Abstract
Gaurav Sethi
Crisis of Identity: Afrikaner Writers Post-Apartheid
My paper will explore the ‘crisis of identity' in the post-apartheid literature of Afrikaner writers Coetzee, Behr, Niekerk and Jooste, examining texts at the moment of change and in the years following 1994. It will examine this through a consideration of spatial concerns: the ‘literal' spaces of the South African landscapes, the ‘bodily' spaces which are inscribed with post-colonial white anxieties (David Lurie's sexual anxiety will provide an entry point into this discussion), and the ‘narrative' spaces negotiated by the respective authors. An examination of the construction of provisional, unstable identities in these novels will necessarily be inflected by a consideration of the positioning of the white writer in South Africa . Coetzee's reluctance to regard his fiction as intimately bound within a spatial or national context, raises the crucial question of how exactly (and if) a text can be located within its historical, political and geographical parameters. I will use the theories of ‘whiteness studies' exemplified by critics such as Michiel Heyns (together with the cultural analysis of Said and Bourdieu) to analyse the complex context of South Africa and set the background for my paper.
Homi Bhabha's argument that “identity is either claimed from the position of marginality or in the attempt at gaining the center” is granted an added dimension in the case of the ‘new' South Africa . The relocation of what was a marginalised culture has been undertaken through a process of negotiation ; in the words of Jyoti Mistry, “normative conceptions of center/margin must be reconfigured to account for a new ‘pluralism' or cultural diversification – celebrating the differences while at the same time maintaining a semblance of homogeneity.” These concepts of “centre” and “margin” will be harnessed to look specifically at the politics and dynamics of space within the textual world of the novels. It is my intention to explore the consequences of the displacement for the ‘identity' of the post-apartheid Afrikaner writer, and the ‘reconfiguration' of the fictional spaces constructed by Coetzee, Behr, Jooste and Niekerk. White Afrikaner identity was founded upon the differential of originary separateness. My paper will consider the new structures through which the Afrikaner novelist looks to redefine this conception of identity.
Finally, I will look more closely at the difficulties faced by these white Afrikaner writers, interrogating what is revealed to be a deeply “problematic positionality”. Writing in response to Andre Brink's notion of the resistance writer (in which he employs the metaphor of health and disease) Coetzee has written: “Is diagnosis carried out from inside or outside the body? … If from inside, how does he escape contagion … If from outside, how did the organ find its way outside the body?” The analysis of narrative perspectives, aspects of plot, and methodologies of writing, will question whether the white Afrikaner writer, disabled by guilt, cannot help distorting or romanticizing Apartheid for a predominantly white liberal readership. If this is the case, what is the space in which white Afrikaner authors may write, clear of the “ever-lurking monsters of complicity and culpability, whilst avoiding too the unsightly swamps of self-flagellation”? (Horrell)