Reading the “Present Time” as Queer Feminist Refuge in Lien Botha’s Eco-Apocalypse

Abstract

Lien Botha’s Wonderboom (2015) explores forgetting as a strategy for undermining linear historiography, and feminine unravelling as a revolt against violent masculinity, colonialism, and environmental decline. This article presents a reading of Botha’s debut novel, accompanying visuals, and a selection of photographs from her oeuvre spanning at least 20 years—in counterpoint—to demonstrate how Botha fashions the present as queer feminist refuge in her engagement with troubled pasts and uncertain futures. I conduct my analyses via a postcolonial, queer and feminist framework, in order to highlight Botha’s careful engagement with race, gender, and the environment, and employ Barad’s hauntology to engage with Botha’s disruption of the space-time continuum. To this end, the article elaborates on the many intertextual relationships between Botha’s own visual and literary work, and those of a selection of South African and international literary figures. Botha’s novel and her photography resist a conception of history that is linear and continuous, instead suggesting experiments with space-time configurations that question social and environmental responsibility. Botha creates a haunted space where past and future become blurred; the present, and the people and landscapes one encounters there, are revealed as a space of possibility for changed relationships with self, others, and nature.