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- Duncan, Rebecca
(författare)
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'My Skin, a Parchment of Tales' : Trauma, Wounding and the Postapartheid Gothic in Terry Westby-Nunn's Sea of Wise Insects
- 2013
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Ingår i: Current Writing. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1013-929X .- 2159-9130. ; 25:1, s. 76-87
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper, I read Terry Westby-Nunn's The Sea of Wise Insects as an example of the literary mode identified increasingly by scholars as South African postcolonial Gothic. In line with existing research, I work from a definition of the gothic genre which casts it as highly culturally specific and shaped by the anxieties of the society in which it arises. In Westby-Nunn's narrative these fears are enmeshed in the South African past, and revolve, more specifically, around the extent to which history's bearing on the present has become a dangerous point of repression. My argument traces a transgenerational logic of traumatic transmission, which situates the unspoken crimes of an old generation at the psychic nerve-centre of Westby-Nunn's contemporary protagonist, a strategy which disrupts any illusion of a stable boundary between the injustice of ‘then’ and the liberation of ‘now’. Finally, I suggest that through the deployment of an aesthetic which draws on the gothic sub-genre of horror-writing, Westby-Nunn develops a narrative which, to paraphrase Tabish Khair, does not operate “only in words”. Instead, the text relies in part on visceral reader reactions so that the novel admits of silence in a way that avoids replicating the exclusionary logic underpinning the institutionalised discrimination in South Africa's history.
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| 2. |
- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(författare)
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Agony and Penance : Sara Lidman in South Africa 1960-1961
- 2017
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Ingår i: Current Writing. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1013-929X .- 2159-9130. ; 29:1, s. 2-15
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Swedish writer Sara Lidman (1923-2004) wrote Jag och min son ("I and My Son") after a brief stint in apartheid South Africa in 1960-61, from where she was expelled for violation of the Immorality Act. Based on a close, interrelated study of her diary, her letters and the two book manuscripts (first published in 1961; revised and re-published in 1963), I examine the colonial boundary crisis of the Self. The major protagonists in the novels or autobiographies embody, variously, aspects of the writer's angst as it developed in the Johannesburg colonial setting of persecuted ANC members, the elite of the local Swedish community, the friendship of Nadine Gordimer, and the pressure of her anticolonial frustrations.
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