Postcolonial Problematics: A South African Case Study

University of KwaZulu-Natal chapmanm@ukzn.ac.za

MICHAEL CHAPMAN

ABSTRACT
The paper argues that earlier literary designationsin this case, South African literaturehave begun to be subsumed under a generalized category, postcolonial literature or literary studies. It is a category that has been given definitional purpose in North Atlantic literary and cultural institutions and is in danger of settling into orthodoxy: an orthodoxy that is somewhat removed from the palpability of human experience in any particular postcolony. An example is to be found in the treatment by influential postcolonial critics of Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, whose concern with the ache of history is made subservient to the intricate abstractions of continental philosophy. If the post- paradigm wishes to retain purchase in contemporary times, it needs to establish a greater congruence than is current between a language of generality and its object of study, that is, the literary work.

t is not fashionable today in the South African academy to invoke the concept or the field South African Literature. Prizes still honor South African writing, but academic criticism prefers term such as postcolonial or transnational. The reasons are several, including the fact that literary studies in South Africa remain largely a white, metropolitan-inflected affair. As in colonies so in ex-colonies, the metropole, or let us narrow it to the North Atlantic institution, retains itself as the arbiter of meaning and value: the model of imitation to the literary critic on the periphery, once Leavisite, now post- in a self-generating debate. Self-generating debate is a feature of post- criticism. There is currently a ready publishing market; there are reputations to be made. Although always threatening to fall into orthodoxypredictable ideology critique (its materialist pursuit) versus abstruse philosophizing (its discursive pursuit)the post- continues to write back, if not from the periphery to the center, then from the center to RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winnter 2011). 2011

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the center, that is, to itself. The book of essays Rerouting the Postcolonial, for example, offers several challenging reformulations is of what are by now well-worn concepts (see Wilson et al.). As Simon Gikandi puts it with some trepidation, the local is increasingly global (he is referring to the permanent presence of unassimilable [Somali] migrants in the Western metropolis). As a number of contributors have it, centers and peripheries need to be cast not in Rushdies earlier catchphrase of the Empire writing back to the center,1 but (drawing on Deleuze and Guattari) in deterritorialized, rhizomatic relationships. And Bill Ashcroft, one of the authors of the landmark text The Empire Writes Back, seeks in the term transnation a conception of the nation not as state entity, but as fluid and migratory, according to which its subjects are released from the myth of fixed identities, the literary parallel being literatures affective power, its power to inhabit an image of hope, as it were, beyond the postcolonial (Transnation). Such is the upside of the post- debate. The route is away from roots, in which the literary critic, whether on the periphery or at the center, shares the inscription of cosmopolitanism, identified by Gikandi as a state of mind. ... A cultivated sensibility that underscores ones detachment from the local and ethnic and a willingness to engage with the Other (32):
From Lagos to New York, from Bombay to Cape Town, cosmopolitans are those who share a critical discourse that is aesthetic in the sense that it seeks to transcend its prosaic materiality. (32)2

The problemthe problematicof which Gikandi is well aware, even as he identifies the cosmopolitan is, to invoke his own question, Where does the local fit into all this? (32). Herein lies the downside of the post- debate: an increasing disjuncture between its language of criticism, indeed its selection of texts, and the contours of the particular postcolony, or the particular literary text, in which the post- paradigm wishes to locate its laboratory condition. To illustrate on a small but quantitative sample, Nirmala Menons analysis of two influential journals of postcolonial literary studies, Interventions and The South Asian Review, confirmed a pattern that is evident also in the MLA Bibliography: the range of authors was limited to those writing in English; the novel was the predominant genre; 25% of the total number of critical articles were based on approximately four texts; and the authors who were repeatedly mentioned included Rushdie, Achebe, and Coetzee. Although the postcolonial glossary prefers issue-driven terms to art terms (the term aesthetic is not mentioned in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, see Ashcroft et al.), the preferred authors permit interesting speculation on a postcolonial aesthetic ranging from an intertextual, postmodern style (Rushdie, Coetzee) to a neat subversion of the still influential colonizers language from within (Achebes easy incorporation into plain English of Igbo proverbial wisdom). My argument entertains the need to return literature to its affective intent. First, however, one may note that Menons findings can be marshalled in two ways, one liberating, the other constraining. Avoiding the term postcolonial (which has accrued to it a prescriptive politics) David Damroschhe prefers the term world literatureis sensitive to the globe overwhelming the locality, but identifies what to him is a positive opening up beyond nationalism in a literature

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syllabus constructed on the principle of like but unlike (12): that is, a syllabus comprising texts that have a world reach. His point is that the characters, preoccupations, and styles of such works will need to strike a chord of recognition on the North Atlantic literary circuit. For Garca Mrquez love is love, even in a time of cholera; Nadine Gordimers anti-apartheid novels portray white middle-class families whose private aches are not foreign to readers of The New York Review of Books, or to students of Eng Lit. These are readers who are more attuned to the disgrace of him or her who scorns the great rationalization of our times than to the accents of any particular postcolony. Of Soraya, the part-time sex-worker whom protagonist David Luriein J.M. Coetzees Disgracevisits once a week, Luries free, indirect speech considers that [to be both a sex-worker and a mother in the suburbs] would be unusual for a Muslim, but all things are possible these days. But, as Lurie also realizes, many things are no longer possiblelike the unfettered teaching of Literature (with an upper-case L)since Classics and Modern Languages were closed down as part of the great rationalization (3). Postcolonialism to the literary scholarif not to David Luriemight be less an action in the world, more an act of reading. The reading, nonetheless, privileges certain kinds of experience at the expense of other kinds, or even at the expense of indigenous others. This is to turn from the liberating to the constraining view. As Neil Lazarus puts it:
To read across postcolonial literary studies is to find, to an extraordinary degree, the same questions asked, the same methods, techniques, and conventions used, the same concepts mobilised, the same conclusions drawnabout the work of a remarkably small number of writers. (422)

Where, to return to Gikandi, is the local in all this? The ambiguities to which I allude hereglobal times in which all is possible to some and nothing much is possible to othersdid not deter a South African intelligentsia, as I have said, mainly white, Westernized, and susceptible to metropolitan imitation, from embracing in the early 1990s the latest theory traveling from north to south: paradoxically, postcolonialism, in which was glimpsed a welcoming transnationalism. These were the years of rainbow possibility, the Mandela years: the end of the eastern bloc, the end of apartheid. The freeing of Nelson Mandela from twenty-seven years of political imprisonment, the unbanning of the liberation movements, and the first democratic election in 1994 saw South Africas accepting the challenge of rejoining the world, a postcolonial, or at least a postcolonializing, world. Well before he won the 2003 Nobel Prize, the writer who, in South Africa, had provided the literary establishment with its model of like but unlike, and to whose novel Disgrace I have referred, was J.M. Coetzee. Coetzees output escapes any single literary grid. His elusive fictions are amenable certainly to close reading: close reading which, in the case of Disgrace, prompts almost simultaneous response to a sophisticated intertextuality and, in a horrific rape scene, a relentless attachment to specifically South African circumstances. (Accusations leveled by the ANC government against the so-called Afro-pessimism of Disgrace cannot simply be dismissed as the fulminations of un-literary politicians.) Despite this, the persistent strand in Coetzee criticism

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has been, continues to be, not so much close reading asI borrow the term from Franco Morettidistant reading (57), or, to be precise, a version of distant reading that brings to bear upon this authors texts the concepts of continental philosophy. The purpose is twofold: to prise the texts from a too localized context of reception thus shifting emphasis from Coetzee as South African writer to Coetzee as postcolonial, or world, writer; second, and related to the first, to defend Coetzee against would-be antagonists who have attacked what they see as the authors political evasions. (Whether or not Afro-pessimism is a mark of Disgrace, the novel takes cynical delight in swiping at various forms of what its protagonista protagonist who is not easily distanced from an authorial voiceregards as the political correctness of our times.) The argument in Coetzee criticism is that in the 1970s and 80s South African literature and its criticismoperating within the binaries of apartheid/liberation politicsreflected the urgency of the times (what Louise Bethlehem calls a rhetoric of urgency, 365) in literary forms of realism, or even agitprop, while criticism fought a war of authority: the realist text had substantial content and therefore aimed at political truththe argument continuedwhereas the symbolist text delimited content in formal device, retreated from events, and was guilty of social irresponsibility.3 Unlike the novels of South Africas earlier Nobel Prize-winner Nadine Gordimer, Coetzees ambiguous, even ideologically suspect, metafiction did not engage directly with the then national question of apartheid. As he himself put it, the novel does not supplement, but rivals, history (25). A refutation of the so-called politically evasive Coetzee began systematically in the early 1990s with David Attwells identification of his novels as situational metafiction (3): that is, the experimental style of modernism and postmodernism need not compromise responsibility to the ethical issues of the day. What might constitute the ethical in Coetzee? Here we arrive at a crucial postcolonial problematic, which, if it is relevant to South Africa, has, according to Terry Eagleton, a global applicability. To summarize the problematic, Coetzeeinfluential critics tell usavoids the faults of both Albert Memmis the colonizer who will (i.e., the apartheid racist, he who excludes the other from the human community) and the colonizer who wont (i.e., the liberal humanist who wishes to turn the other into an image of the self, or the same). Rather Coetzee, we are told by Attwell, Derek Attridge, Mike Marais, and other critics, subscribes to a Levinas conception of ethics: the same is obliged to acknowledge the singularity, the irreducibility, of the other. As Levinas has it, it is the radical otherness of the other that renders the apparently autonomous subject responsible for that otherness. Such a formulation is central to the discursive turn in postcolonial literary studies. We hear echoes not only of Levinas, but also of Foucault, Derrida, and onward to the holy trinity of northern institutional postcolonialism: Said, Bhabha, Spivak. The other begins to lose the materiality of the body. Instead of the simple, hare-lipped, coloured protagonist of Coetzees novel Life & Times of Michael K being understood as the vulnerable outcast trying to survive the devastated landscape of apartheids death throes, K is identified as a Derridean trace, a signifier that is related only arbitrarily to a referent. The tighter Coetzee ties his ethics to the biology of all of us living in a body, the more determined is the discursive turn to ignore the suffering body. The rape scene in his novel Disgrace, for example, is denuded by one critic of flesh and blood to become a structural parallel to what

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David Lurie considers to be his not quite (25) rape of the coloured student Melanie. And this, in turn, is seen to suggest the Orpheus/Eurydice encounter in the underworld (see Marais, Little Enough 176). The problematic here is the decontextualization of a society in which colonialism, apartheid, and, currently, violent crime have brutalized the human body; systematically consigned the other (whether the African other of apartheid or the wretchedly poor of postapartheid) to the dung heaps of daily life. (For the wretchedly poor apartheid, it might be argued, has not in any material sense ended.) To move the observation from South Africa to the more general frame of the post- paradigm, we may briefly follow Eagletons argument in his book After Theory, a book that could well be titled Beyond the Posts. On the subject of ethical responsibility Eagleton observes that what began to emerge in the philosophies of Derrida, Levinas, and others of continental persuasion was a mysterious, unknowable moral law, embodied in some other, which laid upon one an absolute, unconditional demand, and which evoked from one an equally infinite sense of responsibility. The consequence, Eagleton continues, is moral judgment that lacks any sort of criteria or rational basis, and in which there is no longer any material relation between the way the world is and how one ought to act within it, or between the way we are, as responsible subjects, and what we ought to do. Ethics is bathed in an aura of religiosity, and may easily forget its core business of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick (15354). The specificity of such core businessin literary study, at leasthardly enters the post- paradigm; instead, we have generalities. For the Marxist-materialist, literature, according to E. San Juan Jr, is an instance of concrete political practice which reflects the dynamic process of the national democratic revolution in the developing countries (254). This is ideology critique that, in its deadening language, promises little more than a return to economistic base-superstructure rigidity. To which the critic of the discursive turnHomi K. Bhabha, for example might respond that, no, the literary text, indeed the subject in its subjectivity, is characterized not simply as material reflection but as performative act, in which meaning emerges in the textual palimpsest, deconstructively, or against the grain of full intent, in the slippages, in the in-between, the liminal, or The Third Space, not in binary oppositions between master and slave but in the sly civilities of hybridized encounter, in a new presencing where, if the other cannot speak, she or he can at least mimic the colonizer, ridicule and undermine the authoritarian manner. To which the cynicthe colonizer who will, in the settler postcolonymight retort that the colonized babu in his wheedling and winking remains, well, a babu! The postcolony, in short, is not reducible to either San Juan Jrs teleological narrative of national liberation or Bhabhas discursive transformations of negative to positive otherings. To offer, first, a general picture, we might say that the postcolony is racially diverse; heterogeneous in culture, religion, and language, the last in which indigenous oral speech is often majority speech. It is characterized by sharp economic and educational disparities. It is susceptible to disease and crime. Its civil institutions are fragile. Its literacy and literary life are uneven. The Big Man syndrome may signal compromised leaders. The people are often at the rough edge of service delivery. None of this would have surprised Franz Fanon whose wretched of the earth continue to be by-passed by new, indigenous, comprador ruling elites.

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Is such a picture, especially in its multilingual, oral dimension, captured in the like but unlike syllabus? Probably not. To turn from the general picture I wish to add a South African problematic, in which strong and permanent settler presences (both white and Indian) retain distinctive economic and cultural voices while a sizeable coloured, or mixed-race, section of the population shares with many Indians and whites (whether English or Afrikaans) an ambivalence to policies of Africanization. Despite the ruling African National Congress (that is, the former liberation movement) having won almost two-thirds of the parliamentary vote, the movement remains historically scarred, its command of the economy insecure, its identity politics always threatening to pull the race card. The legacy of apartheidwe are told at the hustings by ANC and trade-union spokesperson Gwede Mantashehas so inculcated in our psyches the idea of wealth accumulation as the mark of success that cronyism, nepotism, and corruption among the new upwardly mobile African elitethe black diamondsshould not be blamed on individual frailty, but on a long history of colonialism. Mandelas rainbow nation remains elusive; South Africa is a fractious amalgam of Australia and Nigeria within a single geographical space. Mandelas successor as state president, Thabo Mbeki, highlighted his own psychology of confusion in which, at one moment, he spoke as the measured first-world technicist, at another as the Africanist for whom HIV/AIDS, before it was a medical condition, was a conspiracy of the West against the third world. At any rate, Mbekis arrogance finally angered even his own party; he was recalled by the ANC and we in South Africa now live in a time of Zuma-fication. The current president, Jacob Zuma, is a polygamous Zulu traditionalist who, supported vociferously by, among others, the ANC Womens League (a study in gender politics is called for here), narrowly escaped conviction on a rape charge and, through political manipulation, even more narrowly avoided prosecution on charges of corruption. Nevertheless, Zuma is an honorable man, or so said his supporters in the ANC Youth League, for its memberswe must place our trust in metaphorwere willing to kill for Zuma! With a resurgence of anti-apartheid struggle songsshoot the farmer, shoot the boer, or Afrikaner, or, by implication, the white personANC Youth League leader and rude boy Julius Malema followed Zumas own display, the signature of which outside the court room was Mashini Wam!, or, Give Me My Machine Gun! I use the past tense; more recently, the relationship between Zuma and the Youth League, indeed between Zuma and the trade-union movement Cosatu, has cooled decidedly, the problem being that Zumas presidency has not delivered what its erstwhile backers believe is owed to them for their ousting of Mbeki: for some, a check on neoliberal economic policies; for others, prestige promotions. I do not wish to pursue the machinations. My point is that from public platforms of rabble rousing, crowds of people are meant to be diverted from an ANC organization that appears to have lost its moral compass. Despite Zumas own expansive personality, politics is bullying, racially divisive, and inefficient with cadres of the liberation movement promoted to key state positions for which many have no qualification or experience. To take the longer view, however, we should remember that the previous government in its Afrikanerization of society pursued its own actions of sectarian redress. Zuma-fication, I am suggesting, is not entirely an aberration as the media or art fraternities wish to see it. Political analyst Ivor Chipkin, for example, does

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not, as postcolonial theory usually does, subscribe to two distinct phases of the decolonization process, or project: the first signaling the hopes and failures of national liberation movements (the materialist phase); the second, the recognition that colonial discourse (the West versus the rest) continues to shape not only the economy, but also the psychology of postcolonies, thus rendering as ongoing necessity the deconstruction of the language of colonialism (the Said-inspired discursive turn). Rather Chipkin, especially in postcolonies of settler presence (South Africa, Zimbabwe), identifies a persistent commitment within the ruling party to a chauvinistic African nationalism. The goal of the ANC governmentlike that of Mugabes Zanu-PFis not primarily the cementing of liberal democracy, but the transformation of the state according to the values, norms and visions of the ruling party still in its garb of a revolutionary African national liberation movement. Whatever the Constitution might enshrine as nonracial, the task of the ANC is to position itself as the dominant state apparatus able to orchestrate change in the instantiation of the black African subject (4775; see also African National Congress, Strategies and Tactics). Despite Chipkins provocative analysis, even such a reversal of white/black binaries (no longer the Empire writing back to the center) is a simplification of postcolonial dynamics. Since 1994, the South African body politic has not stood in thrall of cadre redeployment, but has opened itself to all kinds of upward mobility. The young African executive in, say, the AngloAmerican Corporation is probably as embarrassed as the literary artist at daily political rantings that have seen public debate drop to a new low of racial and class antagonism. I might seem to have digressed from a literary consideration of the post- paradigm, but not really. To return to my initial point, the post- paradigm, as currently applied to literary studies, is too generalized to lend to any particular postcolony the subjective, experiential temper, the human and imaginative condition of living that should be the distinctive contribution of the literary act, whether in its creative or critical manifestation. We, as literary critics, do not do justice to Coetzees tactile prose by subsuming his texts beneath disquisitions, however erudite, on abstract otherness. In saying this, I do not wish to undermine the insights of continental philosophy; neither do I wish to suggest that we should jettison the post- paradigm. Rather, I suggest that a modification to the prevalent north-based yardstick might lend vigor to Stuart Halls useful formulation of thinking at the limit, that is, permitting particular postcolonial histories to interrupt the unidirectional narrative of globalization (22155). In this respect, two contributions to the book of essays to which I referred earlier are illuminating. The one considers Leila Aboulelas novels as the reverse of the postcolonial exilic narrative (the journey from rooted national belonging to metropolitan marginality); rather, the protagonists Islamic faith helps them find roots in London (see Ball). The other looks at Andrzej Stasuiks paradoxical image of an East European transnational provincialism that parodies the aloofness of old Europe (see Koodziejczyk). Such examples involve giving local, even indigenous, inflection to terms that in the postcolonial glossary have lost the cut and thrust of palpability. How do we apply the concept of the transnational, for example, to a younger generation of black South African writers many of whom, lacking the cosmopolitans travel resources, experience the globe in their own inner-city hood primarily through Facebook or MixIt? How might we to take seriously a multiple-voiced, racially

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diverse category of the middle class, middle class being a silent swearword in postcolonial studies? Or how might we respond to the spiritual, an experience or illumination which, until very recently, had been neglected in a paradigm posited on Western-derived battles of authority between the advocates of liberal humanism and Marxism, neither of which tradition values the spiritual over and above the secular. Yet Robert J.C. Young, for one, has recognized the potent force of the spiritual in postcolonies, while in several publications we now have the beginning of a spiritual turn (see, for example, Ashcroft et al., The Sacred and Intimate Horizons; Mathuray; Wenzel). Eagleton, to whom I have already referred, introduces classifications that, as in the case of the spiritual, have largely been ignored in both the ideologies and abstractions of post- debate, namely, truth, virtue, objectivity. He reminds the antifoundational bias of the posts, whether postmodern or postcolonial, of important distinctions between fundamentalism and foundationalism, the latter requiring commonsensical checks on the moral and social consequences of deferrals of constants, or an endless relativism (174207). Finally, to add to this list of post- problematics, we may return to another category to which I have made allusion and which in postcolonial literary studies is in short supply: the aesthetic, the dimension that distinguishes the art form from other forms of expression. Here we may recollect pre-Romantic links between aesthetics and ethics according to which both arose from our attempts, as biological beings, to refine relationships between our animal and human natures. How do we understand dimensions of the aesthetic in a society, in South Africa, which lauds the intricacies of the Coetzee text while devoting more reviewing space to a first book, A Man Who Is Not a Man, by Thando Mgqolozana, a life story of a botched circumcision in the still widespread Xhosa rite of passage to manhood. To a greater extent than in a postcolonializing metropole (the black Briton; Islam in France) postcolonies experience forms of the premodern, the modern, and the postmodern in daily interaction. Such forms straddle oral and written modes of expression involving comparative purposes and practices of translation across languages and cultures. Is it simply provocative, accordingly, to ask, why not the Zulu praise poem on the postcolonial literary syllabus? To invoke barriers to translation is not valid. Translation theory and practice have long engaged with notions of untranslatability: source texts may serve functions in target contexts, as indeed have the Greek classics in English literature (see Bassnet and Traversi). So, not to like but unlike, Zulu praise poem! Zulu and Brit, after all, clashed in later nineteenth-century conflict, that is, in colonial conflict.4 To have imagined, as many did in the first-world sector, in business, the academy, or the arts, that South Africas rejoining the world would soften its third-world accent has proved to be illusory. Zuma-fication reminds us, to return to Chipkin, that South Africa is a postcolonial African country uneasily positioned in a neocapitalist global arena, and that the resulting unresolved tensions define the parameters of almost every negotiation or confrontation on the country and its future (6164). As the poet and writer of creative nonfiction Antjie Krog observes in her book Begging to be Black, if the critical concern of the years in the 1990s was to learn to respect difference, the challenge within a site of ongoing racial fracture must be renewed efforts to forge connection. Against a debased public language, literature has to assert its potential to add value, growth, flourishing, to the life of society. What of the mediating practice of criticism?

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Within the post- paradigm criticism has to find greater congruence than is current between its language of generalities and its object of study, in this case the literary text. We should be wary of pronouncement leading to derivative illustration: for example, According to Foucault, or Derrida, I shall now demonstrate alterity, or liminality, or diasporic identity, or whatever, in the work of Soyinka, Rushdie, Coetzee, etc. Instead, we need to pose and explore again the question of evaluation: amid the cacophony of Zuma-fication does this poem, play or novel contribute to re-imagined possibilities of the human experience? To turn again to aesthetics, the fact that it is Coetzees intricate fictions rather than, say, Wilbur Smiths African adventure blockbusters that elicit the concern of the postcolonial critic suggests an evaluation, even an implicit evaluation, of the artwork as complex or resonant in its insights into the unknowable human being. If this in its liberal or new critical allusion to a certain autonomy (whether of person or form) is anathema to the radical disposition of the postcolonial critic, then we may emphasize that there is no return to a naive mimesis: literature as life unmediated by contexts of interpretation or reception. We may follow Elleke Boehmers attempt to tackle what in postcolonialisms issue-driven priorities outside of the work could strike one as oxymoronic (a postcolonial aesthetic) and draw on Adornos forceful construction of texts, their conflict with life suggesting a calibration between the work of art and the world, between aesthetics and ethics, or as Adorno phrases it, Certainly every finished work of art is already predetermined in some way but art strives to overcome its own oppressive weight as an artefact through the force of its very construction (72). None of this need be expected to resolve a tension that, if it characterizes politics talk and art talk in South Africa, has wider purchase: how do we live the undiminished life within a narrative of globalization that calls into question the very idea of particular identities or, more broadly, of social citizenship? What I am suggesting is that the appropriate shorthand is not like but unlike; rather, as the term goes, it is glocal: the awkward consonantal contraction itself suggesting material limits to freedom. If in the postcolony today we encounter a Bhabha-like sly civility, the intention might be less to undermine the master, white or black, more to suck up to the state tender board. Or so Zakes Mda believes in his novel of South Africas newly empowered, Black Diamond, in which the challenge of difference is embodied in the vulnerability of a recognizable human nature. Presencing occurs not in the language of either ideology or philosophy, but in the delineation of peoples actual lives: the subject of postcolonialisms initial justification. In short, the category of the post- should not negate the character of the particular postcolony. It is a point understood, among others, by Athol Fugard whose recent play, The Train Driver, is based on a real-life incident: a young black mother, who finding herself as destitute in the new South Africa as she was in apartheid times, killed herself and her three children (for dramatic focus the play speaks of one child) by stepping with her family in front of an oncoming train. In the play the white Afrikaans driver of the train and a Xhosa-African digger of paupers graves confront their ghosts in a barren cemetery of the present day. Fugards observation forty years ago on the relationship of literature and life, as evident in his acclaimed play Boesman and Lena, connect disconcertingly across the intervening years. He focuses, he said, on specifics:

MICHAEL CHAPM AN 69 If there have been universals in my writing they have had to look after themselves. ... When the fire-blackened paraffin tin or Boesmans flea-ridden mattress, or the mud between Lenas toes mean something to me, things might start to happen. (CAPAB n.p.)

It is an apt observation on which to conclude this South African case study. NOTES

1. Epigraph, Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back. 2. The phrase prosaic materiality, as acknowledged by Gikandi, is taken from De Man 90. 3. As characteristic, see Gordimer. 4. For examples of praise poems in English translation, see Chapman 2632.

Aboulela, Leila. The Translator. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1999. Print. . Minaret. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Print. Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry. Trans. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. African National Congress (ANC). Strategy and Tactics as Amended at the 50th National Congress. Dec. 1997. Web. <http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/ conf/conference 50/strategyamend.html>. Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: U of Chicago P; Pietermaritzburg: U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2005. Print. Ashcroft, Bill. Transnation. Wilson et al. 7285. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Print. , eds. The Sacred. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005. 78. Ashcroft, Bill, Frances Devlin-Glass, and Lyn McCreddan. Intimate Horizons: The Postcolonial Sacred in Australian Literature. Adelaide: ATF Press, 2009. Print. Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print. Ball, Anna. Here is where I am: Re-Routing Diasporic Experience in Leila Aboulelas Recent Novels. Wilson et al. 21827. Bassnet, Susan, and Harish Travedi, eds. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. Bethlehem, Louise. A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger: The Rhetoric of Urgency in South African Literary Culture under Apartheid. Poetics Today 22.2 (2001): 36589. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Boehmer, Elleke. A Postcolonial Aesthetic: Repeating upon the Present. Wilson et al. 17081. Chapman, Michael, ed. The New Century of South African Poetry. Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 2003. Print.

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