Imagining the Karoo landscape

free indirect discourse, the sublime, and the consecration of white poverty

Johan Geertsema

pp. 92-108

in: Attiede Lange, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, Jakob Lothe, Attie de Lange (eds), Literary landscapes, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

The work of the early twentieth-century South African-born English writer Pauline Smith is noteworthy for a number of reasons. In it we find a somewhat unusual, for English writing in South Africa, focus on Afrikaner characters and, what is more, an empathy with them. Influential figures such as J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer have therefore, though on different grounds, indicted her œuvre on the grounds that it fulfils a justificatory function for what was the incipient racial discourse of apartheid. Gordimer claims that Smith helped "[create] a justificatory myth of the Afrikaner people" (1976, p. 105), which thus shaped the way they understood themselves as being of Africa, as a kind of long-suffering white African tribe. Smith's focus on white suffering turns poverty into a virtue in demonstrating Afrikaner forbearance in the face of adversity. In Smith's stories, Gordimer rhetorically asks (she also mentions the writers Herman Charles Bosman and Athol Fugard), "are Afrikaners not shown living [as closely] to the earth and natural disasters as any black man?" (1976, p. 106).