ABSTRACT
Intimacy remains under-theorised in South African fiction. This essay therefore focuses on selected works which all have in common a re-imagining of risk and intimacy in post-apartheid fiction: Achmat Dangor’s Strange Pilgrimages: Short Stories (2013), Makhosazana Xaba’s Running and Other Stories (2013), Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), S.J. Naudé’s The Alphabet of Birds (2014) and Stacy Hardy’s Because the Night (2015). Masande Ntshanga radically reconsiders the risk of HIV infection and its relationship to intimacy. In Achmat Dangor’s short stories, the refuge originally offered by exile is transferred to the transient refuge provided by the bodies of others. Makhosazana Xaba and S.J. Naudé consider same-sex intimacy. Stacy Hardy’s short stories explore sex, longing and alienation. Both Hardy and Xaba in different ways celebrate female sexuality. In reading these works, I investigate whether there is an ‘ethics of risk1’ at work. Risk is not tied to crime, violence, sexually transmitted diseases – although these are all present. Rather risk occurs in the sphere of relationships, of encounters with others, where intimacy itself is a somatic risk which potentially threatens the identity of the protagonists but also offers refuge.
