English in Africa

South Africa-sur-Nemunas1 : Transnational Hinterlands in Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom

Robert Kusek — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The paper investigates the representation of Central Europe and its hinterlands in selected works by 20th-century South African writers. It pays special attention to Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom about Jacobson’s travel to Lithuania in search of the writer’s “middle-European” patrimony. Drawing on previously unpublished archival records, the study argues that Jacobson’s book merges Central European hinterlands (their histories, identities, landscapes) with South African ones in a radical act of re-mapping both areas. The paper also insists on recognising a distinctive mode of conflating Central Europe and South Africa. This hinternational poetics annuls the existing imperial cartography and builds transnational connections between different hinterlands and their pasts. Additionally, the article demonstrates how the need to “unlearn” imperial history allows for a geographic/spatial overlap between the “heart of the country” and the “core of Europe,” as well as creation of a network of transnational solidarity and implication across nations and ethnicities.

“Doing very well in South Africa”: Fiona Melrose, Karel Schoeman, and the Intertextual Afterlives of Woolf ’s

Andrew van der Vlies — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This essay examines two South African responses to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925): Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg (2017), and Karel Schoeman’s Die noorderlig (published in Afrikaans in 1975). Melrose’s novel patterns character and plot directly on Woolf’s with allusions to her biography and to other reworkings of the text. Schoeman’s performs a less obvious homage to Mrs Dalloway in its exploration of the tensions between politics and poetics and formal engagement with the demands of experimentation and realism. The essay assesses these different modes of response, points to Woolf’s influence beyond the anglophone literary world, and positions Schoeman’s work (in particular) as deserving greater attention from those speaking –and writing about–English (and its inheritances) in South Africa.

Some Early Soyinka Letters

Bernth Lindfors — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Among the papers of James Simmons held at the Rose Library of Emory University are nine letters he received from Wole Soyinka as well as one from Soyinka’s British partner, Barbara Dixon, both of whom had been his classmates at Leeds University in the mid-1950s. The letters cover Soyinka’s activities from July 29, 1958, a year after he had graduated from Leeds, until January 13, 1960, just after he returned to Nigeria. During this period Soyinka had worked as a broadcaster for the BBC, been a play reader for the Royal Court Theatre, and a teacher in London schools. He also travelled to Paris seeking employment as a singer. Much of this time he and Barbara were under financial pressure, and their relationship eventually broke up a year after their child had been born. These letters and others like them from later years in his life yield vital information for Soyinka’s future biographers.

Flown Away: Eva Bezwoda’s Life, Death and Poetry

Eva Kowalska — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Eva Bezwoda was a prominent poet in the 1960s and 1970s, who contributed to several South African journals, as well as publishing One Hundred and Three Poems in 1973. Her death by suicide three years later seems congruent with the themes and preoccupations of her work, and was a loss to South Africa’s literary culture at the time. Despite critical attention to her work, after her death her legacy seems to have been forgotten, and her poetry neglected. In this article, I outline what is known of her biography, with a focus on her most productive years as a writer, and the development of her career in relation to recurrent motifs, prominent themes, and relevant details from her poems. I consider the critical reception of her work and engage with archival material, including correspondence from the year before her death with Ad Donker and personal responses to her death by Sheila Fugard and Lionel Abrahams.

Literary Byways in Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way: A Review Essay

Dirk Klopper — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

No Abstract

Obituary: Matthew Colin Noel Shum

The Editors — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

No Abstract

Review

Andrea Thorpe — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

No Abstract