Browsing by Author "Martin, Julia"
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Item A place to pray(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Petersen, Andrea; Martin, JuliaA Place to Pray is a creative nonfiction piece that weaves together personal narrative and historical reflection to explore my family’s dispossession from their ancestral land in Ebenezer, South Africa. The story unfolds through a series of contemporary events—family gatherings, WhatsApp conversations, and the legal steps we are currently taking to reclaim the land. These present moments act as windows into the past, uncovering deep connections between land, identity, and belonging At the heart of this narrative is the figure of my great-grandmother, Ouma Betty, a quiet yet enduring presence in family lore. In A Place to Pray, her life becomes a metaphor for the silenced experiences of women whose stories, like hers, have been overshadowed by history and displacement. By telling a story of my quest to learn more about Ouma Betty, the narrative seeks to recover some of these lost voices and to acknowledge the often-overlooked struggles of women in coloured communities. The work moves between intimate family moments and broader national issues, using personal experience to reflect on the ongoing complexities of land redistribution in South Africa. It begins with a land claim meeting in Ebenezer which establishes both the historical and emotional context of the story. Subsequent chapters include interviews with Tannetjie, Ouma Betty’s daughter, which offer intimate insights into the family's history, and conversations with Antie Lindy, whose vivid memory of Ouma Betty is a crucial inspiration for shaping the narrative. Beyond this, it becomes increasingly difficult to find further information about Ouma Betty, and by end of the fifth chapter, I am unable to continue. Eventually in the final chapter the narrative arc shifts upward again, as I regain the motivation to return to the project, and the story reaches its emotional peak when my mother buys land in Ebenezer. This becomes a symbol of reclaiming not only land but also identity, and it offers a sense of resolution.Item Chapter 12 imagination and the eco-social crisis (or: why I write creative non-fiction)(Brill, 2020) Martin, JuliaGreen Matters reflects on the �unique cultural function� of literary texts with regard to environmental and ecological concerns. Another way of putting this is to ask: what do literary texts enable us to say or do in relation to the eco-social crisis that is not so readily expressed in other forms of discourse? I�d like to explore this question with regard to my own practice. After some years of writing fairly conventional journal articles and conference papers about literature and ecology, I now find myself among those practitioners in the Environmental Humanities who have been prompted by the urgency of the present crisis to reconsider the modes of our academic expression. This means that I wish to extend the reach of my writing beyond the limited readership of traditional academic discourse, and to admit such radical modes of knowing as may only be expressed through literature.Item Hit by the machine: reading a local protest poem on the island of Symi, 120 years later(Routledge, 2024) Martin, JuliaThe poem ‘Χϵιμϵρινός όνϵιρος,’ or ‘Winter Dream,’ by Metrophanes I Kalafatas, was written in 1903 in the hope of influencing the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid Han II to ban the new deep-sea diving suits which had recently started to be used in the Aegean sponge industry at a devastating cost to both individuals and the social body. 120 years later, the poem’s bold rage against modernity and the Machine seems poignantly ineffectual and nostalgic. Yet its lyrical account of the non-commodifiable qualities of life on Symi before the arrival of the skafandro still offers a positive image for the contemporary renewal of sustainable eco-social community on the islandsItem An investigation of the potential role that folklore can play in environmental education: a case study of Mphoko(University of the Western Cape, 2005) Ramaila, Ziphora Mmabatho; Martin, Julia; Becker, Heike; Dept. of English; Faculty of ArtsThis thesis investigated the role that folklore can play in contemporary environmental problems. This research was prompted by people living around the Mantrombi nature reserve in the Nebo region of Limpopo province who showed and interest in reviving folklore as an education model to combat their existing environmental problems.Item The jewelled net: Towards a Southern African theory/ practice of environmental literacy(University of the Western Cape, 1999) Martin, JuliaThis thesis suggests that there is an urgent need for academic work in literary and cultural studies to become more responsive to the contemporary eco-social crisis of environment and development. Questioning the sustainability of current practices, I introduce an approach which has emerged in the attempt to reorient my own work in English Studies towards what I call environmental literacy. My discussion consists of a prologue, six chapters, and an epilogue. The prologue is a story essay which presents through metaphor and narrative some of the questions which later chapters explore in more familiarly academic register. Chapters One and Two assemble the theoretical tools which have shaped my priorities. The first situates the project in terms of issues in South African eco-politics, and goes on to introduce potentially useful models in eco-criticism , environmental history, ecological philosophy and feminist theory. The second chapter argues that elements in Mahayana Buddhism (specifically teachings on emptiness and dependent arising and their relation to compassion) offer suggestive models for further radicalizing our theory I practice. The following degree chapters experiment with writing environmentally literate responses to several texts (one historical and the rest contemporary). Chapter Three is an appreciative reading of the representation of the Garden in William Blake's poem The Book of Thel (1789), Chapter Four brings personal narrative into an analysis of Gary Snyder's epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), and Chapter Five is a critical survey of eco-cultural texts produced in South Africa during the period 1986- 1996. In Chapter Si.." I report on some of the pedagogical implications of thee orientation 1 have described , drawing on thee experience of teaching at the University of the Western Cape. The epilogue is brief and imagistic. The written text of the thesis is accompanied by pictures of people, plants and places.Item Lost on the way home(University of Western Cape, 2018) Levy, Moira; Martin, JuliaThis is a novella about homelessness, and the forms of exile, loss and displacement that it creates. Based in South Africa and Palestine/Israel, it is a story about four men who all find themselves alienated and marginalised and who, in their different ways, find themselves lost in their search for a place to belong. Reuben is the primary character. Estranged from the Jewish community into which he is born, he turns his back on apartheid South Africa, expecting to find an alternative home in Israel. But when he arrives there he encounters once again the same dark side of humankind that he thought he had left behind. He is not the first of his family to be driven from a place he calls home. His grandfather, Sam, who has already passed away by the time this story takes place, experienced homelessness after Nazism forced him to flee. The novella opens at the moment when Reuben takes his son Dov to Israel as a young child. But a growing estrangement between father and son emerges over time, as Dov is fiercely loyal to Israel while Reuben becomes bitterly disillusioned. They find themselves pitted against each other politically, until the pathology of Israeli militarism drives Dov to a breakdown. Following Dov's own eventual personal escape into exile, when he decides he must dissociate himself from the Israeli Defence Force, he calls out to his father to rescue him and take him home. Finally there is Haroom, a young Israeli Palestinian whom Reuben befriends, who has his own story of rootlessness and the absence of belonging. In Lost on the Way Home, the politics of oppression, discrimination, dispossession, and violent victimisation underpins each of the four men's individual stories. And despite their differences, all share the experience of being driven from their "homes", or the communities or places from which they originated. It is through their individual relationships that they reach out to each other to find a place to share and establish an alternative to the homes they have lost. In the end it is left to Reuben and Dov to struggle to find a way of finding each other when they set off together on a desert hike with no destination and only the goal of escaping their pasts.Item Molla's music(University of the Western Cape, 2017) Mudge, Ethne; Martin, JuliaMolla's Music is a novella about Maureen (Molla), a white Afrikaans woman born in 1935 in Cape Town, who faced poverty and abandonment before apartheid and who, during apartheid, faced the choice between an unwanted pregnancy with a married man, and a carreer in music funded by the father who had betrayed her. Maureen is introduced in three sections with very different voices in each. In the first section she is depicted in the context of being cared for by a single mother with severe post natal depression. The short chapters and long sentences reflect the naïvity of the subject, whose unfiltered observations allow the reader to bear witness to the traumas that dictate her character later in life. She was so ashamed of her poverty, her father's abandonment, and her pregnancy, that she hid all memories of her past from her children and grandchildren and almost managed to die with all her secrets in tact. The second section becomes more sophisticated with longer chapters. The reader is guided through the fifties by a young adult whose adolescent memories inform the events that unfold over a mere two days. Finally, the last section consists of only one chapter, but it reviews an entire life. It is written in the first person, revealing the identity of the narrator. Maureen taught herself piano before school. Her father played the violin and her dedication to music seems to be a mechanism for connecting to him and what his absence from her life represents. It is an absense that eludes consolidation until her death. Molla proved to be such a gifted child that she skipped two years of school and took on music as an extra subject until matric, but financial strain and the shackles of patriarchy limited her options and only after years of working, does she apply to the UCT college of music. She inherits a piano from her landlords, who are evicted during the implementation of the Group Areas Act of 1957. In the years after that, playing piano becomes her private liberation practised in plain sight, on the only heirloom that persists from her past. When she dies, her granddaughter has a heritage that beckons to be resolved and remembered. She does not play the piano she inherited from her grandmother, but starts to investigate its past. In the course of Molla's Music, I explore themes of Afrikaner identity, and question modes of being for white Afrikaans women in South Africa today. By offering an intimate depiction of an individual's search for meaning, while negotiating the forces of Apartheid and patriarchy, especially as a confluence of forces, I hope to gain clarity with regard to my own questions about identity.Item Music memoir as an evocation of cultural legacy: The Zayn Adam story(University of the Western Cape, 2019) Jegels, Llewellin RG; Martin, JuliaMusicians of colour are under-represented in the South African archive, in part due to the ravages of apartheid and the lack of resources to chronicle their trajectories outside of the production of their music alone. In this biography, I excavate the story of Zayn Adam, an iconic member of the popular 1970s Cape Flats band, Pacific Express, and construct a narrative based predominantly on a four-hour interview he had with Jonathan Stevens, a co-member of the Cape Minstrel band, the Golden Dixies, plus interviews I conducted with Paddy Lee-Thorp, Zayn’s former manager, Zayn’s son, Danyaal and Glenn Robertson who helped manage Zayn’s last show. I explore the relationships between the various bands and their creation of music fusion as a means of transcending economic realities which forced this artistic reinvention upon which they had to rely as a means of survival, particularly when performing in white clubs. I also explore the role of music as a form of cultural commentary and cultural memory against the backdrop of apartheid. Each chapter is titled after a popular song that reflects the spirit of the chapter. In the essay that follows, I reflect on the process of writing the biography, considering the challenges of historiography in general, and of biography in particular.Item The path which goes beyond: Danger on Peaks responds to suffering(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Martin, JuliaNow well into his eighties, Gary Snyder continues to pursue lifetime habits of engagement and detachment in which the activities of literary work, spiritual practice, environmental activism, and family life are mutually informing. This leads, in the poetry, to an instructive response to personal suffering and to the suffering embodied in our present eco-social dilemmas. When asked in the 1996 Paris Review interview why, for all his environmental involvements, his writing is �surprisingly without disasters,� Snyder countered that �there are several poems that have very bad news in them� (Snyder and Weinberger 335).Item Witness to the makeshift shore: Ecological practice in A Littoral Zone(UKZN, 2013) Martin, JuliaThis essay suggests that Douglas Livingstone's long poem 'A Littoral Zone' (1991), an explicit conversation between his work as an environmental scientist and his work as a poet, makes for a poetic statement that is, in various senses of the word, ecological. The sequence of poems draws extensively on scientific research in the field of bacteriology, is minutely located in 'place', evokes a secular sacramentalism in its representation of ecological interconnectedness, and situates the present moment in the context of deep time. In all, Livingstone's distinctive stance involves a tough, tender negotiation between irony, equanimity, wonder, and a sense of critical environmental urgency. Read twenty years later, his view of the South Coast littoral and of the world in which it is situated, seems prescient.