ABSTRACT
The view of Jennifer Davids as poet sans politics reveals itself most saliently in the reviews Searching for words received on publication in 1974. The mode, the quantity, and the content of criticism to which Davids has been subjected have conferred upon her an anomalous status as disenfranchised poet. As much as Jennifer Davids's writing demonstrates the lack of an ostensible engagement with "colouredness," so politics of the Protest and the Black Consciousness literary variety is also noticeably absent from Searching for words. Davids, ever astute in her comprehension of politics, recognizes that she has no legitimate claim to the status of "exile" as it applies to disenfranchised South Africans. In a tellingly self-reflexive moment in "Camp Site," one tinged with self-recrimination, with the promise of narrative development, and with confusion, Davids begins to explicate why she will not own her coloured identity.
