a bird in a cage has become something of a leitmotif in
prison literature in South Africa. 25 When Malik blows
himself up in a quixotic attempt to make the
government take Black Consciousness as seriously
as the ``other movement'' (the ANC), Jane recovers
consciousness in the hospital with feelings of a ``light,
soaring, unearthly'' calm, but the birds abandon her
(90). Dangor retreats from the power of the image
when he adds the disclaimer ``But let us not pretend
Jane was a bird ... Perhaps her flight to the Truth
Floor at the police station was a hallucination'' (88).
Nonetheless, her flight to Malik's cell and her
thwarted attempt to fly from the hospital after his
death vividly capture her desire for escape, as well as
the elusiveness of that desire.
The final novella in the trilogy focuses on Dorothy,
her brother Donovan, and other ``ordinary people''
who have remained behind in the township. If Jane's
migration to the city is marked as extraordinary,
Dorothy appears at first stubbornly ordinary in
refusing even the prospect of what Donovan calls a
``real place to live in'', a ``house with running water
inside ... And a toilet'' (97), because she wants no part
of Jane's money. Donovan eventually leaves for the
city to become someone ``who writes books and reads
newspapers'' (179), but remains a shadowy figure on
the margins of the township. Dorothy is firmly in the
township but her behaviour marks her as anything
but an ordinary inhabitant of this state-controlled
environment. She asserts her independence by living
off the proceeds of the shebeen, now selling to white
soldiers occupying the township under ``emergency''
regulations, and by taking in a boarder, James, whom
she later weds in a ``marriage of convenience'' (112).
This arrangement is not merely an abstract challenge
to patriarchal norms or what Donovan sees as the
``neutralization'' of ``maleness'' by his mother's and
sisters' ``bright and hard femininity'' (99), but rather a
specific reversal of apartheid interpretation of ``traditional''
custom, which demanded that township
houses be registered in the name of a male head of
household, at a time when the majority were in fact
households headed by women. As with Jane, Dorothy's
extraordinariness takes on magical properties,
at least in her neighbours' eyes. When Dorothy buries
Muriel in a ceremony so extravagant that the denizens
call it ``the American Funeral'' (100), Sarah Kock,
wife of an ex-Communist activist, stones the coffin,
shouting ``She will never rise again!'' (103), apparently
provoking retaliation from ``birds of all colours and
species'' that ``swooped down'' and ``dropped their
stinking missiles'' on the assembled company (103±
104).
Like the funeral, Dorothy's wedding to James is
described (anonymously) as a performance ± ``it's the
Meraai's again, putting on a show for us'' (119) ± in
which James plays only a subordinate role; he
occupies Dorothy's house only temporarily. He
moves away to work, and leaves permanently when
the only space he can call his own, a hammock he
made and hung on the stoep that he also added to the
government's house, is usurped by Dorothy's returning
lover, Georgie da Silva. Only when Dorothy and
Georgie are killed in the hammock by assassins hired
by the police, can James claim his children and
compensation for his property in the house (but not
for the house itself, which belongs to the government;
178). He retreats to the small town from whence he
came, leaving Dorothy to be buried by her brother,
and Georgie to receive one of the heroes' funerals that
provided political rallying points during the late
apartheid years, ``his coffin draped in the flag with
the movement's colours'' (178). But the ``songs and
hymns'' and marches accompanying this insurgent
attempt to wrest township space from the state remain
``in the distance'' (178), and the ``new beginning'' for
James and his children seems more like a private
retreat from, rather than a step towards, the public
threshold to a post-apartheid era of freedom.
~41 .... ARTICLES

Yes, I took advantage of my fair skin. Like
those Jews with blond hair and straight
noses who discarded their Jewishness
because it was wartime and they were
being persecuted. It was a matter of life or
death. Of course there are comparisons to
be made. Not being able to study, to go to
university, become an architect, being
forced to remain Omar Khan, the son of a
newly impoverished township entrepreneur,
was a form of death. I changed from
Omar Khan to Oscar Kahn, fair-skinned
and curly-haired. A beautiful hooked nose
^ Anna used to suck at it, after the appropriate
blowing and cleaning ^ enabled me
to cross an invisible divide ... It was like
leaving one dimension of the world for another,
where time and place remained the
same, but their surfaces had different textures
... Omar-turned-Oscar left the townships
and moved to the suburbs, where
the rustle of the wind in the trees filled him
with a strange peace ... Noises were
noises; they required no explanation and
disappeared into silence ...Trees creaked
and gates scraped upon unoiled hinges,
neither necessarily signifying any kind of
intrusion. In the townships, such noises
made you tense and alert. (Dangor
1997:23^4)
Like Samad in Waiting for Leila
and Jane in Z Town trilogy, Omar
Khan in Kafka's curse (1997) is adrift
from his original environment. Unlike
his predecessors, however, Omar-Oscar
casts himself off to pass into a new
social environment which, at least
initially, he makes his own. The
grandson of Cape Muslims on his
mother's side, and of an Indian trader
(Shaik) and an Afrikaner farmer's
daughter (Katryn) turned Muslim
(Kulsum) on his father's, Omar finds
in the constructed identity of Oscar,
son of Jewish refugees from Nazi
Germany, a kind of refuge, but not a
final escape, from the indignities of
apartheid in its last two decades, ca
1970±1990. When his brother, Malik,
named for God's ``interrogating angel''
Malik ul-Mout, summons him to
their mother's funeral, he falls prey to
a mysterious illness, which leaves him
feeling as if his lungs are contracted
and his skin is covered in a kind of
bark. After his WASP wife, Anna
Wallace, has left him, the protagonist,
in this confession to an as yet unnamed
``you'' ± later revealed to be his
therapist, Amina, daughter of the
Cape Muslim Ebrahim (Abe) Schroeder,
married to the Zionist and paraplegic
Arthur Mandelstam ± dwells on
the impact on his life of a shift in
location, social space and custom.
This shift is so radical that he can call
it ``leaving one dimension of the world
for another'' (23), but also sufficiently
mundane that its difference can be
measured in the domesticated sounds
of the suburban night ± at least at a
time, in the 1980s, when wealthy
suburbs were still shielded by state
violence from the escalation of criminal
violence in the townships.
At the same time, Oscar's sense of
the unreality of his new life (and thus
the foreshadowing of his disease and
death) is registered in the contrast
between the actual township where
Khan was born (Newclare, near Sophiatown)
and the imaginary suburb
to which Kahn migrates (Parkside), as
well as his attachment to the house,
``obsessively battling [its] ninety-yearold
decline'' (10). Omar's passing into
Oscar is thus registered less in racial
impersonation than in spatial and
social dis- and relocation. In flight
from poverty and deprivation caused
by the Group Areas Act which made
commercial competition between the
races as illegal as cohabitation, Omar
not only moves geographically from
township to town, but also crosses the
existential divide that, like the gulf
between ``settler'' and ``native city'',
marks the difference between two
modes of being. 26 He moves from
Khan to Kahn, township to suburb,
coloured ancestry to Jewish pedigree,
and perhaps also from Muslim probity
to Judeo-Christian laxity (from
Malik's point of view), but his features
remain the same. A Muslim can
pass as a Jew, apparently because they
are already kin.
Dangor is not, to be sure, the first
South African writer to link Jews and
Muslims. Near the end of `Buckingham
Palace', District Six (1986), the
soon-to-be former residents of Caledon
Road attend Solomon Katzen's
funeral, at which his son Dieter's
indifference to Katzen's tenantsturned-friends
is juxtaposed with
Mary Brown's comment on the similarity
between the Jewish Dieter Katzen
and the coloured (here ``Arab'')
Amaai Abrahams:
As the nearest male relative, he [Dieter]
rose and stood in front to recite the Kaddish
... Mary looked from Dieter to Amaai
who sat opposite her.The facial similarity
was striking. Both had the same sallow
complexion, the same hair colour and texture,
the same fine facial bone structure.
Maybe the Arabs and the Jews were related.
Maybe they were cousins. (Rive
1996:180)
Reading `Buckingham Palace' in the
light of other fictional representations
of Jews in South Africa, Marcia
Leveson (1996:212±213) sees the difference
between father and son Katzen
as a duel between the stereotypes
of kafferboetie (nigger-lover) and
money-grubber, but overlooks the
kinship and parallel histories linking
Jews and Muslims in South Africa.
The passage highlights an unacknowledged
family resemblance but it also
draws attention to the repression of
this connection. Rive's story high-
~42 .... ARTICLES

lights the difference between the father, a small-time
landlord, refugee from Nazi Germany, and, at the end
of his life, a comrade of Untermenschen rather than
the Herrenvolk (152), and his son, the ``big-time
lawyer'' (178), named for the German who sheltered
his father, but does not deal with the historical
association of Jews and Muslims in South Africa in
the eyes of the ruling classes, many of whom from the
British onward saw both Jews and Muslims as
``Oriental'' intruders in a ``white South Africa''. 27
While Dangor's novella does not provide a full
historical comparison, its portrayal of a Muslim's
progress from the township to the e lite old suburb of
Parkside (whose age and proximity to the Zoo Lake
makes it most likely Parkview) retraces the trajectory
of upwardly mobile Jews from inner-city Fordsburg
to the grand elevation of the northern suburbs. In
appropriating the journey to passing respectability
which has been the subject of several fictions about
Jews, from overtly anti-Semitic satire to ambiguous
treatment by assimilated Jews, Dangor revitalizes the
figure of the Jew as anxious and ailing parvenu, which
many Jews in 1990s South Africa would prefer to
regard as passeÂ. 28
By linking ``white'' Jews to ``brown'' Muslims
(according to apartheid ideology, the ``bastard race''),
Dangor gives Sander Gilman's question ± ``are Jews
white?'' ± a new piquancy, stirring up currents
submerged by mainstream Jewish South African
history and self-representation. 29 As Gilman notes,
the history of anti-Semitism has been pervaded by the
notion that Jews, as members of a ``bastard race'',
would reveal themselves in the attempt to ``pass'' as
white by a racial sign that would contradict the
apparent meaning of ``fair skin''. While the notion
that bastardy will out, no matter how well a ``playwhite''
(to use the coloured term) might perform,
pervades apartheid discourse about coloureds as
much as anti-Semitic discourse about Jews, one key
part of Omar's body identifies him, as it were, as a
``Jewish'' rather than a ``coloured'' patient: his nose. 30
The sentence in Oscar's confession: ``A beautiful
hooked nose ± Anna used to suck at it, after the
appropriate blowing and cleaning ± enabled me to
cross an invisible divide'' (Dangor 1997:23) is revealing.
By making the Semitic nose Omar's passport to
Oscar's white social status and marriage into a Natal
colonial family ± albeit one that might have ``Jewish
blood in [their] distant past'' (12), as Anna's father
Patrick has it ± Dangor taps a history of racial and
sexual discourse applied usually to Jews; ``nostrility'',
as well as the attendant association of the Jewish nose
with the sexual threat of the Jewish penis to the
hegemony of WASP culture, is the Semitic sign that
persists even when skin and respiratory diseases, and
other indications of ghetto poverty have been
removed. 31 But he also modifies this discourse of
Jewish sexual threat by highlighting Omar/Oscar's
reticent relationship with his wife, by making his
therapist, the bi-cultural Amina, coiffed with a
``Muslim scarf'' (50) yet ``as thin as a white woman''
(51), more sexually active, in her relations not only
with Oscar, but, after his death, with Malik as well,
and perhaps most surprising, by making the sexual
predator of the novella a WASP, Anna's brother
Martin Wallace, whose incestuous appetite threatens
to consume not only his sister, but his daughters too.
This threat of sexual and racial disruption touches not
only the WASP family in the novella, although the
opening chapter ``Moving to the Suburbs'', deals with
Anna's attempt to inhabit the gap between Oscar and
the Wallaces. Not only does it destroy Oscar, as
charted in the following first-person narrative, ``Majnoen'',
which invokes once again the martyr for love,
but it also threatens Malik's psychic and political
investment in the separate racial and religious fiefdom
granted minorities in the 1980s (in ``Malik ul-Mout''),
and the domestic peace of his wife, Fatgiyah, their
daughter, Rabia (who so sharply judges Amina for
her ``white'' appearance), and their rebel son, Fadiel,
who, like his great-grandfather, takes up with an
Afrikaner, Marianne (all of whom have their firstperson
accounts in the penultimate chapter, ``Their
Story'').
In Kafka's curse, Omar/Oscar's nose is the authenticating
sign of his Jewish pedigree and therefore, in
the late apartheid universe, of his legitimate participation
in white society, but it is also the site of his
degeneration. Although the death of his mother and
subsequent intrusion of his brother into Oscar's white
~43 .... ARTICLES

life in Parkside expose him as a Jewish
imposter, his disease marks him still as
a Jewish imposter. Despite his princely
name (Khan), Omar lacks the
masculine vigor, authority and rootedness
embodied by Muslims like the
London-based psychoanalyst Masud
Khan (a real but nonetheless thoroughly
performed personality). Masud
Khan's aggressive assertion of his
Muslim masculinity ± ``I am tall,
handsome ... [f]it ... Am a Muslim ...
My roots sunk deep and spread wide''
as opposed to the alleged weakness
and inauthenticity of the Jewish analysand
who sees himself ``stink[ing] in
[the analyst's] nostrils'' (Khan
1989:91, 90, 98) and who, like Oscar,
could not ``get into himself, be his
own person'' ± recalls Malik's ``scorn''
for his Judaified brother (Dangor
1997:33) but also highlights the irony
of a deterritorialized Muslim invoking
a root metaphor to capture his condition.
And, although Omar/Oscar's
ailments, especially his increasingly
laboured breathing and a strange
bark-like substance on his skin, are
framed if not explained by the allusion
± by Anna as well as Omar/Oscar ± to
the ``Arabian'' or at least ``Muslim''
(22) tale of the gardener, Majnoen or
Majnu n, whom the forest turned into
a tree while he waited in vain for his
illicit love, the princess Leila (17), his
condition calls to mind the historical
association of Jews with tuberculosis
and the incipient madness of the
consumptive patient:
Through many years of unconscious
practice, Oscar had developed the perfect
breathing technique ... He did this with
such serenity that he seemed to Anna the
most sensitive and refined man she had
known.Then Oscar was struck by an illness
that reversed the whole natural order
of his being ... his breathing became irregular
and his struggling lungs began to
make harsh, anguished noises. Suddenly
he was overcome, each night, by coughing
spasms that shook his body, his eyes
bulging as if he were near to madness. (5)
In the language of popular prejudice
as well as medical science, tubercular
discourse, ``overheated, highly
charged, highly sexual'', is present in
the ``Jewish'' patient even before the
onset of the disease (Gilman 1995:29).
``Kafka's Curse'' (9), the label applied
to Oscar's ``psychosomatic'' illness by
his brother-in-law Martin even after
Oscar's ``Jewish'' identity has been
undone, takes the form of the nervousness
that was Kafka's signature.
32 The parallel that the novella
draws between the phthisical Oscar
Kahn and the paraplegic Arthur
Mandelstam, linked by way of the
enigmatic Amina, reinforces the idea
that Omar's incapacitation, like
Arthur's, is a Jewish malady. Oscar's
apparent calm is not ``unconscious'',
but rather the result of many years of
practice, and thus a sign of nervous
self-consciousness if not outright insanity;
his ``serenity'' is belied by the
hyper-ventilation of his ``finely structured,
somewhat hooked nose, quivering
like that of a thoroughbred
horse'' (5).
The story of Majnoen's transformation
into a tree and Oscar's degeneration
from sensitivity to
suffocation in a body covered, in his
view, ``by a coarse and grainy bark''
(39) (but, according to Amina, only in
his fevered imagination; 134), and
thence to ``remains'' with an ``earthly
smell'' but, in Malik's opinion, too
``insubstantial to withstand ... ritual
cleansing'' (42), suggest that the condition
of diaspora, deterritorialization
and uprootedness, attributed to the
Jews, applies to other minorities as
well, even in a possibly post-apartheid
moment of the 1990s, when racial
classification is supposed ``not to
matter any more'' (45). The tale of
Majnoen ± whose location in an
unlikely forest in an otherwise arid
Arabia seems to Oscar to have been
adapted, like the spelling of the
protagonist's name, to the condition
of slavery in Africa, ``sentimentalized
and exaggerated to heroic proportions
by slaves from India or Java or
Malaysia to sustain themselves'' (21) ±
marks the displacement of Muslim
slaves, not Jews. 33 Nonetheless, it
registers the process by which a
minority (here Cape Muslim slaves
and their descendants) deterritorialized
a major language (here the
Arabic of The book of songs and A
thousand and one nights, as well as the
Qur'an) in a minor key, in a way
comparable to Jewish treatment of
major European languages, as Deleuze
and Guattari (1975:29±50;
1986:16±27) famously argue for Kafka's
German. What turns Omar's
``coloured'' experience of discrimination
into Oscar's ``Jewish'' knowledge
of deterritorialization is its self-consciousness.
What Oscar calls the
``sentimentalization'' of the fated love
of the gardener and the princess may
serve, like the recent, supposedly postapartheid,
recuperation of the apartheid-era
``Malay'' classification by
way of ``friendship tours'' to Malaysia,
to ``sustain'' a beleaguered minority.
Oscar, however, cannot allow
himself the simple immersion in communal
tradition, which, while it may
be keenly felt by others, strikes him as
largely invented. But his inability to
reterritorialize himself or to reinvent
~44 .... ARTICLES

his roots destroys him, leaving a dusty corpse in a
bedroom usurped by the spreading branches of a tree.
The memory of this spectacle invites a reference to
``fate'' ± or takdier in the Afrikaans spelling of takdir,
the Indonesian rendering of the Arabic taqdH }r
(Federspiel 1995) ± from both the politically devout
Malik and the resolutely skeptical Amina, despite
their differences. Reterritorialized in the Cape, Arabic
punctuates the everyday Afrikaans of the Slamse
characters in the novella, while also marking their
occasional appeals to divinity. 34 Yet takdier and the
attendant terms of Muslim funeral rites act as an
exclamation rather than an explanation of Omar/
Oscar's metamorphosis. The gadat (prayer service)
held in Fatgiyah's house after Malik too has died
brings no jana[t] (paradise) to Malik's spirit and
certainly no earthly peace to Fatgiyah or to Amina,
condemned by Fatgiyah as ``whore and murderer''
(139) and indicted in the press ± or perhaps only in
Martin's unreliable memory ± for allegedly killing
Oscar, Arthur, and Malik (137), and at the very end
perhaps also Martin (but that might have been Anna;
142). The multiple, incompatible stories, as well as the
unraveling of the narrative in the final chapter,
ironically titled ``Nothing to confess'', and the
ravelling together of apparently unrelated languages,
confound readers tempted to follow Deleuze and
Guattari's lead and find in this minor narrative the
national saga of a minority, understood collectively
and politically: ``[I]n a minor literature ... everything
takes on a collective value'' (1975:31; 1986:17). Like
Yiddish in Deleuze and Guattari's ``minor literature'',
Afrikaans has been treated as a language that ``invites
disdain ... a language that is lacking a grammar and
that is filled with words stolen in flight [vocables
voleÂs], mobilized, emigrating, and turned into nomads''
(1975:47; 1986:25; translation modified). Black/
Brown Afrikaans speakers in Dangor's fiction, and in
today's South Africa, may be mobilized in and by the
language, but they are not subjects of a single political
narrative.
Certainly, in Kafka's curse, asinWaiting for Leila
and The Z Town trilogy, Dangor takes on politics and
collective narratives, but he does so not in the sense of
adopting them or defending them single-mindedly, in
the manner of the classic anti-apartheid narrative, but
rather in the sense of tackling them, parrying them, or
even of fending them off. In so doing, he offers
readers schooled by the strategic dichotomies of antiapartheid
discourse a language for exploring ± if not,
as yet, completely encompassing ± post-anti-apartheid
stories. He also takes readers, South African or
otherwise, from South Africa into the world, by
charting the intersections, interferences, and incompatibilities
of diasporic trajectories ± black, Jewish,
and Muslim ± which are all too often treated in
different, if not downright antagonistic, ways. But, at
the same time, Dangor holds off from any simple
equation or resolution of these differences. Although
the trajectories in his fiction carry, shape, and also
divert what can indeed be identified as major currents
at the Atlantic/Indian confluence and confusion at the
``Cape of Storms'' ± such as the trajectories of slavery
across the Indian as well as the Atlantic Ocean; the
different varieties of indigenized Islam in South
Africa; or the emergence, in Afrikaans, of a language
to match the nexus of cultures, at once European,
African and Asian, at the Cape and beyond ± these
remain stories in a minor key that has yet to be
resolved.
Notes
My thanks to Ian Baucom and Sander Gilman for
critical comment on earlier drafts of this essay, and to
Achmat Dangor for crucial clarifications. Translations
are my own, unless otherwise attributed. This
article appears with the permission of South Atlantic
Quarterly and Duke University Press.
1 Pageants commemorating the emancipation of slaves
in the British Empire (1834) were held by Cape Muslims
and coloureds in nineteenth-century Cape Town and
by blacks across South Africa for the centenary in
1934; see Ward and Worden (1998); Bickford-Smith
(1994) and Kruger (1999:23^29) but the impetusfor this
commemoration faded under pressure first from apartheid
``preferences'' for coloureds, which encouraged
separation from other blacks, and later from resistance
movements wishing to identify themselves with ``original
inhabitants'' rather than ``imported slaves'' (Ward and
Worden 1998:209). Discussion of slaves at the Cape
has tended to mention the fact of slavery in the margins
of histories of discrete groups, especially the Cape
~45 .... ARTICLES

Muslims (``Malays''), from the once official view of the
Head of the Department of Coloured Affairs, ID du Plessis
(1944), to the liberal historians Frank Bradlow and
Margaret Cairns (1978), to community historian Achmat
Davids (1980). Only recently has a socially engaged
history of slavery emerged; see Worden and Crais
(1994). As Ward and Worden (1998:204^205) point out,
``the descendants of slaves at the Cape who were categorized
`Coloured' and `Malay' under apartheid legislation
... repressed the history of slavery as part of their
perception of their heritage ... in sharp contrast to African-American
tourists [approaching Ward in search of
`roots'] for whom a slave past has been one of the main
themes of identity politics and popular memory''.Terms
such as ``Malay,'' ``coloured,'' or ``Indian'' are to a degree
``artefacts of apartheid policy'' but, as AbdouMalique
Simone writes (1994:161^173), they retain an existential
salience for people who embody and even embrace
these identities in present-day South Africa and hence
cannot simply be scrapped or scare-quoted out of use.
2 Desai's account of coercion, even kidnapping, is corroborated
by Marina Carter's comparative study (1996),
but the standard South African accounts tend to pass
over the question of coerced passage, focusing instead
on Indian life in South Africa.
3 This presumption has the status of received truth
among Indians in KwaZulu-Natal even though the
documentation of slaves from India was published as
early as the1970s by Cape historians; for recent reiterations
of the myth, see Desai (1996:3), Bhana and Brain
(1990) and TG Ramamurthi (1995); for a critique of the
myth that cites ``Cape'' evidence, see SE Dangor
(1993:73^80). According to records in the Dutch East India
Company's Deeds Office,1658^1700, documented
by Bradlow and Cairn and cited by Dangor, slightly
more than half (653 out of 1296) slaves were registered
from India (mostly Bengal and Madras), as opposed to
189 from Batavia, Bugis and other regions in Dutch Indonesia,
and only four from Malaya. Dangor's title alludes
ironically to the myth of the British 1820 settlers,
implying that Indians have cultivated a similarly nostalgic
identity.
4 On the self-representation of Indian traders as `Àrabs'',
who would have been classified ``white'', see the traders'
petitions against the Alien Acts, in Bhana and Pachai
(1984:31^45), and Bhana and Brain (65^76).
5 Malaya remains the`òrigin''endorsed not only by apartheid
policy but by the current curators of the Bo-Kaap
Museum in CapeTown, which displays artefacts from a
recent ``friendship tour'' to Malaysia, and by visitors to
the exhibition of Muslim Culture at the Cape in 1994,
which also commemorated the tricentenary of the arrival
in 1694 of Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar (Indonesia),
political exile and religious leader; see Ward (1995).
The source of ``Malay'' affiliation is unclear, but current
research suggests that slaves were so identified because
their shared tongue was Malayu, the lingua franca
of the East Indies in the seventeenth century, which
shaped Afrikaans into the lingua franca of the Cape in
the eighteenth; see Davids (1994).
6 On District Six, see Jeppie and Soutien (1990); on Fietas,
Carrim (1990), and on the social history of Jews in
South Africa, see Krut (1984) and Shain (1994:9^78).
7 Although Roach's circum-Atlantic analysis (1996) encompasses
the Caribbean and, indirectly, West Africa,
it still remains largely within the North Atlantic traffic
mapped out especially by intellectual African-Americans
(such as WEB Du Bois) migrating eastward in
Paul Gilroy's account (1993).
8 Census 96 (published October 1998; http://
www.ccs.gov.za/censuspr/population.htm) lists the
number of Asians (over 90% South Asian) at
1 045 596, but Colin Clarke et al (1990) have 750 000
as an estimate for1980 (5) and only 350 000 on a list of
``Overseas South Asians by Country'' (2)! This discrepancy
is symptomatic of a broader ignorance, which
also plagues literary bibliography. Nelson (1993b) lists
only one South African writer of Indian descent: Essop
Patel, a poet best known for his edition of Can Themba's
writing. It omits the work of more prolific authors,
such as Ahmed Essop (prose fiction) and Ronnie Govender
(prose and drama), or other published writers
such as Ismael Mahomed (drama) or Deena Padayachee
(poetry and prose), not to mention women writers,
such as Farida Karodia (prose), Muthal Naidoo (drama),
or Agnes Sam (prose), and adding instead the
daughter of an Indian diplomat who spent a few childhood
years in the country. His edited collection of essays
(1993a) has only one essay that discusses a
South African writer, Ahmed Essop, but only in comparison
with writers in East Africa.
9 See``Ujamaa and soul'' and ``Nomadic citizenship'', in
Joseph (1999:37^48, 69^88).
10 Michael Chapman argues for treating black and white
writing in South Africa as part of ``the same story''
(1996:xvii) of colonialism and the struggle against it,
and against ``balkanizing literatures into distinct ethnic
units'' (xvi).Chapman's focus on the black/white conflict
is understandable, but it leads him to omit the important
work of writers whose oblique position vis-a© -vis this
conflict should not exclude them from South African literary
history. No South Africans of Indian descent appear
in the formal list of authors and only two who write
about coloured experience. Achmat Dangor, at the
time author of two fiction collections, a play, and poetry,
and Ahmed Essop, author of three volumes of short
stories, are both reduced to a footnote on ``Muslim'' writers.
I take the term``smaller stories'' from Leon de Kock's
critique of Chapman (De Kock1996), but regret that he
does not identify likely stories by name and that the collection
(Smit 1996), despite its publication in Durban,
South Africa's most ``Indian'' city, contains no comment
on Indian contributions.
11 See Dangor (1998). For the Indian appropriation, see
Reddy (1989:203). In a recent lecture, Dangor returned
to these issues; see Dangor (1999).
12 The critique of the `èxhibitionist'' aspect of protest literature,
the tendency of anti-apartheid texts, especially
plays and performance poetry, to use abstract indict-
~46 .... ARTICLES

ments of apartheid to agitate black audiences and
shame white ones, has its most powerful expression in
the work of Njabulo Ndebele, but it appears also in
Franz Fanon's indictment of the ``violent, florid writing''
of anticolonial intellectuals that often, in his view, ``serves
to reassure the occupying power'' by its excesses; see
Fanon (1965:239) and Ndebele (1986:143^157). For a
critique of New York spectators' appropriation of the
moral certainty of anti-apartheid outrage, see Kruger
(1991).
13 On God's Step-Children and its pre-eminent place in
the literature of miscegenation, see Coetzee
(1988:136^62); for an alternative view arguing that the
novel critiques white prejudice against coloureds from
its Jewish author's perspective of alienation, see Leveson
(1996:77^79). For miscegenation melodrama and
Fugard's debt to it, see Kruger (1999:103^113).
14 See Rive (1996) and Mattera (1986). Like Sophiatown,
District Six has been the subject of nostalgia, most famously
in the eponymous musical by David Kramer
and Taliep Pieterson (1989), although earlier accounts,
such as Alex La Guma's A walk in the night (1962) offered
much bleaker depictions of a population degraded
by crime and poverty, which correspond more
with official accounts. As historians Worden, Van Heyningen,
and Bickford-Smith argue, former residents'
memories of life in the District as``those wonderful days''
cannot be simply dismissed with reference to the ``objective
existence of widespread discrimination and
poverty'' (1999:114), and high crime (135), but should
rather be understood as an ``ideological counter'' to
the official representation of the ``crime and vice-ridden
slum'' that justified its demolition (138), a counter-position
that not only sustains former residents' memories
but also matches the documented greater degradation,
crime, and poverty of life in the state-controlled
townships that lacked the social cohesion and community
institutions of the inner-city neighbourhoods
(140).
15 Rive draws on his own life, including his childhood in
the District and his departure to be educated as a teacher
(1996:127), but he changes the age of the narrator
^ who is only ten in 1955 when Rive was twenty-five ^
and refers to the Rive family only in the third person
(201^202; 207). These changes allow Rive to insert a
certaincriticaldistanceintowhatmightotherwisebe
too nostalgic an account, and also to draw on the naivete¨
with which a ten-year-old might view the goingson
of Caledon Street's shadier denizens.
16 Majnu¨ n has been characterized as a philosopher, mystic,
or as secular revolutionary, but the protean figure
escapes all these labels (Miquel and Kemp 1988:145).
The oldest written version of this story and the trope of
the ``martyr for love'' is attributed to the Arabic poet Jamil
(d.701 ce) (Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. majnu¨ n); it
reappears in better-known texts such as Thebookof
songs by the tenth-century (ce) poet 'Abu al-Faraj al-
Isfahani, the celebrated narrative by the twelfth-century
Persian poet Nizami, and a dramatic version inthe early
twentieth century by the Egyptian writer, Ahmad Shawqi.
The tale has influenced European stories of lovemadness
from the courtly tradition to the surrealist
Louis Aragon's Le fou d'Elsa; for a French translation
of 'Abu al-Faraj's anecdotes, see Miquel and Kemp
(1988:211^56); and, for the translation of Nizami's poem,
see 92^115.
17 I refer to Bloke rather than to Modisane as the voice of
this text because, as Mark Sandler argues, the ``landmarks
of history'' and the author's status as a witness
of the destruction of Sophiatown, belie ``signs of another,
undeclared narrative'' (1994:52^53), which charts
the narrator's responses to white charity he both accepts
and despises as ``chicanery'' (Modisane 1986:91).
18 As the much-quoted graffito ^ ``you are now in fairyland''
^ suggests, the District had a visible population
of sexual outsiders designated by the elastic term moffie
since at least the1950s; see Chetty (1995).
19 The link between ``screen memory'' and ``cover story'' is
clearer in Freud's original German term, Deckerinnerung,
which more precisely signifies the imaginary narrative
the subject creates to displace an original trauma
or to ``cover for''an event too painful to make conscious
(1928:1:465); in English (1962:303).
20 See Lefebvre (1996:229^246); Lefebvre's term is abstract
[abstrait] space, but abstracted captures more
precisely the active element of social engineering.
21 Before the coloured population was removed from the
common voters' roll inthe1950s, elected representatives
in areas such as District Six certainly courted voters by
patronage, but could offer some resistance to white
power in local as well as national government. Dangor's
portrayal of the Coloured Representative can be
contrasted to the representation of politicians in Cape
Town coolie,Re¨ shard Gool's roman a© clef,featuring,in
indirect portrayal, Dr Goolam Gool, Trotskyite leader of
the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department wing of the National
Liberation League, his sister and political rival,
Cissie Gool, in the CPSA, and other associates in the
1930s and 1940s (Gool 1990); see also Lewis
(1987:174^243). Under apartheid, the townships were
governed directly by unelected white officials (such as
the relatively benign Mr Fischer who manages Z Town
before the Representative arrives), until the Constitution
of 1983 installed coloured and Indian representatives
with only shaky electoral mandates, since 80+% of eligible
voters boycotted. During the ``emergency'' of the
mid-1980s, the period of Dangor's trilogy, the central
white government retained the representatives but
dropped the pretence of ethnic autonomy; see Lewis,
280^283.
22 Dangor (1999:360) notes that ``[o]ne strong feature of
this [National Housing Standard] design was the way
people walked into their homes right off the street. The
stoep, that simple, long-established way of enhancing a
small house, was abolished.''
23 Jabulani Mkhize places sexual politics, especially, the
Meraai daughters' attempts to secure freedom or at
least autonomy through ``control of their sexual lives''
(1992:19), at the centre of the novel.This approach high-
~47 .... ARTICLES

lights the tensions between each woman's interpretation
of autonomy, and between their lives and the political
struggle represented here by men, but it overlooks
the ways in which location and dislocation, the township,
the inner city and the spaces of exile, shape the
actions and options of male as well as female characters.
24 This migration was an early manifestation of the volatile
mix of peoples that have radically deepened the transience
that has always characterized Hillbrow. In the last
ten years, the arrival of informal traders and jobseekers
from across Africa has left the managers of Johannesburg
unable to ``manage transience'', let alone
provide the institutional and social stability that might
create civility in the place of the crime that thrives on
the absence of collective civic commitment, informal
or formal, to the city; see Simone (1998).
25 See, for example, Kathrada (1999:251).
26 The relationship between town and township is more
complicated than Fanon's manichean opposition between
``settler'' and ``native city'' (1965:38^39) implies, if
only because the ``natives'' here include the descendants
of Indians, Malays and other ``non-natives'', but
Fanon's conception of the``incompatible zones''of ``reciprocal
exclusivity''does highlight the hazards of Omar's
crossing as well as the existential impossibility of Oscar's
return ``home''.
27 As Shain demonstrates (1994:114^117), this view prevailed
at least a generation after ``Western'' Jews persuaded
the British colonial authorities in 1902 to
exempt ``Eastern'' Yiddish-speaking Jews from the Alien
Acts barring immigrants who were not literate in a ``Western''
language. More recently, a rare comment on the
``love-hate relationship'' between Jews and Muslims in
South Africa from a Muslim of Indian descent draws attention
to sociological similarities (placement in commerce
and the professions) and to the Group Areas
Act's disruption of what might have developed into
competition or collaboration in these areas, but does
not note that this sociological similarity applies more to
Indians than to Cape Muslims; see Akhalwaya (1993).
28 An obvious candidate for the former is Stephen Black's
play, Helena's hope Ltd (1910), whose villain, Abraham
Goldenstein, is a Jewish parvenu in Parktown. Leveson
(1996:172^194) offers a provocative reading of the tension
between unassimilated Jews and those who can
pass as British in Nadine Gordimer's early fiction, such
as The lying days (1953), arguing that it reflects the
author's own rejection of her Yiddish-speaking ``foreign''
father.
29 As Gilman argues (1991:170^171), the question ``are
Jews white?'' reminds us that notions of Jewish difference
retain a racial cast even in the era of assimilation.
The idea that Jews were a ``bastard race'' pervades
even early Zionist discourse and the language of assimilated
Jews such as Sigmund Freud who used the
image of the Mischling or ``half-breed'' unable to suppress
the signs of his origins as a figure for the unconscious
(174^176). Where Shain discusses the historical
association of Jews and ``non-whites'' in South Africa
but insists nonetheless that ``the white status of the
Jew was never seriously questioned'' (1994:152), Krut
suggests that the very repression of Anglophone Jews'
historical embarrassment at so-called ``Peruvians'' (the
pejorative label of uncertain origin applied to poor Yiddish-speakers)
and of the general questions of race
and Jews by present-day organized Jewry testifies to
the ongoing contentiousness of these issues; see Krut
(1984:155^159).
30 By calling Omar/Oscar a ``Jewish patient'', I am drawing
on Gilman's analysis of the state of Jewishness as a disease,
over and above ailments, from tuberculosis to
skin eruptions, which have been associated with Jews
(1995:53^60,111,171^176).
31 Nineteenth-century physiognomists, including assimilated
Jews, treated ``nostrility''as a sign of Jewish imperviousness
to acculturation, which remained as a sign of
Jewish difference even after the ``diseases which
haunted the poverty of the ghetto'' had been washed
away; see Gilman (1991:181).
32 As Gilman argues,``this nervousness'' not only surfaces
in ``Kafka's own struggle with the trope of the inherent
instability of the Jew'' but also signifies, in residual prejudice
as well as period medical discourse, the psychosomatic
tendencies of Jewish subjects, the result not
merely of oppression but also of the overworked intellect
attempting to overcome it (1995:90).
33 Dangor (2000) explains his relocation of the story as
follows: ``Omar/Oscar tells his counsellor that he thinks
that the legend is clever propaganda; he also can't remember
Arabia having any forests. Setting it in a forest
allowed for Oscar's metamorphosis into a tree, which in
turn fits in with where he lived: Parkview, a tree-lined Johannesburg
suburb. Can you imagine the difficulties I
would have had, had he turned into a grain of sand or
some hardy desert shrub? No room for decay there.''
Beyond its immediate significance for the plot, the commentary
that Dangor puts into his protagonist's mouth
reminds readers of the impact of Muslim and specifically
Arabic culture on quite different societies and the
ways in which those societies made use of this inheritance,
particularly in times of severe duress, such as
slavery.
34 The impact of Arabic on the emerging Afrikaans language
went beyond the absorption of some colloquial
or Muslim terms to the shaping of literacy in the Cape
Muslim community and the sound of Afrikaans in Cape
Town more generally (Davids1994). As is now acknowledged,
the first texts written in Afrikaans were not the
patriotic papers of white Afrikaanders but rather manuals
for Muslim education, written in Arabic script. That
legacy is present, albeit in fragmented form, in the language
of Kafka's curse.
~48 .... ARTICLES

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~50 .... ARTICLES

Three Skeleton Pieces
.......................
DON MACLENNAN
I
From a shaft grave by the river
I watch them excavate a man
whose knees obtruded
from a crumbling mound.
A trowel unearths his skull,
a dental pick his strong
but worn down teeth.
II
My head is an empty cave
filled with seeds of light.
Upon the walls are signatures
I cannot read.
III
What can you learn from poets?
Skeletons are more eloquent:
an urchin washed up on the beach
its juice and prickles gone,
is a round of gooseflesh Ð
you, when stripped
naked on your way to bed
one black mid-winter night.
~51 .... POETRY

Politics
.......................
DON MACLENNAN
I
My eyes burn from reading
dishonest works,
and I am going deaf
from politicians' promises,
those who best know how
to close the door on truth.
What can we expect
when Hitler spent his evenings
falling asleep over bad movies?
And what did Stalin read?
II
I looked into the world
wishing to find a truer life,
and came to know only
the world as it is,
and what it means
to sit by the Bosphorus
drinking blood red tea
from narrow-waisted glasses
and deeply breathing in
the evening air.
~52 .... POETRY

The exquisite joy
of acquiescent
and accomplice bodies:
only for this I wait
by the darkening river.
I sit here in the evening dew,
thinking it is presumptious
to connect freedom with virtue.
~53 .... POETRY

In the peppergrove
.......................
DON MACLENNAN
Under the green umbrellas
of the outdoor restaurant,
the fresh, clean morning's
thrown together randomly
a small tableau
of primary reality.
The wooden table's
slatted like a boat;
the sail above us
flaps in the morning wind.
At the next table
a beautiful young woman
demonstrates her skills
to her admiring friends,
her skin alive with need.
We could be anywhere Ð
the Adriatic coast,
a pebbled beach
that hurts your eyes
with caustic light.
In the honey of the sun
she lights a cigarette,
playing with its pristine shaft,
draws it to her lips,
exhales smoke like incense.
~54 .... POETRY

We sit and watch
drinking our modest coffee.
We have been lovers now
for over forty years,
have felt the chasm broaden
between the body and the soul.
We too believed unquestioning
in the body's omnipotence.
Reality was the least of ills.
We cannot tell them
we have been where they are now,
as drunk as they with possibility.
They see us with our crow's-feet
and our wattles and sore backs,
but can't imagine all the beds
we quartered in, or children
who went singing through
the gates of paradise.
Why do I remember this from school:
Si rite remetior astra?
What torment Virgil was that term.
Yet I recall a wind that blew
from invisible fields and seas.
Seferis says, ``The poem is everywhere.''
And of the words of Socrates some say
that when they are opened out
and you get inside them,
you find them full of ripened sense.
If light shines through
my language now, let me
retrieve its darkness,
thick curds
and clots of meaning,
the smell of smoke,
~55 .... POETRY

damp beds of herbs
in the harsh sun.
Let it not wither
into deadening concepts,
but like Virgil's
make the light quiver,
start echoes
of immeasurable meaning.
~56 .... POETRY

Untitled
.......................
STEPHAN MEYER
I unlock my locker
a swimmer across
peels down his trunks
I gasp
at the force of his buttocks
over my breath
and his glance
at my eyes
which hover
between
devour and demure
~57 .... POETRY

Untitled
.......................
STEPHAN MEYER
if I stuff
my eyes
into my ears
I'll be neither
tempted to
see nor hear
the rush of
desire rippling through
the lining of fantasies
holding together
skin and flesh
~58 .... POETRY

Untitled
.......................
STEPHAN MEYER
a morbid love
of life
makes me suspect
that there must
be more to it
than the regret
that I am
~59 .... POETRY

Untitled
.......................
STEPHAN MEYER
these days that have been fluid
have set in the shape of my body
a pyre of words and twigs
pleading for the fire
~60 ..... POETRY

Inside me
...............................
PP FOURIE
~I lose people.
.......
They die in ways that are incomprehensible to me.
Making their entry in an almost gentle and unsolicited
way, they exit brutally, inappropriately, usually
suddenly. They mark my existence and are the worlds
and songs and reflections that map my life; the time
that is me.
And thus it was with her. Her name is Margalith.
And she has left me with the cruelty that is memory,
with the sweet ache that is nostalgia.
She will fade and change in my thoughts about the
time when we were ``we''. I struggle to retain some
semblance of her that is real, devoid of the inevitable
sentimentality or carefully contrived reminders that
make the present bearable.
Almost three decades my senior, I met her in a city
far from my own. At a conference for translators and
editors, where bosses send their minions for purported
improvement and dull, safe interaction with dull, safe
peers. These are occasions when companies ensure
that they retain their next financial year's training
budget; a footnote in the script of our daily dance of
earning our daily bread.
And thus it happened that in the Spring of a
comfortably uneventful year we met in one of those
insignificant, pivotal moments that define the essence
of what, if only for an instant, makes sense; makes us
alive.
``Mental disease is a learning curve.''
The accent sounded blonde Ð Norwegian, maybe.
She smiled surreptitiously, a stranger leaning towards
me from across the table. The casually stretched-out
hand took a peppermint. She moved back into her
seat Ð no response was required.
We had been listening to a speaker meaningfully
recounting the nuances of translating personal correspondence
between two late-eighteenth century literary
figures. I did not know whether she was
referring to the subjects of the translations, the
audience, or the speaker. It was not important Ð
any interpretation seemed appropriate. My smile was
a spontaneous and careful acknowledgement of our
sense of kin.
***
There is a moment, not often but sometimes, when
there is a hiccup in time. Rules, seconds, morals and
thoughts are suspended in a void of utter significance;
a moment that changes everything forever. These
moments are not limited to the endorphin-induced
slowing down in those milliseconds before a car crash.
(Though perhaps the analogy is appropriate for my
first, eternal acquaintance with her). And it is during
such moments at the beginning of relationships when
one knows beyond all doubt that you have met
yourself in someone else. One knows that things will
work out, that the feeling is mutual; there is a shared
excitement that goes beyond all semantics and social
foreplay.
And thus it was with her.
***
~61 ..... SHORT FICTION

``No, I am not Norwegian.'' We were standing in
exactly the centre of her hotel room. ``And I'm very
pleased to meet you.'' The face pleasantly and unashamedly
hinted at her age: she had elegant lines around
her eyes, and the ease with which she moved under her
clothes would have seemed ridiculous and almost an
anachronism had she been a younger woman.
I looked around the room. Not much betraying
anything personal. A small bottle of perfume next to a
picture framed in ancient silver. ``My son,'' she said,
slightly tipping her wine glass at the young man of
about my age. She did not take her eyes off me.
them. I wonder if I am one of them. I hate myself a
little bit. But more than anything, I wonder where she
is now.
I could see my wife waving at me when I walked
into the international arrivals hall. She said my name
softly when we embraced. I was genuinely happy,
relieved to see her. We exchanged the usual
pleasantries: gifts; cursory thoughts about the conference;
she remarked that I looked a bit tired. I was
abittired.
``Well, this is certainly quite strange.'' I tried to
look unembarrassed, regretting the remark almost
instantly. She passed me a glass of Merlot, and
seemed almost pensive for a second.
``Yes, slightly, I suppose.'' She seemed sincere,
bemused, relaxed Ð in total control. She sat down on
the lime green chaise longue.Iwasgladwhenshespoke.
``Oh dear, what do we do now?'' she smiled.
I had never made love to an older woman before.
***
She drove us back home. I looked out the window
(noting that it was autumn), then pretended to sleep.
Nothing had really changed. Though everything had.
I knew the feeling would pass. But hopefully it would
not.
Maybe I did not lose her.
She had gone.
Inside me.
I believe there are natural adulterers. I used to hate
And that was all.
~62 .... SHORT FICTION

A troubled sense of belonging
....................................................
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC HISTORIES IN THE POETRY OF ISOBEL DIXON, JOHN EPPEL AND DON MACLENNAN
NICK MEIHUIZEN
~I
.......
f, according to Michel Foucault's
notion of the episteme
or the inherent knowledge by which
we arrange experience in different
eras, the order of concretely existing
things in modern times is determined
not by structures of thought, but by
historical forces, the matter has some
significance in South Africa, where
history is so largely entailed in our
present sense of material, spiritual,
aesthetic and intellectual impermanence.
Although the phenomenon of
globalization has its place in this
picture (as I discuss below), the
impermanence referred to here has
largely to do with issues surrounding
colonialism, the memory of apartheid,
and the memory of Rhodesian UDI
and its aftermath. Awareness of issues
related to these matters dates back to
Thomas Pringle, and was certainly
present in Roy Campbell, who experienced
an associated anxiety well
before it became inevitable to do so.
As a consequence, Campbell became a
nomad. There are far more white
southern African nomads now, both
literally and figuratively speaking. 1
Their tents are their histories, woven
from their own past or from threads
left by earlier Europeans. This essay
examines relations to both public and
private histories in newly published
works by three such nomads: Don
Maclennan, Isobel Dixon and John
Eppel.
In the first volume of his History of
modern criticism, Rene Wellek considers
the importance of ``the awakening
of the modern historical
sense'', which he defines as ``a combination
of the recognition of individuality
with a sense of change and
development in history'' (1955:26).
Thus, the ``individuality of different
epochs [becomes] recognized'', and so
definition is effected through history
(27). In Foucault's more minutely
considered analysis, history deploys
``in a temporal series, the analogies [or
similarities in function] that connect
distinct organic structures to one
another''. 2 History ``gives place to
analogical organic structures, just as
[neo-classical] Order opened the way
to successive identities and differences''
(Foucault 1970:219). Foucault
emphasises that history ``in this sense
is not to be understood as the
compilation of factual successions or
sequences as they may have occurred;
it is the fundamental mode of being of
empiricities, upon the basis of which
they are affirmed, posited, arranged,
and distributed in the space of
knowledge for the use of such disciplines
or sciences as may arise.'' He
adds that history is ``the depths from
~63 .... REVIEW ESSAY
which all beings emerge into their
precarious, glittering existence'' (219).
In short, history is no longer a table of
dates, a string of related events; it is
the source of things perceived as an
ever operative power that constitutes
existence itself. 3 Foucault (251)
claims:
European culture is inventing for itself a
depthinwhichwhatmattersisnolonger
identities, distinctive characters, permanent
tables with all their possible paths
and routes, but great hidden forces developed
on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible
nucleus, origin, causality, and
history. From now on things will be represented
only from the depths of this density
withdrawnintoitself,perhapsblurredand
darkened by its obscurity, but bound
tightly to themselves, assembled or divided,
inescapably grouped by the vigour
that is hidden down below, in those
depths.
Aspects of this conception of history
(to take one example) are not
alien to TS Eliot. Frank Kermode, in
The classic (1975:23), underlines the
link between it and Eliot's understanding
of the translatio imperii and
translatio studii, or subsequent cultural
drives to recapture the values
and potency of classical times:
Our failure to use Virgil as a criterion Eliot
calls `provincial'. He intends something
more than a literary judgement, for the
failure is a cultural failure to perceive the
true structure of history; it implies the heretical
assumption that ``history is merely the
chronicle of human devices which have
served their turn and been scrapped''.

For Eliot, history is not a mere succession of events,
it is a centre of constitutive energy that emerges from
the dark origin where destiny has its source. And we,
in Eliot's renovatio of the imperium, are part of that
destiny, and so part of an empire that stretches far
beyond individual historical moments: ``You must
remember that the Roman Empire was transformed
into the Holy Roman Empire ... We are all, so far as
we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of
the Roman Empire ...'' (Eliot 1953:92).
The ``depths of a density withdrawn into itself''
seems more fundamental in the constitution of human
beings than does the imperium, though, and is more
Darwinian in thrust. Man, as inheritor of all that has
gone before, says Foucault (1974:313),
merely unveils himself to his own eyes in the form of a being
who is already, in a necessarily subjacent density, in an irreducible
anteriority, a living being, an instrument of production,
a vehicle for words which exist before him. All these
contents that his knowledge reveals to him as exterior to
himself, and older than his own birth, anticipate him, overhang
him with all their solidarity, and traverse him as though
he were merely an object of nature, a face doomed to be
erased in the course of history.
Thus human beings are not enlarged by the sense of
what has come before them, as they might be by
feeling they belong to an extended imperium, they are
confined even more within their own finitude.
Just as the endlessly subjacent but ever-present
sense of the return of the origin of the human species
makes nonsense of ontological enlargement derived
from historical tradition, the notion of ``infinity'' at
the heart of earlier epistemes is replaced by the
``paradoxical form of the endless'', which, ``rather
than the rigour of a limitation'', indicates the
monotony of a possibly endless journey; but this
form, at least, is prone to the useful attribute of
``hope'' (Foucault 1974:314). Campbell, it seems to
me, uses the paradox surrounding this form as his
point of departure. Investing immense enthusiasm in
Futurism, for instance, a celebration of pure mechanical
finitude, he creates a mechanistic flaming terrapin
yet replete with ``endless'' possibilities, and invested
with an accompanying sense of hope (Campbell
1949:60ff). 4
Whatever the role of ``hope'' as an antidote to
limitation, positive finitude is of principal constitutive
importance. That is, to evoke Foucault's trinity of
Life, Labour and Language, experience of life is given
through a finite body; labour is a consequence of
satisfiable desire; and language is circumscribed by
the time of utterance and its place in history. ``At the
foundation of all the empirical positivities, and of
everything that can indicate itself as a concrete
limitation of man's existence, we discover a finitude
Ð which is in a sense the same: it is marked by the
spatiality of the body, the yawning of desire, and the
time of language''. And this finitude is not imposed
from the outside; it is fundamental, resting ``on
nothing but its own existence as fact'' (314±5).
It is the analytic of finitude, ``a reflection on the
conditions of possibility of finitude'', whose goal is to
present man's finitude in the terms indicated above,
``as providing its own foundation'' (Gutting
1989:200). It does so, primarily, through repetition.
Repetition is found in the ``identity and the difference
between the positive and the fundamental''. The
positive ``death'' that wears away life from day to
day, ``is the same as that fundamental death on the
basis of which my empirical life is given to me''. In a
similar manner, ``the time that bears languages along
upon it, that takes up its place within them and finally
wears them out, is the same time that draws my
discourse out, even before I have pronounced it, into
a succession that no man can master''. What emerges
from the fact of this repetition is the figure of the
Same,
in which Difference is the same thing as Identity. It is within
this vast but narrow space, opened up by the repetition of
the positive within the fundamental, that the whole of this
analytic of finitude ö so closely linked to the future of modern
thought ö will be deployed; it is there that we shall see
in succession the transcendental repeat the empirical, the
cogito repeat the unthought, the return of the origin repeat
its retreat; it is there, from itself as starting-point, that a
thought of the Same irreducible to [neo-]classical philosophy
is about to affirm itself. (Foucault1974:315^6)
~64 .... REVIEW ESSAY

Campbell seems aware of the repetition
involved at the heart of his
historical moment; his glorification of
bull-fighting, or, in terms of his
renovatio of imperial terms, ``tauromachy'',
which he presents as a
central ritual, initially gains strength
from such a sense of historical
``emergence'' as the following: ``It is
with the Bull that Man first emerged
as a conscious creative being against
the background of troglodyte prehistory''
(Campbell 1988:500). Campbell
then claims a phenomenological
superiority in his relationship with
bulls, seeing them as they ``really are''
in positivist, empirical terms. But the
extended frame he erects for his
tauromachy is in tension with this
attempt at positivist limitation; the
same ``object'', then, is at once of
acute positivistic and fundamental
significance, suggesting a type of
repetition of the Same not different in
kind from that found in the dual
nature of his terrapin.
Campbell, as an exemplar of what
Fredric Jameson (1991:304) terms the
``anti-modern modernist'', the modernist
opposed to aspects of modernization,
uses this repetition of the
Same in his relationship with empire.
He might posit a colonial primitivism
suggestive of the ``vigour that is
hidden down below, in those depths''
wherein history gives definition to
discrete, positive entities, while at the
same time questioning both the positivism
attending a dispirited Western
cosmopolitan culture, and the fatuous
double of this culture, still lurking in
the colonies. The colonies, if the locus
of vibrant primitivism, are also purveyors
of a sad repetition of ``Home'',
a repetition that involves clinging to
imperial values attached to outmoded
notions of the metropolis. It is the
subsequent sense of emptiness that
stirs in Campbell the need to create his
own credo, centred in a profound
belief in the ``endless'' possibilities of
life itself, and, finally, traditional
religious verities centred in reactionary
notions of ``infinity''. 5
It is useful to bear this wider
perspective associated with Campbell
in mind today, where the nomadic
instinct (inherent in the repetition of
history as both one's basis and one's
continued being) is not simply a
product of a reaction to colonialism
but also of globalization, whose threat
was long since anticipated by Benjamin,
Adorno, and Horkheimer,
among others. 6
Isobel Dixon (Weather Eye, 2001)
and John Eppel (Selected Poems
1965±1995, 2001), exemplify two different
types of nomad ± one who has
left the South, and one who has
stayed. From within themselves they
have created structures of selfhood
conditioned by a finitude underlined
by the radical changes that have taken
place around us. Thus, for example,
much is invested in personal history,
certainly in the case of Dixon, perhaps
less so in the case of Eppel, though he
does contrast past with present in a
way that tells of a close acquaintance
with place (Eppel 2001:66±7). With
Dixon, different hemispheres offer the
contrast, and the socio-political landscape
of South Africa is given only a
type of grudging acknowledgement
(Dixon 2001:38), as if she requires
more certainty in her sense of Africa
than that allowed by political change.
South Africa offers refuge from globalization
(or at least from the
North), primarily through its past,
though one cannot doubt that certain
treasured aspects of the country have
not changed, especially in the deep
rural areas Dixon has recently revisited.
Her nostalgia is frank, freely
acknowledged (11), and tells more of
necessity than indulgence. With these
sources she invests the materials of her
selfhood. The explorer Richard F
Burton (1964:16) wrote that there are
nomads who are actually inherently
domestic, who can establish a sense of
belonging anywhere. Dixon is not of
this type. All her sympathies are for
the South, and her present life in the
North serves only to highlight the
qualities and values of the South
(Dixon 2001:45):
Close my fists tight around the thoughts of
breathless
nights, the heat distilling scent from every
bush.
The leap and crackle of a fire outside,
the clink of ice.The promise
of a morning glorious, ablaze with light.
Eppel, one who has travelled extensively
through the varied sociopolitical
landscapes of Rhodesia-
Zimbabwe, but who is now committed
to Zimbabwe (he claims he wants to
die there, 2001:73), seems a more
likely candidate for Burton's domestic
nomad. Perhaps it is wrong-minded to
call him a nomad, as he has sent roots
deep down into the soil. The numerous
plants, flowers and trees that we
find in his poems emphasize rootedness,
emphasize his Anteus-like
grasping of the soil through these life
forms. But if roots emphasize adherence
to a location, it is his dogged
awareness of the need for that adherence
that alerts us to his being a
nomad. He feels at times alienated
~65 .... REVIEW ESSAY

oth as an individual and as the member of a race or
culture (33), and this feeling, as in Campbell, is not
confined to a particular hemisphere (41): ``My times
are, my spaces, are diminished. / I am afraid. I have
nowhere to go.'' But, also as in Campbell, he is
nevertheless very much of the place of his origin,
claiming memories, claiming experiences, recreating
the place through his private history, his participation
in public history, and his botanical and geological
susceptibility to the very earth around him. Relatively
exotic he may be (as are all southern whites), but he
has become naturalized, and in a way suggestive of
deep commitment, as his singing of ``Nkosi Sikelele''
with his children dramatizes (60). Then too, he speaks
of the plight of the people, endlessly waiting for thirdrate
transport, as the fat-cats' jets fly overhead. The
people count the jets, a mindless pastime while they
wait for their jalopies (64). He shows here his
solidarity and compassion, human roots that bind
and commit.
It is not just present change that prompts a feeling
of displacement; the old Rhodesian mentality was
hardly compatible with his own, and he makes this
explicit at times (66):
On the rugby fields of Spreckley
Rhodesian manhood pounds;
on the Colenbrander Oval
Rhodesian spunk abounds.
For all his deployment of memory and the past, the
sentiment he imparts is never one of simple nostalgia.
He does not, apparently, long for what has been lost.
He records his experiences of the past and their loss in
an almost factual way (53):
I showed you the foundations
of the store where we had swopped our coins
for sugar-sticks and sherbet. I showed
you the pile of bricks where the Meyers
used to live; I pointed out the less
bushy patch of ground which supported
the Van Deventers ...
For one thing his disquiet is more implied than
expressed. For another he doesn't romanticise the
past, he doesn't make of it a paradise lost. This is
partly because of his discontent with the mind-sets of
that past, but more because of his ability to allow his
subjects their own voices. That is, he doesn't impose
sensibility. His style is factual, clear-headed, and often
incorporates a twist of humour. And it makes no
appeals to sympathy or a higher justice; perhaps this
is a peculiarly white Rhodesian voice after all. A few
of his poems are set in England, where he feels (like
Dixon) out of place, haunted by Africa. But even in
these poems, Africa is not a source of redemption, a
holy vale of the past, as it tends to be in Dixon. It is a
place of discomfort and danger, of a hard lifestyle.
What matters is not desire for a now unobtainable
past, but the hurt of incompletion, the incompletion
of alienation. And so, again, he establishes himself in
his poems, affirms presence, natural presence, botanical
presence (16, 20, 26). In doing so he creates a
home, whether inhabited by botanical, reptilian,
geological, or human life-forms. The poem gives
shelter, gives substance, in its matter-of-factness, its
adherence to Linnean classification, its wry reflection
of the poet's history. Though the Adenium Obesum,
originally dug up in a war-zone, is now on a property
long since passed from his hands (32), and though
words aren't quite trees (44), words provide Eppel
with location in the midst of postcolonial impermanence.
Don Maclennan's primary focus in Notes from a
Rhenish mission (2001) is the impact of experience on
one's inner self (Maclennan 2001:19), not the immediate
pressures of belonging or not belonging.
History is not a means of defining a relation to the
past in his eyes, it is a means of investigating this
impact. It is also, though, a means of deconstructing
colonial continuity through a blighted repetition of
the Same. For instance, the cracking plaster of the old
Mission sounds like the markedly ``foreign'' Germanic
tongue of the missionaries, thus parodically
``uttering'' past fundamental certainties regarding
infinity in terms redolent of positivistic finitude (8):
Theypriseofftheoldmudplaster
which still smells of grass, and sounds
like foreign vowels and consonants as it breaks ^
``Nun danket alle Gott'' ^
and falls around their feet.
~66 .... REVIEW ESSAY

Europe has left its traces in this
country, just as the poet has. It has
withdrawn, just as he now withdraws,
conditioned by the disinterested presence
of the ``endless'', a curiously
ambivalent presence tangible in the
dry landscape, the crumbling ruins,
the remarkably concrete realization of
a saviour figure speaking another
foreign tongue (Aramaic) whose foreignness
(biblical, archetypal) is yet no
barrier to reciprocity (13). Where a
personal past finds its way into his
writing he comes closer to Dixon and
Eppel. Closer, but not that close. He is
more a lonely wandering Jew than a
familial, gregarious nomad; he is a
speaker of apophthegms based on
experience that is stripped of individual
content (14):
To what do we aspire?
Do hyacinths know their fragrance,
or clouds the colour they acquire?
Maclennan's minimalism reflects
his subject matter, and for me conveys
a strength and grace not void of
passion (13):
The Mission has become a painting
where being is so vivid
that the light shines through it ^
the red grass,
cadmium yellow sand,
rock outcrops softened with flowers,
and a heat haze vibrating like a harp.
These are the bones of experience
(even where ontology is evoked), and
in this finite fact lies their beauty.
Each serves a fundamental function,
or seems to suggest this, in the way
that more prolix pieces (by definition)
cannot.
Writing from abroad, Dixon, mentally
absorbed by the South, seems
psychically adrift in comparison with
Eppel and Maclennan (although her
writing captures the South with precision).
What is important for her,
then, is not the relation to the
immediate ``here'', as is the case with
Eppel and Maclennan, but to ``there''.
That is, the immediate ``here'' cannot
hold her for long. Her desire is always
for the ``hereness'' of the past (the
other time), which translates invariably
into Africa (the other place).
Both meet, then, in her nostalgia,
which assumes a double poignancy ±
it is spatio-temporal; and this poses a
problem. For this double focus makes
her cross the taboo lines of the past to
embrace her life under the old order,
to rescue a sense of belonging inherently
part of that order. The notion
might suggest a parallel with an
originally innocent warmth for Berlin
in Hitler's heyday, which of course is
not impossible, but which must now
be modified to carry with it a degree
of acknowledgement or even acceptance.
Thus, the past associated with a
troubled place and time and then
viewed in retrospect is problematic,
for it is revisited in full knowledge.
Longing for the past can be divorced
from acceptance of all that the past
stood for, but must either incorporate
some degree of condonation of that
past, or at least carry a plea to be
allowed to cordon off the personal
from the public.
Eppel does not do this. Even his
earliest poetry in this collection, from
the sixties, is humorously critical of
social attitudes of fellow Rhodesians,
for instance (Eppel 2001:19). Dixon
steers clear of such matter, preferring
the apolitical sociology of the family,
conditioned by an earlier perception
of the world, that of the very young
child, as opposed to Eppel's young
adult. In choosing this focus she steps
outside public history and stays within
private history, while Eppel engages
with both.
And what of Maclennan in this
regard? In concentrating on a German
Mission, Maclennan brings to mind
the missionary endeavour and its
complicity in colonial subjugation. He
goes back, then, far beyond the
apartheid years to the ideological
machinery of emerging globalization,
the coupling not so much of cross and
sword as cross and commerce, but
does not harp on the fact. As in the
case of Dixon, socio-politics in Maclennan
are displaced by internal
imperatives. What focus one chooses
is of course a matter of preference, but
the implications attending such revisitings
of the past require some
response from the writer.
I do not want to be mistaken. It is
refreshing to move away from what
have become the cliche d mouthings of
the recent past. But have the pressures
attending this past been adequately
dealt with? Is a truth and reconciliation
process that lasts only a few years
enough to lay the ghosts of centuries?
Perhaps we all need to heed Cronin's
warning (1997:43): ``Beware, right
now amnesia is sneering at us.''
Whatever the case, the past is not
easily integrated. Condemned or distanced
in Eppel, it is mourned or
treasured in Dixon, and it is symptomatic
of the mysteries of presence in
Maclennan. None of these writers,
then, is ever at one with the past.
Perhaps Dixon momentarily is, in
those spots of time that tell of an early
~67 .... REVIEW ESSAY

perfection (Dixon 2001:9±12); but for all the comfort
they offer, they also give witness to present disaffection.
Having mentioned her implicit disaffection, I
should also point out that her recuperation of the
past is not simply governed by a tendency to idealize.
She is aware of shortcomings, of pain and restrictions.
Apart from being golden, her past is also one of hard
times and droughts (13), where the plight of black
people is very well known to her, despite the
overriding existential security that was a reality, she
says, not a ``childhood myth'' (38). But the past for
her is primarily golden, a source of comfort, a
wellspring of paradisal essence, captured in the
sensuousness of her memories, where even the present
taste of a grape in England can evoke the paradise of
childhood in a different hemisphere (11). It is also the
site of familial warmth and goodness, because of
which a bearded man in the street can bring to mind
her father, who modulates into a type of Moses figure,
striking with his stick the rocky heart of metropolitan
London, showing the way to the promised land of
human reciprocity, of values from a different time and
place (15):
There'll be a stillness as the faultline fissures
deeper than the Underground.
The engines stop, the hush reminding us
of history and grace.
The clear ``good morning'' from your smiling face
settling among us like a dove.
But perhaps his values are not necessarily confined
to a different time.
For Africa is not all memory for Dixon. On
occasion it is a place for present experience, compelling,
absorbing, as in Maclennan (42, 43). As soon as
she is back in England, however, memory makes its
claims, and her mind becomes transitive again,
nomadic, returning to the South, contrasting it with
the North (44):
I'm sorry to see
my mosquito bumps fade:
the love bites of a continent,
marks of its hot embrace.
If anything is dark,
it's this damp island
with its sluggish days,
its quieter, subtler ways
of drawing blood.
It is not just a difference in time that is at issue in
Dixon, then, it is a difference in values, and the values
she cherishes are to be found in the South. If this is so,
nostalgia isn't simply a question of longing for a
neatly cloistered and inviolate past. It takes the
measure of present existence, and it is its ability to
do this which gives Dixon her final strength, or which
allows her to make the claims on the South that she
does. In the final poem in her book, for instance, ``She
comes swimming'' (46±8), a female figure, something
of a kelpie, follows Da Gama's route to the Cape, and
so evokes not only CamoÄ ens, with his Adamastor and
Thetis, 7 but also Campbell and his flaming terrapin.
She will
fall on her knees and plant a kiss
and her old string of beads,
her own explorer's cross
into the cruel, fruitful earth at last.
She's at your feet. Her heart
is beating fast. Her limbs are weak.
Make her look up.Tell her she's home.
Don't send her on her way again.
The female wants to be reintegrated with Africa,
Thetis desires union with Adamastor in far more
hopeful terms than Moira Lovell allows in ``Thetis
regrets'', which has a qualifying ``But'' looming large
at the beginning of its sestet (Lovell 1994:23):
I clasp your sex in the vice of my thighs
And draw you down to my moistureful hide ^
Where dreams and fantasies are given lives.
But your heart's interred in a desert chest;
The once-besotted brain by Heracles
Now pulverised into a bowl of dust
That nods unconsciously upon your breast;
Your body's nailed onto a cross of seas
That lick your loins with nympholeptic lust.
Dixon's hopeful intensity is closer to that found in
Mongane Serote's Come and hope with me (1994). She
has tested her vision of and feelings for the South in
~68 .... REVIEW ESSAY

various ways in the remainder of her book, and has
earned this right to hope.
Is it hope for something better rather than
acceptance of what is that gives purpose to the
postcolonial nomad? Eppel too hopes in a way that
itself suggests he has earned the right in the final poem
in his book. He is not the settler oblivious of his
position. He is a man who has taken stock of the past,
but who is centred in this world around him now. Yet
he is not fully settled, a clue only gleaned from his
words to his wife: ``This is where I want to die'' (Eppel
2001:73). This final and eternal link to the soil is
desired, hoped for, not guaranteed. The statement
itself implies other possibilities, but the emphatic
expression of hope is potent, affirming. And Maclennan's
book ends, ``We can begin'' (Maclennan
2001:24), in a rather tension-filled context conditioned
by lack of true talent, absence of ``original
sin'', and spillage of life's ``abundance'': 8
How few of us can sing.
There's no original sin:
we overflow with
our own abundance.
We can begin.
That is, the only constraints have to do with
personal ability; but we are immersed in life regardless,
ever on the brink of beginning. There is an
acceptance here, true enough, but it is tempered by
the opposite extremes of lack and abundance, and an
affirmation (``can begin''), which conveys an eternity
of hopeful potential; the wandering Jew is thousands
of years old, and though he wanders, he is symptomatic
of the eternal return apparent in this potential.
Or maybe he is symptomatic of the ``paradoxical form
of the endless'', a measure of finitude, though finitude
not without hope. Eppel absorbs history to kindle this
hope; Dixon filters it; Maclennan hopes for something
more (14):
How to get back under
the mountain's shadow,
disengage from place and history.
In Khoi its name is Hommoequa
because it is not a mountain
but a blue cloud,
and blue clouds mean
more than history.
Whatever their relations to history, Dixon, Eppel
and Maclennan deploy it in aesthetics that are
continuous with their lives, to the point where art
and life suggest more than glancingly a repetition of
the Same (where individual life is the circumscribed
``positive'' and historical aesthetics the more encompassing
``fundamental''), a repetition perhaps only
possible in an era where history is of such epistemologically
constitutive importance.
Notes
1 This is not to forget the black South African nomads of the
apartheid years. But their nomadism was politically enforced.
Different agents of enforcement are abroad today,
not so reprehensible, but often as acutely felt.
2 Gary Gutting, in Foucault's archaeology of scientific reason,
observes (1989:190): ``For Cuvier, the structure of an
organ is to be understood in terms of the function that
the organ performs. In drawing up a list of species, what
is of importance is no longer identities and differences in
plants' and animals' properties but only functional similarities
in theirorgans.Thus, organs (eg, gills and lungs) that
have no elements at all in common may nonetheless be
grouped together on the basis of their similar functions''.
Gills and lungs are analogous on the basis of their similar
functions. History adds a temporal dimension to such
grouping, where, say, evolution is emphasized, rather than
abstract systems of classification.
3 Consider Lukcs's observation in The historical novel
(1969:20): ``During the decades between 1789 and 1814
each nation of Europe underwent more upheavals than
they had previously experienced in centuries. And the
quick succession of these upheavals gives them a qualitatively
distinct character, it makes their historical character
far more visible than would be the case in isolated,
individual instances: the masses no longer have the impression
of a `natural occurrence'. One need only read
over Heine's reminiscences of his youth in Buch le grand,
to quote just one example, where it is vividly shown how
the rapid change of governments affected Heine as a
boy. Now if experiences such as these are linked with the
knowledge that similar upheavals are taking place all
over the world, this must enormously strengthen the feeling
first that there is such a thing as history, second that it
is an uninterrupted process of changes and finally that it
has a direct effect upon the life of every individual.''
4 Intoday's terms the terrapin is what is called a cyborg, part
biological, part mechanical.
5 Campbell eventually turned to Catholicism and even pagan
Mithraism.
6 Recently in local poetic circles the drive to globalization
~69 .... REVIEW ESSAY

was brilliantly savaged by Jeremy Cronin in Even the
Dead (Cronin 1997:42):
CNN is globalised amnesia
The Gulf War ^ lobotomised amnesia
Santa Barbara, the Bold and the Beautiful, Restless
Years ^ the milk
of amnesia.
7 Sometimes she is Tethys. There's a tradition, beginning
with Camens, of confusing or conflating goddess and
nymph.
8 Maclennan's words question Yeats' repudiation of Soul's
emphasis on salvation in``VacillationVII'': ``What, be a singer
born and lack a theme? / ... What theme had Homer
but original sin?'' (Yeats 1950:285). But if there is no Fall,
there is also no salvation. What remains? Hope qualified
by finitude.
Works cited
Burton, Richard F.1964. Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to
Al-Madinah and Meccah.I.NewYork:DoverPublications.
Campbell, Roy.1949. The collected poems of Roy Campbell.
Volume 1. London: The Bodley Head.
Campbell, Roy. 1988. Collected works, vol. IV: prose.PAlexander,
M Chapman and M Leveson (eds). Johannesburg:
Donker.
Cronin, Jeremy.1997. Even the dead. CapeTown and Johannesburg:
David Philip and Mayibuye Books.
Dixon, Isobel. 2001. Weather eye. Plumstead: Carapace
Poets.
Eliot, TS. 1953. Selected prose. John Hayward (ed). Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Eppel, John. 2001. Selected poems 1965^1995.Bulawayo:
Childline.
Foucault, Michel. 1970. The order of things: an archaeology
of the human sciences. London: Routledge/Tavistock.
Gutting, Gary.1989. Michel Foucault's archaeology of scientific
reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jameson, Fredric.1991. Postmodernism or, the cultural logic
of late capitalism. London and New York: Verso.
Kermode, Frank.1975.The classic: literary images of permanence
and change. New York: Viking Press.
Lovell, Moira.1994. Out of the mist. Plumstead: Snailpress.
Luka¨ cs, Georg. 1969. The historical novel. Transl. H and S
Mitchell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Maclennan, Don. 2001. Notes from a Rhenish mission.Plumstead:
Carapace Poets.
Serote, MonganeWally.1994.Come and hope with me.Cape
Town and Johannesburg: David Philip.
Wellek, Rene¨ .1955. A history of modern criticism:1750^1950.
I. London: Jonathan Cape.
Yeats, WB. 1950. Collected poems. London: Macmillan.
~70 .... REVIEW ESSAY

With this kind of record, how can we be sure?
....................................................
ELWYN JENKINS
he article by Samantha Naidu, ``The myth
of ~T. ......
authenticity: folktales and nationalism in the `new
South Africa' '' (Naidu 2001b; scrutiny2 Vol 6 No 2),
is a useful addition to the little criticism that has been
published on the phenomenon of South African
folktales in translation and also on South African
children's literature, of which folktales form a large
part.
It is a pity that Naidu is an unreliable scholar, who,
in order to make her point, misrepresents her
predecessors.
Her references can be slighting and ignorant. She
calls the motto on the South African coat of arms,
which is written in the San language /Xam, a ``Khoi
San slogan'' (25). The Khoi had nothing to do with it
(and the term Khoisan is written as one word,
anyway). What is she implying by calling it a
``slogan''? She writes Mapungubwe in italics (21, 25)
and says it ``is said to have flourished about a
thousand years ago'' (25). There are enough radiocarbon
dates for Mapungubwe to satisfy the most
sceptical archaeologist. What is she insinuating?
Some of her misleading statements may be the
result of compressing parts of her thesis (Naidu
2001a) into an article, since the original is more
nuanced, but they cannot be allowed to stand as
published.
She includes Marguerite Poland's Once at KwaFubesi
in her critique of English versions of Xhosa
folktales (20), but Poland has never pretended that
her book is anything other than her own fiction. It is
not a collection of versions of African folktales. To
include it along with the books by Savory and Stewart
is inaccurate.
In the article earlier scholars are given short shrift.
``Some contemporary scholars,'' she says, ``have
recognized the role of folktale texts in the processes of
cultural formation, but they do not situate these texts
in the wider discursive structures of colonialism,
nationalism or neo-colonialism'' (17). No mention is
made of the groundbreaking and courageous paper by
AToÈ temeyer (1989).
She says that in Children of the sun (Jenkins 1993) I
did not question the motives of publishers or analyse
how otherness is represented (Naidu 2001b:25). Three
of her major points were discussed by me in my book,
as follows:
(i) the fallacy of the ``image of textual transparency''
(Naidu 2001b:19): see Children of the sun (24±25);
(ii) ``the adoption of specific colonial discourses''
(Naidu 2001b:20): see Children of the Sun (21±22);
(iii) the adoption of a ``pseudo-anthropological character''
(Naidu 2001b:20): see Children of the Sun
(11±13, 23).
I do not know what she means by saying in her
thesis that my approach is ``sociological''. Among the
literary-critical techniques which I used I analysed the
peritexts of the books. She follows me in doing this,
~71 .... LETTER TO THE EDITOR

though she calls the peritext the ``superstructure'',
which, by some twist of logic, she says ``surrounds''
the tales (19). 1
I turned to her thesis (Naidu 2001a) to see whether,
in its more spacious context, her treatment of other
scholars was more subtle. There her dismissal of
anyone who has not used her schema of ``discursive
structures of colonialism, nationalism or neo-colonialism''
is equally emphatic. This is the fate of Andree -
Jeanne ToÈ temeyer, who does make a brief appearance
(without the acute accent in her name and with a
mistake in the title of her paper) (120,124,195).
Moreover, Naidu's references to other scholars are
not necessarily reliable.
On p 131 she gives as direct quotations from p 51
of the Companion to South African English Literature
(Adey et al. 1986): ``Colonial and English tone of
much that has been written in South Africa for
children in English'' and ``colonial and English
tone[s]''. The actual words in the text are, ``... are,
like many of these earlier works, `English' in spirit
and `colonial' in tone''.
She also quotes from p 51 of the Companion: ``The
important role that folktales, in their various forms,
play in the emerging cannon of children's literature.''
(It is not clear if the spelling of cannon is hers or
supposed to be that of the Companion.) This quotation
is not on p 51. In fact, it is not in the article on
Children's Literature in the Companion at all.
She launches into an attack on David Adey, who
has the misfortune to come first in the alphabetical list
of co-authors of the Companion, revealing her
misunderstanding of the nature of a reference volume
such as the Companion: ``But Van Vuuren is
impatient, as I am, with Adey for not pulling off the
scabs. If the wounds of `colonial and English tone[s]'
are to heal, then scholars like Adey will have to do
more than give titles and content summaries of
various folktale collections'' (131).
It is not always possible to go back to the original
to check the references she cites, since many of them
(including one of mine, Jenkins 1988, cited on p 121
of the thesis) are missing from her bibliographies in
the article and the thesis.
In some places in the thesis it is possible to compare
her interpretation against the other person's original
words. On p 35 she writes:
For example, she [Finnegan] quotes Bleek ... but she is
conspicuously silent about what can be interpreted as his
derogatory, evolutionist-inspired comment: ``The fact of such
a literary capacity existing among a nation whose mental
qualifications it has been usual to estimate at the lowest
standard, is of the greatest importance.''
Here Bleek is saying the opposite of what Naidu
says he ``can be interpreted'' as saying: he is defending
the indigenous people against other people's derogatory
remarks, as he consistently did (Lewis-Williams
2000:14; Jenkins 1993:22).
Another example is on p 130, where she says that
``Jenkins goes so far as to claim that Poland's selfconsciously
hybrid style is superior to and more
relevant than either of the traditions she borrows
from'', and then quotes me as follows:
Marguerite Poland's ``Stories for the children of Africa'' are
unique to their time and place.They are not the moral fables
that their European talking-beast ancestors were; nor do
they reflect the concerns, almost uninterpretable to modern
anthropologists, of their San and African cousins.
The passage quoted does not say that Poland is
either superior to or more relevant than anybody or
anything.
I hope Samantha Naidu has been truer to the other
writers whom she discusses, but the trouble is, with
this kind of record, can we be sure?
Note
1 An article in which I continued the analysis of the significance
of peritexts (Jenkins 2001) was published in
January 2001, which was probably too late for Naidu
to refer to.
~72 .... LETTER TO THE EDITOR

References
Adey, David, Ridley Beeton, Michael Chapman and Ernest
Pereira.1986. Companion to South African English literature.
Johannesburg: Ad. Donker.
Jenkins, Elwyn.1988. The presentation of African folktales in
some South African English children's versions. In: Sienaert,
G and N Bell (eds). Oral tradition and education.
Durban: Natal University Oral Documentation and Research
Centre.
Jenkins, Elwyn.1993. Children of the sun. Johannesburg: Ravan.
Jenkins, Elwyn. 2001. Reading outside the lines: peritext and
authenticity in South African children's books. The Lion
and the Unicorn 25(1):115^127.
Lewis-Williams, JD. (ed). 2000. Stories that float from afar:
ancestral folklore of the San of Southern Africa.Cape
Town: David Philip.
Naidu, Samantha. 2001a.Transcribing tales, creating cultural
identities: an analysis of selected written English texts
of Xhosa folktales. Unpublished MA dissertation. Grahamstown:
Rhodes University.
Naidu, Samantha. 2001b. The myth of authenticity: folktales
and nationalism in the ``new South Africa''. scrutiny2
6(2):17^26.
TÎtemeyer, A.1989. Impact of African mythology on South
African juvenile literature. SA Journal of Library and Information
Science 57(4):393^401.
~73 .... LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Reviews
...........
Not yet time to despair
Ivan Vladislavic . 2001. The restless supermarket.
Cape Town: David Philip.
Nadine Gordimer. 2001 The pickup. Cape
Town: David Philip.
MICHIEL HEYNS
There would seem to be little reason, other than the
vagaries of publishing, for two novels as dissimilar as
these to end up together on a reviewer's desk.
Vladisavic situates his novel in the South Africa of
the Transition, whereas Gordimer, having dealt with
that period and its issues in None to accompany me,
has moved on, through The house gun, to a later era
and even another country. Furthermore, Gordimer's
sober, stripped, slightly ungainly realist style, her
restrained, remote, humourless narrative manner, her
cool dissection of her characters, all contrast markedly
with Vladisavic 's exuberant narrative, his outrageous
situations, his confident virtuosity, his
satirical angle on things, even his adoption of a
first-person fallible narrator.
And yet perhaps there is some point in the
comparison, aleatory as it is: in their very different
styles, both writers are novelists of Johannesburg and
historians of its streets. Gordimer and Vladisavic 's
characters move in an environment shaped in the first
place by other people. As Aubrey Tearle, Vladisavic 's
narrator and protagonist says, ``my view of the
skyline was all nickel and paste by night and factory
roofs and television aerials by day'' (15).
It is thus appropriate that in both The pickup and in
The restless supermarket a cafe plays a crucial part,
both as meeting place for the characters and as
metaphor for the hybrid culture of a particular kind
of Johannesburg, the kind that does not centre its
existence on a home in the suburbs. Vladisavic 's CafeÂ
Europa is witness to and register of the social changes
that turned Hillbrow from a cosmopolitan cappuccino
culture into a different kind of hybrid. When
Tearle first enters the Cafe Europa, he is immediately
taken with its congenial atmosphere, created in part
by Mevrouw Bonsma at the piano: ``She was playing
`I love Paris', which suited the establishment, if not
the city and the season, down to a semi-quaver'' (15).
It is in short the kind of restaurant frequented by
people like Aubrey Tearle who think they love Paris
even though they've never been overseas (and refer to
the Tour Eiffel as the Tour d'Eiffel). Self-consciously
pretentious, Tearle enthuses about the cafe : ``A
European ambience. Prima''(16). On the wall of the
Europa is a mural, which represents the city of Alibia,
all things to all men of European origin: ``It was a
perfect alibi, a generous elsewhere on which the
immigrant might find the landmarks he had left
behind'' (19) ± provided of course that the immigrant
is from Europe rather than Africa, an assumption that
Gordimer's novel reflects on interestingly.
Vladisavic 's protagonist is a retired proofreader, an
anxious, opinionated pedant, consciously out of place
in the changing city, nevertheless self-righteously
intent upon, as he sees it, keeping up standards,
fulminating against neologisms and portmanteau
words: ``Currywurst? It was ersatz, a jerry-built
portmanteau if ever I heard one'' (53). It is typical
of Tearle that his objection to this nauseatingsounding
concoction should be linguistic rather than
gastronomic. Linguistic contamination is for him
metaphoric of all disruption of system: ``There is
nothing I admire more than a system,'' he says (78),
and later: ``I have always liked the Germans. I admire
their discipline''(159).
It follows that the New South Africa fills Tearle
with apprehension, though he registers it in the first
place as a change to the population and ``ambience''
of the Cafe Europa: ``How could I have foreseen such
an outcome, in the gold-flecked afternoons of my
past, how imagined that I would become a stranger in
my home away from home, beset on all sides by
change and dissolution? ``(122) His final apocalyptic
vision is of his beloved Cafe Europa being flooded by
``Some frightful solvent in which all things would
~74 .... REVIEWS

float and dissolve, gradually losing their shape and
running into one another. A solution of error.'' (273)
they favoured, or had to, being unable to afford
anything better'' ( 8).
Tearle is recognisably the hidebound conservative
South Africa who is not going to accept change, and
can see it only as a lowering of standards and a denial
of privilege. The type is of course plentiful and not
self-evidently likeable. It is part of Vladisavic 's
achievement to render his protagonist as pathetic
rather than arrogant, vulnerable rather than offensive.
Emotionally costive, he is attracted to the
vivacious Merle, who does what little she can to
unbend the rigours of years of solitude and proofreading,
but eventually gives up with good grace.
If Tearle's dedication to his life's work the Proofreader's
Derby is as misguided as it is anachronistic,
there is nevertheless something heroic in his folly. He
is a man intent upon erecting a monument to a
forgotten art, a selfless labour of misguided love.
``Proofreading, properly done, is an art,'' he pronounces
(80), and leaves us in no doubt that he, at
least, has always done it properly. The book's central
section, ``The Proofreader's Derby,'' is an elaborate
fantasy in which the kingdom of Alibi is saved by the
labours of its proofreaders: ``[W]hen peace had been
restored, the City Fathers afforded the heroes a
victory parade, the grandest that had ever been seen''
(228).
In reality of course, or in that altered reality that
constitutes the novel's present, the city of Johannesburg
is supremely indifferent to its proofreaders, and
the novel ends on a vision of hopelessness, in the face
of unregenerate chaos: ``Languages were spoken there
that I would never put to the proof. As if they were
aware of it themselves, the lights were not twinkling,
as lights are supposed to do, they were squirming and
wriggling and writhing, like maggots battening on the
foul proof of the world'' (304).
From this chaos, of course, Gordimer's Suburbs,
(they are invariably the Northern Suburbs) seem to
offer an escape, but the other Johannesburg is always
present, the Something Out There that keeps the
Suburbs from sleep and work. In The pickup the
protagonist, Julie Summers, believes she has escaped
from the Suburbs into the more liberated, cosmopolitan
atmosphere exemplified by the LA Cafe : ``She
did not live in The Suburbs, where she had grown up,
but in a series of backyard cottages adapted from
servants' quarters or in modest apartments of the kind
We know from her other works that Gordimer can
be particularly hard on the illusions of the white
liberal who believes she has escaped the illusions of
her class, and Julie, at first, is no exception. Her
adoption of the attractive but enigmatic and not
particularly communicative pickup, an illegal immigrant
from an unnamed Arab state, has about it
something of a rich woman's whim, insofar as it is not
pure lust ± the latter of these two being of course, in a
Gordimer novel, the more respectable motive.
Julie is in many ways the exact opposite of Tearle:
young, female, sexually adventurous and active,
consciously liberated from attitudes she associates
with the Suburbs, her LA Cafe exactly the kind of mix
that he abhors as the end of the Cafe Europa. But she,
no less than Tearle, is the butt of her author's irony:
her sexual adventure with her pickup exposes the
complacency of her own liberation from luxury and
ease. Ashamed of her affluent background, she has no
way of knowing that to an illegal immigrant this is her
main attraction, that she promises access to the
privileges of the new country.
In a sense, it is then a horrible irony that Julie
should through her involvement with Abdu follow
him to his desolate desert community, whereas he had
hopes of being given access to her prosperity.
Gordimer has in the past interested herself in the
plight of affluent white people finding themselves
dependent upon those whom they had been accustomed
to regard as their social inferiors: the hapless
Smales family thrown upon the mercy of their
gardener in July's people, the well-meaning Lindgards
entrusting their son's case (and life) to a black lawyer
in The house gun. That pattern is repeated here in that
Julie, confident rich man's daughter, contemptuous of
the Suburbs and yet a product of it, street smart as
street smart goes in her part of the world, is
transposed to a dusty, forlorn desert settlement,
dependent for everything from food to communication
on her ``Pickup'', the enigmatic Ibrahim/Abdu,
who understands her as little as she understands him.
Gordimer assumes authority over her characters
with a certain steely certitude that can come across as
condescending: ``She wants to respond with a surge of
tenderness and guilt at having to have been reminded
of this ± the nostalgia she thinks he is expressing. But
~75 .... REVIEWS

at the same time her self-protective instinct ± which is
the image of herself she believes to be her true self and
that she has contrived to project to him ± prompts her
to head him off with an explanation commensurate
with that image'' (37).
Gordimer cuts through her characters' self-delusion
and interprets their misunderstandings for us with the
confidence of a creator fully in possession of her
creation: ``She is ashamed of her parents; he thinks
she is ashamed of him. Neither knows either, about
the other.'' (38) It becomes clear to the reader and
perhaps eventually also to Julie that her enlightened
views are not shared by the object of her enlightenment.
Ibrahim refers scathingly to ``her rich girl's
Cafe ideas of female independence'' (256), and here is
a painful discrepancy between her concern for his
welfare and his callous readiness to take advantage of
whatever material benefit he can derive from the
relationship. But for once Julie is allowed to
transcend her humiliation and, in a sense, her author's
disdain. To compare the outcome with that of July's
people is to recognize the distance Gordimer has
travelled as writer and as social critic. Whereas the
Smales family had indignities heaped upon them that
it was difficult not to imagine as sponsored by the
author, Julie, misguided liberal though she may be, is
afforded agency of her own: not the absurd gesture of
accompanying Abdu to his desert settlement, but the
decision to stay on without him.
Where, at the end of July's people Maureen Smales
is pictured running towards the helicopter that
represents some alternative, however ambiguous, to
the settlement, Julie insists on staying; and staying not
for love, since Ibrahim is about to leave, but for the
strange appeal of the desert, its half-inarticulate
people, the gentle, submissive women, even the stray
dog that haunts the outskirts of the village. Gordimer
is here perhaps closer than she's ever been to
portraying solidarity between women, even in the
face of the erotic bind between man and woman that
she here again asserts and celebrates.
I have heard it suggested by Lars Engle that
Coetzee's Disgrace was in part a reply to Gordimer's
None to accompany me, his dark vision intended as a
corrective to her more hopeful one. If this is so, one
may be tempted to extend this to a view of The pickup
as in its turn a reply to Disgrace: the young white
woman taken up in an alien community is here not a
source of perplexity and outrage; it is seen as a free
choice freely taken (and without the sacrifice of the
dog). The muted ending is wide open, promising
nothing in terms of reconciliation or resolution; but
Julie has travelled an immense distance, emotionally
as well as physically, from the LA Cafe and its
assumptions. Ibrahim's taunt that ``her decision was a
typical piece of sheltered middle-class western romanticism''
(262) gradually loses its validity as a disabused
Julie discovers her own meaning in the desert.
Vladisavic 's protagonist, on the other hand, has
remained in Hillbrow and returns to his flat and his
dictionaries. But he, too, has travelled: he has walked
through the night, with a young woman named
Shirlaine (``The poor thing was a portmanteau,'' he
comments, not unsympathetically (289)), shared a
roast chicken with her at the eponymous all-night
Restless Supermarket, and though his life seems not
to have been changed by it, one senses that for once
he has ventured beyond the margins of his page, and
lived with the corrigenda and delenda that make up
``the foul proof of the world''.
Shirlaine offers him such consolation as she can for
the destruction of the Cafe Europa and all it
represents: ``I can't believe you're so upset this joint
is closing down. It's not the end of civilization, you
know. There are new places for whites opening up in
Rosebank'' (300). For Tearle it is the end of
civilization, of course, with its mythical city of Alibi,
but he has had a glimpse of an alternative civilization,
and walked the streets of the gritty new Hillbrow that
make up the here and the now. It's a tiny journey, but
Vladisavic convinces us that it matters; just as
Gordimer convinces us that Julie's harebrained
scheme is ultimately liberating.
By now the old question of what South African
authors will write about after Apartheid has been
given a rich variety of answers. These two novels
provide us with two more, suggesting that it's not time
yet to despair for lack of a subject matter.
~76 .... REVIEWS

Running Zen into postmodernism
Marilet Sienaert. 2001. The I of the beholder:
identity formation in the art and writing of
Breyten Breytenbach. Cape Town: Kwela
Books and South African History Online.
IAN TROMP
This is one in a series of books, Social Identities South
Africa, under the general editorship of Abebe Zegeye.
The colophon describing the Social Identities South
Africa Series refers to the crucial changes that have
taken place in South African cultures since the first
democratic elections in 1994, and describes the series'
mission in terms of clarifying ``the nature and
influence of the identities being formed in response''
to the end of statutory apartheid. This is the first
book in the series to be focused on the work of a
single South African artist, and Sienaert is primarily
interested (as her subtitle indicates) with the formation
of personal identity within Breytenbach's art and
writing, and only tangentially with broader matters of
social identity in South Africa. This is a monograph
on the work of a controversial artist and writer, who
has spent most of his adult life living outside the
country of his birth, whose influences ± though
intimately tied to his experience as an ``albino
terrorist'' ± have as much or more to do with
European critical and philosophical theories of the
late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and with Zen Buddhism,
as they do with South African politics, identity, or
culture.
Sienart's second and third chapters present the
approaches of Zen and of certain prominent poststructuralist
theorists. These are the defining chapters
of her book, which establish the paradigm applied in
the four succeeding chapters. Chapter Two considers
the Buddhist doctrine of ``no-self'', or ana}tman (Skt),
one of the three characteristics which the Buddha
described as defining all conditioned existence (the
other two are impermanence and unsatisfactoriness).
Put simply, the insight of ana}tman is the realisation
that there is no fixed self, that ± like everything else
around us ± we are subject to constant change, and
that there is no enduring substrate with which we can
meaningfully identify. Chapter Three outlines ideas of
the ``shifting subject position'' in postmodern literary
and psychological theory. Though her material in
both these chapters is difficult, Sienaert's exposition is
fairly clear. Her prose style, though, is stilted, and in
places quite turgid and repetitive. Though she cannot
be blamed for the pomposity and wilful difficulty of
the French theorists, she could certainly have
tempered her exposition of their work. This limitation
might have been attributed to the fact that these two
chapters were translated from Afrikaans, but their
tone is not much different to the rest of the book, and
the limitations of the prose of these opening chapters
carry through the remainder of the book.
Though Sienaert acknowledges that there are
differences between the approaches of Zen and
postmodernism, there is yet a troubling coincidence
of these very different views throughout her book. She
distinguishes them in several passages, such as the
following:
Although such blurring of conventional self-other boundaries
and the associated notion of a fluid identity invite readings
in terms of Buddhist selflessness, the shifting ``I'' also
clearly emerges, in true postmodernist fashion, as a construct
within the discursive practice of writing or painting.
(68^9)
And again (familiarly):
Although a reading in terms of Buddhist selflessness goes a
long way in clarifying statements of this kind, the blurring of
conventional subject-object boundaries and the associated
notion of a shifting ``I''also postulates identity, in true postmodernist
fashion, as a construct within the discursive practice
of writing or painting. (81)
The abiding sense that there is yet a sleight of
mapping Buddhist ``selflessness'' onto postmodernist
ideas of identity's non-fixity is perhaps heightened by
the fact that the book is structured with its two
introductory chapters establishing the ground and
parameters of her approach to Breytenbach's work.
Because she does not adequately distinguish them
from one another, it seems that she runs the two
together. Some of the things Sienaert says in her
chapter about Zen have interesting resonances with
postmodernism, but the transaction does not work in
the other direction. Since the metaphors and imagery
of Zen are attractively poetic, one can easily be misled
by reading them in terms of other discourses, here
that of postmodernism. But the approaches and
positions of these disciplines are very difficult to
integrate with Buddhist beliefs in any but the most
superficial ways, and the brevity of Sienaert's discussion
means she is unable to adequately argue such an
integration ± which, anyway, is not her project.
~77 .... REVIEWS

Several years ago, one of the Johannesburg newspapers
(I forget which) ran a cartoon in response to a
series of remarks Breytenbach had made in criticism
of the ANC government. The cartoon was headlined
``Soutpiel'', and depicted Breytenbach towering over
Earth's globe (much as in one of his own more
pleasing drawings, ``Hy kom met die sekelmaan'')
with one foot in Paris and the other somewhere in
South Africa. And from this lofty position between
the two cultures he inhabits, he was urinating on his
homeland. I cite this not because I agree with the
cartoonist's view of Breytenbach, but because it is
descriptive of a real disjuncture in his relation to the
culture and politics of South Africa, and to his social
identity within that culture and those politics.
The Brazilian poet Machado wrote (in Bly's
translation) that it is necessary, before writing a
poem, to invent the poet to write it. This could have
made a very good epigraph to Sienaert's book, for her
concern throughout is with the invention of Breyten
Breytenbach, rather than with the social identities of
the series' title. To my mind, Breytenbach is an
extraordinarily uneven poet and painter. Among the
works cited and reproduced in this volume there are
images that are clumsy in their technical means, and
passages that are unduly solipsistic; but there are also
images of delightful competence and poignancy
(``Here's a forest-like eternity''), and some of his
poems are masterful (though Sienaert tends to quote
more convoluted, dense examples). Though the reader
has to work hard ± not because the material is difficult
(though it sometimes is), but because of the limitations
of Sienaert's style and manner, this is yet a
capable series of essays, which offers engaging insight
into Breytenbach's oeuvre.
Ruled by his dark side
Arthur Nortje. 2000. Anatomy of dark: collected
poems of Arthur Nortje. Ed. Dirk
Klopper. Pretoria: Unisa.
GARETH CORNWELL
The first sentence of Dirk Klopper's Preface announces
that this volume ``comprises the complete
poetry of Arthur Nortje (1942±1970)'' (xxiv). In fact it
doesn't ± a Port Elizabeth postgraduate student has
recently unearthed another 15 poems from the years
1962±63 (Hendricks 2002). But believe me, the 401
pages of poetry gathered together in Anatomy of dark
will be more than enough for even the most devoted
Nortje enthusiast.
Klopper rightly points out that his editorial
``principle of inclusiveness ... has the advantage ... of
revealing Nortje's poetic practice in the most comprehensive
way possible'' (xxiv). But by picking up all
the poems he could find, including ``incomplete or
imperfect'' drafts, Klopper has done nothing to
enhance Nortje's reputation. Keeping my finger in
the handy guide to sources at the back of the book
and checking every time I came across what seemed to
me a worthwhile poem, I noted with some dismay that
every single such poem had been published before. It
might be argued that this proves no more than that
my taste happens to coincide with that of Dennis
Brutus, who edited Dead roots (1973), the most
comprehensive collection of Nortje's poems up till
now. But to me it suggests that Nortje's poetic
achievement, though not inconsiderable, was distinctly
limited. After all, he was less than 28 years
old when he died, a lifetime of writing still ahead of
him; and in my view, a clear majority of the 411
poems in Anatomy of dark can without condescension
be classified as juvenilia.
On the evidence of this collection, I would divide
Nortje's brief but prolific poetic career into four
phases. The first comprises the poems written in
South Africa, 1960±65, before his departure for
Oxford. Although there are exceptions, these early
poems display most glaringly the faults that Nortje's
writing never altogether escaped: most notably, a
profligacy with language that repeatedly sacrifices
clarity and meaning in favour of verbal invention. The
baroque exorbitance of Nortje's imagery and diction
mean that one seldom encounters ± in the earlier
poems, at least ± any descriptive detail or personal
emotion unmediated by fanciful abstraction or
rhetorical flourish. Even when the expression is terse,
the emotion or thought somehow keeps getting lost in
the words, as Nortje awkwardly pursues rhyme,
confuses registers, skirts bathos. This ``protest poem''
dated June 1963 is a relatively austere example:
~78 .... REVIEWS

What We Fear Most Must Happen
Dark ragged youth at the campus store,
raps a dull coin. Sharp voice rings
down steel and glass and marble corridor;
``Make mine milk, make quick'' she sings.
He spilt a great deal on the floor
but laughed, his thick lip quivering.
This is the hallmark of the poor,
They hardly ever cry over these things.
Only the blonde Apollo wins
(and he gets the libations too).
The thirsty sun drinks all our dew:
sandwiches stored in cellophane skins
are curled and dried and hard to chew;
heads are bowed, hands chained to shins
because the gods won't offer you
ambrosial slices from their rich bins.
In spite of what theThunderer thinks,
bold posters scream ^ give Bread, not Guns!
A starving heart is left to shrink
so that a marble face can grin;
atatteredyouthwhobuysourdrinks
falls back with a cracked, an empty cup,
the red wine gushing from his hip.
Among the gems uncovered by Shaheed Hendricks in his
MA research is a comment by Nortje's English teacher at
Paterson High in Port Elizabeth, Dennis Brutus. In response
to the young Nortje's poem ``To Nomis'', Brutus writes:
The theme does not emerge clearly and the emphasis seems to be
on the technical.The emotion comes through so faintly that it suggests
a manufactured rather than genuine one ^ or a disproportionate
one.
Athought:
Surely it is possible for you to use the technical resources you must
exploit on a subject more personally felt ^ even if less exalted emotionally:
some anger, or problem, or frustration or argument which
involves you personally and directly? (Hendricks 2002, Appendix 3)
Would that Nortje had taken this advice more seriously!
Far too many of the poems are prevented by their ``technical
resources'' from delivering a coherent thought or emotion.
In the early work, an obvious debt to Gerard Manley
Hopkins is partly to blame, but the brash virtuosity remains
long after the obvious signs of Hopkins's influence have
disappeared.
When Nortje's writing gets into its stride in England from
1966 there is a palpable increase in quality and control: one
notices a greater awareness of poetic decorum, especially of
diction, with no loss of imaginative power. At the same time
the poems become more personal: in works like ``Foreign
body'' (158), ``Casualty'' (168), ``Up late'' (192) and the
brilliant ``Waiting'' (243), Nortje begins to explore the
implications of exile and the complexities of a self in the
process of emerging from the leap between coloured slum in
apartheid South Africa and the urbanities of Oxford:
The germ lodges like a young grain
in the gloomy oyster of the soul.
What substance around the foreign body
can pearl it smooth, what words can make me whole?
(from ``Foreign Body'')
You yourself have vacated the violent arena
for a northern life of semi-snow
under the Distant Early Warning System:
I suffer the radiation burns of silence.
It is not cosmic immensity of catastrophe
that terrifies me:
it is solitude that mutilates,
the night bulb that reveals ash on my sleeve.
(from ``Waiting'')
Then, in late 1967, Nortje moves to Canada, and his
poetry takes a nosedive. In his preface to Lonely against the
light, Nortje's friend Raymond Leitch wrote as follows:
He came to Canada to meet an inamorata [according to Hendricks,
Joan Cornelius from Port Elizabeth], presumably to marry
her. Once, in a drunken moment, he told me that he would never
form any close attachments with any woman because he had been
cuckolded by this Canadian resident. Things began to fall apart. A
man he had befriended in Hope, British Columbia, committed suicide.
A close friend in South Africa committed suicide. He could not
get published inToronto. He felt humiliated because the University of
Toronto's August School of Graduate Studies insisted that he complete
honours courses in English before being allowed into graduate
school . . . He was popping amphetamines and barbiturates,
absenting himself from his job and being unusually concerned
about his health. (Nortje1973:7)
If one adds to all this his ongoing drinking problem (James
Davidson recalls that when Nortje visited him in Vancouver,
he was drinking a bottle of whisky a night [Hendricks
2002:124]) and the bald fact that Nortje found Canada
bland and uninspiring, one begins to understand why his
writing from this period is so confused, directionless,
~79 .... REVIEWS

lacklustre. One also sees quite clearly the extent to
which Nortje was a child of his time and place, the
place being North America and the time the crest of
the 1960s youth counter-culture movement. Poems
like ``Mundane monday'' (241) are clearly influenced
by the ``psychedelic'' vibes of the era (cf ``Message
from an LSD eater'', 210), and a piece like
``Walking'' (281) reminds one of nothing so much as
the ``subversive'' free-association monologues which
served as sleeve notes for Bob Dylan's early albums.
A visit to London in February-March 1970 sees
Nortje's verse perk up and marks the beginning of
the fourth and final phase. There are amazing bursts
of creativity in Toronto in April/May and back in
Oxford in the months leading up to his death in
December: these produced a score of memorable
poems, including the incomparable ``Dogsbody Half-
Breed'' (344), and the deeply moving ``All Hungers
Pass Away'', which ends thus:
The rain abates. Face-down
I lie, thin arms folded, half-aware
of skin that tightens over pelvis.
Pathetic, this, the dark posture.
Written less than a fortnight before Nortje was found
dead, 1 the poem has been read as a presentiment of
suicide; but recalling the reference at the end of the
previous stanza to his ``[recovery] from the wasted
years'', it is possible to construe the posture the poet
describes (turned away from the world, if not exactly
foetal) as expressing a time of introspective pause, a
time of waiting for the slow rise of new life,
renascence. I would like to believe that Nortje felt his
life had reached a turning point, and that he was at
last mustering the resources to face and defeat the
intimate demon that had dogged him from Africa to
Canada and back ± his own self-loathing.
If the previously unpublished poems in this
handsome edition don't add much to Arthur Nortje's
reputation as a poet, those interested in his life will
find a great deal to mull over. As Klopper's wellchosen
title suggests, the creativity of the man Leitch
described as ``a companionable roisterer'' (Nortje
1973:7) was ruled by his dark side, the shadow cast
by his experience as the bastard child of a coloured
South African ghetto.
Note
1 Nortje died by choking on his own vomit after ingesting
quantities of alcohol and barbiturates. He was
found by his friend, Donald Arthur, lying face down in
bed. The Coroner returned an open verdict on the
question of suicide.
Works cited
Hendricks, Shaheed. 2002. Arthur Nortje in Port Elizabeth:
a regional reconstruction of his world through interviews,
letters, diaries, poems and photographs. Unpublished
MA dissertation, Vista University, Port Elizabeth.
Nortje, Arthur.1973. Dead roots: poems. London: Heinemann.
______ . 1973. Lonely against the light.Grahamstown:NewCoin.
~80 .... REVIEWS

Notes on contributors
..........................
Diane Simmons is the author of books on Jamaica Kincaid and Maxine Hong Kingston. Portions of her study of
the popular literature of British Imperialism are forthcoming in The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and
Society and Connecticut Review, and she is the winner of the 2002 Heinz Kohut Prize for her essay ``Chivalry,
`Mutiny', and Sherlock Holmes''. She is an assistant professor of English at City University of New York-
Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Ian Tromp writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and Poetry Review in England, and for Poetry, The
Nation, and Boston Review in the US. He is a member of the Western Buddhist Order and teaches meditation
and Buddhism in Cambridge.
Stephan Meyer is engaged in postgraduate study at the University of South Africa and Basel University. Most of
his work is on (feminist) critical theory and collaborative auto/biography. With Judith LuÈ tge Coullie and
Thengani Ngwenya, he is co-editing a collection of interviews on auto/biography in southern Africa.
Loren Kruger is the author of The national stage (University of Chicago Press) and The drama of South Africa
(Routledge), and editor of The autobiography of Leontine Sagan (Wits University Press). She teaches at the
University of Chicago, is a former editor of Theatre Journal and currently a contributing editor for Theatre
Research International, Theatre Survey, and scrutiny2.
Don Maclennan is one of South Africa's most highly regarded living poets in English. His volumes of poetry
include Collecting darkness (1988), Letters: new poems (1992), Solstice: poems (1997), Of women and some men
(1998), and Notes from a Rhenish mission (2001).
PP Fourie holds an MA from the University of Stellenbosch and lectures International Politics at the Rand
Afrikaans University. He received a research grant from the Foundation for Research Development to assist in
the completion of his Masters, and attended the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris with the assistance of a
French government bursary. Fourie has published one work of short (Afrikaans) fiction before.
Nick Meihuizen is Professor of English at the University of Zululand. He has published articles and essays on
Yeats locally and internationally as well as a book in 1998. Currently he is engaged in extended work on
CamoÄ ens, Pringle and Campbell in relation to contemporary world-views and the notion of a continuing
imperium. He is also working on two historical novels, set in Portuguese Africa in the sixteenth century.
Elwyn Jenkins is Professor Emeritus of English at Vista University in Pretoria and a Research Associate of the
Children's Literature Research Unit at Unisa. His latest book, South Africa in English-language children's
literature, 1814±1912, was published in 2002.
Gareth Cornwell is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Rhodes University.
~81 .... NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Michiel Heyns is Professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch. He has written on the nineteenth century
English novel and on contemporary South African fiction. His first novel will appear later this year from
Jonathan Ball.
~82 .... NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS