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| Title: | Divided personas in the early poetry of Arthur Nortje |
| Author: | Smith, Neville |
| Year: | 2013 |
| Periodical: | Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa (ISSN 2159-9130) |
| Volume: | 25 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 20-29 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | apartheid identity poetry |
| About person: | Arthur Kenneth Nortje (1942-1970) |
| External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1013929X.2013.795747 |
| Abstract: | This article explores the idea that by writing poems depicting a fragmented identity prior to 1965, Arthur Nortje represented the horror of South African apartheid by using his body as a warzone. It argues that Nortje uses schizophrenia as a trope for registering the destructive psychological impact of racial segregation in the 1960s. The article examines several of Nortje's poems before his departure into exile which describe a haunting fear of implosion by linking the dissociated gaze of the observer to a devastating socio-political topography. It also scrutinises Nortje's use of the constantly shifting and unfolding condition of an ontologically insecure persona as a poetic device, and suggests that he appears to consciously register schizoid symptoms in constructing a flâneur-type observer to record experiences of fragmentation at a psychic level. Nortje assumes the mask of a dislocated self to voice his inner torment as a young man growing up in displaced communities within segregated cities like Port Elizabeth and Cape Town under apartheid. The focus is on how this works as a stylistic technique in the early poems. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |