The Outsider as Insider: The Jewish Afrikaans Poetry of Olga Kirsch

Olga Kirsch (1924–1997) occupies a unique position in the canon of South African literature. While the contribution of Jewish authors to South African literature is considerable, it is almost entirely in English. Kirsch is unique in that her contribution as a Jewish South African writer is to Afrikaans literature. She was a major Afrikaans poet and one of the first women poets to publish in Afrikaans. Anthropologists like Van Gennep (The Rites of Passage, 1960) and Turner (The Ritual Process, 1969) define a condition of " liminality," a position of being on the threshold, part of a particular cultural space yet not entirely within this space, outside, yet not entirely excluded from such a space. Kirsch holds such a position of liminality in the tradition of Afrikaans poetry, recognized at once as an important, even beloved poet within the tradition and yet identified as an outsider in terms of culture and religion (issues that are central to her work) to the Calvinist Christian tradition closely associated with the mainstream of Afrikaans culture, a culture which has, of course, also been characterized by strong manifestations of racial exclusiveness. American critic Paul Gilroy (The Black Atlantic, 1993) comments on the phenomenon of "cultural insiderism," which marries race and religion with cultural and national identity, culminating in "an absolute sense of ethnic difference." This highlights the anomalous position of the politically liberal, Jewish Kirsch as Afrikaans poet. Her work reveals shifting identities, becomes the nodal intersection of, on the one hand, the condition of the outsider, the exile, Jewish, and on the other, the insider, the young woman from rural South Africa who could only express her soul in Afrikaans. In Kirsch's work the painful split is sublimated into her art which derives vigour from it, functioning in what Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) calls the "third space of enunciation" in which identity is not static but fluid, constructed and reconstructed, where contraries are assimilated.