A “You Remember to Excavate; You Excavate to Remember:” Women Poets Exposing the Shortcomings of the South African Archive

Abstract

This paper investigates the intersections of race, class, and gender in women’s voices and/or in historical characters from a selected corpus of English and Afrikaans poems from South Africa. The discussed authors include Makhosazana Xaba, Koleka Putuma, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Malika Ndlovu, Yvette Christiansë, Ronelda Kamfer, Jolyn Phillips, and Lynthia Julius. The article will specifically examine how black and coloured women’s poetry often focuses on historical female figures, either ignored or marginalised in the official records. By unearthing forgotten women and their life stories, the poets we examine contribute to illuminating the complex experiences of South African black and coloured women from different periods. The theoretical approaches that have supported us in this journey include recent views on the concept of intersectionality, such as the current reflections on the dynamics of assemblage (Bogic 2017), critical approaches to South African feminism and literature, like Barbara Boswell’s And Wrote My Story Anyway (2020), and insights on the controversial political and cultural archives of South Africa, as put forward by Verne Harris (2021). This analysis will focus on how the selected poems contest the dominant versions of history and the official archive’s lack of inclusiveness.