Language as a Cultural Barrier In South African Literature Post-2000

Abstract

Justin Cartwright's White Lightning (2002) and Damon Galgut's The Impostor (2008) address white South Africans' complicity in apartheid from a decidedly post-apartheid perspective. Like J.M. Coetzee's powerful and controversial novel Disgrace (1999), each of these more recent novels narrates a middle-aged white South African man's return to pastoral space as a retreat from such political realities as affirmative action and globalization. I read these novels, in part, as responses to a traditional Afrikaans genre, the plaasroman, or farm novel. By revisiting this genre in the decades following the end of official apartheid, Cartwight and Galgut go beyond merely refreshing an outdated literary mode. By engaging with language and its inherent limitations - the focus of Paige Sisley's engaging essay - both authors effectively confront a set of cultural mores responsible both for some of the most systematically heinous crimes ever committed against humanity. The main characters' relations to the land, to people, and to non-human animals include ambivalence, ownership, and terror. As Paige argues in her essay, language itself reinforces these problematic relations by announcing difference more loudly than belonging. Though both characters claim to be seeking some kind of cultural understanding in the wake of monumental social and environmental changes, an understanding that will enable them simultaneously to atone for apartheid and emerge from the wilderness prepared to participate in the New South Africa, they struggle to transgress the barriers that have been erected between themselves and the world.

-Dr. Travis Mason