Time is Always NOW: Animist Materialism in Keorapetse Kgositsile's Temporal Order

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores Keorapetse Kgositsile's re-ordering of time through his coined concepts of “NOW,” “future memory,” and the “coil of time” in his poetry. In his reckoning, colonial modernity's time imposed a temporal order that is not congruent with his African worldview and understanding of time and space. Further, being of South African descent and living in the diaspora meant occupying two realities concurrently. Being informed by southern Africa's indigenous oral archive and knowledge system in a different milieu necessitated a creative re-invention of those concepts in his poetic. I draw from theories of animism and the animist unconscious to show how Kgositsile deconstructs modernity's linear time, with its attendant Cartesian divide between “I and the world,” and show how he absorbs this divide within mythical and magical matrices to re-enchant modernity's temporality and elevate his worldview. As such, this paper shows how the relationships between modernity and tradition, memory and desire, past and future, home and exile, and Africa and its diaspora are powerfully synthesised in a manner that necessitates imperative recalibrations of temporality as we understand it within the context of colonial modernity.