The Language of Ham and the Language of Cain: “Dialect” and Linguistic Hybridity in the Work of Adam Small

Posted in Africa, Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, New Media, South Africa on 2010-09-30 18:03Z by Steven

The Language of Ham and the Language of Cain: “Dialect” and Linguistic Hybridity in the Work of Adam Small

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Volume 45, Number 3 (September 2010)
pages 389-408
DOI: 10.1177/0021989410377550

Nicole Devarenne, Lecturer in English
University of Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom

The “coloured” South African writer Adam Small has made an important and largely unrecognized contribution to anti-apartheid literature in Afrikaans. His pioneering use of “Kaaps” (a linguistic variety spoken by “coloured” Afrikaners at the Cape) in his poetry and plays complicated the racial designation of Afrikaans as a “white” language and challenged the dominance of the “white” Afrikaans literary tradition. In a literature where the variety used by the white nationalist government was also that used by (albeit some of them dissident) Afrikaans writers, he created an appetite and appreciation for vernacular language as a medium of resistance against white supremacy. His work has helped to make possible a continuing investment by Afrikaans writers (white as well as “coloured”) in non-standard language as resistance to cultural imperialism and nationalism. During apartheid, however, he faced considerable criticism for his use of what was seen as a degraded and degrading “dialect”, and for his ostensible complicity in apartheid as a self-avowed “brown Afrikaner”. This article examines some of the difficulties which faced “coloured”Afrikaans writers during apartheid, taking Small as a specific example of a writer whose career displays the impact of the collision between “coloured” separatism and a politically pragmatic universalism, and proposes a reconsideration of his work as a subversive, ironic and ground-breaking intervention in South African literature.

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