Precarious Love: Reading Selected Works by Lesego Rampolokeng

Dr Danyela Demir, University of Johannesburg

Date: Wednesday 20 February 2019

Venue: Departmental Common Room

Time: 14h15 - 15h00

In most of the few studies that look at South African poet, playwright, documentary filmmaker, and novelist's Lesego Rampolokeng's work, the focus often lies on the more 'violent' side of his writing. For example, critics have been concerned with the scatological and the 'politics of waste', particularly in Rampolokeng's early writing (Mkhize 2011) and 'writing about madness' (Veit-Wild 2006; Wachira 2018). This paper attempts to move away from these one-dimensional readings of Rampolokeng's work. I will trace ambivalent moments in his oeuvre that do take the violence and harrowing existence that black people are subjected to into account, but that also speak of love and solidarity amidst utter desperation, loss, and mourning. The paper is part of a larger project which looks at Rampolokeng's oeuvre from Horns for Hondo (1990) to Bird-Monk Seding (2017), and it traces, amongst other things, ambivalent intersections of (self-)love, violence, resilience, and the quest to survive as people of colour in a hostile world. I will argue that these powerful intersections, often expressed at times of loss or traumatic events, are not only visible on a content level, but are also expressed on a more formal level, where the artist crosses 'conventional' boundaries of genre and modes of writing.

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