The authors of all the articles to be found in issue 33 (1) of The English Academy Review are all based at South African universities, and eight of the nine articles are concerned with topics relating to southern Africa. Four of the articles derive from papers read at the 2014 English Academy conference. This issue was not themed, but nevertheless there are some area of overlapping in a number of the articles, and two focus specifically on the works of Zakes Mda. Two others consider aspects of life in post-independence Zimbabwe. Most notably, perhaps, several of the articles are concerned with aspects of South African Indian writing. All the articles reflect, in one way or another, on a sense of place.
The first article is Lindy Stiebel’s ‘Sugar-coated Stories? Plantation literature by selected South African Indian writers’. Stiebel takes 2010 as her starting point, a year which marked the 150th anniversary of the arrival of indentured Indians in South Africa, and which saw a significant number of publications by South African Indian writers, among them what she calls ‘sugar stories’ – those that treat on the early experiences of indentured labourers on the sugar plantations of the KwaZulu-Natal coast. The texts she especially focuses on are Aziz Hassim’s Revenge of Kali, Rubendra Govender’s Sugar Cane Boy, Girrmit Tales by Neelan Govender and Tholsi Mudly’s Tribute to our Forefathers. Stiebel notes ‘a repeated pattern of oppression, resistance and survival’.
At the heart of these selected ‘sugar stories’ … is an assertion by the writers of their identity as South Africans of Indian origin. This assertion is made through a revisiting of history – in this case, the history of their forefathers, who arrived in this country as manual labourers with very few rights, but whose descendants rose, nonetheless, to positions of respectability with a powerful voice able to articulate their experience and that of those who came before them.
Stiebel also comments on the range of opinions that have been expressed about indenture as a system. Some have seen it as a form of slavery, while others have argued that for many the move from India was a liberating experience.
In ‘Love in the Time of Mirrors: The Real and the Imaginary in Zakes Mda’s The Sculptors of Mapungubwe Harry Sewlall explores Mda’s novel in terms of what he describes as ‘a thesis / anti-thesis’.
By the term ‘thesis’ I refer to the vision, or world view, or foundational idea that drives the plot of a novel … By the term ‘anti-thesis’ I refer to the contrary forces that destabilize and dialogically interrogate the status quo of the subject or society in a text.
For Sewlall the thesis and its antithesis are presented in the context of the novel’s setting in the thirteenth century Southern African civilization of Mapungubwe, which had trading links with China, India and Egypt. He also argues that the novel moves beyond its immediate time setting: ‘Mda’s novel constitutes a thesis and an anti-thesis not only of an ancient civilization but a contemporary one like ours in Southern Africa’.
Mda’s novel also considers aspects of art, both the realistic and the non-realistic: ‘The reader of Zakes Mda, whose range of talents includes painting, would exult in his satirical tone towards the commissars of art who insist on its utilitarian and nationalistic value’. The novel also touches on contemporary environmental concerns in its attack on rhino hunting.
Sewlall concludes thus: the novel ‘bridges the past and the present, thus affirming the eternal verities of antithetical forces such as love and jealousy, ambition and corruption, art and charlatanism … in society across space and time’.
Environmental issues are central to the discussion in Reinhardt Fourie’s ‘Identity, gender, and land in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat’, which considers Van Niekerk’s novel in relation to the tradition of the plaasroman (Afrikaan farm novel). Fourie reflects on the interconnections between land and identity, sexual and otherwise, and considers ‘the representation of the machinations of gendered power, and how this representation can be read in the different farming practices depicted in the novel’.
He notes that Van Niekerk disrupts the patriarchal assumptions usually associated with the plaasroman, since the farm is inherited by Milla and not Jak. Fourie also notes some of the ways in which Milla consciously attempts to break assumptions about conventional Afrikaner womanly virtues.
Explicit contrasts are drawn between Milla and Jak’s attitudes to farming, and Milla’s is the less aggressive: ‘Unwilling to exhaust the farm’s soil, her approach to farming involves a slow process that will only be lucrative over a long period of time’. Jak, ‘a firm supporter of modern agricultural practices’, seeks to farm invasively. And their contrasting approaches to the land are matched by their differing views of sexuality.
The characters’ different approaches to farming on Grootmoedersdrift, both multifaceted and threaded through the entire novel, serve as the basic axis around which their relationship revolves. As a kind of self-aware plaasroman that weaves problematized notions of gender identity through the narrative, Van Niekerk’s novel offers a nuanced representation of how gendered power is enacted and subverted in the attachment to and cultivation of land, and of the body.
In Rajendra Chetty’s ‘Transactional Memory in Ronnie Govender’s At the Edge and other Cato Manor Stories’ it is, as the title of Govender’s collection suggests, Cato Manor that is the place of focus. Chetty comments on the needs for South Africa ‘to re-define itself after 1994’ and to reconstruct a new national identity’.
Sites of suffering and pain such as District Six, Sophiatown, Cato Manor or Robben Island have had to be reconciled with the collective memory of the nation. Ronnie Govender’s prose works and plays re-constitute the vital memory of multiracial living in Cato Manor in a way that contributes to the new national identity; it reminds audiences and readers of the possibility of harmonious interracial existence.
Chetty notes that Govender’s texts function both as fiction and as drama: ‘At all times it must be remembered that the short stories are theatrical scripts used to great effect in performance … This transgression of customary generic boundaries sparks a particular kind of memory work: one that is far more dynamic and confrontational as stage event than as the quiet recollection of the armchair reader’.
This memory work ‘involves recording and confronting evils of the past such as indenture, colonialism or apartheid, as well as revivifying aspects of good: patterns of bravery and self-reliance which merit replication’. And memories of Cato Manor are ‘a gift of knowledge to be transferred to all South Africans, and actively lived out from one generation to another, in order to respect, safeguard and replicate patterns of democratic and meaningful life’.
The sense of place in Marguerite de Waal’s ‘The poetry of dream and the threat of barrenness in three sonnets by John Keats’ is not of a physical entity but rather the space occupied by the poetic imagination. Keats himself uses images from agriculture of fertility and barrenness to suggest the contrasting states that can be found in that space.
Close readings of the three sonnets are offered, and de Waal argues that the poems form a significant bridge between the early poetry, such as Endymion, and the great odes. Thus the ‘Elgin Marbles’ sonnet ‘articulates what are, at this point, becoming established concerns for Keats: poetic process, human life and the effects of time, the extant artistic traditions of the past which, by their magnitude, threaten to overwhelm the young and ambitious poet of the present’.
Keats’s shifting attitudes towards romance are given consideration, with particular attention being given to the ‘Lear’ sonnet. And in the ‘Burns’ sonnet Keats seems ‘to find, in the life of an admired fellow poet, a reflection of the struggle between imaginative barrenness and fertility with which he himself has been concerned. In Burns’s case, the barren lifelessness is represented by the church’s persecution of human warmth and passion … ’
Finally, the sonnets ‘do not offer a stable, linear progression or neat solutions, however; the conflict represented by the barren dream is never resolved because it is this conflict, in its various formal and thematic manifestations, which defines Keats’s art’.
In the second article on Zakes Mda, Irikidzayi Manase’s ‘Black diamonds in the fictional and lived South African City of the early 2000s’ examines the lives of the newly enriched black middle class South Africans (the ‘black diamonds’ of the title), in Mda's Black Diamond (2009), and in media reports of the extravagant lifestyle of Kenny Kunene.
The analysis develops from the assumption that the black diamonds express aspirations that are manifested in practices and performances of excess. This creates a complex sense of how it feels to live in the contemporary South African city, and inscribes, in a loud and sometimes comical way, the entrance of black diamonds into and presence in the urban spaces of extravagance and glamour.
Focusing in particular on Johannesburg, Manase notes how, after 1994, middle class blacks moved increasingly into the formerly white inner city areas. And in Black Diamond, the central characters Tumi and Don are keeping up appearances, imitating the life of black diamonds, with excessive spending that is financed by credit.
Manase concludes that the life lived by black diamonds, as portrayed both in fiction and in the media, is characterized ‘by unending yearnings and elusive possibilities’, and is also ‘indicative of the permanence of a black South African desire for upward social mobility that is almost always juxtaposed with high chances of failure, and with criminal activity’.
Owen Seda considers plays by the Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera in ‘Grotesque Realism in Dambudzo Marechera’s Dama’. Noting the autobiographical elements in Marechera’s writing, Seda also comments on his tendency to focus on ‘excessive consumption, violence, exaggeration, food, drink, merry-making, death, excrement and sexual reproduction’.
The theoretical conception of grotesque realism is derived from Mikhail Baktin, whom Seda quotes thus:
The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, and abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of Earth and body in their indissoluble unity … To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth.
Seda also follows Baktin in seeing the grotesque as offering possibilities for regeneration. ‘Marechera uses grotesque realism to effect an overt social criticism, targeting the economic excesses of postcolonial Africa’s socio-political elites, specifically in post-independence Zimbabwe’. So for example in The Gap Marechera ‘presents Spot Kenfield’s case of severe constipation as an extended metaphor for the white Rhodesian former establishment’s refusal to accept national independence and black majority rule’.
And in Blitzkrieg (or The Toilet) the ‘dramatic action takes place inside a toilet and its immediate vicinity at a party somewhere in suburban Harare’: ‘the grotesque here represents unbridled corruption and social decay in post-independence Zimbabwe’.
Naomi Nkealah and Shumani F. Rakgope are the joint authors of ‘The Loss of Nature: Ecocritical Discourse in Gabeba Baderoon’s Poetry’. The authors comment on the ‘originality of her poetic voice, with its skilful conversion of everyday South African experiences into episodes for poetic contemplation’. Their specific focus is on ‘the ways in which Baderoon’s poetry evokes ecocritical discourses as it paints varied landscapes of South Africa’s historical, political and cultural experiences’.
The article begins with a quotation from Baderoon in which she prioritizes human loss over nonhuman loss. This, it is argued, derives from ‘her experience of apartheid’s dehumanization of black, Indian and coloured people’. Thus, in one poem (‘Nature’) she ‘not only calls into question the hierarchies imposed on human relations, but she also asserts that such hierarchies are largely opposed to social cohesion and human dignity’.
Nkealah and Rakgope also acknowledge the dystopian nature of Baderoon’s humanism, ‘because it acknowledges that it is in the nature of humans to dominate, to pillage, to secure their own interests, that their human nature is both that which is promotive of social equality and that which is antithetical to it՚. At the same time, while Baderoon privileges human loss, she does not ignore nonhuman loss. ‘Elements of nonhuman nature in the form of plants, animals, birds, hills and aquatic life are given subjective existence through their dominance of their own natural habitats. In Baderoon’s ecocritical poetics, humans and the natural world share a relationship of interdependence’.
For the last article in this issue, we return to post-independence Zimbabwe with Robyn Wilkinson’s ‘Broaching “Themes Too Large for Adult Fiction”: The Child Narrator in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names’. The first part of Bulawayo’s 2013 novel offers an account of shantytown life in Zimbabwe, as seen by the child-narrator, Darling.
This story demonstrates that the voice of a child, though limited in terms of knowledge, experience and understanding, can offer an effective mode for the critique of social and political issues, because of its straight-forward and unselfconscious nature. It can … be employed as a creative means by which to approach topics that become difficult to discuss when trying to pander to the various justifications and explanations that typically govern adult discourse, including the influence of the desire for social affirmation.
At the same time Darling is of course not infallible; she is ‘old enough to have some understanding of the world she lives in, but young enough to still be ignorant of the complexities of that world, and confident enough to state her opinions as though they were unquestioningly correct’. This brings an element of comedy to the dark themes of the novel. ‘Darling repeatedly states things with the comical wisdom of a child’.
Wilkinson also notes that the use of a child-narrator allows Bulawayo ‘to provide a profound critique of social and political issues, but also allows her to hold a dissonance of outrage and love for Zimbabwe in balance without the need for rational explanation’.