The issue of identity is receiving the most attention in recent times. Communities,
groups and individuals tend to ask themselves who they are after the colonial period.
The dawn of modern democracy and the fall of the Berlin Wall have become important
sites of self-definition. In this study, I examine narratives of self-invention and selflegitimisation
from a variety of texts ranging from poetic to dramatic voices. The
author creates characters who represent his wishes, desires and fears in dramatic form.
The other characters re-present the other members of his family. He uses
autobiographical voices to re-create and re-present history, particularly his family
history which has been dismembered by memory's inability to recover the past in its
entirety. Memory, visions and dreams are used as tropes to negotiate the pain of loss.
These narratives assist him to recapture that which has been lost dearly, and
imaginatively re-members what has been dismembered. The autobiographical I shifts
into an autobiographical we where the author uses his poetry to lambast the injustices
of apartheid.
The study further examines some aspects of postcolonial identity, which include the
status of African writing and the role of africalogical discourse, the conception of home
in apartheid South Africa as well as the juxtaposition of power between indigenes and
settlers. These reflect the problem of marginality as a postcolonial condition and how
the marginals can be returned to the centre of power. Marginalisation of the indigenes
occurs by coercion, inferiorisation, tabooing certain political and cartographical spaces,
harassment, torture and imprisonment. Despite these measures, the poetry of NS
Puleng persisted to remove the fetish of apartheid disempowerment and
disenfranchisement. / African Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/17481 |
| Date | 06 1900 |
| Creators | Mokgoatsana, Sekgothe Ngwato Cedric |
| Contributors | Serudu, M. S. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (xi, 263 leaves) |
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