| dc.description.abstract | My aim is to carry out an exploration of our relationship with the past, specifically in a literary-artistic context. In the background of this lies an anti-patriarchal discourse in which I myself participated in my research, with specific focus on the novels of Eben Venter. In this lecture I attempt a conciliatory move with respect to the self and the other, in the wake of Venter's recent novel Green as the sky is blue. At one of the later therapy sessions recounted in this novel, the protagonist Simon Avend finally tells the harrowing tale of the death of the emaciated old farm worker Jackson, abandoned in his poorly insulated worker's hut in the heart of winter, by which the theme of complicity and guilt is foregrounded. Simon emphasises that Jackson was either childless or forsaken by his children. Through the protagonist’s painful engagement with the memory of Jackson's end, as with the memories relating to Simon's own father, and the eventual inconsolable and reverent narration of Jackson's story, a kind of reconciliation within a larger South African human family is suggested.
Based on this, and through engagement with the legacy of the fathers, especially in a literary context, a thematic cluster consisting of the following is investigated: weight, weigh and being weighed; to add one’s weight to this or that; value, valuation; deemed worthy or not; considered part of or not; belonging to or not; and one's own perceptions, prohibitions and concessions in this regard.
Setting out from the Afrikaans language and literature, which constitutes my home, I carry out a comprehensive exploration, underpinned by the idea of empathic universalism, of literary pasts in world literature through a comparative telescoping of selected works. My guiding metaphor is derived from Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka’s volume Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known in which markets around the world are celebrated and problematized. The long title poem, informed by the Yoruba philosophy of life, depicts the market as a place of peaceful and dynamic gathering and temporary displacement; everyone there is not home. Much more than just money and goods are exchanged and the trade therefore also takes place for the benefit of the spiritual household.
I start with "Wanneer dit reën op Tankwasdrif" (When it rains on Tankwasdrif), a short story by Pirow Bekker in which the filial, the colonial past, and the act of looking back are problematized but indeed also reframed by emphasising the matriarchal line of love, after which I turn my attention to "Portmanteau", a poem by Johan Myburg in which he opts for a sophisticated approach instead of a simplistic settling of scores, thereby demonstrating how the exploration of the compelling final question, "[w]aarmee is afgereken, waarmee sal ek sterf?" (what has been finally reckoned with, with what shall I die?), could be approached.
My argument is guided by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney's reflections on what literature, in its singularity and as a form of redress, can place in the scales within filial and broader societal contexts. By "redress" he means adding one’s weight to the lighter, neglected side. However, poetry’s contribution in this regard is not one of direct activism. Rather, it places "a counter-reality in the scales" (Heaney, 1995: 3). This resonates with Julia Kristeva’s (2002) contention that the return to memory and self, constitutes revolt; she holds that this revolt ought to be seen as more than just political revolution.
Based on Eliot's statement, in his essay "Tradition and the individual talent", that the author will not know what he should do here and now "unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living" (Eliot, 1987: 44), I postulate the following: Attempting to understand what being contemporary might entail in one's own context, one could start by turning, in the vast supply of world literature, to the "global South" in general and Mexican literature in particular, paying specific attention to the literary agency of a previous generation as an example of how the discovery of modernity and the own tradition could be navigated. At the heart of my argument is what the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes learned from his predecessor Octavio Paz (following also in the footsteps of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote), namely that the discovery of the self and one's own tradition is also an outward movement as it became clear to him "that the poetics of Paz is an art of civilizations, a movement of encounters" (Fuentes, 1995: 447). Paz demonstrated through his example that Mexico was not an isolated, backward province but part of the entire human family – "contemporary with all men and women" (Fuentes, 1995: 448).
Via the "southern"/Andalusian tradition in Spanish literature and specifically Juan Ramón Jiménez’s early semi-autobiographical work Platero y yo / Platero and I (1914) in which the preservation of a childlike experience is paramount, as well as James Joyce's 1932 poem “Ecce puer” on the birth of a grandson and the death of his father, I come to the underrated authorship of Pirow Bekker who in his late work with heightened urgency and relativization grapples with his own literary "estate". His work is generally characterized by universal-elemental themes; deeply associated with this, is the recurring motif of the sun and the foregrounding of the archetypal puer aeternus (the eternal youth or child). I incorporate in my discussion here an early Bekker poem, "Sonnet by oupa se portret" (Sonnet with grandfather’s portrait) and "Digging", the opening poem of Seamus Heaney’s debut volume. Reading Bekker alongside Heaney, the various strands of my argument are weaved together: writing from one's own home and language but with a view to and nurtured by the wide world and its rich literary and artistic traditions that can be shared and celebrated by all and to which older writers and artists are valuable links; growing out of and in critical conversation with the past; wrestling with literary value, the legacy of the fathers, self-worth and with appropriate literary participation in the present; moving outward for the sake of self-discovery to come home, finally, to a more sun-drenched reconciliation between father and son and a childlike, affirmative embracing of life and of one's own labour with words. | en_US |
