Why I Write

At first it was easy to answer this question. I said that I wrote because I could not speak (a curious answer from a garrulous person) - because as a black person, an outsider in Britain, I somehow did not have the right to speak. When health visitors or shopkeepers spoke to me in pidgin they constructed for me the choice of silence, of replying in their pidgin, or of replying in a caricatured voice of Her Majesty. Never in my own. My license to speak as a teacher or to speak in the domestic domain never transferred to that of the public, to the arena outside the immediate classroom or the home. This silence rendered me ineffective within institutions, marked me as an outsider and writing seemed to offer a way out of it. I have always tried to write, as a child and as a student but never sustained it. There is a huge leap between having the potential to write - most literate people do - and actually producing a text, an act which also always depends on material conditions

Slow man and the real : a lesson in reading and writing

This essay addresses the problems of reading Slow Man (Coetzee 2005) through tracking its engagement with various levels of the real as well as its representation of the complex relationship between author, narrator and character. The real difficulty that besets the writer trying to produce a story from an inchoate idea is explored through the concept of substitution, one of the hermeneutic keys that structures the novel. Thus I examine the continuous slippage between the “real” and represent-ation. The novel’s turning of itself inside out is read, like Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture, “House”, as an absence-as-presence that also points to its overt engagement with photography

Translations in the yard of Africa

In his account of the style in which Pauline Smith represents Afrikaners, her 'faux-naief' translation or transfer from Afrikaans to English, J.M Coetzee identifies the grammatical error of aspect as evidence that there is no actual Afrikaans original behind the archaic-sounding, ethnicised English: 'no-one speaking his own language makes errors of aspect: the time-system of the verb is too fundamental to language, and therefore to conceptualisation for that to happen'. Two issues in this position relate to my argument about Disgrace as a text that struggles with translation as concept-metaphor for the postapartheid condition: firstly, the question of an original language Coetzee expects to find behind the English 'translation' that claims to retain its trace; and secondly, the grammatical aspect of the perfective that not only preoccupies Lurie, the novel's central character, but also in terms of cultural translation marks the arrival at the target language/culture. In the following examination of the ways in which cultural translation is figured in the text, I also consider the relationship between translation and what has been called the period of transition in South Africa

David's story

Unfolding in South Africa, at the moment of Nelson Mendela's release from prison in 1991, this novel explores the life and vision of a male activist who is part of the world of spies and saboteurs in the liberation movement - a world seldom revealed to outsiders

South African short fiction and orality

This volume originated in the second conference on postcolonial short fiction organized in Nice by Jacqueline Bardolph. The scope has been subsequently enlarged to cover most geographical areas and make it more comprehensive, resulting in a total of thirty-five contributions analyzing a broad spectrum of stories. If theoretical approaches to this often undervalued yet multifaceted genre receive due attention, the essays closely scrutinize specific texts. Some of the writers discussed are exclusive practitioners of the short story (Mansfield, Munro), but others (Achebe, Armah, Atwood, Carely, Rushdie) are also well-known novelists, a duality of interest that allows stimulating comparisons between shorter and longer works by the same authors. The origin of the short story in orality is a topic frequently addressed by contributors, who comment in particular on the use of dialect and dance rhythms in Selvon and Mittelholzer, or on circularity and the trickster figure in Thomas King and Ken Saro-Wiwa. Alternatively, they assess the stance adopted by characters or implied authors towards their communities, a stance ranging from marginality (Janet Frame) through apparent rootlessness (Wilding, Gunesekera) to a more or less explicitly formulated sense of belonging (Marshall, Head). Correspondingly, in the case of a multicultural society such as South Africa, the changing political situation has rendered possible new ways of defining whiteness (Isaacson, Gordimer). The status of women (both white and black) emerges as another major theme, with an emphasis on their persistent marginalization. As for the confessional mode, favoured by a number of women writers, it assumes a new form with Janice Kulyk Keefer, who gives the reader the rare pleasure of discovering 'Fox,' her version of what she calls 'displaced autobiography,' or 'creative non-fiction.

Setting intertextuality and the resurrection of the postcolonial

This is not an abstract: this essay responds to the phenomenon of writers being invited "to speak as a writer" at conferences on postcoloniality. My attempt to discuss the setting of my fiction via "the death of the author", to revisit the distinction between writer and narrator, in turn discussed in relation to ... does not lend itself to an abstract. Rather, I must rely on readers' patience and beg their goodwill to follow my text, which cannot claim to be an argument, without the influence of a summary

In Piena Luce

Italian Translation of the novel "Playing in the Light" by Zoe Wicom