Imraan Coovadia’s Post-transitional Palimpsest

Abstract

It is widely accepted that South African literature has undergone considerable thematic and stylistic shifts since the transitional decade of the 1990s. However, literary scholarship is divided not only as to the extent of these shifts but also as to what should be emphasised when mapping their contours. In this article, I focus on two of Imraan Coovadia’s recent novels that point to a post-transitional literary landscape in South Africa. Focusing particularly on The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012) and Tales of the Metric System (2014), I use the concept of the palimpsest to think through the internal logic of these two novels and their locatedness within the post-transitional present. In these texts, Coovadia inscribes imaginative possibilities over the histories of apartheid and the transition in a way that renders multiple narrative temporalities and discourses legible simultaneously. In particular, I focus on the way in which this post-transitional palimpsest defamiliarises apartheid and transition-era understandings of history and nation.

Keywords:

• The Institute for Taxi Poetry
• Tales of the Metric System
• Imraan Coovadia
• Post-transitional
• South African literature
• palimpsest

Notes on contributor

Andy Carolin is a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of South Africa. He has a particular interest in South African literary and cultural studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This discussion of transitional South African literature is informed by several critical works, including Davis (2013), Frenkel and MacKenzie (2010), Samuelson (2010), Heyns (2000), and Jolly and Attridge (1998).

2. Post-transitionality has been linked to various ideas including “continuity and rupture” (Barris 2015: 41), “greater thematic and aesthetic [authorial] freedoms” (Kostelac 2010: 57), a “turning away” from apartheid writing’s preoccupation with the overtly political and the national context (Fasselt 2014: 88), “new local reworkings” of western cultural influences (Narunsky-Laden 2010: 66), and an “outward-looking mode” that engages with “new forms of politics and sociality, particularly transnational ones” (Davis 2013: 801). Post-transitionality has also been boldly coupled to literary trends ranging from the decline in magical realism (Grzda 2014) and the emergence of South African horror fiction (Duncan 2014) to the fluid mobility of city narratives (Bethlehem 2014: 524; Putter 2012) and the “market-led corporate phenomenon” of recent popular sista-lit fiction (Narunsky-Laden 2010: 64).

3. Though Titlestad (2010: 121) recognises this shift in South African literary culture, he resists post-transtionality as a concept not only because it is “premature” but also because it fails to reflect that “[w]e have been forever transitional and all indications are that we are condemned to that plateau of being and meaning”. Chris Thurman (2010) is similarly sceptical of the concept.

4. Coovadia is similarly critical of the inadequacies of government’s response to the AIDS crisis in High Low In-between (2009), his third novel.