ABSTRACT
South African writing over the past decade has provided a fascinating paradigm of a society in transition as it has reflected the changes from a racially divided and repressive apartheid society to a post-apartheid climate of greater tolerance of difference and the non-violent creation of the ‘rainbow nation’ envisaged by Archbishop Tutu. Many writers whose theme had been the stultifying effects of apartheid on people and place were now able to take up new issues in their texts: issues of memory and history; of a changing society; and of new possibilities for literary forms. In the words of poet Ingrid de Kok, this transitional literature was Janusfaced, ‘vigilant of the past, watchful of the future’ (de Kok 1996: 5). Albie Sachs’ provocative paper ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’ published in 1990, four years before South Africa’s first democratic election, suggested that one-dimensional politically committed works and the concept of the artist as ‘cultural worker’ could be replaced by art alive to its own ‘capacity to expose contradictions and reveal hidden tensions’ (Sachs 1991: 118). While there was much controversy in response to this African National Congress ‘position paper’, the sense that old structures needed to be replaced by a literature of transition was and is a resonant one and it has, indeed, given birth to a number of ‘post-apartheid’ works that engage with these contradictions and tensions. In the words of Attwell and Harlow:
South African literature since 1990 has taken upon itself the task of articulating . . . the experiential, ethical and political ambiguities of transition: the tension between memory and amnesia. It emphasizes the imperative of breaking silences necessitated by long years of struggle, the refashioning of identities caught between stasis and change, and the role of culture – or representation – in limiting or enabling new forms of understanding.
