insider as outsider - jewish afrikaans poetry by olga kirsch

y 63

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.

64 y ANDRIES WESSELS

PROOFTEXTS 29: 1

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,

The Outsider as Insider y 65

Winter 2009

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


PROOFTEXTS 29: 1

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


Winter 2009

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


Winter 2009

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


PROOFTEXTS 29: 1

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


Winter 2009

[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


PROOFTEXTS 29: 1

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


Winter 2009

— 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


PROOFTEXTS 29: 1

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:


Winter 2009

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.


PROOFTEXTS 29: 1

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


Winter 2009

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


PROOFTEXTS 29: 1

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


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,


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


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


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.


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


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


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.

insider as outsider - jewish afrikaans poetry by olga kirsch

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