Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 ed. by Derek Attridge, Rosemary Jolly (review)

HUMANITIES 357 The from we find deal with his love for Andre and his horrible feeling ofhaving to deal with Andre's death and the five that followed. 19831 1986, and 1990 are the of Palazzo's diaries we are to read. And AIDS is common em)m'mator the disease not only ravished Palazzo and his lover, as and also continues to ravish the lives the illness and death of relatives and friends - a disease seem to have taken off of the front burner. Most be~~mmnlgof 1986, after Andre's death: 'I'm too yOW1g to be visiting my lover's I Indeed, like many of those who have left their loved ones Nick Palazzo was also 'too young' to leave not his ones but the universe to which he felt he belonged - that world that so nourished the art that he left for us to ponder and admire Palazzo may , as some have suggested. But his an originality thatrecalls those who have come before him: Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Umberto Boccioni, Salvador de yes, even Edward are some of the names that come to mind. As his art was into its own as the disease ravaged his body, the world is left with what he was able to in his short life. This book thus has a double function: it re(:ogm~i":es the art of one who died he could such deserved praise; to use social worker David it Nick Palazzo's 'face to AIDS/ so that we do not forget those who have 'passed into the other room.' (ANTHONY JULIAN TAMBURRI) Derek Attridge and Jolly, editors. Writing South Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995 ,-a.UU_'J.l\..l~C:; University Press. xviii, 288. us The between 1970 and 1995 in South Africa can only be understood in terms of a radical break. The to from this· collection of has also suffered a break. Although the editors argue that the future cannot be narrated 'as though it were severed ... from the 'many of the contributors doubts about the value of texts' the It seems that Africa on the international Emergency could see in matters of and 358 LETTERS IN CANADA 1998 second-hand and the imported. The need to become less dependent on European models and more responsive to voices as yet unheard and to .indigenous artistic forms is something all the contributors agree upon. In the new dispensation; it seems, the old tensions between realism and modernism, black writing and white, political responsibility and aesthetic concerns are being reframed. To be sure, Lewis Nkosi, in one of the most eloquent of the contributions, laments the continuing colonial state ofblack writing in South Africa and opposes the multicultural project that would merely reabsorb black African difference as so much diversity. But if this collection is any indication, a new debate, between those who assert the continued validity of the subversive critique established during the apartheid years and those who favour utopian projection, will shape the reception of South African literature. J.M. Coetzee, the one author whose writing during the Emergency still attracts the attention of these critics, is quoted by David Attwell as admitting that white South African literature was always better at subversion than at imagining a new community. Peter Hom believes that South Africa's tmbearable racist past, however much denied, will not be forgotten, any more than the experience of the victims of racism was ever forgotten. Michiel Heyns, in a discussion of white South African gay writing, eschews easy equivalences between forms, of liberation and celebrates Koos Prinsloo's depiction of a gay man not as victim but as 'participant'in the Emergency. The editors have also included AlbieSachs's already famous position paper, arguing for the autonomy of literature and for a ban on the notion that culture is a weapon of struggle. Other critics, however, prophesy something wholly new that, because it is needed, is presumed to be coming. Andre Brink believes that South Africans will see more magic realism, 'an awareness of more things in heaven and earth than have been dreamt of in our philosophy, a free interaction between the worlds of the living and...