Please note: this work is permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for this item. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / Creative writing / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: this work is permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for this item. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / A series of stories set in rural North America, where characters wrestle with poverty, family, and faith. / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Bibliography: page 293. / Phillip Grier, architect and artist has told his students they should visit White Gables Hotel in order to understand the significance of urban and architectural planning. It is there he encounters Jenny who, seeking temporary accommodation, has taken her lecturer's advice. Their meeting is unusuaL He is drunk; on a bender to escape his inadequacies and obsessions, the result of a traumatic childhood. She is patently terrified at finding herself in such a disreputable place and clings to him for protection. Discovering that they were both abandoned at the same orphanage, children who were "not quite right", they form a deep bond of supportive friendship.

Bibliography: leaves 116. / In essensie is die manuskrip wat volg 'n versameling van my gedigte in Afrikaans en Engels. Verder word die digterlike stemme van Antjie Krog en Ingrid Jonker verken met die oog daarop om my eie poesie te verstaan. The thesis also focuses on the impact of illness and disability on my own creative processes and is an analysis of the gender constructs projected by my poetry and that of Ingrid Jonker and Anljie Krog . The work of C. G. Jung and secondary interpretations of his theories form the basis of this inquiry. The conflicting pOints of view around the terms anima and animus are explored. While special emphasis is placed on female archetypal structures, such as those coined by psychoanalyst Toni Wolff. Fairy Tale analyses, especially the dialogue between Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Mari-Louise Von Franz, seek to assist in understanding gender issues that are placed in the foreground by the poetry under discussion. In this regard the role of women in an archetypal context is discussed in conjunction with the feminist theories of, amongst others, Julia Kristeva and Simone De Beauvoir. The different strains of thought reflected in the manuscript complement and run parallel to one another, all addressing the common theme of gender.

Includes abstract. / Experiments in Inhumanity utilises for its setting the recognisable suburban backdrop of a mid to late nineties and early 21st century Cape Town and Pretoria. It focuses its attention around a specific white, middle class experience within pop-culture, making many references to music, television and film. In so doing it enters the debate as to how influential pop culture may be on teen behaviour, such as violence within relationships and peer groups. It throws elements like morose suburban existence, family dynamics and dysfunctional behaviour (specifically of a sexual nature) into the melting pot and attempts thereby to illustrate a fictional situation, which illuminates how youth culture might produce juvenile delinquency. It follows the lives of siblings Michael and Alison and gives a window into the formative years of these characters as they struggle to find and sustain meaningful relationships. The characters' problems stem from a sexually traumatic incident in childhood. The novel investigates how, faced with the same starting point, the two characters achieve vastly different outcomes. The novel uses German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of Eternal Recurrence as a motif, suggesting a repetitive, cyclical experience in the lives of the characters. It supposes a finite set of events recurring over an infinite time span. It also experiments with narrative structure, breaking up a predictable - or expected - chronology while still attempting to retain a well-structured, suspenseful plot. The seemingly out-of-sync chronology has the purpose of reflecting the confusion inherent in the lives of the characters, as they attempt to reconstruct or extract meaning from a tortured existence.

For Andzani, home has always been a trigger for unpleasant memories, it has become the site for anxiety. After completing his Accounting Degree at the University of Cape Town and securing employment after, Andzani minimizes his visits back home to evade those memories home allows to seep through and confront him. He fears what this remembering will do to him, undo in him. Then one morning he receives a phone call from his uncle, Sontaga, to come fetch his mother, Violet, and take her to a mental institution because her mental health is deteriorating. As if given a last chance, on this trip, long-repressed memories flood his head and dull his days in order to force him to pay attention to them, digest them. In Dorothy L. Pennington conceptualisation of memory as a helix, she states that “the past is an indispensable part of the present which participates in it, enlightens it, and gives it meaning.” Taking this assertion as a point of departure, ‘A Soft Landing' is a novel that explores the implications of a past not decisively dealt with. The novel explores how the past gives meaning to present identities and how new identity formations are negotiated within the eye of the past participating in the present.

Please note: this work is permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for this item. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / A collection of poems / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: this work is permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for this item. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / Poems (2018-2021) / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

This thesis, submitted as part of an M.A in Creative Writing, takes the form of a novel set in a small coastal town outside Cape Town and follows the life of Johanna, a maid to a pastor's family in the early 90s. At the centre of the novel is the relationship between Johanna and a first-person child narrator. Johanna arrives and sets out to undermine the household and social order with increasingly bold acts of violence. She is abusive but despite the sporadic abuse the narrator and Johanna develop an odd friendship. Her past is revealed in late night confidences (a paraplegic mother, a white employer who she identifies as family and a stint in a squatter camp where she loses her ID). Near the beginning of the novel the child and Johanna embark on a quest to obtain her birth certificate from her old employer (needed for a new ID). The journey is unsuccessful but signals the start of a kind of sympathy between the two protagonists (with insight by the narrator into Johanna's past). Johanna finds a kind of belonging in the neighbourhood and with the narrator's family, particularly with the neighbourhood children. She is like a child herself and they become a neighbourhood pack roving the streets on bicycle. But Johanna has periodic rages, throwing bricks or abusing pets and comes to focus her ire on the youngest member of the family, the narrator's youngest brother. When political forces at large come into play (as well as an increased sense of danger), the adults set out to anglicize the family in a half-baked attempt to emigrate. The children are sent to English schools and Johanna, sensing her loosening grip on the family ramps up her reign of terror. She recruits the narrator in a plot against her brother, a prank only half comprehended that she consents to in order to placate Johanna. When the time comes, they dress up as "bergies", capitalising on the paranoia of the time. They ambush her brother and what (at least for the narrator) was a game turns into a horrifying dismemberment of her brother. Johanna disappears for weeks but returns for one final confrontation outside the pastorie. After this Johanna disappears permanently from the life of the narrator and her family, and her brother is patched up with little visible impairment. Soon afterwards the family moves to a security complex, an island of safety in the crime-ridden reality of South Africa that recalls their European dream. Years later the narrator interrogates this suppressed chapter and longs for the Johanna of her childhood in relief to the cultural anonymity that has become her life. Constructed in episodes that succeed each other spatially rather than chronologically the novel seeks to reconstruct the childhood landscape while building obliquely to a tragic climax. The style is lyrical, referencing magical realism and could be read as an effort in prose poetry with paragraphs operating as lyrical units. Of interest to the story are themes of cultural and physical homelessness as well as language itself as it relates to a stable cultural identity.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of four short stories and a novel excerpt. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z