Abstract
Samuel Durrant
Keeping alive the idea of gardening in postapartheid South Africa.
In Coetzee's 1983 novel Life and Times of Michael K , Michael K's commitment to keeping alive the idea of gardening in a time of war is often read as an analogue to Coetzee's own commitment to his writing; both Coetzee and his protagonist affirm the integrity of their solitary vocations in the face of calls to participate in more politically active modes of resistance. Elsewhere, I have argued that this singular commitment constitutes a mode of bearing witness or inconsolable mourning, a vigil performed in memory of the hope of a beyond to apartheid. Moving into the postapartheid era, the importance of Michael K's vigil has become increasingly clear. Njabulo Ndeblele's call for an art of the ordinary and Albie Sachs's call for a temporary ban on talk of art as a weapon of the struggle are both responses to the instrumentalisation of artistic production during the apartheid era. Coetzee's work might be said to have kept open a space for postapartheid literature precisely in its insistence on the autonomy of art as a work of mourning. In view of the relentless politicisation of funerals during apartheid, the work of writers such as Zakes Mda, John Kani, Ingrid de Kok, Damon Galgut, Zoe Wicomb, Elleke Boehmer, Ndebele and Coetzee himself need to be understood not as naïve attempts to produce a non-political art but as attempts to reclaim a space for the work of mourning.