No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Self and community in the poetry of Arthur Nortje: A symptomatic reading
Abstract
Many studies of Arthur Nortje's poetry have commented on the prevalence in his work of images of alienation, seeing this as a function either of political conditions in South Africa in his lifetime or of Nortje's exile from his home country. In this paper, I maintain that Nortje's depictions of alienation are more fundamental than suggested by earlier studies, inasmuch as his depictions point to primordial loss as constitutive of identity. I argue that because identity is posited in relation to the other, it is inescapably a function of division and displacement, and suggest that as a result of his specific history, Nortje was more directly aware of this dynamic than most. Nortje's self‐reflexive awareness of the paradoxes of identity formation emerges in what I identify as symptomatic forms of communication that cut across, and mutually implicate, the life and the work. In support of my argument, the paper uses as its material two poems, one written shortly before Nortje's departure from South Africa in 1965, the other written shortly before his death in exile in 1970.
This article explores the idea that by writing poems depicting a fragmented identity prior to 1965, Arthur Nortje represented the horror of apartheid by using his body as a warzone. It argues that Nortje uses schizophrenia as a trope for registering the destructive psychological impact of racial segregation in the 1960s. The article examines several of Nortje's poems before his departure into exile which describe a haunting fear of implosion by linking the dissociated gaze of the observer to a devastating socio-political topography. It also scrutinises Nortje's use of the constantly shifting and unfolding condition of an ontologically insecure persona as a poetic device, and suggests that he appears to consciously register schizoid symptoms in constructing a flâneur-type observer to record experiences of fragmentation at a psychic level. Nortje assumes the mask of a dislocated self to voice his inner torment as a young man growing up in displaced communities within segregated cities like Port Elizabeth and Cape Town under apartheid. The focus is on how this works as a stylistic technique in the early poems.
