Du Plessis does more than observe the individual through the eyes and words of medical professionals with a Victorian mindset. He gazes at the crumbs left by reports and throwaway descriptions – all that remains of these individuals, who were invisible because they danced to a tune different from everyone else.
Onstage, it is just Ingrid and her words, her wine, her complex articulation of love and her brutal experience of despair. The letters are unabashed in their eroticism and give-and-take, but Jonker’s aloneness is candidly central. This theatre-making gesture makes you consider the loneliness of being in the world, altogether.
In this book, Rory du Plessis enables you to look into the eyes of people who were subject to mental institutions in South Africa and to experience a sanctification of them as individuals. This beautiful protest touches on the slippery issue of anonymity and intimacy without hurting the people pictured.
WHEN YOU ARE able to be present in a huge concrete interior in which one woman and her voice can with clear authority, take control of the whole space, with a packed audience and a vault that reaches storeys into the sky, you know you are in the […]
ONE OF THE ingredients necessary in every generation is a voice of fire. Particularly if it is a generation beset by hurt. Sandile Dikeni had that inimitable quality. A poet, an arts editor and a man of words who originated in a thirsty Karoo hamlet in an apartheid-stained […]
SHE’S LOOKING AT you peripherally, her face fierce and focused in profile, a pencil in her hand. She’s a woman who has waited her turn in a schoolroom in Kampala, Uganda. For generations. But she’s more than just a reflection of education and abandonment, of culture and sexism. […]
OF RAIN AND curiosity, the personality of mountains, love and loss, this week’s Radio Sonder Grense drama slot is filled with the sound and fury of beautiful poetry. Born in 1871, Afrikaans poet Eugène Marais was to become one of the language’s most mysterious and romantic characters in […]
ZANE MEAS ADORES everything about South African writer Chris van Wyk. It’s about the cunning and oft self-deprecating magic of being Coloured in a world that doesn’t consider you black enough or white enough. It’s about the chalky memories of racism and the mixed up words and opaque […]
THE FACT THAT this anthology of poems has to date sold over 2 000 copies, according to its publisher, attests to the need for inflammatory words of this nature, couched as they are, in the conventions of poetry and uttered by a young person – Koleka Putuma was born […]
ansunecilliers
beckkglass
Gillian Rennie
elizhanduvenhage
erinventer02
Geoff Sifrin
henricopg
huibrechtdehart
isabeausophiajoubert
jessicajoubert
kaylamullerr
matthewvanderwalt
meereieliefde
olgalouiselemmer
Peta Kaplan
Robyn Sassen
shanelschoombee
thembanhlapoart
zainabchoonara
Recent Comments