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Abstract
This article explores the idea that by writing poems depicting a fragmented identity prior to 1965, Arthur Nortje represented the horror of apartheid by using his body as a warzone. It argues that Nortje uses schizophrenia as a trope for registering the destructive psychological impact of racial segregation in the 1960s. The article examines several of Nortje's poems before his departure into exile which describe a haunting fear of implosion by linking the dissociated gaze of the observer to a devastating socio-political topography. It also scrutinises Nortje's use of the constantly shifting and unfolding condition of an ontologically insecure persona as a poetic device, and suggests that he appears to consciously register schizoid symptoms in constructing a flâneur-type observer to record experiences of fragmentation at a psychic level. Nortje assumes the mask of a dislocated self to voice his inner torment as a young man growing up in displaced communities within segregated cities like Port Elizabeth and Cape Town under apartheid. The focus is on how this works as a stylistic technique in the early poems.
Notes
See Baudelaire's flâneur figure who strolled in the streets, observing society from a proto-modernist vantage.
See Pemba's African modernist portrait of A. C. Duna in the Grahamstown public Library, the poems of Dennis Brutus, and plays of Athol Fugard (to whom Nortje dedicated Athol Fugard's Invitation (137).
Eugene Lunn Citation(1985) outlined the key motifs of Modernism as: Aesthetic Self-Consciousness or Self-Reflexiveness (where the process of producing the work of art becomes the focus of the work itself); Simultaneity, Juxtaposition, or Montage (the work loses its organic form and becomes an assemblage of fragments from different discourses); Paradox, Ambiguity, and Uncertainty (the world ceases to have a coherent, rationally ascertainable structure and becomes multiple and indeterminate) and Dehumanization and the Demise of the Integrated Individual Subject or Personality (such as the literary explorations of the unconscious inaugurated by Joyce and pursued by the Surrealists).
I use the italicised form to indicate racial classifications of the apartheid regime.
November 1960; immediately prior to the Afrikaner Nationalist Government's declaration of the South African Republic, even though the country was engulfed in violent conflict, a Referendum among white voters had decided in favour of a republic by a two per cent majority in January; in March the Sharpeville massacre took place; in April Verwoerd survived his first assassination attempt at the Rand show. A series of Apartheid laws had been promulgated throughout the 1950s including the Homelands Act, Bantu education, Pass laws, accompanied by acts designed to silence opposition such as state of emergency acts and the Suppression of Communism Act. In response, the ANC had initiated the Defiance Campaign (June 1952) aimed at large scale civil disobedience and the escalation of conflict which contributed to the declaration of the Unlawful Organizations Act (1960). Shortly after this, the PAC organised a peaceful protest against the Pass laws which saw police firing on unarmed civilians in the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March. This was followed by mass protests throughout the country.
The former Editor of “The Evening Post” and colleague of Christopher Gell, John Sutherland explained how Gell was a vigorous and outspoken champion of democracy and human rights, who was closely monitored by the Security Branch, despite being an invalid who, used an ‘iron lung’ to assist his breathing. (Unpublished interview with journalist Ivor Markman c.1998).
In his public lecture (April 2008) at NMMU, Dennis Brutus explained how Nortje had acted as a runner for political activists in the Northern areas and how this outspoken critic was regarded as a security risk by the Special Branch and subsequently harassed in his home.
Sass (1992) and R. D Laing (1959) provide detailed descriptions of schizophrenia, from which I have selected a range of features. Karl Jaspers in General Psychopathology (1959) also stressed its extreme diversity and the alien-ness of its signs and symptoms. Accordingly, schizoid experience is notable for its heterogeneity, strangeness: its diversity and incomprehensibility. At times the schizoid individual was hypersensitive to human contact, but also indifferent. This can be summarised as a flatness of affect: where the individual appears devoid of emotion or desire.
See R. D. Laing The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1969).
For Laing engulfment entails the subsuming of the individual's identity by another, by being loved, comprehended or even seen by the other. The reaction to this threat is often isolation of the self. Laing notes that what the person fears most is often embraced in order to prevent it from happening. For example, by giving up your autonomy, you have chosen to give it up and it has not been taken from you. It could be said that the fear is more from the loss of control than the actual threat; therefore the reaction is an attempt to gain control. (1969: 43-46).
See 14 December 2010: BBC 4 historical documentary, “Ich bin ein Berliner”, in which Matt Frei interviews an old German woman who found herself at the mercy of rapists during the Russian advance on Berlin 1945.
See Frederic Jameson Fables of Aggression, p. 97.
Ironically, Elleke Boehmer has described J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (2000) as an ‘oblique’ view of the post-apartheid era in “Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain: Gender Implications in Disgrace.” (Citation2002: 343).