Magister Artium - MA (Creative writing)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/16394

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Browsing by Subject "Cape Town"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Molla's music
    (University of the Western Cape, 2017) Mudge, Ethne; Martin, Julia
    Molla'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.
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    Of flowers and tears
    (University of Western Cape, 2018) Rodkin, Hayley Amanda; Van Der Merwe, Meg
    The collection of ten short stories, Of Flowers and Tears, aims to capture the events that have shaped my life, impacted on my community. It hopefully gives a voice to topics such as mental trauma, sibling strife, abortion, drug use and abuse, suicide, as well as political and social activism. Whilst none of the topics are new, the collection could potentially add to a growing genre of short story fiction by local authors which examine issues relating to trauma, loss, violence and the acknowledgement of identities. As South Africans, we carry many metaphoric scars (including psychological, socio-economic, sexual) as well as literal ones, which act as testimonies to our violent and frequently traumatic past and present. Even though most of the material used in my collection forms part of my personal memory bank and will be interpreted in a wholly fictional way, I propose that such a collection speaks to pertinent, present and pervasive realities.
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    Post–exilic an old South African returns to the new South Africa
    (University of Western Cape, 2020) Devereux, Stephen; Moolman, Kobus
    This portfolio of poems, prose poems and short fiction pieces is quasi-autobiographical and tracks the trajectory of my life, from childhood in Cape Town (‘pre-exilic’) to emigration abroad (‘exilic’) and return to Cape Town in late middle age (‘post-exilic’). Themes explored include the deceptive nature of memory and the risk of imbuing a childhood recollected in later life with affective or narrative nostalgia; the psychologically dislocating nature of exile on personal identity and notions of home; and Cape Town as both an imaginary construct and a multi-layered reality: specifically, ‘my’ Cape Town – now as well as half a century ago – and ‘other’ Cape Towns, reflecting a diversity of highly unequal experiences within this city. The dominant mode of expression chosen to explore these largely personal themes is confessional.
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    Reflexive Essay
    (University of the Western Cape, 2011) Cornelius, Jerome; Vandermerwe, Meg
    His brown hands, tanned darker than they already were from hours of supervising men shoveling sand and mixing concrete on building sites, gripped the steering wheel. Hendrick Vermeulen drove down Voortrekker Road after a long day's work. He had dropped off the last of the guys with his bakkie and was looking forward to resting. He was enjoying the cool night air blowing up his arm. And there it was, that mountain. There was nothing more to think about it. It meant nothing to him; a big rock, a marker to remind where he was. The rich people were there by the mountain; he was not. He drove on. The sun had gone down and he was making his way home. He looked at his eyes in the rear view mirror, the lines on his forehead more visible than they had ever been. He lived close to the university that he dropped out of thirty years ago. He drove past it often - a reminder of a life he could have had. He was supposed to be a teacher and help his mother move out of the coloured townships and into a nice house, nessie wit mense, like the white people, she would say. She always said that and she laughed, with a cough at the end as she slapped her knee. That was a long time ago. He often thought of the past, but he always made sure he snapped out of it soon enough. No time for that, he thought. And then he saw her, the young· lady walking down the street. He slowed the car. What do you think you are doing, he thought to himself as he idled down the main road. She had a plastic shopping bag and was probably on her way home from the Pick 'n Pay. Student life, he thought. He hardly had a taste of it before the riots and state of emergency and all that. Now he was a contractor. Men like him are not supposed to look at girls walking down the streets going home to their flats. Jissus she was beautiful though, he thought as he stopped at the intersection and she crossed the road. She ran across and as she walked under a street light, he got a better view. A thick, brown coat and black pantyhose and not much else. Heshook his head and laughed. These kids of today. But that's how Chalita used to dress. When they were young themselves and fell in love. They were free. When they had dreams and hopes and she thought that things were still decent and they were going to have a double story and everything will be ...