Kelwyn Sole

"The Witness of Poetry: Economic Calculation, Civil Society and the Limits of Everyday Experience in a Liberated South Africa"

Abstract:

This paper seeks to examine how South African poets have responded to the economic and political changes which have occurred in the country since the unbanning of political organisations in 1990 and the first democratic elections in 1994. This is done both through quoting of their poetry itself and through statements they have made in interviews and on other public occasions. Contrary to popular media opinion, it is shown that many poets have been reluctant to eschew the 'political' role they had played in the country previously, although the focus and range of this role has undergone modification. It is shown that many of the younger black poets, and a handful of white poets of a more left-wing orientation, have responded critically and vociferously to the increasingly neo-liberal macro-economic policies of the A.N.C. government; especially in a scenario where the withering away of a once vibrant anti-apartheid nascent civil society has been matched by an increase in corruption, clientilism and a burgeoning of bureaucratic centralisation. The final section of the paper attempts to reconsider the range and scope of the concept of the 'everyday' in relation to the evidence of this poetic production. It is argued that (especially in countries which are in a relatively weak position and suffer uneven development as a result of the increasingly globalised reach of neo-liberal policies emanating from the metropole) the purview of the 'everyday' cannot escape the overdeterminations of such economic policies and the new types of social (most obviously class) divisions it inculcates. It is demonstrated that the issues tackled by South African poets in the last decade, and a number of fresh themes that have become apparent in their work, show especially clearly that this is happening.