My initial intention is to try to show how, as a poet in South Africa, I suffer from a creative identity crisis. I am a white English-speaking male. I live surrounded by isiXhosa-speaking people. Is my poetry, or will my poetry be, relevant in the ‘New’ South Africa? Is English, the language of the colonial oppressors, the appropriate medium in the post-apartheid milieu? Will my subject matter be relevant? These questions and my attempts at answering them, form the basis of the poetry and the portfolio that accompanies the poems. My absorption with finding a creative ‘voice’, my concerns with the environment and a questioning of what post-apartheid poetry should write about all seem a bit Quixotic, especially to me! But at another level, they are deeply serious. (p. 5.)

My poetry investigates the extraordinary in the everyday, exploring my life as a mother and wife, to find the quiet truths that lie there. Using fresh ways of describing familiar experiences, the poems describe tiny, almost-missed moments and voices that have shaped me. Throughout the collection, I imagine my younger selves commenting on my current self and vice versa. Ultimately, my poems use simple words and clean lines to evoke how I feel (and how I want the reader to feel) in each of the moments they describe.

PhD / M.E.R. Mathivha Centre for African Languages, Arts and Culture

Chapter One will introduce the central area of exploration of this study and establish the main terms of reference and guidelines of the research. Chapter Two will deal with the background and history of the project, and will include a discussion on creative writing as therapy in the context of a prison. Chapter Three will present a critical overview of the project's aims and results, as well as an account of the pedagogical methods employed. It will also analyse the work of three members of the writing group: Vusi Mthembu, Themba Vilakazi and Sibusiso Majola. Chapter Four will outline the socio-political context of my primary research material: a collection of poems written in prison by Bheki Mkhize, Sipho Mkhize and Bhek'themba Mbhele. It will also include a brief biographical account of the three writers, as well as an historical examination of the Seven Days War in Pietermaritzburg in the early nineties. Chapter Five will focus on the three writers' accounts of incarceration, the threat of violence in prison and their resistance through writing to the loss of identity. Chapter Six will deal with the issue of alterity, and the way that the writers represent issues of identity in their poetry, and create spaces of difference and distinction. It will also focus on intertextuality, and analyse the manner in which the writers negotiate the Western tradition of aesthetics in order to stake claim to their own spaces of difference in the prison. Chapter Seven will conclude the study, and will examine contemporary cultural studies theory with specific reference to South Africa. It will also include an overview of the proposition of the research, and elaborate the way forward for a popular culture embracing such findings. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

Touching Brýnstone is the story of Beth, a young journalist who is troubled by misfortunes in her family and work circumstances. In a Pretoria library she is seduced by a book that consoles her and progressively becomes a fetish object. It sparks a journey to Japan, where she arrives to teach English. She is intent on meeting the author, whom she confounds with protagonist and book. This Bildungsroman is an exploration of the complex relationship between inner and outer self, and the struggle towards wholeness. Beth must find a way out of the obsession so that she can return to South Africa with an enriched insight into her shadow self.

M.A. / This dissertation investigates the work of black women poets in South Africa during the period 1970 - 1991, within the context of race and gender politics. The period 1970 - 1991 represents the approximately two decades in which black poetry became recognised as an important development in South African literary studies. Although several studies of the work of black male poets have been written, hitherto no substantial study of the writings of black women poets, in particular, has been undertaken. Although relatively few black women poets published their work during this era, when compared to their male counterparts, this critical survey will attempt to give a broad overview of the poetry black women produced. Focusing on poetry written in English, this dissertation will argue that the majority of black women poets writing during this period harnessed their writing to the anti-Apartheid or liberation struggle in South Africa. Many of these poets regarded their writing as a 'cultural weapon' which could contribute to political transformation, and although few regarded themselves as 'feminist' poets, their poetry reveals a deep concern with gender oppression as well as racial and class oppression. Chapter one, the introduction, focuses on the way in which black South African women poets have been largely ignored, neglected and 'silenced' by the majority of critics. This chapter will also consider some of the factors that may have prevented more black women from producing and publishing poetry: social factors such as education, literacy and access to publication will be explored. The second chapter explores the emergence of South African 'protest poetry', and focuses on the poetry of Jennifer Davids and Gladys Thomas in relation to the 'protest' tradition. It will be argued that while poet Gladys Thomas defined her writing in terms of 'protest' literature, Jennifer Davids produced a more introspective, personal poetry that was primarily concerned with the difficulties of 'finding an individual voice' in the South African environment. The third chapter focuses on the more intensified phase of 'protest poetry' which was produced after 1976 by the growing culture of literary activism in the black townships, and will show how women poets write of the suffering specific to township women. This chapter will also focus on an analysis of gender oppression within the poets' own homes and communities, as well as celebrations of political activities by women. In particular, this chapter concentrates on women's poetry published in the literary magazine, Staffrider, established to promote the work of black writers. The Trade Union Movement was a major influence on literary production during this time, as we shall see from the 'worker poetry' produced by many women in the 1980s. Chapter four will concentrate on the poetry produced by black South African women in exile, most of whom were active in the ANC. It will be argued that rather than producing introspective poetry about the condition of exile, these women harnessed their writing to `the struggle'. This poetry can broadly be defined as 'resistance' or 'liberation' poetry. Some of these poets also explore the issue of gender in relation to liberation politics.

MA (SeSwati) / Sikhungo I-MER Mathivha Setilwimi Temdzabu, Buciko Nemasiko Inyuvesi Yasevenda / Lolu lucwaningo lolutsintsa tingcikitsi letehlukene etinkondlweni teSiswati. Tinkondlo tibukwe emagcogcweni lehlukene, kubosonkondlo labehlukene futsi titsintsa tikhatsi letehlukene. Lapha kutawubukwa tingcikitsi letilandzelako: lutsandvo, inkholo, umbusave, imvelo, imfundvo, buchwepheshe naletinye. Kubukwe kusebenta kwetinongo tenkhulumo, lukhetfomagama nekuhleleka kwetinkondlo kwangaphandle kutsi kwelekelela kanjani ekugcamiseni tingcikitsi etinkondlweni. Inshokutsi yenkondlo ivela kahle lapho ihambisana nengcikitsi yayo. Luhlelolwati lwetingcikitsi ngilo lelisisekelo nemkhombandlela walolucwaningo. / NRF

Tonalität ist eines der herausragenden prosodischen Mittel, das traditionell in der Poesie afrikanischer Tonsprachen eingesetzt wird, und Sprachminiaturen (z.B. Sprichwörter und Rätsel) gehören nicht zuletzt ausweislich ihrer weit verbreiteten tonalen Reimcharakteristik viel eher zur afrikanischen Poesie als etwa zur Prosa, wie es bislang herrschende Meinung war.

The collection of sonnets Rings of a Thundering Tree (2000), by R.K. Belcher, is rich in metaphorical imagery; lending itself particularly well to textual analyses of imagined sensory perceptions. Although perspectives on or theories about metaphor can be deployed in such analyses, an imagined sense of sensory perception in itself theoretically frames the study of this poetic imagery. In this regard, the titles of the sonnets within this collection and their themes, as well as the title of the collection and the theme of ”South African decay” (with which this title is linked), are explored with an emphasis on imagined sensory experiences. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Within a southern African literary-historiographical milieu, the corpse of the First World War (1914-1918) either wanders in the ‘darkling’ woods or wades in the ice-mirrored sea of a sinister psychological landscape. The veld, with its moon, flowers, bowers, animals and sea, is a potent South African metaphysical conceit in which both the white and black corpse – the horrific waste product of war – is seemingly safely hidden within euphemistic shadows. However, these shades are metonymic and metaphorical offshoots of an Adamastorian nightmare, which has its inception in a nascent South African literary tradition. This thesis explores these literary-historiographical leftovers within the war poetry of both civilians and soldiers. Both ‘white’ and ‘black’ poetry is discussed in a similar context of dressing the corpse in meaning: a meaning that resides deep within the wound of loss. In tracing this blood spoor in the poetry a highly eclectic approach has been followed. As the title illustrates, both literary and historical approaches were used in analysing the effect of the Great War on the poetry, and by implication, on the society from which it sprung. It is, therefore, a cultural history as well as an intellectual subtext of wartorn South Africa that has been scrutinised, and is revealed in its poetic literature. Archival research and the scouring of individual volumes were the sources of the poems for this study. This is true especially with regards to the ‘white’ poetry, where very few examples of poetry have been published in secondary histories. Various anthologies and studies on ‘black’ poetry considerably lightened the search for war izibongo. A variety of literary theoretical approaches have been most useful in extracting the subtext of early 20th century South African history. The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s collective unconscious have been most insightful. The poststructuralist theory of Julia Kristeva has cast more light on the recalcitrant corpse, the main waste product of war. David Lewis-Williams’s recent archaeological-anthropological approach has also been crucial in understanding the indigenous izibongo by putting forward Neuroscience as an explanation of the universally held neuropsychological hallucinatory poetic experience. Finally, war poetry in this thesis is seen as verse written by both soldiers and civilians as a response to the reality – or rather surreal unreality – of conflict, in an effort to come to terms with the abjection of both body and mind. Thea Harrington‘s manqué reading of Kristeva’s poststructuralist corpse is used as a referent for the abject, or loss thereof, that is to be found in the war poetry. Throughout the thesis, the term manqué is used to refer to the corpse as a fluid linguistic-psychological signifier saturated with loss. It is the manqué that has essentially remained hidden behind the various political histories of the war. / English Studies