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PROOFTEXTS 29 (2009): 63–85. Copyright © 2009 by Prooftexts Ltd.
The Outsider as Insider: The Jewish Afrikaans Poetry of Olga Kirsch
A N D R I E S W E S S E L S
A b S T R A c T
Olga Kirsch (1924–1997) occupies a unique position in the canon of South African literature. While the contribution of Jewish authors to South African literature is considerable, it is almost entirely in English. Kirsch is unique in that her contribution as a Jewish South African writer is to Afrikaans literature. She was a major Afrikaans poet and one of the first women poets to publish in Afrikaans. Anthropologggists like Van Gennep (The Rites of Passage, 1960) and Turner ( The Ritual Process, 1969) define a condition of “ liminality,” a position of being on the threshold, part of a particular cultural space yet not entirely within this space, outside, yet not entirely excluded from such a space. Kirsch holds such a position of liminality in the tradition of Afrikaans poetry, recognized at once as an important, even beloved poet within the tradition and yet identified as an outsider in terms of culture and religion (issues that are central to her work) to the Calvinist Christian tradition closely associated with the mainstream of Afrikaans culture, a culture which has, of course, also been characterized by strong manifestations of racial exclusiveness. American critic Paul Gilroy (The Black Atlantic, 1993) comments on the phenomenon of “cultural insiderism,” which marries race and religion with cultural and national identity, culminating in “an absolute sense of ethnic difference.” This highlights the anomalous position of the politically liberal, Jewish Kirsch as Afrikaans poet. Her work reveals shifting identities, becomes the nodal intersection of, on the one hand, the condition of the outsider, the exile, Jewish, and on the other, the insider, the young woman from rural South Africa who could only express her soul in Afrikaans. In Kirsch’s work the painful split is sublimated into her art which derives vigour from it, functioning in what Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) calls the “third space of enunciation” in which identity is not static but fluid, constructed and reconstructed, where contraries are assimilated.
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Most literary commentators agree that the Jewish poet Olga Kirsch
(1924–1997) occupies a unique position in the canon of Afrikaans1
literature and of South African literature in general. While the
contribution of Jewish people to South African literature is considerable, and
includes such notable writers as Nadine Gordimer and Dan Jacobson, their works
are almost entirely in English. Kirsch is unique in that her contribution as a
Jewish South African writer is to Afrikaans literature. Moreover, she was one of
the first women poets to publish in Afrikaans and is indeed widely acknowledged
as a part of the Afrikaans canon.2 Yet her Jewish identity and perspective lend her
work a marginality that is unusual in the Afrikaans literary tradition, where
conformity to a particular cultural and ideological sense of identity was the norm
during her lifetime.
Olga Kirsch was born in the small town of Koppies in the Free State provii
ince of South Africa in 1924. Her father was a Yiddishispeaking immigrant from
Lithuania who could not speak English or Afrikaans fluently;3 her mother was an
Englishispeaking Jewish South African. The social language of Koppies was
Afrikaans, however, and it was also the language of Kirsch’s primary school
education. Although she received her secondary school education at the Englishi
medium Eunice Girls’ High School in Bloemfontein and then graduated from the
University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (majoring in English and Afriii
kaans), Afrikaans—because of the profound impact of her Free State childii
hood—appears to have remained the language in which she could express herself
most effectively, most earnestly, and most sincerely in poetry; it was, one may say,
perhaps, the instinctive currency of her soul. Her daughter, trying to explain this
anomaly, said in a radio interview: “It is the language that resonates most deeply
for her.”4 This is particularly remarkable if one takes into account that, having
published two volumes of poetry, Die Soeklig in 1944 and Mure van die Hart in
1948, Kirsch—prompted by her fiery Zionism5—emigrated in that year to Israel
where she spent the rest of her life. She never spoke Afrikaans there, having
married a Cambridgeieducated mathematician of British (Jewish) origin to whom
she spoke English, while she spoke Hebrew to her Israeli children.6
Most people assumed that the move would mean the end of Olga Kirsch’s
career as an Afrikaans poet,7 but twentyifour years later, in 1972, a third volume,
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Negentien gedigte, appeared unexpectedly, and was followed by another four
volumes of Afrikaans poetry between 1976 and 1983, the last one appearing
thirtyifive years after her departure from South Africa and effective isolation
from the language medium of her poetry. During this time she made only three
short visits to South Africa, in 1975, 1979, and 1981 respectively, on the last occaii
sion to visit her dying mother.8 The Soweto race riots of 1976, with their focus on
Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor, moreover caused her to reconsider her
relationship with the language, and she resolved for a time to distance herself
from Afrikaans for political and ideological reasons.9 It appears, however, that it
was impossible for her to stick to that resolve, as it effectively implied muzzling
herself as a poet, and three of her volumes of poetry in Afrikaans appeared after
1976. She tried to write in Hebrew but found the exercise unsatisfactory: she felt
that her work in Hebrew sounded like translated poetry.10 She did publish some
English poetry in the New York journal Jewish Frontier in 1966 and a single
volume in English, The Book of Sitrya,11 in 1990 in Israel, but it is as an Afrikaans
poet that she excelled and is remembered. She died in Israel in 1997.
In the 1960s, anthropologists like Van Gennep12 and Turner13 defined a
condition of “liminality” (often with reference to people undergoing cultural rites
of passage) as being on the threshold, part of a particular cultural space yet not
entirely within this space, outside the cultural space, yet not entirely excluded
from such a space:
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”)
are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude
or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states
and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor
there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed
by law, custom, convention and ceremonial.14
As suggested above, Olga Kirsch holds a position of liminality in the tradition of
Afrikaans poetry, recognized at once as an important, even beloved, poet within
the tradition and yet identified as an outsider in terms of culture and religion (issues
that are central to her work) to the Calvinist Christian tradition closely associated
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with the mainstream development of Afrikaans culture and its literature, a culture
which has, of course, also been characterized by strong manifestations of racial
exclusiveness. American critic Paul Gilroy suggests that “the ideas of nation,
nationality, national belonging, and nationalism . . . are extensively supported by a
clutch of rhetorical strategies that can be named ‘cultural insiderism.’ The essential
trademark of cultural insiderism which also supplies the key to its popularity is an
absolute sense of ethnic difference.”15 This marriage of race, and in the Afrikaners’
case, religion, with cultural and national identity was particularly strong in South
Africa in the twentieth century and highlights the anomalous position of the politiii
cally liberal, Jewish Olga Kirsch as Afrikaans poet.
In his book The Ritual Process, Victor Turner states that “prophets and artists
tend to be liminal or marginal people,”16 able to transcend the borders of a particii
ular status or place. This aspect evokes Homi Bhabha’s later notion of a “third space
of enunciation” that emerges when two cultures intersect. In The Location of Culture,
Bhabha suggests that when two cultures interact antagonistically (as in classical
colonialism), the interaction does not only involve authority and subalterneity, but a
“third space of enunciation” also emerges, a space in which identity is not static but
fluid, constructed and reconstructed, where contraries are assimilated. “It is that
Third Space . . . which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that
ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity;
that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read
anew.”17 The third space, characterized by hybridity, is a place of potential, of redeii
velopment, renegotiation, creativity, and possible renewal and growth. In an interii
view with Christian Hoeller, Bhabha states that “thirdness . . . is part of an
unceasing process or movement that is at once inibetween and beside the ‘polarities’
of conflict, unsettling any essentialist or foundationalist claim to the ‘originary’ that
they make.”18 Kirsch’s voice, articulating in her oeuvre her unstable position in
Afrikaans literature, shifting between being an outsider in terms of the Christian
Calvinist nationalist culture and an insider in terms of language, sympathy, underii
standing, approaches the conditions of Bhabha’s “third space of enunciation.”
Kirsch’s first volume, Die Soeklig (The Searchlight), appeared in 1944 when she
was only twenty years old. In this work, the liminality of her position is fairly
understated. While religion figures quite prominently in Die Soeklig, the poems deal
The Outsider as Insider y 67
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with what is common in the JudeoiChristian tradition, rather than presenting an
essentially Jewish perspective. It is in her second collection, Mure van die Hart
(Walls of the Heart), published in the same year as her emigration to Israel (1948),
that Kirsch’s poetry begins to reveal a distinct Jewish identity, claiming its position
of alterity in the Afrikaans canon.19 The title itself suggests division, a closing off,
indicating Kirsch’s position of distinctness in this volume, as well as criticism, in
the last cycle of poems, of her compatriots’ social attitudes and policies of racial
separation. Kirsch’s Zionism clearly emerges. In a cycle of poems entitled By die
Riviere van Babel (By the Rivers of Babylon), she uses Psalm 137 as a springboard
for Zionist contemplations. The poem Heimwee (Nostalgia) bears the epigraph “As
ek jou vergeet, o Jerusalem, laat my regterhand dan homself vergeet” (Ps. 137:5; “If I
forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget itself”):
Gee ons die land, ons het so lank gedwaal
deur vreemde oorde orals, orals en
jaarliks met Paasfees eeue lank herhaal:
in die jaar wat kom sien ons Jerusalem.
Ek sal die land miskien nooit binnegaan
nog dié wat op my volg, maar is ’n volk
se hoop nie tydeloos soos die hemelbaan
waarin die enkeling wegsmelt soos ’n wolk?
En sal die swerwendes van alle tye
nie in die tyd wat kom hul land ontvang
met vreugde wat hul vrugtelose lye
ewig uit die gedagtenis sal ban?
Tog bly die stille hunkering ongesus:
o land, my land, die eindelike rus.20
Give us the land, we have wandered in time
through foreign parts far, so far, and then
every year at Passover21 we repeat the line:
next year we shall see Jerusalem.
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Perhaps I shall never enter the land
nor those who follow, but is a people’s hope
not timeless like heaven’s orbit band
wherein a single being is subsumed like smoke?
And will the wanderers through all earth’s plains
not receive the land in future times
with a joy that bans their fruitless pains
forever from their thoughts and minds?
Yet the silent longing remains unstilled:
O land, my land, o rest yet unfulfilled.22
The poem is distinctly Zionist in its expression of the longing for a Jewish homeii
land and the justification of individual sacrifice for this greater cause. It can be read
as a quintessentially Jewish poem. However, the poem makes a number of appeals
to Kirsch’s Afrikaansispeaking audience of 1948, assuring a sympathetic reading.
After the Afrikaans people lost their independence and selfidetermination when
the Boer states of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (or Transii
vaal) were annexed by Great Britain at the end of the AngloiBoer War (1899–1902),
the Boer people were inspired by a fierce longing to regain independence and selfi
determination. Afrikaner nationalism reached a peak in the 1940s and culminated
in 1948, the year this volume was published, when the National Party with its policy
of regaining selfidetermination for Afrikaners (but also the apartheid policy of
racial segregation) won a general election to gain control of the country. Their
agenda was accomplished in 1961, with the proclamation of the Republic of South
Africa outside the British Commonwealth. Kirsch’s opening line, “Gee ons die
land . . .” (Give us the land . . . ) would immediately evoke these emotions of
yearning for the appropriation or ownership of a land lost through the vicissitudes
of history. The next lines, on wandering through foreign parts, would likewise have
evoked recognition. The deeply religious Afrikaans people identified strongly with
the Israel of the Old Testament, as they also felt themselves to be a people with a
divine destiny (to bear Christianity into Africa) and in the 1830s had also made
their own much mythologized epic journey (from British colonial rule in the Cape
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Colony to independence in the interior), often likened by Afrikaans leaders to the
Jewish migration from Egypt to the Promised Land, to find their own Promised
Land in Africa. This was the Promised Land subsequently lost during the Boer War.
The notion of the individual struggling for something that may only materiii
alize after his or her own death would also appeal to the Afrikaners’ sense of a
national struggle for political independence. The identification resides physically
in the language; it is the very texture of phrases such as “Gee ons die land” (Give us
the land), “’n volk se hoop” (a people’s hope or aspiration), “die stille hunkering” (the
silent longing), “o land, my land” (O land, my land), which would strike powerful
chords in Kirsch’s Afrikaans readers, with phrases Afrikaners were familiar with
in articulating their own national aspirations. It is thus actually the fact that
Kirsch uses Afrikaans to articulate her Zionism that casts a bridge of familiarity
across the divide of cultural identity and religion, bringing the Jewish outsider
into the fold as a familiarisounding insider. The Zionist aspirations articulated in
Kirsch’s poem implicitly during the reading process become metaphoric for the
Afrikaner nationalist aspirations of her readers.
A more activist sentiment is expressed in Koms van die Messias (The Coming
of the Messiah), an evocation of historical suffering that leads to a recalling of
the traditional hope for a deliverer. Then, in the last lines, this focus is turned
unexpectedly into a call for individual and personal activism:
Eeu aan eeu het hul ons saamgehok
in ghetto’s. Draers van die skanderok,
verworpenes, kon ons onsself nie eer
en wapenloos, nie teen hul wapens weer.
Ons boeke het hul een vir een verbrand
om so ons Godgeloof ook aan te rand.
Slegs één hoop het gebly om aan te kleef:
dat eendag die Messias sou herleef.
O kleine land, jy bied herrysenis
waar elke Jood self sy Messias is.23
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For centuries they herded us tame
into ghettos. In the dress of shame,
rejected, we could muster no pride,
no defense against the violent tide.
Our books they burnt, our hopes deceived
to undermine what we believed.
Only one hope could be sustained:
that the Messiah might rise again.
Oh small land of resurrection, ye,
where every Jew his own Messiah be.
Liminality is suggested by the divergence between the title, which would arouse
Christian expectations among Kirsch’s Afrikaans readers, and the execution that
undercuts those expectations in an expression of Zionist fervor. Again the Chrisii
tian religion and Afrikaner myths are invoked for her readers in phrases such as
“ één hoop . . . dat eendag die Messias sou herleef ” (one hope that the Messiah would
one day rise) and “ons Godgeloof ook aan te rand” (our faith also undermined—or,
more accurately, assailed or assaulted), evoking for her readers basic tenets of the
Calvinist religion and echoes of the history of the persecution of their French
Huguenot ancestors, for example. These phrases of familiarity and identification
are completely overturned in the explicitly Zionist conclusion, however, so that
the poem moves from the familiar to the unfamiliar in the liminal space.
In these poems, Kirsch can and does rely on an intimate familiarity and even
identification of her Afrikaans reading public with Old Testament history and
the concepts that she invokes, but she steps beyond the familiar Christian reading
of the Bible into a peculiarly Jewish evocation, shuttling between a position of
intimate familiarity to her Afrikaans readership and a defamiliarizing, implicitly
deliberate affirmation of her Jewish, outsider status. The biblical language and
terminology are profoundly familiar and are deeply rooted in the Afrikaner
readers’ sense of Christian identity, yet the application she makes of these subverts
the expectations evoked by that very familiarity. This can be compared to “signs
The Outsider as Insider y 71
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[being] appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” in Bhabha’s “third
space of enunciation.”24
Although the main political focus of Mure van die Hart is Zionist, the year
1948 is also, as mentioned earlier, the year the National Party, propagating the
dogma of apartheid, came to power in South Africa. In a short cycle of poems
entitled Die Blokhuis (The Blockhouse), Kirsch also reveals with searing irony her
attitude toward ideological developments in the country of her birth and
upbringing. The title of the volume suggests the putting up of barriers, and in the
short title poem of this particular cycle, Kirsch renders a prophetic vision of Afriii
kaner sensibilities during the era of apartheid:
Die fondamente van die fort was vrees,
haat het die deure een vir een gesluit.
Nou loer die bouer deur ’n skietgat uit
en durf die muurskrif agter hom nie lees.25
The foundation of the fort is fear,
through hate the trapdoors steadily fall.
Now the builders through an embrasure peer,
not daring to read the writing on the wall.
Once again Kirsch uses images that are part of Afrikaans mythology—blockii
houses with embrasures were widely used during the Boer War and would evoke
for her readers resonances of a heroic struggle for independence, while the writing
on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast in Daniel 5 would have been a familiar Bible
story—but she once again undercuts the expectations evoked by these images in
an uncompromising exposé of the doomed and fearful attitudes of racial separaii
tion espoused at the time by her Afrikaans readership, establishing a critical posiii
tion of alterity from within an apparent familiarity.
After Mure van die Hart followed twentyifour years of silence while Kirsch
was establishing herself in Israel, marrying and raising her children; then
Negentien Gedigte (Nineteen Poems) appeared in 1972. This slim volume proved
to Olga Kirsch and to her Afrikaans readership that in spite of all the years, she
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had not lost her skill in constructing the welliwrought verse. In this volume
Kirsch harks back to her Free State childhood and tries to reclaim her father,
whom she describes in a series of five sonnets dedicated to him, as a very quiet,
almost estranged figure:
Omdat ek my geskaam het vir jou spraak
wat in twee vreemde tale vreemd gebly het,
omdat ek met alle mag wou maak
soos kinders van die plek, wat ek beny het,
aan wie die land en haar geskiedenis
behoort by wyse van geboortereg
wat nie die kragte van die hart verkwis
met daagliks die geveg weer oor te veg.
Omdat jy besig was, min by die huis
— met sonop uit, selde voor die donker terug —
en afgemat en afgetrokke tuis
— aan tafel min gesprek en geen gerug —
omdat die stryd om brood jou oë streng
en ver gestel het, het ek jou skaars geken.26
Because I was ashamed of your speaking
strangely in two strange tongues,27
because with all my heart I was seeking
to be one with the young,
to whom the land and its past
belonged by right of birth
who did not waste heart’s passions vast
to fight the old fights of the earth.
Because you were seldom at home
— out at sunrise, not back till late —
exhausted and distant, often alone
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— with little to chatter and nothing to state —
because the struggle for bread endowed your view
with stern regard, I hardly knew you.
The poem provides an important psychological key to Kirsch’s ambivalent, liminal
position. In the first two stanzas, she articulates her passionate desire as the child of
immigrants to identify with the new land and its culture, to be just like the children
of Koppies where she was growing up. She expresses this need for identification in
terms of language, pointing to her eventual intense identification with Afrikaans.
The poem also stresses the noninative origins of her family, as she blames her father
and his foreign speech for their outsider status. In the poem, she moves to a position
of estrangement from her father in the closing words “I hardly knew you.” The
tension that is created between the term “father” and the concluding phrase of
dissociation suggests the child’s discomfort in the liminal space between belonging
and not belonging. Ironically, her intense identification with the people around her
to compensate for her foreign origin would in its turn become an element of
personal estrangement from her environment, when—with a Zionist heart but an
Afrikaans poetic soul—she eventually settled in Israel.
The last poem in the volume, a sonnet, provides a moving counterpoint to this
last poem when the poet captures a moment of closeness with her father in the
synagogue during her early childhood, and bitterly regrets the wasted years since:
Toe ek nog klein was het ek aan jou sy
gestaan in die sinagoge en gevolg
terwyl jou vingers langs die letters gly
van woorde wat ek nog nie kon vertolk.
Die kantor hef sy stem op, yl en soet
wierook die lied omhoog. Rooi, geel en blou
slaan vlamme uit ’n ruit hom tegemoet –
sou die Voorsienigheid Sy guns weerhou
wanneer daar so gesmeek word? En jy vou
jou syige gebedsjaal weg en hou
jou arm om my en ek staan gedruk
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vas teen jou knie en bewe van geluk.
Swaar stemme styg in stadige akkoorde
oomblikke veertig jare sonder woorde.28
A little girl I stand at your side
in synagogue and try to trace
your fingers as over lines they slide
past words I cannot read or place.
The cantor’s voice ascends, thin and sweet
the song incenses on high. In reds, gold and blues,
flames from the window glow to meet
him, could Providence possibly refuse
such beseeching? And then you fold
back your silky shawl and gently hold
me and I stand pressed against your knee,
shuddering with joy, listening to the plea.
Ponderous voices rising in sonorous tiers –
moments, then silence for forty years.
The images and the scene evoked in the poem are profoundly unfamiliar to
Kirsch’s Christian readership: the synagogue, the finger sliding along the text,
the cantor’s rising voice, the silky shawl. Unlike as in the previous poems, no
overture to familiarity is made in spite of the Afrikaans phrasing used. The poem
in which she now identifies strongly with her father comes across as excitingly
exotic, affirming the exclusive aspect of her shifting position. It is significant that
this moment of closeness, wrested from the past, is rooted in her Jewishness,
which is the bond of blood and culture that she shares with her father.
The opening poem in Negentien Gedigte, “Droogte” (Drought), significantly
uses the image of the desert and drought—concepts familiar in both South Africa
and Israel—that would be central in her next volume, Geil Gebied (Lush Land;
1976). In “Droogte,” she contrasts the desert landscape of her life in Israel to
memories of rain in the Free State or on the South African Highveld in a lyrical
celebration:
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Maar ek onthou reën
onthou die westewind
swaarweer wat nader dreun
bliksems wat wit verblind
die takke nat en swaar
die vlaktes plas aan plas
die hemel hoog en klaar
die blare blink gewas.29
But I remember rain
the west wind’s pressing flight
the thunder rolling close again
lightning’s blinding white
branches wet and low
the plains pool on pool
heaven high aglow
the leaves clean and cool.
It is clear that the desert serves as a metaphor for Kirsch’s twentyifour years of
silence, while the rain is a symbol of her poetic fruitfulness. She states that it is hard
to conceive of rain at a time of drought; thus, the poem ends with the invocation of
rain for blessing and thanksgiving, celebrating, I believe, the retrieving of her poetic
voice after all the years. In Geil Gebied, the lush land becomes the central metaphor
for poetic utterance against the desert of the ordinary, uncreative life:
Gedigte kan nie vergoed, is nie tot troos.
Hul geil gebied is klein,
die heining broos.
Rondom hom knaag en knetter die woestyn.30
Poems neither reward nor cheer.
Their lush land is small,
the fence not tall.
Around it gnaws and blazes the desert drear.
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The contrast between the desert outside and the lush land of the poem is exacerii
bated by the fact that the language of Kirsch’s poetic utterance is also a tongue
foreign to her everyday life and even to her family life in Israel. The imagery
suggests the fragility of her poetic creativity in its isolation. This isolation makes
the opening poem from Geil Gebied, in which she refers to her long silence and
poetic isolation, particularly moving:
Nou spreek ek weer bekendes aan:
Sluit ek my oë, sien ek weer
die oë vriendelikgspottend, teer
wat my herken; my stem nie meer
geluid wat in my hoof vergaan,
uitroepe in ’n klankdig sel
maar soos een van stil vertel:
jy was nie tuis toe ek jou bel.31
Now I address old friends again:
Closing my eyes, I see
the friendly, mocking, tender eyes
recognizing me; my voice no longer
sound extinguished in my head,
cries in a soundproof vault,
but like someone stating quietly:
you weren’t at home when I called.
The poem movingly expresses her intense sense of isolation in her creative
endeavor, a sense of muted imprisonment that could only be relieved by her
retrieval of her Afrikaans reading public in the 1970s, when these extinguished
and anguished cries “in a soundproof vault” could become again a dialogue. This
poem painfully evokes the anomaly of Kirsch’s different modalities of isolation—
isolated by the language of her poetic endeavor in Israel, and isolated within her
poetic endeavor by her religion, culture, and expatriate status. Yet the poems in
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Geil Gebied also suggest that it is the very existence of the desert that makes the
concept of the contrasting lush land possible.
Geil Gebied contains poems that describe Kirsch’s first visit to South Africa
in many years, but it is in a gentle poem called “Die Tydgees” (The Zeitgeist) in
Oorwinteraars in die vreemde (Those Wintering in Exile) that she returns to the
South African political situation. Nothing demonstrates her insider–outsider
identity in terms of Afrikaans as clearly as her political poems about South
Africa. In his discussion of “cultural insiderism,” Gilroy suggests that “where
racist, nationalist, or ethnically absolutist discourses orchestrate political relationii
ships so that [different] identities appear to be mutually exclusive, occupying
space between them or trying to demonstrate their continuity” requires “some
specific forms of double consciousness.”32 Kirsch’s status as an exile and her reliii
gion and Jewish cultural identity mean that she can look upon the Afrikaans
people with an outside detachment, but the “lush garden” of her Afrikaans poems
becomes a node of intersection in which she moves within the fold so that she
also speaks from inside. Her first political poems, as we have seen, reveal a very
early and discerning understanding of the contorted mindset that would lead to
the enduring apartheid state, but express this unflinchingly honest and perceptive
assessment without malice or rancor, as if she were speaking among her own
people. In this later poem she again looks unflinchingly but without malice at
South African history and the South African situation. The poem personifies the
Zeitgeist or spirit of the times into a gleeful manipulator that plays around with
human fate, rather along the lines of Gloucester’s pessimistic perception of the
gods or fates in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / they kill
us for their sport” (IV:1: ll. 35–36).
Hy het skepies met trompetgeskal
en koorsang van die mis geloods uit Portugal
om slakgversigtig die gevreesde kus
voelgvoel te ondersoek; in elke nis
waar anker bodem vat, die donker land
met name van heiliges en kruise geplant
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wortelloos voor die oerwoud te besweer.
Hy het hul kos en water laat ontbeer
sodat hul kosbaarhede mog besit:
speserye en goud. Hy’t Hollander en Brit
tot nyd gewek om bloedig mee te ding;
op land en see het hul mekaar verdring.
Hy’t hul verryk. Europa het floreer.
Koopman en skeepskaptein en goewerneur
is na die tuisland terug met titels, eer
en munt. Maar hy het andere geleer
in hul geslagte, om die land lief te kry
met hartstog wat die ou hartstogte oorskry
totdat ’n eikehoutgerfstuk en die verhaal
van aankoms en swaarkry oorvertel in ’n taal
langsameraan anders in die mond, van ’n wilde land
se grondkruie en brak fonteine, al band
met die vorige was. Hy het hul nie laat gis
wat hy alleen, dalk uit die staanspoor wis
dat alles wat hul gemaak het – huis en haard
en werkplek – uitwisbare tekens op die kaart
was. Hy’t hul laat glo dat hul die onbesitbare
sekuur besit: die land van donker skare,
die ver, gedempte holslag van die trom
wat tot verpletterende crescendo kom.
Wat hy voorheen as heldedade geroem
het, laat hy nou ander name noem
en kondig aan: dit alles moet verdwyn –
sy ironieë soos altyd hoog verfyn.33
The Outsider as Insider y 79
Winter 2009
With choral mass and trumpets’ call
he launched small ships in Portugal
like snails to wind their cautious way
down the frightening coast; in every bay
where anchor fell, exorcised the place
with crosses, names of saints, to face
unsteadily the jungle’s dark dread.
With hunger and thirst he bred
desire for riches: spices and gold.
Dutchmen and Englishmen bold
on land and sea he incited to strife,
jostling and fighting for space and life.
He enriched them. Europe flourished too.
Merchant, governor, captain and crew
returned with titles and glory, contraband.
But some he taught to love the land
from father to son, with passion beyond
the love for other things, to forge a bond
till oak chest heirloom and the story sung
of landing and suffering, in a tongue
gradually different, like a wild land’s sky,
wild herbs and bitter springs, were the only ties
with the past. He never let them guess
what he probably knew from the outset, yes,
that everything they made, whole and part,
was naught but erasable marks on a chart.
He let them believe they were secure lords
of what cannot be owned, land of dark hordes,
80 y ANDRIES WESSELS
PROOFTEXTS 29: 1
the muffled rumblings of a distant drum
to a shattering, crushing crescendo to come.
What he previously hailed as pride and glory
he now retells as a shameful story
and boldly declares: this must go, it’s behind,
his ironies always highly refined.
The poet describes history or the Zeitgeist personified as bringing Europeans to
Africa and allowing them to grow in the belief that the land belongs to them,
even though he knew, probably from the start, that everything they accomplished
here only constituted “erasable marks on a map,” and with his “highly refined”
sense of irony, he labels what was formally regarded as heroic, the subjugation of
the land, now as shameful, announcing that all they had accomplished must
disappear. Again Kirsch’s take on the subject reflects the direct, detached, dispasii
sionate perceptiveness of the onlooker, the outsider, yet the evidence of her underii
standing of Afrikaner thinking, of the Afrikaners’ historical dilemma, suggests
the intimate knowledge of the insider.34
And so, in the lush land of her poetry Kirsch remains at the nodal intersection
of, on the one hand, the condition of outsider, the exile, the Jew, and on the other,
the insider, the girl from Koppies who could only express her soul in Afrikaans,
always divided in herself. The Afrikaans poet Lina Spies captures this duality when
she speaks of the “vreemde, vertroude stem” of Olga Kirsch35—the strange, familiar
voice of Olga Kirsch. But it is in this liminality that her poetic strength lies.
Commenting on the work of the black American writer Richard Wright, Jean Paul
Sartre writes that his works “contain what Baudelaire would have called ‘a double
simultaneous position,’” speaking to two different audiences at once. “Jeremiah
spoke only to the Jews. But Wright, a writer for a split public, has been able to
maintain and go beyond this split. He has made it a pretext for art.”36 In Kirsch’s
work, the split lies in the identity of the writer, as Afrikaner and as Jew, concepts
usually held to be mutually exclusive. But as with the subject of Sartre’s observation,
she sublimates the split into her art. Kirsch’s lush land in the desert also suggests
the coming together of the different, apparently conflicting elements of her life and
The Outsider as Insider y 81
Winter 2009
identity, a confluence of incongruities that lies at the heart and root of her unique
creativity. Her verse becomes for her a place of fulfillment, completion, and reconii
ciliation in her otherwise divided life. In her poetic lush land within the desert, in
her Afrikaans poeticism within her Jewish identity, and in her Jewish sensibility
within her Afrikaans identity, we encounter Bhabha’s “third space,” a place of
shifting positions, but also a place of renewal and creativity.
In a short poem in Geil Gebied, Kirsch acutely articulates this fundamental
tension in her life and work, revealing the pain and the reward of her anguished
liminality:
My lewe sal gesplete bly:
Groen stamme as die byl hul kap
kerndiep, sal nooit weer heelheid kry.
Maar aan die staallem klewe sap.37
Split in two my life remains:
Green trunks, when the axe cuts a gap
to the core, can wholeness not regain.
But to the steel blade clings the sap.
Department of English University of Pretoria
N O T E S
1 Afrikaans is the language spoken by the descendants of the seventeenthi and
eighteenthicentury Dutch colonists at the Cape of Good Hope. It is closely
related to seventeenthicentury Dutch, but also shows some influence of Malay
(owing to the influence of slaves imported from the east in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries) and of local South African native languages. It was
recognized as an official language of the Union (and later Republic) of South
Africa in 1925 (together with English), effectively replacing Dutch, and is today
one of the eleven official languages of the country. It is the mother tongue of
approximately seven million people of European and of mixed race descent in
South Africa and Namibia (where it is recognized as a national rather than
82 y ANDRIES WESSELS
PROOFTEXTS 29: 1
official language). Due to the recent diaspora of white South Africans, there are
also substantial Afrikaansispeaking communities abroad, notably in the United
Kingdom and New Zealand.
2 Louise Viljoen points out that if one should measure canonicity in terms of the most
influential collection of Afrikaans poetry, the various editions of the Groot
Verseboek, it is telling that only five women poets were included as late as in the
1968 edition of the collection: Elisabeth Eybers, Olga Kirsch, Ingrid Jonker, Ina
Rousseau, and Sheila Cussons. (Louise Viljoen, “Antjie Krog en haar literêre
moeders: die werking van ’n vroulike tradisie in die Afrikaanse poësie,” Tydskrif
vir Letterkunde 44, no. 2 [2007]: 6.)
3 Lina Spies, “Olga Kirsch: ’n Huldiging,” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 35, no. 3 (1979):
79; Daniel Hugo, “Inleiding” (Introduction) in Nou spreek ek weer bekendes aan, ’n
keur 1944–1983 (a selection of poems by Olga Kirsch), ed. Daniel Hugo (Cape
Town: Human & Rousseau, 1994), 13.
4 Spies, 80.
5 Ibid., 77.
6 Hugo, “Inleiding,” 12.
7 J. C. Kannemeyer, Die Afrikaanse literatuur 1652–2004 (Cape Town and Pretoria:
Human & Rousseau, 2005), 246.
8 Hugo, “Inleiding,” 10. The death of her mother is the central theme of Kirsch’s
penultimate volume, Afskeide (Partings) (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1982).
9 Personal account (2005) by Prof. Elize Botha of Pretoria to the author of her visit to
Olga Kirsch in Israel, ca 1977.
10 Hugo, “Inleiding,” 10.
11 Olga Kirsch, The Book of Sitrya (Rehovot, Israel: 54/52 Hansi Harishon Street,
1990).
12 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
13 Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and AntigStructure (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).
14 Ibid., 95.
15 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3.
16 Turner, 128.
The Outsider as Insider y 83
Winter 2009
17 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 37.
18 Christian Hoeller, “Don’t Mess with Mister IniBetween,” interview with Homi K.
Bhabha, http://www.translocation.at/d/bhabha.htm, accessed September 6, 2006.
19 Kirsch’s language in these early volumes is in complete harmony with the tenor of
Afrikaans poetry at the time, approximating in particular the style of the
younger Elisabeth Eybers. This highlights a distinction between Kirsch’s work
and that of the other prominent category of liminal poets in Afrikaans, mixedi
race Afrikaans speakers (such as the poet Adam Small), who in the land of
apartheid likewise found themselves (linguistically) inside and (racially) outside
the fold. Small and his ilk generally proclaim their marginal status by using a
clearly recognizable social dialect of “Coloured” or “Cape” Afrikaans in their
poetry, uncompromisingly announcing their social, cultural, and by implication
ideological identity and dissociation from the mainstream in the language of
each poem. Kirsch, on the other hand, speaks with the tongue of the mainii
stream, and the revelation of her marginality is therefore more subtle and
indirect, proclaiming itself only in some poems and only in terms of focus and
perspective.
20 Olga Kirsch, Mure van die Hart (Johannesburg: Afrikaanse PersiBoekhandel,
1948), 12.
21 In Afrikaans, the same word (Paasfees) is used for Christian Easter and Jewish
Passover, so that the name of the feast does not act as a cultural indicator and
therefore alienating element in the Afrikaans text.
22 All translations are by the author of the article.
23 Kirsch, Mure van die Hart, 19.
24 Bhabha, 37.
25 Kirsch, Mure van die Hart, 37.
26 Olga Kirsch, Negentien Gedigte (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1972), 20.
27 It is intriguing that as Yiddish bears a strong resemblance to German, which
belongs to the same family of Germanic languages as Dutch and Afrikaans, there
are some similarities between the language of her father and the language of
Kirsch’s poetic utterances. A resemblance can often be detected in individual
words or phrases, but Yiddish and Afrikaans are not mutually intelligible. It is
clear that Kirsch did not see Afrikaans as a kind of relation to or extension of her
father’s native language, but exclusively as a language associated with South
84 y ANDRIES WESSELS
PROOFTEXTS 29: 1
Africa and its people. In this poem, she explicitly refers to Afrikaans and English
as being “strange tongues” (“vreemde tale”) to her father.
28 Kirsch, Negentien Gedigte, 24.
29 Ibid., 5.
30 Olga Kirsch, Geil Gebied (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1976), 11.
31 Ibid., 5.
32 Gilroy, 1.
33 Olga Kirsch, Oorwinteraars in die vreemde (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1978),
21–22.
34 Kirsch’s experiences in Israel and the counterclaims on land made in the Middle
East may also have influenced her fairly sympathetic understanding of the
Afrikaners’ historical dilemma expressed in this poem. There are very few
political references in Kirsch’s later work, but what there is—brief references in
Oorwinteraars in die vreemde (1978), and in Ruie Tuin (Cape Town: Human &
Rousseau, 1983)—bears witness to a continued dedication to and cherishing of
the state of Israel. While some contemporary readers may find an anomaly in
Kirsch’s critical attitude to apartheid as expressed in her early work and her
apparent unquestioning support for the policies of the state of Israel, this
ambivalence is fairly common among members of the South African Jewish
community, a community which played a significant role in resistance to
apartheid, but which has on the whole remained vehement in its uncritical
support for the state of Israel. So, for example, in the South African Sunday
Times of August 3, 2008, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein takes umbrage at the
comparison between apartheid and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, drawn
by the editor of that publication and responds:
Mondli Makhanya, in “The neveriending faceioff” (July 27), is wrong when
he describes Israeli policies towards Palestinian Arabs as a form of
apartheid.
These accusations defame the Jewish state, and also diminish the victims
of the real apartheid—the men, women and children of our beloved South
Africa—who suffered for centuries under arrogant, heartless colonialism,
and then for decades under the brutal apartheid policies of racial superiority,
oppression and separation inflicted by the National Party. If everything is
apartheid, then nothing is apartheid.
In Israel, all citizens—Jew and Arab alike—are equal before the law. Israel
The Outsider as Insider y 85
Winter 2009
has none of the apartheid legislative machinery devised to discriminate
against and separate people (http://www.thetimes.co.za/article.
aspx?id=814070, accessed August 18 2008).
35 Spies, 80.
36 In Gilroy, 146.
37 Kirsch, Geil Gebied, 6.
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