Beyond Impasse: Affect and Language Community in Select Contemporary Afrikaans Lyric Poetry

Abstract:Stasis and impasse register as conditions of interrupted development in many examples of postapartheid South African writing, works that engage the affective discontents of the transition from white minority rule to a future that has not quite materialised as promised. Much extant scholarship on this body of work attends to prose and to texts written in English. This essay takes two collections of poetry published in South Africa in Afrikaans in 2016—Ronelda Kamfer's Hammie and Bibi Slippers' Fotostaatmasjien—as case-study examples of how lyric poetry in this contested language might model a way out of postcolonial (and postapartheid) malaise. These poets' lyrics are performances in a language whose ongoing, creolizing nature is exploited and advanced by their refusal of conventions that historically linked Afrikaans to white nationalist politics. Kamfer's and Slippers' work evokes—and provokes—an excess of continuity whose multiple affective resonances are testimony to the possibilities that lie beyond stasis.