Anderkant die stilte (2002) deur André P. Brink as postkoloniale, Gotiese roman

Abstract

Although awarded the Commonwealth Prize for best novel from the African Region, as well as the Sunday Times' Alan Paton Award in 2003, André Brink's novel Anderkant die stilte (published in English as The Other Side of Silence) received mixed critical reviews (especially in the Afrikaans press). It seems that the majority of critics approaching the novel as a historically verifiable representation of colonial history found it unconvincing, exsessive and melodramatic, while critics who read the novel as a creative re-construction and re-interpretation of history generally showed much more patience and tolerance for textual elements like exaggeration, generalization and the use of stereotypes. Taking into consideration the critical views expressed by Brink himself in a 1998 essay entitled "Interrogating Silence: New possibilities faced by South African Literature", as well as remarks made by Rebecca Duncan in "Unburying the Past: Post-Apartheid Gothic Fiction" (2013), Anderkant die stilte is read within the context of the so-called postcolonial Gothic. Specific attention is given to the way in which Brink's novel (i) reinhabits, reconfigures and newly imagines ways of being, seeing and expressing from the points of view of people whose experiences and expressions have been largely unheard and even discredited in the official version (master narrative) of colonial history, and (ii) troubles versions of reality in a manner that is culturally inflected and redolent with traces of history and expressions ignored and denied by received versions of colonial, imperial histories