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

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. / Collection of short stories and excerpt from the novel / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

. / In hierdie novelle, wat oor 'n tydperk van drie dae afspeel, word drie karakters se lewens verwoes nadat hulle vroeg een oggend 'n misdaad pleeg op pad terug van 'n partytjie. Die verhaal speel af in 'n moderne stad, wat bekend voorkom dog vreemd is; asof dit 'n dekade of twee in die toekoms is, met 'n geskiedenis wat homself effens anders uitgespeel het as wat 'n mens sou kon verwag. Le Roux Basson, oftewel Maanhaar, is 'n bekende sanger wat oenskynlik 'n perfekte lewe het in 'n era waarin celebrity-status slaafs nagejaag of selfs nageboots word. Sy vriend, Henk van der Hoest, is 'n misdaadjoernalis by 'n dagblad in die stad en vind dat die verskil tussen 'n lewe van misdaad en 'n 'gewone' lewe minimaal is. Stacy Plummer, 'n groupie van Maanhaar, werk in 'n kroeg en verkoop dwelms op klein skaal om die huur te betaal. Sy is die enigste karakter wat met waardigheid deur die gebeure van die verhaal gelaat word. Die verhaal speel agteruit af, met sekere feite wat van die leser weerhou word tot aan die einde, wat eintlik die begin van die chronologiese verhaal is. Die idee is dat die leser hom- of haarself moontlike ander hoofstukke (elke hoofstuk is 'n dag) kan verbeel voor en na die hoofstukke in hierdie novelle.

This dissertation provides an investigation into the similarities between poetry and ballet in relation to historical development, generating forces behind the artistic process, technical aspects, subject and theme, as well as the role of the mentor and the mentee in the creative effort. Works of Cleanth Brooks en Robert Penn Warren (Understanding poetry), Ruth Padel (The poem and the journey), Camille Paglia (Break, blow, burn), Jay Parini (Why poetry matters), Ottone M. Riccio (The intimate art of writing poetry) and other writers provide a theoretical basis upon which parallels between poetry and ballet are constructed. Practical examples from the collection Pirouette (Botha 2009), the works of several other poets and the ballet world serve to illustrate that poetry can be regarded as ""a dance with words"", whilst ballet can be viewed as ""poetry in motion"".

Includes abstract. / In January 1860, the painter Thomas Baines returned to Cape Town in disgrace, having been dismissed from David Livingstone's expedition to explore the Kebrabasa rapids on the Zambesi River. Livingstone's Cataract is a historical novel that follows Baines's involvement with the expedition. It is written from Baines's point of view, in the first person...

These are the experience as a prisoner of war at Zonderwater of Romeo's father, Umberto; Ruth's memory of her father checking the list of Holocaust survivors' names, posted outside Salisbury Synagogue, as it was updated; Geraldine's description of her elderly neighbour's drawers full of embroidered linen - his mother's trousseau - unused and perished by time; and Anthony's experience as an Allied gunner officer in Sansepolcro, Italy, during World War 2 when he did not fire on the building that housed Piero della Francesca's mural, the Resurrection, though German soldiers were thought to be in the town.