The Case for a New Approach

Abstract

It would be futile to embark on any consideration of recent black writing in South Africa without recognising at the outset the need to abandon traditional literary critical assumptions and to forge a new kind of critical framework which will take account of the radically different forces at work within the literary production of that country. Over the past thirty years, writers in South Africa have gradually evolved an approach which has very little in common with western literary tradition. The latter has seen the progressive withdrawal of the writer from communal and political involvement, the evolution of literary forms and linguistic modes increasingly introspective and arcane until art has been ‘raised to the status of a solitary fetish’.² South African writers have long discerned the inappropriateness of such a convention for their circumstances and for their function within society.

What’s poetic

about long-term sentences and

deaths in detention

for those who ‘threaten state security’?

Tell me

What’s poetic

about shooting defenceless kids

in a Soweto street?

Can there be poetry

in fostering Plural Relations?

Mafika Gwala: from ‘In Defence of Poetry’¹