Editor's Notes

Abstract

This is the second of two issues on ‘Literature in South Africa: The Last 30 Years, Looking Back, Going Forward.’ The first issue (Current Writing 34.1. 2022) focused on prose fiction; this issue planned to focus on poetry. It does focus on poetry, albeit in somewhat unexpected ways. Chapman’s article offers a critical overview and a particular response to the contemporary and near-contemporary poetry scene in South Africa. He draws selectively on key developments that both anticipated and did not anticipate directions in the 1990s and up to today: from the Soweto poets of the 1970s, through modernist and anti-poetry pursuits, to poetry that explores women’s voices, both written and oral, while considering the local influence of US-based L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. Poetics. Quite differently, Klopper returns to a figure who, in the 1820s, sought to adapt, intermittently at least, his inheritance – the Scottish Enlightenment; a revival of European Romanticism – to his settler condition on the eastern frontier of the then British Cape Colony. Thomas Pringle, both as poet and social commentator, continues to stir controversy. Did this ‘1820 Settler’ push the boundaries of new indigenous concerns or did he remain trapped in a metropolitan, classicalliberal worldview that was at odds with the harsh and divisive politics of frontier? The landing in 1820 of parties of settlers had been celebrated by many English-speaking South Africans as securing the English language, church, education, and trade in the colony; the landing, however, hardly received notice on its 200th anniversary in 2020. Yet the year 2020 saw the publication of Matthew Shum’s study of Pringle, Improvisations of Empire, while Zoë Wicomb published Still Life, a ‘postcolonial’ novel of Pringle’s life or afterlife, or still life. It is these two books that provoke Klopper’s fresh perspective on Pringle’s ‘ghosts’ of the colony. If Pringle helped focus the local environment to a wider world, such a turn is reflected in the formulation of the title of these two ‘theme’ issues: not South African Literature, but literature in South Africa. As in other ex-, or post-, colonies, the metropolitan ideas, conventions, fashions, and publishing interests retain a hold on South Africa. It is not books on South Africa or by South African authors that strike the book browser in the much-reduced bookshop outlets particularly since COVID-19; rather, the book browser is confronted by shelves of the latest bestsellers from London and New York. Avoiding the ‘bestseller’ allure, Martin confirms that reading interests in South Africa are not confined to any locality. She extends considerations of poetry beyond apartheid or post-apartheid; beyond what the new (post-1990) South Africa has achieved or failed to achieve. (‘Can South Africa Survive?’ is a thread in many books of non-fiction.) It is the North American poet, Gary Snyder, who accompanies Martin on a journey, both ecological and spiritual, on the possibilities of a poet’s calling and inspiration. Similarly, Dimitriu finds in J M Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ trilogy works that speak more globally than locally. She finds in the Jesus novels a justification for what has stared both literary critics and readers in the face but which few have been willing to address: namely, the word ‘Jesus’ in the title of each of the three books. Focusing mainly but not exclusively on The Death of Jesus,