Creative Writing

Both film-maker Timothy Gabb and anthropologist Michael de Jongh have noticed the disappearance of the karretjiemense, a marginalised people who travel the Karoo desert using donkey carts or karretjies. Having run a petrol station in Prince Albert in the Eastern Cape, author Carol Campbell’s debut novel My Children Have Faces features a family of karretjiemense who wander the Karoo desert and in real ways ‘belong to’ it. This belonging is reflected in the novel through the ‘interchanges and interconnections between [their] human corporeality and the more-than-human’, which ecocritic Stacey Alaimo calls ‘transcorporeality’. It is an engagement that enables the resilience of the tight-knit family to the vulnerabilities of living in the desert in order to escape the pursuit of the murderous Miskiet. Campbell reflects this transcorporeality, fictionally, through naming, through animal imagery and through the motifs of smell and of movement. She also registers how transcorporeality dwind...

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work-I am the grass; I cover all. So begins Carl Sandburg's poem, 'Grass', which, published in 1918, commemorates the processes of nature responding to the human ruins of war. Of course, grass cannot 'speak'. To take up the poem in its own terms, readers must enter into a fictional contract with the poet that enables it to do so. We remain aware that the 'person' speaking is the mediated voice of the poet; yet his text works by inviting us to consider the work of the grass that overlays and ultimately obliterates the violent traces of war. By contrast, Langston Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' retains for its speaker a human voice, identified by his African ancestry and by his witnessing Lincoln's liberation of American slaves. 'I've known rivers', he says (Hughes 1921): I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. Here is no attempt to speak for water, but rather a brooding similitude set up between the speaker and the 'ancient dusky rivers' he evokes. Published in 1921, 3 years after Sandburg's 'Grass', the poem shares with it imagery drawn from nature that insists on an intrinsic interrelatedness with human experience. In a more recent poem, Ted Hughes (1970:93) too eschews first-person, while focalising 'How water began to play'. The form the poem takes is repetitive. The assertions 'water wanted to live', 'it went to' and 'it came weeping back' recur multiple times. On its ventures, water meets 'the sun'; 'the trees', which 'burn' and 'rot'; and 'the flowers', which 'crumple'. When it goes to 'the womb' it meets 'blood', 'knife', 'maggot and rottenness'. Then it wants to die. Having been 'to time … through the stone door'; after searching 'through all space for nothingness', it wants to die. Finally it has 'no weeping left', and lies 'at the bottom of all things / utterly worn out utterly clear'. Hughes's representation relates to what scientists call the water cycle: 'The interdependence and continuous movement of all forms of water provide the basis for the concept of the hydrological cycle ', say Ward and Robinson (1990:3) in their Principles of Hydrology. The major processes which make up the cycle are evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Not all precipitation reaches the ground. What does, follows three courses: remaining on the surface Bordered by the Swartberg mountain range to the north and the Cape Fold Mountains to the south, the semi-desert region and its people inspired Pauline Smith's eponymous collection of stories, The Little Karoo (1925). Earlier critics have argued that, in Smith's stories, the region's geographical boundaries (as well as her use of Afrikaans-inflected language) 'confine' and 'restrict' the world of its characters. Informed by the precepts of ecocriticism, this paper provides a fresh take on Smith's stories of the Karoo, close to a century after their first publication. Our intention is to 'read for water' after Isabel Hoffman, Sarah Nuttall and Charne Lavery, as the motility of the streams and rivers that flow in and through this arid landscape challenges the fixity and enclosure the earlier critics read into her work. Drawing on Hubert Zapf's conception of literature as 'cultural ecology', we are interested in the 'energetic processes' of water in the stories, and the 'ecological space' in which it makes its impact. Rather than reading water as being at the behest of humans, we seek to recognise the valency it is given in the stories, and in this light to explore the impacts of its presence, its actions, and its absence. Contribution: This article adds to the emerging field of ecocriticism in South Africa by exploring the literary valency given to water in Pauline Smith's stories of the Karoo.

Ecofeminism is an interdisciplinary movement which dissects unhealthy power relations. Assessing the science fiction film Black Panther (Coogler 2018) through an ecofeminist lens offers up fruitful and complicated explorations. Ecofeminism focusses on the impacts of toxic hegemonies, and the paper evaluates representations of power in Black Panther. As the vibranium meteor gives Wakanda an advantage, vibranium functions as a speculative symbol for privilege, and the responsibilities that come with the power of privileged positioning are interrogated. An analysis of the representations of culture and nature in Black Panther potentially indicates that Wakanda is not as severed from nature as our contemporary global neoliberal culture-although, arguably, much of the imagery is idealised, and what is excluded from our view is as important as what is included. An uninvited ecofeminist observation suggests that Wakanda's isolation goes against the grain of contemporary globalised neoliberalism and posits that self-reliance and self-subsistence can be a powerful alternative force. In our neoliberal system, where deregulated global trade is driving the Anthropocene, there is potentially a lesson in Wakanda's selfsufficiency. Finally, a discussion of the heart-shaped herb reveals it to be a speculative symbol of ecofeminist connectivity through uniting humanity, nature, technology, and consciousness.

Ecofeminism is an interdisciplinary movement which dissects unhealthy power relations. Assessing the science fiction film Black Panther (Coogler 2018) through an ecofeminist lens offers up fruitful and complicated explorations. Ecofeminism focusses on the impacts of toxic hegemonies, and the paper evaluates representations of power in Black Panther. As the vibranium meteor gives Wakanda an advantage, vibranium functions as a speculative symbol for privilege, and the responsibilities that come with the power of privileged positioning are interrogated. An analysis of the representations of culture and nature in Black Panther potentially indicates that Wakanda is not as severed from nature as our contemporary global neoliberal culture-although, arguably, much of the imagery is idealised, and what is excluded from our view is as important as what is included. An uninvited ecofeminist observation suggests that Wakanda's isolation goes against the grain of contemporary globalised neoliberalism and posits that self-reliance and self-subsistence can be a powerful alternative force. In our neoliberal system, where deregulated global trade is driving the Anthropocene, there is potentially a lesson in Wakanda's selfsufficiency. Finally, a discussion of the heart-shaped herb reveals it to be a speculative symbol of ecofeminist connectivity through uniting humanity, nature, technology, and consciousness.

Rachel Zadok's dystopian Sister-Sister (2013) was short-listed for the Herman Charles Bosman Prize and the University of Johannesburg Prize. This complex, experimental, magical realist novel has been described by Christopher Hope as '[a]n extraordinary blend of parable, passion and poetry; it's not often a novel of such originality comes around' (Sister-Sister cover endorsement). The novel is set in an alternative South Africa and has a lyrical, dream-like quality, and yet beneath its lyricism, it is a savage tale that explores the compound ways in which the Anthropocene is impacting on both the human and nonhuman ecosystems. Zadok's work is an exploration of a planet in crisis, a society in crisis, and ultimately a family in crisis. The novel delves into the complexities of sibling rivalry-in this case between the twins Sindi and Thuli-and explores the sisters' quest for separation and selfhood in a traumatised society. On an ecofeminist level, Sister-Sister examines how, in a fractured society, where the earth is victimised, underprivileged children too are vulnerable. Colonisation and decolonisation are important concepts in the novel, and one of the most important symbols of colonialism Zadok explores is the road: it is a metaphor for capitalist greed, homelessness, and grief. The title of this article: 'The road never ends' (Zadok, 2013a: 297) is inspired by the twins' symbolic journey along the Ring Road. The gloomy concrete highway operates, first, as ecofeminist commentary (as discussed later). Second, the layered, sometimes dislocated way the road finds expression in the text is a feature of the magical realist storytelling in the novel, and Zadok's exploration of the road reveals the power of the interplay between ecofeminism and magical realism. After the dream prologue, the twins' story opens on the road: 'I stand at the edge of an overpass as another bleak dawn spills over the city stretched out below. Office blocks rise into the leaden sky like a jawful of giant's teeth' (Zadok, 2013a: 13). This apocalyptic, evocative opening immerses us in the twins' journey on the Ring Road: a road that circles in on itself, never ending, much like the horror of the capitalist systemic abuse that