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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Narrating the Island: Robben Island in South African literature
Author:Jacobs, J.U.ISNI
Year:1992
Periodical:Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
Volume:4
Issue:1
Pages:73-84
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:imprisonment
literature
Abstract:Robben Island and the body of writing in which its place in the South African narrative is recorded provide a particularly useful focus for addressing questions about the role of fictional narrative in the process of nationbuilding in South Africa. It is not the purpose of this essay to examine the Robben Island text purely in terms of the prison memoir and its generic features, but rather to locate it discursively. Topologically and symbolically, Robben Island has always represented the ultimate margin to which the Pretoria government banished its opposition; in the South African discourse of liberation, however, the island has grown into a central trope for displacement of Nationalist Party dominance. Despite the prohibitions of the Prisons Act and the various State security laws, Robben Island has featured significantly in the mainstream South African literary discourse. This article discusses three books that in particular tell of conditions on the island during the 1960s and early 1970s and need to be read as complementary: Moses Dlamini's autobiographical memoir 'Hell-hole, Robben Island: reminiscenses of a political prisoner in South Africa' (c. 1984), Indres Naidoo's 'Island in chains: ten years on Robben Island' (1982), and D.M. Zwelonke's fictionalized story of detention on the island from 1964 on, in his book 'Robben Island' (1973).
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