Equivalence, Excess, Ekke: Multilingual Poetics

Abstract

Abstract:South African–Canadian poet Klara du Plessis explains that in Afrikaans Ekke, the title of her first full-length poetry collection, is an emphatic form of the first-person singular pronoun ek. Ekke is predominantly in English, but a significant portion of the work is in other languages, primarily Afrikaans. As the back cover copy aptly states, Ekke “explores the multiplicity of self through language,” and, in Ekke and other writing, du Plessis offers a promising albeit not uncomplicated vision of the potentials of the multilingual self. My analysis examines the ways in which the multilingual nature of her poetry as well as its subject matter relating to language, art, and identity create a sustained interrogation of systems of meaning. Furthermore, informed by the work of Sherry Simon and others, I situate Ekke in relation to a tradition of multilingual writing in Quebec, and I address du Plessis’s own thoughts on the fraught history of Afrikaans as not only a language linked to the history of Apartheid but also a contemporary language threatened with erosion by the spread of English. Ultimately, I argue that the multilingual poetics of Ekke brings synergistic attention both to the experiences of meaning on an individual level and to the shaping of systems of meaning by cultural history.