Faculty of Humanities
School of Languages
Department of English
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The first international article on the poetry of the Jewish-Afrikaans poet, Olga Kirsch was published in the influential American Journal of Jewish Literary Studies. While jewish South African writers like Dan Jacobson and the Nobel Prize-winner Nadine Gordimer are internationally known, Kirsch's work has remained unknown outside South Africa because she wrote in the language of her Free State childhood. Referring to the work of Gilroy and Van Lennep, it is suggested that Kirsch occupies a position of liminality in Afrikaans literature. She is recognised as an important poet in the tradition, yet an outsider in terms of Calvinist Christian belief and the mainstream political sensibilities of the community. The researcher proposes that Kirsch's voice, articulating her unstable position between being an outsider in these terms, yet an insider in terms of language, sympathy and understanding, approaches what Homi Bhabha called the “third space of enunciation”, where two cultures intersect, and where identity is fluid, constructed and reconstructed. The researcher finds that this instability is a crucial sublimation and springboard in Kirsch's art: in the “lush land” (of her poetry) within the desert (of existence), her verse becomes a necessary place of fulfilment
Contact person: Prof JA Wessels.
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