Helize van Vuuren

Examining the Servant's Subversive Verbal and Non-Verbal Expression in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat

Summary The power struggle between Milla and Agaat in Marlene van Niekerks Agaat (2006) is one based in language. While the matriarchs perspective dominates the novel, thereby presumably silencing Agaat, the servant-cum-nurse employs alternative methods of communication, or mimetic gestures, to undermine Millas point of view. Through verbal and non-verbal measures, Agaat attempts to counteract the dying womans story. While these communicative measures rely on their finely nuanced and insidious attributes to function, they contain an essential ambivalence, as the controlling white woman never understands the full implications of her rejected childs communication.

The Universal Sanctity of Whiteness: Antjie Krog\'s Negotiation of Black Responses to White Transformation in A Change of Tongue

Abstract Country of My Skull (1998) emerged out of Antjie Krogs participation as a journalist covering the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings and consists mostly of the collected stories of individual trauma inflicted by the apartheid regime, which are overlaid with her own responses to these graphic details. A Change of Tongue (2003) is more autobiographical and personal than the earlier work, more searching in its negotiation of the complexities and paradoxes confronting white identities in relation to a new sense of unhomeliness in a space which had been reserved exclusively for whites as home. It is also less comfortably indicting of the regime responsible for the atrocities, and more willing to confront the continued force of whiteness as a cultural construct. Studies in whiteness are employed to investigate Krogs experimentation with genre and her experience of ‘race’. The narrative perspective and its engagement with a post‐apartheid crisis in white identity, is explored, paying specific attention to the encounters recorded in the book with black South Africans. This is done in order to map Krogs understanding of what post‐apartheid whiteness might represent and how it might be transformed. Such a mapping demonstrates the ambivalences that emerge in the interstices of Krogs painful grappling with her growing sense of un‐belonging as a white woman in post‐apartheid South Africa.

Eksperiment en intertekstualiteit in Niggie

Summary This article focuses on the creative adaptation of Anglo-Boer-War material in Ingrid Wnterbachs Niggie [Cousin] (2002) with specific reference to the Oorlogsdagboek van Jan F.E. Celliers, 1899–1902 [War Diary of Jan F.E. Celliers, 1899–1902] (1978). A fascinating substratum of ironic commentary arises as an extra dimension in the novel as a result of the subtly suggested comparison of South African issues and perspectives a century ago with the post-1994 South Africa concerns. Topics to be discussed are the intervention debate, the evolution debates, the role of the intellectual amidst less educated people, racial issues and the theory that the character Japie Stilgemoed, in Niggie, is actually based on the poet Jan F.E. Celliers.

Antjie Krog: Towards a syncretic identity

Krog’s striving towards a new syncretic South African identity develops in her later oeuvre on two fronts: thematically in terms of content, and with relation to form, in terms of the increasing use of an African-based orally orientated poetics. At the basis of her poetics lies the aim to “revolutionise” the language through transgressing taboos, while her “translation as transformation” project is at the basis of a search for a common humanity. My hypothesis is that there exist unresolved tensions in the implied ideological project of the later Krog oeuvre, based on the tension between the writerly and orally orientated traditions on which she draws. The striving towards healing of the communal and individual psyche in Kleur kom nooit alleen nie [Colour Never Comes Alone] (2000) is largely given up in Verweerskrif [Body Bereft] (2006), but taken up again in the co-authored work, There Was This Goat (2009), which illustrates the strengths and profits of intellectual and creative collaboration on an intercultural basis.Abstract Krogs striving towards a new syncretic South African identity develops in her later oeuvre on two fronts: thematically in terms of content, and with relation to form, in terms of the increasing use of an African‐based orally orientated poetics. At the basis of her poetics lies the aim to “revolutionise” the language through transgressing taboos, while her “translation as transformation” project is at the basis of a search for a common humanity. My hypothesis is that there exist unresolved tensions in the implied ideological project of the later Krog oeuvre, based on the tension between the writerly and orally orientated traditions on which she draws. The striving towards healing of the communal and individual psyche in Kleur kom nooit alleen nie [Colour Never Comes Alone] (2000) is largely given up in Verweerskrif [Body Bereft] (2006), but taken up again in the co‐authored work, There Was This Goat (2009), which illustrates the strengths and profits of intellectual and creative collaboration on an intercultural basis.

Plagiaat? Appropriasie? Kulturele Oorplanting? Huldiging?: Brandende Kwessies Rondom Mondelinge Tradisies-Eugene Marais En Die San Opnuut Bekyk

Summary South African literature has a long history of cultural translation or transplantation from the San or Bushman2 oral tradition. This phenomenon of the appropriation of the voice of the extinct San can be traced though all genres, but is especially prevalent in childrens books, poetry, and fiction. Through a historical overview of degrees of cultural translation (in all its literary variations) clarification is sought for issues involved in Stephen Watsons plagiarism charge in 2005 against Antjie Krog for her The Stars Say “tsau” (2002). The central question is whether this practice of importing elements of San orality and culture into South African literature constitutes an illegal appropriation of the First Peoples heritage, or whether it is an ongoing form of homage, as George Steiner suggested of all forms of translation in 1999. Read as a tribute, keeping San cultural memory alive, this literature of cultural transplantation is an archive consisting of the stronger cultures interpretations of an extinct tradition, with the latter-day “bacteria of values invisible but invidious” (Leggo 1995: 40). Eugène Maraiss Dwaalstories (1927) serves as a final focal point.

Book reviews/Boekresensies

The ideology of conduct: Essays in literature and the history of sexuality Nancy Armstrong; Leonard Tennenhouse (eds.) 1987 London: Methuen. Reading in detail: Aesthetics and the feminine Naomi Schor 1987 New York: Methuen Dagblad Hennie Aucamp 1987 Pretoria: Haum‐Literer Teodoliet Henning Snyman 1987 Kaapstad: Dias‐uitgewers Why seers are not believers Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology Philip Rosen (ed) 1986 New York: Columbia University Press pp 549 R50,90.