ABSTRACT
For Ndebele, the space of creativity is the only space in which we can ‘break free’
and ‘make a home’.
Ndebele’s intellectual sense of the critical involvement of landscape in
writing, and his awareness of the ability of landscape to reflect interrupted narra-
tives and fragmented histories, is made all the keener by his personal experience
of exile and dislocation. He speaks here, in his public capacity as intellectual, to
his personal feelings of alienation born of exile from his home, of the need to
make a home within the personal space of creativity, and of the implications this
has for the meaningful rewriting of the South African landscape. For Ndebele,
the framing of landscape as ‘blank’ is the first step in a process of a rewriting
which acknowledges the burden of pain, violence and dispossession encoded
within landscape, as well as embraces the possibility of the recreation of new
post-apartheid identities and narratives.
