Mimetic Presuppositions: On the Epitextual Responses to Two Poems in English by Marlene van Niekerk

Abstract

In this article, I consider two fairly recent English poems by Marlene van Niekerk: “Mud school” (2013) and “Fallist art (in memory of Bongani Mayosi)” (2018). Specifically, I explore the context surrounding the production of these poems, and what we can possibly glean from their limited (and not exclusively literary) reception in order to understand how this part of Van Niekerk’s (English) authorship has thus far been read in more limited ways by critics and scholars. By focusing on the epitextual responses surrounding these poems, I show how they are symptomatic of what Jahan Ramazani calls the “mimetic presuppositions” that often take shape in critical readings of postcolonial literature (2004). Considering the especially politically engaged nature of Van Niekerk’s novels in particular, I argue that the oversight of Van Niekerk’s poetry, both residing in the dearth of translation of her poetry and in the critical blind spot writ large in studies of her work in English, comes as a result of what Emma Bird (2018) calls poetry’s “distinctly peripheral position” in postcolonial literary studies – a critical lens that has in various ways directed readings of Van Niekerk’s English work.