Gendered landscape/ landskap in South African women’s poetry 

Di Maria Paola Guarducci e Francesca Terrenato 

In: Semicerchio LIV (01/2016), “Poesia sulla pietra”, pp. 87-105. 

Borders and edges of territory and language, home
and body, land and water have always offered some
of the most attractive hideouts for women writers
who have long understood that the secret might be
simply to let the other in or to sift through whatever
flotsam washes up. (Shapcott: 2000, 45) 

Introduction 

As is typical of many colonial and postcolonial countries, land, with its conquest, possession, dismissal, redistribution, etc., has a crucial role not only in South African history, but also in its literature. Landscape, that is the scenery involving the land, whether with or without an aesthetic appeal, represented through words, is almost fatally connected to the idea of home and belonging. This article will focus on the role of landscape in women’s poetry of English and Afrikaans expressions. It will pay particular attention to how the poets select, reject or rewrite stereotypes tied to the landscape in literature such as the identification of the land with a woman, often a mother; they neither romanticize the landscape, nor establish any sort of patronizing relationship with it, as is typical in male colonialist poetry. A different kind of relationship is built by substituting the idea of conquest with that of affiliation, affection or mirroring1. 

As for the choice of juxtaposing here English and Afrikaans texts from South Africa, a preliminary note is due. Although the colonial presence of settlers coming from England in South Africa meant the imposition of a hard legislation severely affecting the life of the blacks as early as the end of the Eighteenth century, apartheid, officially established in 1948, was a regime predominantly associated with the Afrikaner National Party. Although white English speaking South Africans benefited from the privileges created by the system just as much as the Afrikaners, they were less associated with the ruling class. Paradoxically, English ended up becoming the language of the protest and of resistance rather than being identified with the oppressors: a means which could easily convey the anti-apartheid message throughout the world. English is today the privileged language of South African literary expression and it is chosen also by authors for whom it is not necessarily their mother-tongue. Afrikaans, born as a creolized variant of the Dutch language spoken by the first European settlers of the Cape, a bridge language developed through interference with the mother tongues of the coloured, black and white people, is now one of the eleven official languages in South Africa. Its survival depends largely «on a more inclusive standard on the one hand and an alliance with the other African languages on the other hand» (Alexander: 2011, 21) which will finally grant visibility to black and coloured Afrikaans speakers. English and Afrikaans together are recognized as the home or first language of 23% of the population; neither of them can thus be exclusively seen as a ‘white’ language. 

A preliminary note about the concept of landscape in South African literature in English and Afrikaans is also due. While the English came slightly later than the Dutch and, because of their bourgeois background, established themselves primarily in urban environments, the so-called Boers of Dutch descent were mainly peasants and quickly developed a strong tie with the land. As a consequence Afrikaans poetry has a different approach to the subject and also a more ‘natural’ relationship with it, last but not least because of the rooting of the language itself in that environment. There are many words related to the local landscape that can only be expressed in Afrikaans, such as veld (open grassland) and vlei (shallow lake). The veld is at once bound to the original African landscape and prone to a process of familiarization within the boundaries of the Boer farm, the plaas. Its literary representation is peculiarly oblivious of the presence of earlier inhabitants and owner; as Jennifer Beningfield argues in her groundbreaking study on landscape and politics in South Africa, «the complexity of the land and the lives of its inhabitants were predominantly represented not as a struggle of many histories, but rather as a seamless and coherent narrative in which contradiction was suppressed and the presence of other claims on the land denied» (Beningfield: 2006, 17). The veld features also in English South African writing, especially in the novel, where together with the farm it is often presented as a highly disturbing site. 

Although evidence shows that landscape is a main literary concern for white authors, the presence of alternative paradigms in representation coming from the black and coloured components should not be underrated. ‘Landscape’, with its long tradition in European culture, identifies both a physical place and the emotions, memories, histories it evokes in a person or a collectivity; it suggests a view from afar and its representation, in order to claim the right to own it. The idea of ‘land’ on the other hand is not dependent on representation, and in rural black culture it displays the possibility of an unmediated contact with nature and an inversion of the idea of ownership: «rather than a person owning land, the land owns the person», especially in the case of the place of birth (Beningfield: 2006, 5). 

The relationship between people and space was a pivotal one during apartheid, as the Group Areas Act (1950) and the Natives Resettlement Act (1954) established where people could live according to an ethnic criterion. As a consequence, a problematic sense of belonging arose in those who were dispossessed of the land (or of their urban home) in the course of South African history, and who often had to reconstruct landscape through a process of remembrance. 

I. Landscape in the poetry of Ruth Miller, Ingrid de Kok, Makhosazana Xaba, Malika Ndlovu and Yvette Christiansë (Maria Paola Guarducci, Roma Tre) 

If landscape, in all its diversities, including both natural and cultural scenarios (veld, desert, bush, sea, cities, villages, etc.), is crucial in the development of the South African English novel, it is clearly also central in its poetry. Ideologically the landscape plays a more sober role in the English white community than in the Afrikaner’s, since the English settlers never competed with the natives for common activities related to the land, such as pasture and cattle (see Beningfield: 2006, 89). On the other hand, as J.M. Coetzee has outlined in White Writing (1988), landscape has a pivotal role in local literature, although he mainly discusses it with regard to prose. In the only chapter he devotes to poetry, «The Picturesque and the South African Landscape», Coetzee remarks how some peculiar features of the local landscape – such as its dryness – do not match with the «moistness of English conditions» (Coetzee: 1988, 43) and produced specific symbolical equations in poetry: «skies are blue, light and shadow are static (which is why writers repeatedly characterize the landscape as sleeping, torpid, heatstruck)» (ivi). If this generally applies to male poetical tradition, the situation is rather different when we read women’s poetry, which does not feature in Coetzee’s analysis2. Generally speaking, most of the writers connect landscape, overtly or metaphorically, with the ideologies derived from the country’s complex history in order to challenge or reassess its statute within them. Landscape has an important role in South African women writers of English language, but its function eschews the paradigm Coetzee identified in the male tradition. Nonetheless, to orientate ourselves in the female scenario, we can still adopt Coetzee’s challenging questions: 

The dominating questions, particularly in poetry,
and most of all in English-language poetry, become:
How are we to read the South African landscape?
Is it readable at all? Is it readable only through Af
rican eyes, writable only in an African language? Is
the very enterprise of reading the African landscape
doomed, in that it prescribes the quintessentially
European posture of reader vis-à-vis environment?
Behind these questions, in turn, lies a historical in
security regarding the place of the artist of Europe
an heritage in the African landscape such as we do
not encounter in America – an insecurity not without
cause. (Coetzee: 1988, 62) 

The historical and cultural needs, in 1988, to raise such questions, hit where the matter hurts. Can they be of use in the definition of the role played by landscape in women’s poetry? Can the implicit exclusion of women artists from any assumed, patriarchal, literary tradition as the one scrutinized by Coetzee, reveal that there is a different approach to landscape if it is a woman who writes? Furthermore, is the relationship with landscape necessarily smoother if the author is black or coloured? How do South African women writers feel about landscape? What has landscape to say to them? Landscape is always the place where something has happened, that is, it is never devoid of historical implications and could only exist in a dialectical relation with them. Whether because it fits into a particular tale or because it has different stories to tell according to whom relates to it, landscape is a vital element of South African women’s poetry in English and I will explore its meaning through a selection of compositions by a restricted number of noteworthy poets, without any pretension of being exhaustive. 

Hinterland 

If one had to indicate a beginning from where to draw the lines of signification leading to the profile of a path weaving together women’s poetry and landscape, a possible one could be the lyrical universe of Ruth Miller (1919-1969), one of the pioneers of South African women’s poetry in English, or better, as Joan Metelerkamp defined her, its «literary mother» (Metelerkamp: 1992, 57). Although her compositions are filled with personal implications and are more allusive than referential, she brought to light, as early as the Sixties, many of the topics which were due to become central in the long run and her work can be used as a starting point and a fruitful thread to move among different authors. 

No explicit political message interferes with Miller’s depictions of desolate scenarios peopled by animals, children playing, women working, and often crossed by a poetical I or we perceived as either ‘passing by’ or unintegrated. Long Journey (1968) seems to me a case in point. The poem reshapes and expands a scene already portrayed in The Halt, a short composition belonging to a group of uncollected lyrics. The Halt, compiled between 1960 and 1969, depicts the daily passage of trains near a township at the border of the veld: 

Daily the trains creep by. Numberless windows
Thrust down, and people lean out, wearingly star
ing;
[…]
A dog barks, the chicken scratch in the dust; the
child
Dumps sand from a pail and does not lift her head.
The house is prim and old, defaced, malformed,
Too small, too hot in the summer, too cold at night.
For miles and miles the veld creeps up to it,
The bleak and level rim of the world each dawn.
[…]
(Miller: 1990, 110) 

The point of view is external; neither is it located within the trains (plural) nor among the people (unidentified). The landscape is made of the sketched details of ‘the’ house, too small, too old, too hot, too cold, intertwining with the creeping veld. The repetition of «creep» marks a difference between the veld creeping ‘up’, as if about to invade the house, and the trains creeping ‘by’, that is without really engaging with the township, whose population features as tired spectators of their transit, indifferent as the little girl who does not even lift her head to watch them passing. In Long Journey, made up of fifty-five lines, we read: 

[…] We recognise
The station that we passed a year ago.
The trees are taller now; the dust remains.
Corrugated iron dazzles in the sun.
A dog barks, the chickens scratch in the dust. A
child
Dumps sand from a pail and does not lift her head.
[…]
Through the bony continent of skull
Cave-socketed our minds reach rag-bound cities
And sidings where the train stops for a while
Hot in the noonday veld, bare as a cloth with
crumbs,
Silvered with milk-cans in the clattering dawn.
(Through the dark shutters the slatted sunlight
draws
Thin lines of neon-like intensity).
[…]
(Miller: 1990, 48,49) 

The landscape of the first poem is here recounted by a lyrical «we» located inside the train qualifying the indistinct gaze of The Halt: here «we» are the observers (subject) and the rest is observed (objects). People have disappeared: among taller trees and old dust the little girl of the first poem is just «a» child, absorbed by herself as before. The house is encapsulated in the topical (South) African metonymy of corrugated iron, which becomes, in turn, symbolic of a whole continent of «rag-bound cities», presumably looking all alike just like the houses. No more windows, only a roof sharing the dazzling in the sun with the «silvered» train. The train, not the house, is hot in the noon; the horizon of the first poem is substituted by the thin lines of light penetrating from the shutters and separating the two worlds. It feels like there is no possible interchange between the watchers and the watched: the train, caught in «sidings», the place and the scene observed, unfathomable. 

Natural landscape is also a key element in Miller’s poetry. She uses it to mirror her tragic sense of life; it renders the idea of the ontological ‘nothingness’ inhabiting the world, her world. The land often appears as it was in pre-historical times, unaffected by humanity and unchanged by history, the tales of which cannot account for its real essence. As in Long Journey, where the minds were significantly «cave-socketed», caves recur in her lyrics as the emblem of the lack of land-within-the-land. They do not provide mystery; on the contrary, their emptiness is the tangible proof of the void her lines struggle to define. The poem Sterkfontein (1965), about the Gauteng caves where the remains of the first human skeletons were found at the beginning of the past century, helps to clarify Miller’s attitude towards landscape: 

Our caves do not go Boom! and make one nervy,
For they are underground, and dark and hard,
[…]
In India the smooth sides make one shiver,
But here the walls have teeth, the roof is low;
And suddenly a deep and silent river
Looms out of nothing, and into nothing flows.
[…]
And when we reach the light – bare veld and boul
der
Hard as the hidden bones within the caves –
Stand in the wind, that wind which, growing colder,
Will blow us to the kingdom of shared graves.
(Miller: 1990, 64) 

Although the sense of national belonging is underlined by both the use of the possessive «our» and the juxtaposition of the South African caves against the Indian’s, with a reference to the modernist enigma represented by the Marabar Caves in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, these caves are neither mysterious nor homely. They are underground; toothed, dark and hard and, last but not least, they are located in a windy and bare veld. They are uninviting and inhospitable but for the bones they guard, as custodians of the physical remains of humanity. They qualify as an informal cemetery, as the association with the «shared graves» in the last line suggests. 

Caverns feature again in Miller’s After the Caves (Tzitzikama) (1965): 

Now there is nothing to say
About the caves.
Distance has made them cold.
[…] They have lost their existence
In a tired fable,
In an old
repeated story, too often told.
In a smooth corner of the furthest caves
An arrowhead
Inert a million sullen years
Feels cold to the touch. But do the dead
Feel cold in the grave?
[…]
Yet we remember
The caves, though there is nothing to be told
About them, but that they were cold as death;
And we left them cold.
(Miller: 1990, 84) 

Hosting the remains of one of the oldest cultures ever, the Khoisan’s, these Eastern Cape caves, in spite of the paramount importance of the treasures they shield, primarily evoke coldness, absence of meaning («there is nothing to say»), distrust towards the formulaic repetitions of history, and death. The point of view is that of a «we» appearing in the last stanza and defined by the act of remembering the caves, but not their stories - «there is nothing to be told» the poem stresses – but rather their coldness and indifference. They may well testify to ancient cultures, but the human passage leaves them unaffected and they are keener to manifest their bond with death rather than with life. 

A relic discovery at Sterkfontein is also at the core of the short poem Long before Mrs Ples (2008) by Makhosazana Xaba (1957), Mrs Ples being the name informally given to the fossil skull found in 1947 by South African palaeontologists Robert Broom and John T. Robinson. Xaba deals with the issue in a totally different way, discarding history, as Miller did, but only to re-shape it as a ‘history of her own’, rooted in the place long before the manipulations of science and historiography of European descent: 

She was here long before Mrs Ples.
She stands as tall steady as the mountains of
uKhahlamba.
She is as standard as the numerous hills of any val
ley.
She bathed in the Limpopo, swam in uMfolozi,
played childhood games along the banks of uM
hlathuze.
She strolled the shores of seas before they were
given names
by the arrivers who never left. She breathes belonging,
sings tunes of the seasons, loves other women.
She is a native.
(Xaba: 2008, 22) 

The unnamed protagonist of the poem, defined in the last line as «a native», is caught in different landscapes – mountains, hills – with which she shares tallness and standards. She positively engages with rivers, beaches and the sea. She is not necessarily heterosexual, she does not need to be named, located or classified, the European toponimy discarded as well, because she «breathes belonging», in harmony with her surroundings. 

The tie between the individual, the land and the possibility to put into verse this relationship are, as we have seen so far, intricate issues both at emotional and political levels. When the land turns into homeland, the situation gets even more complicated. 

Homeland 

As in Miller’s works, the occurrence of images of hardness in relation to the land can often be found also in the poetry of Ingrid de Kok (1951), one of the literary ‘daughters’ of Miller. An extremely refined poet, de Kok authored five collections of lyrics dating back from 1988 up to 2006. Just as in her Brazilian years the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), another one of de Kok’s points of reference, wrote about the alienating experience of coming to terms with forms of marginality she could not personally share, de Kok is similarly alert to the complications affecting her aesthetical practice as a poet, that is, not only of her task of creating beauty out of traumatized environments, but also doing so, as Bishop did, whilst being a member of a privileged minority. As a matter of fact, Adrienne Rich’s definition of Bishop’s poetry also accounts for de Kok’s poetical stance: «More and more, her poems embodied a need to place herself in the actual, to come to terms with family and class and race, with her presence as a poet in cities and landscapes where human suffering is not a metaphor» (Rich: 1987, 126). 

De Kok’s poetry deals with pain, trauma, the discomforts of daily life both in apartheid South Africa and nowadays. She is not afraid to manifest her right to love her country, foreign and familiar at the same time, and to search for, recognize and reclaim profound bonds with it, in spite of the ethical and emotional complexities that such a relationship means when it is confronted with the nationalist rhetoric of both apartheid and post-apartheid with regard to identity and belonging. De Kok’s poems link the ‘land’ to the idea of ‘home’. The landscape cannot be but a combination of the two, resulting in a series of scattered images, perceptions and fragmented memories. To drink its water (2006) is a case in point: 

Home is where the heart is:
a tin can tied to a stray dog.
The only truth is home truth:
preserves on the winter shelf.
[…]
Beside the beaten path
to the veld where I once played,
dry riverbed and unwashed clothes
grey lizard on the rocks.
My shadow squats in the shade of a thorn
where children sift and store
the remnants of corroded bins.
Over the path, the rocks, the tree,
marauding sky, fiercer than memory.
[…]
(de Kok: 2006, 15) 

After an almost whispered first line, hosting the emotional alliteration between «home» and «heart», we are dragged into the South African harsh landscape not only by the distressing scene portrayed – stray dogs being notoriously frequent throughout the country – but also, once more phonetically, by the insistence of dental (hard) consonants in the second line. The intimate revelation of truth as «home truth» is followed by the image of the house pantry opening the way to the memories of the lyrical first person’s childhood in the dry veld, craving for some shade, even though the only possible shelter is that of a thorn. The thorn is a topical component of the local flora while at the same time it metaphorically suggests suffering and sacrifice by the evocation of Jesus’s crown of thorns. In these memories, the idea of separation/exile is introduced by children playing apart from the narrator, entertaining themselves with rubbish while the sky is «marauding» above path, rocks and trees. If we go back to J.M. Coetzee’s remarks about how male poets portrayed the landscape as indolent also because of its static sky, here we acknowledge a different representation of the sky which, on the contrary, is personified and aggressive. The sky is also assigned a meta-textual function since it competes with memory, from which the poem partially originates. For de Kok, who had the typical white childhood and adolescence in South Africa and who migrated later on to Canada to go back to her country with a different political awareness only in 1984, homeland is a concept matured by absence and distance, which acquires substance via scattered recollections, physical sensations, cryptic associations, epiphanies: 

[…]
To return home you have to drink its water,
in a drought you have to drink its water,
even from the courtyard well,
the water blossoming in the gut,
on brackish, from a burning trough,
flypaper on your tongue,
pooling your hands,
bending when you drink.
Home is where the heart is:
husk of heat on the back.
The sky enters into the skin,
the sky’s red ants
crawl over the shoulders.
This bending body is my only body.
I bend and drink
the shadow in the water.
(de Kok: 2006, 16) 

In these final lines the relationship between land, home and individual is woven in a complex scenario around water, body and sky. Whereas in European-descent tradition water is the symbol of a calmness from which reflection originates, as the Romantic tradition rooted in the peaceful landscape of the Lake District teaches us and as Coetzee once again remarks (Coetzee: 1988, 44), de Kok’s water establishes a more intimate relationship with the individual. It needs to be drunk, even if it is brackish and tastes like flypaper, and one needs to bend in order to collect it, as in an act of compliance. The «shadow in the water» is not therefore a trick leading to death, as in Narcissus’ myth; ingested, water is a principle of life and continuity between the individual and her land. The sky partakes in this physical and spiritual blending, coming down from its heights to penetrate the skin. Body parts - tongue, hands, heart, back, skin, shoulders - model a «bending body» paying homage to the land, merging into landscape. 

The physical tie connecting land and body leads us to another relevant poem by de Kok: Body parts, which is included in the collection Terrestrial Things (2002), largely devoted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The analogies between the breakup of body, language and landscape is at the core of this poem, which does not claim reconciliation and reconstruction, but rather sings the need for fragmentation to stay as such; as a testimony, a bearer of a history that words could neither articulate nor endure. Body parts are scattered across the South African landscape, they are planted in its soil, they infiltrate within it in a poetical appeal for an intimate relationship with the land. To de Kok, this seems to be the most appropriate and less fabricated way to account for the ‘dismembered’ history of her country: 

may the wrist turn in the wind like a wing
the severed foot tread home ground
the punctured ear hear the thrum of sunbirds
the molten eye see stars in the dark
the faltering lungs quicken windmills
the maimed hand scatter seeds and grain

the heart flood underground springs
pound maize, recognize named cattle
and may the unfixable broken bone
loosened from its hinges
now lying like a wishbone in the veld
pitted by pointillist ants

give us new bearings.
(de Kok: 2002, 37) 

The final «us» clarifies the plea structure - «may» - opening the poem and reiterated throughout it. The particular relevance of this composition is better grasped if read in the context of the TRC, at the centre of which stood tortured, dismembered, destroyed, maimed, disfigured, injured bodies, as well as the metaphorical body of a nation similarly torn. 

A different set of complications comes forth when Malika Ndlovu (1971) depicts her idea of homeland in From Her Sky (2004). A gendered homeland, a «motherland» in fact, South Africa reveals to the poet «her breathtaking beauty» which is expanded in the following depiction of an elegant woman: 

[…]
Her royal robe of velvet green
Brown and red earth tones
A terrestrial tapestry
Dressing her peaks
Collecting in her valleys
Fading towards her shores

White sand and glistening river seams
Stitching her proud African patchwork
Embroidered with winding footpaths
Over mountains
Circling hills
Stretching across plains
[…]
(Ndlovu: 2008, 51) 

This landscape, though, would be incomplete without the representation of its urban counterpart, «a different texture / beading her garment here and there», that is the cultural settlement, the city, characterized by strips of tarmac, glittering cars, the «formulaic plots» of the rich neighbourhoods. The contrast suggests to Ndlovu an ending for her poem whose structure resumes the opening although it is substantially different in meaning. I align here beginning and end of the poem: 

[…] From her sky From her sky Once again Once again My motherland reveals My motherland conceals Her breathtaking beauty Her children’s endless suffering To me From me […] (Ndlovu: 2008, 51) 

As an admiring daughter who is kept protected from the parent, the poet underscores the passive (positive) and active (negative) function of the motherland: to reveal and conceal at the same time. 

Islands, inland waters and seascapes 

In spite of a wide use of inland rocky and bare landscapes in white women’s poetry, water also, as Ingrid de Kok’s work shows, plays an important role in this context. Once again, J.M. Coetzee remarks: 

What concerns us here is, by contrast, the near
absence of surface water on the South African pla
teau, and the consequent lacuna in the repertoire
of the artist (painter but also writer) wishing to give
meaningful (meaning-filled) representation of that
landscape within the schema he has carried over
from European art. In the rarity of bodies of still
water in South Africa, European-descended land
scape writing finds confirmation, and perhaps even
occasion, for several of its commonest themes: that
in South Africa the earth and the heavens are sepa
rate and even sundered realms; that the earth is
dead or sleeping or insentient – in Thoreau’s figure,
lacks an eye; that no dialogue can be carried on
with it. (Coetzee: 1988, 44) 

As a matter of fact, rivers and especially the sea abound in women’s poetry. Miller’s most anthologised work is called The Floating Island (1965) and provides a highly symbolic imagery of land and water at the same time. The lines picture a herd of bucks blocked on a piece of eradicated land (the floating island of the title) swept by the river Zambesi flood towards the Victoria Falls, where they are doomed to die. The quickness in the scene, made more dreadful by the vivid description of the terror in the eyes of the trapped animals, translates according to Christopher Heywood as a metaphor for «the colonial presence in southern Africa» (Heywood: 2004, 69). I am not so sure that the equation is such a straightforward one, there are no human beings nor any other sign of culture mentioned in the poem and the meaning could well be much more intimate, as is often the case in Miller’s poetry. The lyric, however, certainly focuses on the panic up against a powerful, unstoppable force - the river waters as a «giddy gyre» – acting violently both against the land and its harmless living creatures: 

[…]
Swirling in a giddy gyre
Down the brown Zambesi flood
Comes an island – torn entire
With tendon reeds and brackish blood,
Prised from its moorings in the silent mud,
Bearing on its swinging arc
A herd of buck, alive, aground,
With anguished eyes, their wet flanks dark
With sweat. The water gubbles round
Their sucking hoofprints moon the mud with sound.
The sliding scenery repeats
The gliding greenery of fear
[…]
(Miller: 1990, 70) 

To make connections between this scene and the Western presence in Southern Africa is undoubtedly a temptation which has a point and is bolstered in the final lines: «Wrenched from our continent, we blunder / And lacking weather-sense for guide / Our green uncharted islands sink in ravelled floods, blind-eyed» (Miller: 1990, 70). 

If The Floating Island’s enigmatic meaning can be adapted to a variety of private and political situations, the works of Yvette Christiansë (1954) are far more explicit and engage with a precise island and identifiable seascapes. Christiansë’s two collections, Castaway (1999) and Imprendehora (2009), bring to the fore the role played in local and global history by the two Oceans merging in front of the South African coasts. Re-establishing the slave trade routes across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, both collections give broad relevance to the isle of St. Helena. A topical location in Western history for being the site where Napoleon was exiled and died, the island also features in local history as the place where many slaves died, where the Zulu king Dinizulu was banished and thousands of Boers made prisoners by the British army during the Anglo-Boer Wars were secluded. A prison, a place for segregation which witnessed desperation, suffering and death, St. Helena is also connected, in Christiansë’s personal records, to issues of birth, life and beginning, being the place where her own grandmother was born: 

My grandmother’s island is
Wrapped in its own ocean and a fog
That whispers and sings to itself
Since lighthouse and watermarked maps
put reefs out of business and
exiles no longer smoulder into their diaries
in the gloom of rock and rain.
(Christiansë: 1999, 1) 

For the poet, as well as for all those who descend from the slaves and whose roots disappeared in the middle passage, the sea, as Gabeba Baderoon has underlined, is both the theatre of violence and destruction, and a place of origin: «the oceans are also a connecting tissue to memories of a life before and outside of slavery» (Baderoon: 2009, 95). Up to very recent times though, slavery was a repressed issue in South African historiography, swallowed, as Zoë Wicomb (1998) argued, by a collective amnesia involving, for different reasons, all ethnic groups. South Africa started re-considering ‘its’ own middle passage only very recently. Christiansë’s sea can be read as a complex text, hard to decipher because of the massive amount of information it carries in terms of memories and suggestions, bringing back alternative narratives made up of oral tales, private remembrances, associations with other waters and contradicting the official versions of history and geography, as in Geography Lesson: 

[…]
“Name the largest river in…”
The Nile, Reverend Mother.
The Conga, Reverend Mother.
The… The… river
that flows from my grandmother
through my mother, into
me and my sister and now
the great-grandson where it waits.
[…]
“Who was the first to…?”
Vasco de Gama. Bartholomew Diaz.
Gray-faced men facing out into the
salt, their faces eaten each living
second by the wind; their heads
rest points for gulls and children’s
careless attention on school tours.
Men laid out across continents and
oceans, measuring the world into
scales in a trader’s warehouse.
[…]
(Christiansë: 1999, 57) 

With Imprendehora3 Christiansë seizes the opportunity to give voice to all those silenced by history, especially women since they were twice repressed (as women and as slaves). The final composition titled Ship’s Register provides a numbered list of names, from n. 343 to 372, supplied by sex, age, stature, supposed parents, particular physical marks, alternating with lines spoken by different lyrical first persons. The multifunctional role of water is outspoken: 

Water. Never enough.
To drink. To bathe.
Water. Too much.
To drown. To swim.
No-yes water brought me,
Put me here. No-yes
Water punched me away.
(Christiansë: 2009, 87) 

Urban landscapes 

Among the variety of landscapes so far examined, urban scenarios should not be left aside, even though they do not constitute a recurrent topic in women’s poetry. Once again, Ruth Miller features as an interesting landmark. Compared to the rest of her production, Library Gardens (Johannesburg) (1965) is a far more referential composition which helps us in defining Miller’s position vis à vis with South African politics and culture. Library Gardens is the central library in Johannesburg; the building was assigned to this function in 1935 having previously been a site for a huge informal market, then a colonial post office and finally, in 1910, the City Hall. Library Gardens is located in what used to be the largest square in town, around which, at the turn of the century, the city of Johannesburg, as we know it today, developed. A highly significant place - the first library in the country which opened as early as 1974 to all races – Library Gardens is a palimpsest of South African urban development and its evocation in Miller’s poem refigures the trite dichotomy of nature versus culture: 

Pagoda-pink the foxgloves stand
And stare me out with scentless pride;
Culture has made them pale and bland,
Their scalloped lips with red are dyed.
From each bell lolls a tongue of pollen.
Beauty alone could look so sullen.

Bottle-lit and brown as earth
The tramp leans on his jangled knees
And stares between his distant feet
Where shoes grin toes enlarged with dirt.
While pigeons strut on salmon legs,
He drains his death to life’s last dregs.

Beneath the Latin tag the shade
Rears around the metal doors.
Cold rings hang from lion’s jaws,
The steps are shadowed with black blades.
And leather spines, in lofty racks
Stand royally, untouched by Blacks.
(Miller: 1990, 84) 

The scene depicted juxtaposes the personified foxgloves, whose natural beauty has been mortified by their misuse/abuse in culture, against the depiction of a drunkard, «brown as earth», leaning on his knees, surrounded by indifferent pigeons, dazed, dirty and wearing worn-out shoes as if coming from a long rambling. In a way reminiscent, by opposition, of Tennyson’s Ulysses who, rejecting forced immobility in Ithaca, wants to drink «life to the lees» (Tennyson, line 7), Miller’s tramp, immobile, «drains his death to life’s last dregs». In the final lines it is the library, though, which plays the part of the main character. Its Latin tag, reminding us that books are the treasure ‘house’ of the mind/soul (Libri Thesaurus Animi, recites even today the inscription on the façade), creates a disturbing contrast with the body of the homeless in the previous stanza and anticipates the idea of ‘misplacement’ which has already informed the foxgloves and will inform the books (kept in), the Blacks (at the time of the poem not allowed to get in), and the function of culture in the last lines. The image of the metal doors reinforces the idea of a separation between worlds. Nature itself is objectified in the lion bas-relief on the entrance, a possibly aggressive warning strengthening once more a frontier, and culture remains immobile and useless in the ironical ‘royal’ image of rows of books which Blacks were not allowed to touch. 

Although Johannesburg features in many poems, especially those by male writers, Cape Town is the South African city normally providing artists with a stunning landscape to exploit: the special light, the sea and Table Mountain as a backdrop. De Kok dedicates three poems to Cape Town and although the titles, Cape Town Morning, Cape Town by Day and Cape Town by Night, wink at a postcard’s kind of repertoire, the texts discard all romanticism and go directly to the less attractive core of the South African urban landscape. Cape Town Morning provides a good example: 

Winter has passed. The wind is back.
Window panes rattle old rust,
summer rising.

Street children sleep, shaven mummies in sacks,
eyelids weighted by dreams of coins,
beneath them treasure of small knives.

Flower sellers add fresh blossoms
to yesterday’s blooms, sour buckets
filled and spilling.

And trucks digest the city’s sediment
men gloved and silent
in the municipal jaws.
(de Kok: 1997, 25) 

In the first stanza de Kok focuses on the change of season; Cape Town’s poor children appear in the second stanza; flowers in the third (Cape Town hosts one of the most beautiful botanical gardens in the whole world and South Africa in general is renowned for its flowers), and the street cleaners in the last stanza. If we look at the poem we see that the first stanza anticipates the rest. The cycle of the seasons, the wind moving the window panes so as to provoke the sound of «old» rust, a corruption (of iron) rooted in time. The human landscape of the poem relies on its ultimate outcasts, poor children, living-dead (de Kok wrote many poems on street children, orphaned by Hiv/Aids and possibly sick themselves). As mummies, frozen in time, they sleep outdoors and dream of better worlds while in fact they are ready to defend themselves/attack the others with the knives they keep hidden. Every morning the flower sellers add new flowers to the decaying ones. There is a powerful contrast between the dramatic impact of the second stanza and the frivolous subject of the third. Above all these images stands the rubbish lorry which, like a monster, daily devours the rotten leftovers of the city while indifferent cleaners quietly do their job. As in William Blake’s London, injustice is exhibited; no comments interfere with a present tense in which we feel actions are mechanically performed every day in a never-ending cycle preventing the future to develop. Children should be the future, while cut flowers die. 

II. Landskap in the poetry of Ingrid Jonker, Antjie Krog, Wilma Stockenström, Diana Ferrus and Ronelda Kamfer (Francesca Terrenato, Sapienza) 

A distinctive trait of mainstream Afrikaans poetry was to find evidence for the ‘natural’ relationship between the people and the land, which would justify the white presence in South Africa and its right to own the land. This tradition dates back to the first decades of the twentieth century, when Afrikaans was officially recognized, becoming the banner of Afrikaner Nationalism. The authors and poems presented in this survey, in their refusal of apartheid ideology and of its heritage, aim at disrupting this exclusive territorial appropriation through language. Fragments of a South African geography serve here to renegotiate the connection and/or identification of the lyrical subjects with the land. Afrikaans women poets partake of the unconventional approach to landscape detected in the poems in English earlier in these pages. The complex connotations of these elements in the different texts help us detect the ethical, symbolical, historical and/ or political potential of waterscapes and landscapes. Physical elements playing a meaningful role in the construction of this relationship can be organized in two clusters centering around Water (ocean, rocks, and coasts) and Land (veld, vlei and mountains), respectively. That the individual’s relationship with landscape was, and still is, highly problematic is evident in the surviving perception of a segregated landscape also in post-apartheid poems; a possible reaction to this is to be seen in the idea of a reconciled ‘wordscape’ made of tales and verse. 

Waterscapes 

A striking feature in the production of these poets is that waterscapes abound, as opposed to a traditional interest, in South African poetry, for the land, the mountains, or the cities. This evidence brings us back to Shapcott’s evocation of those «edges of territory and language, home and body, land and water» (Shapcott: 2000, 45) women writers are attracted to. This recurring presence of water has been identified by Guarducci as a distinctive trait also in the poems discussed in the previous paragraphs. The sea is a prominent element in Ingrid Jonker’s work and life (1933-1965). Her suicide by drowning in 1965 has provided her with the dramatic aura of a poète maudit, and many of her verses may be read as a prophecy of her death. The daughter of a National Party’s foreman, she deserves to be counted among the dissident white writers under apartheid. She is best known for her poem Die Kind wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga (The child who was shot dead by the soldiers at Nyanga, 1960, published in 1963), written on the occasion of the killing of a child by the South African police. This poem, quoted by Nelson Mandela in his inaugural speech in 1994, starts with the widely resonating lines: «The child is not dead/The child lifts his fists to his mother/who shouts: Africa!»4. 

In the following early text by Jonker, Ontvlugting (Escape, 1956)5, composed in rhyming couplets, the coastal landscape of Gordon Bay (where the poet lived as a child) is posited as a refuge from Valkenburg (the hospital for mental illnesses where she and her mother before her were admitted):  

(Jonker: 2000, 10). 

The marine landscape is home to creatures that partake her desire for freedom (the tadpoles), her confinement (the barking dog), her frustration and ‘hunger’ for love (the seagull with its «famished flights»). The lonely cry of both dog and seagull allows a closer identification between those animals and the poet, alone in her writing and offering memories from a dead past. This clarifies the following reference to the self as a god who shaped a lover, or a younger ‘I’, now lost, leading in turn to the final image of death by water. We face here a personal landscape, assembling remembrances from a youth that forebodes the present distress. 

South African scholar Louise Viljoen has investigated the pervading presence of hints to ‘literary mothers’ (older Afrikaans women poets) in Antjie Krog’s work (Viljoen: 2009, 15). Krog (1958) is familiar to anybody at home in South African recent history for being the author of the documentary novel on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Country of My Skull (1998). Her writing, according to her definition, is «split by languages into genre and theme» (Krog: 2003, 249): English is her language for prose, Afrikaans is her tool for verse. An interesting comparison can be drawn between Jonker’s Escape and Krog’s Paternoster (1995)6:  

(Krog: 2013, 54). 

Krog, with Jonker a key-figure in Afrikaans poetry, overtly links her lines with those of her predecessor, but reverses Jonker’s ‘Ophelian’ topos of the forlorn, drowned woman into an assertion of gendered empowerment (see Viljoen: 20071). The stormy sea is confronted by a female I steadily anchored to the land through a rock. The feminine body, evoked through sexually-laden parts such as thighs, pelvis, breasts, is where the rebellion takes place; the use of sexually hinting interjections like «fucking» (fokken) and the original Afrikaans se moer (a typical Capetonian insult involving someone’s mother, rendered in English with «like hell»), is also telling in this context. The identification of this triumphant body with the soil, as opposed to the sea, is expressed in the form of a projection woman-land (her arms recall the coastal line). Among the many hints for interpretation we can mention the connection with the political situation of the country (consider the date: the free woman reflects the freed country after 1994) and, in a broader context, the rebellion against the patriarchal Afrikaner ideology relegating women to the role of volksmoeder (Brink: 1990; Vincent: 2012), mother of the Afrikaner people, held responsible for its racial purity. Both Jonker and Krog, each with her own peculiarities and time-related sensitivity, consciously embody an alternative to this model, and challenge the ethical curse of their mother tongue by writing against apartheid in the language of apartheid, as appears in their more engaged poems. The controversial relationship they establish with language and land as ‘dissident oppressors’, is acutely described by Stander and Willemse as a suspension between «privilege and concern» (Stander-Willemse: 1992) that causes a haunting sense of displacement, or rather misplacement, and a desire to acquire a different kind of ‘African-ness’. 

In Ooskus (East Coast, 1973), Wilma Stockenström (1933) turns the idyllic topos of the ‘motherland’ into an image of decay, rather than identifying the lyrical self with the coastal landscape. A gendered representation of the land is not unusual for these poets, but it typically results in a positive and sometimes ecstatic identification between ‘woman’ and ‘land’. The same author had followed this topos in a love poem from 1970, Africa Liefde (Africa Love), in which a woman-island craves for the «brown body» of the mainland, representing her lover and the continent at once. In Ooskus, this reversal serves the evident political stance of the poem, barely hidden under the rich imagery:  

(Stockenström: 2000, 70). 

The east coast is home to oil and coal plants and refineries. This deadly mother, the «toadstool woman», her body «curled up», with «cancerous cities» as breasts, nourishes and consolidates the «white roots», at the same time giving birth to a generation of opponents. Their call to rebellion is the same heard in Jonker’s poem Die kind: it is one of the more or less explicit quotations from her work in the poetry of other Afrikaans women authors. 

Physical displacement and subsequent uprooting and isolation of black and coloured communities are part of the cruel legacy of apartheid. The experience and feeling of displacement often inform literary texts concerned with the black and coloured diaspora. In discussing black Afrikaans writing, Viljoen also rightly stresses the presence of an underlying, meta-literary form of displacement of the black and coloured authors with respect to the Afrikaans literary canon. She follows the cues given by Deleuze and Guattari, to define Afrikaans literature stemming from the oppressed black and coloured communities as a ‘minor literature’. When the literature of a minority adopts the language of the majority it «subverts the hegemonic structures and questions its own displacement from the centre» (Viljoen: 20072, 96-97) in a process of deterritorialization of that language from its tradition and mainstream values. This certainly applies to the work of the young poet Ronelda Kamfer, who focuses in her second collection, grond/Santekraam (2011), on the forced removal of a fishermen’s community from the coastal village Skipskop. The memory of a lost ocean pervades Kamfer’s poems although they never indulge in the descriptive approach consistent with the European colonizers’ tradition. As other poems in the collection, oorvertel 2 (retelling 2, 2011)7 has the form of a brief monologue by an old inhabitant of the fishermen’s village:  

(Kamfer: 2012, 26). 

The landscape elements and historical places are present, immanent because of their individual and collective meaning: a place, Skipskop, is defined by the people who lived in it and their fate; no matter how marginal, it establishes its centrality through the presence of its old inhabitants, which introduces the theme of District Six as a symbol for the forced removals, and the consequent under-exposure of similar experiences by virtue of their marginality. A third place has a key role in the poem: St. Helena island, one of the historical slave trade ports in Africa, and the place of origin of a grandmother. This reference in Kamfer echoes the recurring presence of the island in Yvette Christiansë’s collections. The ‘I’ in the poem thus connects the more recent experience of uprooting and displacement with the history of the slave trade. Among the multiple belongings and creolized formations advocated by Zoë Wicomb (Wicomb: 1998) and Zimitri Erasmus (Erasmus: 2001) as elements forming the fluid identity of South African coloureds («brown people» in the poem), an ancestry can be traced back to the journey of enslaved people through the ocean. This was an element also underlined by Guarducci earlier in this article in relation to Christiansë’s poetry. Baderoon argues that: «turning one’s gaze to the sea recovers evidence of slave lives otherwise erased from folk memory» (Baderoon: 2009, 89). In the closing lines the haunting ocean (curiously wearing the maleficent red shoes from Andersen’s tale, or the ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz) is therefore both the sea from which Skipskop’s community was removed and the sea that the offspring of enslaved people see as ‘home’, an all but reassuring and stable place of origin. 

Landscapes 

An ancestral mother belonging to the history of colonization, and a symbolic figure in the struggle for the restitution of dignity to the original khoisan inhabitants of South Africa, Sara Baartman (or Sarah Bartmann) inspired Diana Ferrus’s A poem for Sarah Bartmann (1998)8. This poem features a different ‘home’, rooted in soil, located in the veld. Ferrus is an Afrikaans poet, but this particular poem by her has circulated widely in its English version, playing a role, as is known, in the final return of Sara Baartman’s rests (once part of the collection of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) to her country of birth. Sara’s grave lies now in the Gamtoos River Valley in the Eastern Cape and has been declared a national heritage site. In our context Ferrus’s poem illustrates a double restitution: that of the martyrized body of the so-called Hottentot Venus to her homeland, and that of the veld landscape, appropriated by Afrikaner culture, to its first, pre-colonial settlers. 

I’ve come to take you home - home, remember the veld? the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees the air is cool there and the sun does not burn. I have made your bed at the foot of the hill, your blankets are covered in buchu and mint, the proteas stand in yellow and white and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs as it hobbles along over little stones.

I have come to wretch you away - away from the poking eyes of the man-made monster who lives in the dark with his clutches of imperialism who dissects your body bit by bit […] (Ferrus: 2011, 15). 

The lyric description of the environment records the names of plants spread in the Western Cape, a natural world bearing no sign of human hand, identified as «home» in the first line. This natural world forms a sharp contrast with the depiction of the evil Western civilized world (dark, populated by monsters, imperialistic). The African veld and Europe can also be read here as gendered opposites: the woman belongs to the realm of vegetation, the man responsible for her rape and dissection lives in a barren land. 

Dissident poets with an Afrikaner background tend to problematize their sense of belonging to the land, to the veld in this case. In Jonker’s Madeliefjes in Namakwaland (Daisies in Namaqualand, 19639) the depiction of the veld as the realm of wild flora and fauna reminds somehow Ferrus’ stone, but the comparison here is drawn between the idyllic grassland (another name for Namaqualand is ‘the flower desert’) and the political landscape of apartheid.  

(Jonker: 2000, 94). 

An interesting detail is the fact that, as elsewhere in Jonker’s oeuvre, when criticism is expressed by the poet against the establishment, it is frequently accompanied by references to a suffering self; pain, constriction and death drive characterize her poetic I (see here the reference to drowning), that clearly embodies the «land torn apart», «our divided home» bearing the scars of «wire fences, camps and locations». The final lines take the reader back to the grassland in search for a ‘something’, natural sound or healing word, that is confined beyond comprehension. 

An ambivalent feeling towards language, in their case ‘compromised’ Afrikaans, is to be found in all authors, women and men with any cultural background, whose literary activity shows some form of engagement. It is no surprise then that the «word killed in action» in Jonker’s poem is echoed in the second verse («had I language I could write») of Krog’s Grond (Land, 1994)10:  

(Krog: 1995, 72). 

It is a poem with a distinct socio-historical contextualization (the Dutch ancestors and the occupied land), and characterized by an abundance of first person pronouns, which qualifies it as an ‘identity poem’, trying to come to terms with an Afrikaner affiliation, as such not infrequent in Krog’s work. Landscape enters in the second section after the land rejects the ‘I’, no matter how deeply she tries to identify herself with the soil and the nature, by physically covering, embracing its features and creatures. The evoked landscape is a vlei in the Western Cape. Once again plants are named in detail (the sort of eucalyptus known as blue gum, the Karoo acacia, in the original) and animals, in this case cattle, are part of it. The act of lowering the horns and drinking (with the minute description of jowls and dripping gums, and the rippling on the water’s surface) is given here an overexposure that can only be explained when compared to the position of the ‘I’: she is ready to renounce her privilege, humble, and anxious to quench her thirst for recognition as a daughter of the land, as a righteous inhabitant. On this same metaphor Ingrid de Kok builds her own ritual of regained familiarity with the land in To drink its water, discussed by Guarducci in these pages. As opposed to de Kok’s successful return home, Krog feels that the refusal is stronger than her desire: the last lines define her love as «fruitless», a term forming a sharp contrast with the Afrikaner boasted ability to turn the desert into a prosperous farm. 

Towering above the coast, the city and the veld with its spectacular flat top, Tafelberg (Table Mountain) is also a recurring presence in poems. It is, and always was, ‘the’ mountain, overlooking the land and the capital, a witness to its history: its slopes hosted the pre-contact khoi tribes and it announced to European sailors the proximity of the Cape at the outset of the complex colonial history of South Africa. Among the many occurrences of its purely physical or personified presence in Krog’s poetical geography, it is worth mentioning the long poem elke dag kan ek met jou maak asof jy myne is (every day I treat you as if you were mine, 2006)11. Here the colonizer-engraver, while directly addressing the mountain, describes its charm for the European settlers in search of a rational landmark in the destabilizing landscape:  

(Krog: 2006). 

The author’s voice then concludes in a final note: «…the mountain was the forerunner/of how apartheid and forgiveness were applied/against a continent’s clamour». 

In contrast with the colonizer’s view, in Kamfer’s poem grond (land, 2011)12 the mountain is directly involved in the sense of displacement affecting eradicated communities. The massive rock fastens the land to the world, but because of its absent-mindedness a piece of land is swept away by the wind: that land loses its quality of ‘home’, and its inhabitants are forced to leave. The mountain does not prevent the disintegration of the land; it is indifferent to the fate of humans, while the reader is left to wonder whether the disruptive power of the white rule is here present in absence, or programmatically understated:  

(Kamfer: 2012, 12). 

Segregated Landscape and ‘Wordscape’ 

The poems selected in this survey provide us with an insight into how landscape in poetry develops and takes different forms, and into how women authors select and arrange elements and to what purpose. In general, landscape still plays a prominent role as a theme and on a metaphorical level in Afrikaans poetry, but some clichés are absent by virtue of the positioning of the poetic ‘I’ in a postcolonial condition and/or in a gendered, female relationship with space. The physical constitutive elements help contrive a vision which is seldom detached from the socio-political context of the land: the issue of ‘home’ is particularly felt by all authors, either because they choose to give voice to eradicated individuals or communities, or because they express a sense of misplacement as ‘dissident oppressors’, desperately in search of an ‘innocent’ tie with the land. Landscape and politics are therefore often indissolubly bound. Poetry gives voice to the poets’ different views and options: words can harm or heal, denounce or reconcile, divide or unite. The function of landscape changes accordingly. Two texts, one by Kamfer, one by Krog, will help us see how. 

Kamfer’s poetry often restates the binary opposition we/they, where ‘we’ stands for the oppressed, the uprooted, the wretched, and ‘they’ for the dominant white. Or at least this is the inescapable categorization of the world as it is felt by her characters. In Kamfer’s vision apartheid lingers on in people’s lives and the racial, social and economic divides (older than apartheid itself) are still part of the individual’s perception of space. This is evident in her epilogue Klippenkust13: in the poem, uncle Bigfish Visser, an old fisherman from Skipskop, looks at the two sides of the sea landscape that used to be his home before the forced removal. There is a ‘rich’ side, with tourist resorts and restaurants. Here, people there take pictures and will never understand the suffering of a whole community being pulled out of their homes; they don’t have a clue of what really happened. «They» and «we» inhabit different landscapes and histories. In old uncle Fisherman’s perception ‘we’ can only identify ‘our’ homeland with the «heavenwatersea» expanse, where each of us carries the wrecks of her/his past:  

(Kamfer: 2012, 102). 

A strong belief in the political power of words is shared by all poets discussed here when we consider the fact that they use their tainted language as an antidote to uprooting, suffering, or sense of guilt: their poetry, even when declaring harsh facts as Kamfer’s does, represents a process of reconciliation with a mother tongue bearing a historical weight. Reimagining the words, taking them back to their core and arranging them in order to convey alternative meanings is the task all these poets face. This is especially true for key words such as ‘language’, ‘land’ and ‘landscape’. The hope for reconciliation, which, at a more general level, provides the basis for the transition to post-apartheid is, encompasses for Antjie Krog a larger, national landscape made of words, where stories are told and verses are written in all the languages of South Africa. Some lines from her long poem Country of Grief and Grace14 evoke this vision of a reconciled ‘wordscape’:  

(Krog: 2002, 63). 

References 

Alexander, Neville, 2011. «Afrikaans: Success or Failure?», in Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity. The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts, ed. by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, vol. 2, Oxford, Oxford UP, pp. 11-22. Baderoon, Gabeba, 2009. The African Oceans - Tracing the Sea as Memory of the Slavery in South African Literature and Culture, «Research in African Literatures», 40: 4, pp. 89-107. Beningfield, Jennifer, 2006. The Frightened Land. Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century, London and New York, Routledge. Heywood, Christopher, 2004. A History of South African Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge UP. Brink, Elsabe, 1990. «Man-made Women: Gender, Class and the Ideology of the Volksmoeder», in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. by Cherryl Walker, Claremont (SA), David Philip Publishers, pp. 273-291 Christiansë, Yvette, 1999. Castaway, Durham and London, Duke UP. Christiansë, Yvette, 2009. Imprendehora, Cape Town, Kwela. Coetzee, J.M., 1988, White Writing: on the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Hale, Yale UP. DeCaires Narain, Denise, 2007. Landscape and Poetic Identity in Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry, «Ariel», 38:2-3, pp. 41-64. de Kok, Ingrid, 2006. Seasonal Fires. New and Selected Poems, New York, Seven Stories Press. de Kok, Ingrid, 2002. Terrestrial Things, Plumstead-Roggebaai, Snailpress/Kwela. de Kok, Ingrid, 1997. Transfer, Plumstead, Snailpress. Erasmus, Zimitri (ed.), 2001. Coloured by History. Shaped by Place. New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in CapeTown, Cape Town, Kwela Books. Ferrus, Diana, 2011. I’ve Come To Take You Home, Kuils River, Diana Ferrus Publishers. Gunner, Liz, 1996.«Names and the Land: Poetry of Belonging and Unbelonging: a Comparative Approach», in Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. By K. Darian-Smith, L. Gunner, S. Nuttall, London, Routledge, pp. 115-130. Jonker, Ingrid, 1956. Ontvlugting, Kaapstad, Culemborg Uitgewers. Jonker, Ingrid, 2000. Ik herhaal je, translated by Gerrit Komrij, Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Podium. Jonker, Ingrid, 2007. Black Butterflies, translated by Antjie Krog and André Brink, Kaapstad, Human & Rousseau. Kamfer, Ronelda, 2012. Santenkraam, translated by Alfred Schaffer, Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Podium. Krog, Antjie, 1995. Gedigte 1989-1995, Groenkloof, Hond. Krog, Antjie, 2002. Kleur komt nooit alleen, translated by Robert Dorsman, Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Podium. Krog, Antjie, 2003. A Change of Tongue, Johannesburg, Random House. Krog, Antjie, 2006. Verweerskrif, Houghton, Umuzi. Krog, Antjie, 2013. Skinned, New York, Seven Stories. Metelerkamp, Joan, 1992. Ruth Miller: Father’s Law or Mother’s Lore?, «Current Writing», 4 (October), pp. 57-71. Miller, Ruth, 1990. Poems, Prose, Plays, edited & introduced by Lionel Abrahams, Cape Town, The Carrefour Press. Murray, Jessica, 2011. ‘They can never write the landscapes out of their system’: Engagements with the South African Landscape, «Gender, Place & Culture: a Journal of Feminist Geography», 18:1, pp. 83-97. Ndlovu, Malika Lueen, 2008. Truth is Both Spirit and Flesh, Mowbray, Lotsha Publications. Odendaal, Pieter (ed.), 2013. Many Tongues. A Translation Anthology, Slip, online edition. Rich, Adrienne, 1987. Blood, Bread and Poetry. Selected Prose 1979-1985, London, Virago. Shapcott, Jo, 2000. «Confounding Geography», in Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, ed. by A. Mark and D. Rees-Jones, Basingstoke, Macmillan, pp. 40-46. Stander, Christell and Willemse, Hein (eds.),1992. Winding Through Nationalism, Patriarchy, Privilege and Concern: a Selected Overview of Afrikaans Women Writers, «Research in African Literatures», 23: 3, pp. 5-24. Stockenström, Wilma, 2000. Vir die bysiendeleser. Voor de bijziende lezer, translated by Robert Dorsman, Amsterdam/ Antwerpen, Atlas. Viljoen, Louise, 2007a. Antjie Krog en haar literêre moeders: die werking van ’n vroulike tradisie in die Afrikaanse poësie, «Tydskrif vir letterkunde», XLIV, 2, pp. 5-28. Viljoen, Louise, 2007b. Displacement in the Literary Texts of Black Afrikaans Writers in South Africa, «Journal of Literary Studies», 21:1-2, pp. 93-118. Viljoen, Louise, 2009. Onsongehoorde sort: beskouings oor die werk van Antjie Krog, Stellenbosch, SUN MeDIA. Vincent, Louise, 2012. From Suffrage to Silence: the South African Afrikaner Nationalist Women’s Parties, 1915-1931, in Women of the Right, ed. by Kathleen M. Blee and Sandra McGee Deutsch, University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 132-146. Wicomb, Zoë, 1998. «Shame and Identity: the Case of the Coloured in South Africa», in Writing South Africa. Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970-1995, ed. by D. Attridge and R. Jolly, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, pp. 91-107. Willemse, Hein, 1996. «The Invisible Margins of Afrikaans Literature», in Afrikaans Literature. Recollection Redefinition Restitution, ed. by Robert Kriger and Ethel Kriger, Amsterdam, Rodopi. pp. 91-102 Xaba, Makhosazana, 2008. Tongues of their Mothers, Scottsville, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. 

Note 

1 The same can be observed in many postcolonial contexts, as Denise DeCaires Narain has successfully demonstrated (see DeCaires Narain 2007). 

1 Although Coetzee extensively engages with Olive Schreiner and Pauline Smith’s prose, when he analyses South African poetry he mentions no South African woman writing in English; he only makes a quick reference to Eden by the Afrikaner poet Ina Rousseau (1926-2005). 

2 Imprendehora was the name of the slave ship seized by the British Royal navy and re-directed to St. Helena with her human cargo after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. 

3 See for the English translation: The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry, ed. by Stella and Frank Chipasula, London, Heinemann 1995, 151. 

4 Translated from Afrikaans into English by Antjie Krog and André Brink (Jonker: 2007, w.p.). 

5 Translated into English by the author (Krog: 2013, 54). 

2 Translated into English by Pieter Odendaal (Odendaal: 2013). 

3 English version by the author (Ferrus: 2011, 15). 

4 Translated into English by Antjie Krog and André Brink (Jonker: 2007, 98). 

5 Translated into English by Karen Press (Krog: 2013, 110). 

6 Translated into English by the author (Krog: 2013, 116). 

7 Translation mine. 

8 Translation mine. 

9 Translated into English by the author (Krog: 2013, 143).