Magister Artium - MA (Creative writing)

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

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Around a Fire: Poems of Memory and Ritual
(University of the Western Cape, 2019) Mpuma, Nondwe; Moolman, Jacobus
This Creative Writing mini-thesis offers a deep meditation on what it means to speak to ritual and memory. The thesis is compiled from a collection of original creative work as well as a short reflective essay that present a critical analysis of the creative pieces in relation to the ideas I present. The first of these ideas being, memory as an encapsulation of the past, present and future as explored by writers such as W.G. Sebald and Toni Morrison. This collection examines an understanding of memory and ritual as being uncontained, as constant providers of stimulation for a range of literary responses. Ritual will be regarded primarily in the South African context where there is the intersection of the urban and rural landscapes both physically and metaphorically. In this regard I am thinking alongside writers such as Louise Glúck and Vangile Gantsho. The understanding of ritual is extended to the realm of spirituality where Christianity and African spirituality exist both harmoniously and in conflict. In short, the collection of poems and the reflective essay will explore the ways that memory and ritual interact in time and they will collectively contribute to the production of literature in South Africa.
Bab’aba - Ugly short stories
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Nxadi, Julie Ruth Sikelwa; Moolman, Kobus
Bab’aba - Ugly Short Stories is a collection of vignettes whose function is to colour and collage three portraits of Black women characters; namely, a rural woman (Nozikhali), a township teenager (Zola), and a child/baby (Loli). Each of these stories serve as details in each other’s portraits whilst remaining stories on their own. My intention with this collection was to restore some form of abstract equality and right to mystery by functioning within a lexicon of opacity. In the scholarship of decoloniality this is my argument for the legitimacy of vernacular/customised definitions for problems that preoccupy communities/individuals rather than having to always pin ourselves to already existing theory in order to be legible. In the scholarship of opacity, this is a contribution to the argument against the necessity for legibility/transparency (in the first place) in exchange for dignity. I chose ugliness as my thematic district of departure because of its connoted potential to provide richer explorations into notions of marginality and an emancipatory praxis that cannot afford to have in its makeup the potential to seek to eliminate. And though such a liberatory ambition is hard to fantasize about against the backdrop of popular chauvinism in the contemporary landscape of - particularly - South Africa, and the visceral effects thereof and the swift justice needed to attend thereto, I do think that there is merit in hallucinating some sort of doctrine of humanity that ends in dignity for all.
Chrononormativity: An Exploration of Queerness, Time and Aestheticism in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Conway, Jamie; Davids, Courtney; Clarkson, Carrol-Ann Pauline
This thesis will explore the extent to which Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) addresses chrononormative issues in the Victorian period, using literary scholar Josh Mcloughlin’s “Queer Time in Woolf and Wilde” as a point of departure. By definition, chrononormative issues are linked to the organization of human lives towards maximum productivity following the “major milestones” of life, including but not limited to coming of age, academic graduation, marriage and children. Mcloughlin examines the connection between queerness, aestheticism, gender practices and what Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) refers to as chrononormativity. Mcloughlin argues that in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1933), both protagonists, as queer characters, resist and reject chrononormativity. Mcloughlin goes on to compare the use of aestheticism in both novels as useless and digressive. In order to expand on his claims, I apply the theoretical framework of Freeman’s chrononormativity and queer temporality, with reference to Swikriti Sanyal’s focus on gender and sexuality in “Breaking through the Limits of Flesh: Gender Fluidity and (Un)natural Sexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando”.
A cow’s meat: an original collection of poems and photographs that explores the influence of imagery in narrative
(University of the Western Cape, 2023) Deane, Kirsten; Moolman, Jacobus
This MACW mini-thesis will examine how photography can inspire narrative in a poem and enhance the impact of its imagery. As I embarked on my journey of writing, I came to the point of needing to augment its effect. So I decided to experiment with photography as the prompt for my writing; exploring how photography can inspire a writer’s creativity, and help them to take their work further and deeper. One of the most important and impactful parts of poetry is its use of evocative imagery. A poet employs imagery in her work to add sensory detail and lyrical effect in order to heighten the reader’s understanding and experience of the topic at hand. Poets such as Angifi Dladla, Chika Sagawa, Max Ritvo and Dawn Garisch use powerful, sometimes strange, images in their work to provide a literary experience that would have an impact upon the reader. With this in mind, I decided to explore using another form of art, specifically photography, to help me expand my use and understanding of the way imagery functions in poetry.
Dance on the red-brown earth
(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Conradie, Ina; Vandermerwe, Meg
Nandi, Java and Uuka are students at a Cape Town university, where they are enrolled in a film making course. Adela, their lecturer, will supervise their screenplay and film on a story which depicts the experience of the loss of land in South Africa. They are however also deeply involved in student protests for free university education for all. When the #feesmustfall protests reach a deadlock at their university and the university is temporarily closed, they decide to leave for the Eastern Cape to look for a story. There they stay with Uuka’s grandparents and spend their time trying to understand the family history and the family’s ownership of land, as well as the broader history of land dispossession. They do not only discover more about Uuka’s ancestors and about distant history, but also about themselves. As the characters delve more deeply into the past in their search for a story for a screenplay, the margins between their own stories and the screenplay shift and merge, as do the forms of novel and screenplay
Harreخ at: A novella and reflective essay
(University of the Western Cape, 2023) Ajouhaar, Quanita; Moolla, Fatima Fiona
Background: On the 9th of August 1961, an especially cold, rainy day, the five girls were standing outside of their mother, Rhoda’s, bedroom door, waiting patiently for their first brother to arrive, since Rhoda’s belly was unusually large this time around. It looked different from the way it did the five times before. The girls sat against the door in the hallway that was filled with rakams that their mother recently got as a gift from their neighbour. They all thought that it was a miracle to finally have a brother. It had to have been a blessing from Allah, a Makkah baby. “Aaaah,” they heard Rhoda scream from the other side of the door, where the mid-wife stood in front of her open legs repeatedly saying, “Merrem is amper daar.” It was Rhoda’s sixth baby. She thought it would come out easily. “Dit is darem my sesde kind. Ek poep hom sommer uit,” she would say every time one of them spoke about her birth. And she eventually did, “poep the baby out,” and a healthy cry reached the hallway piercing the ears of the girls. They beamed smiles, pushing against the door to come in. Luckily, it was still locked. When the midwife pulled the child out, and Rhoda’s husband, Boebie, got the first peek of the baby, he smiled.
I am not a colour: A novella
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Gcwadi, Madoda; Krog, Antjie
Nobathembu lifts her hand and waves at her neighbour. She is watering spinach in her garden with a jug from a bucket. At age sixty-nine, her beauty shines. The sun is high on the echoes of Nyanga village – echoes of barking, the neighing of nearby donkeys, a truck against a slope. Two butterflies mate in her thorn tree. In their hearts the story begins. Their wings brighten and in their own time they disappear, following their peculiar rhythms.
In-between: a collection of poems of loss and memory
(University of the Western Cape, 2022) Williams, Justin; Moolman, Kobus
My mini-thesis in Creative Writing aims to explore memory and childhood through the lens of spatial and temporal consciousness. The vehicle for navigating these memories, whether individual or collective, real or surreal, is a collection of original poems based in and around the Cape Flats. Childhood specifically is the central theme of these poems, as it provides the basis for all the related memories in the collection. To me memory is like a map, dotted by landmarks in time. I will explore these landmarks in the poems to discover if there are patterns in the way that memories are made and stored. I will also explore changes in the physical environment – be these ecological or to do with human development – and how these changes intersect with memory. My aim in the collection is to channel the voice of a central character – a young boy – who is trying to find his place against the backdrop of the Cape Flats setting, while contending with all its challenges. My creative writing mini-thesis will also be accompanied by a reflexive essay that discusses the concepts of memory and spatial and temporal awareness and how these are manifest within my collection of poems.
Lady Liberty
(University of the Western Cape, 2016) Orner, Phyllis June; Vandermerwe, Meg
Learning to Exhale
(University of the Western Cape, 2019) Mojapelo, Lebohang; Moolman, Jacobus
My MA mini-thesis in Creative Writing is a collection of 33 poems titled Learning to Exhale. The poems are centred around a character – a black African woman who is sharing her experiences of mental illness. The poems revolve around memory, forgetting and remembering; going back to the moment when the woman realises that she is ill, understanding it from the present while working to find ways to express what bipolar disorder is and how she experiences it. The collection also highlights her search for words and meaning to describe these experiences that are highly traumatic. This is to create a language of expressing the indescribable. This means that the form and structure is experimental, combining differing styles and form to show different voices, different states of mind that swing from depression, mania to suicidal thoughts.
Let’s go home: Stories and portraits
(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Phillips, Jolyn; Meg, Van Der Merwe
Let's Go Home encompasses thirteen short stories inspired by the Coloured fishing community of Blompark in Gansbaai. These stories embody a range of voices and perspectives, some contemporary, some set in the past thirty to forty years, each of which attempts to represent the lives, loves and losses of a rural community that too often has found itself at the margins of society and ignored by literary representations. Themes explored include traumaphysical, psychological and spiritual. Some of these traumas are linked to the legacies of Apartheid: For example, my story titled "Fraans‟ is about a man who struggles with alcohol addiction and represents one of countless individuals within rural Coloured communities still haunted by the inheritance of the dop system. Other traumas in Let's Go Home represent more personal and private traumas. In "Secrets‟, for instance, a young woman who finds out that the man she wishes to marry is in fact her illegitimate brother. Such stories in rural communities are not uncommon because children born out of wedlock are seen as sinful and thus many women keep quiet about illegitimate offspring. Voice, (whether that of a narrator or in the form of the characters' dialogue) is also a central concern, for as I have explained above, one of my chief preoccupations and inspirations for writing this collection, has been the lack of texts giving voice to Coloured fishing communities.
Lost on the way home
(University of Western Cape, 2018) Levy, Moira; Martin, Julia
This 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.
The marginal grey: A collection of short stories
(University of the Western Cape, 2015) Douman, Bronwyn; Van der Merwe, Meg
A Collection of Short Stories.
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.
'n Maatskaplikewerk-profiel van persoonsontbering in die Swartland met spesifieke verwysing na die groter Chatsworth-gebied
(University of Western Cape, 2002) Blankenberg, Jurine Henry; Small, Adam
Hierdie skripsie wil die mens en sy ervarings, of dit wat hy binne 'n bepaalde gebied beleef, blootlê. Daarmee saam kom 'n duidelike teoretiese beskouing na vore om die persoon in sy gedepriveerde gemeenskap uit te beeld. Die karakter van die gebied weerspiël die volgende kenmerke: Dit is landelik van aard, 'n beduidende afstand vanaf stedelike ontwikkeling geleë, en dit word as 'n "slaapdorp" ervaar. Histories word die gebied bykans 'n honderd jaar deur die inwoners en hul voorgeslagte bewoon, maar as gevolg van poli tieke rompslomp het ontwikkeling nooi t werklik plaasgevind nie. Die probleme wat in die gebied tydens navorsing aanwesig was, is die volgende: Onvoldoende infrastrutuur, watervoorsiening is gebrekkig, riolering kom nie voor nie, gesondheidsdienste word periodiek gelewer, en werksgeleenthede moet buite die gebied bekom word. Die haglike woonomstandighede het die inwoners se lewensverwagting geaffekteer en ongelukkigheid meegebring. Die doel van die navorsing is om 'n geheelbeeld te verkry van die gebied se probleme en behoeftes, hoe die inwoners daaroor voel en wat die mense dink gedoen kan word om, ten spyte van die heersende probleme, hul lewensomstandighede te verbeter. Dit wil sê die ondersoek poog om te bepaal wat die werklike lewensomstandighede van die mense in die Groter Chatsworthgebied (Chatsworth en Riverlands gekombineerd) is.
Native: An album of modern South African blues songs
(University of the Western Cape, 2021) Ellis, John; Brown, Duncan
This Creative Writing project is an album of South African songs written specifically in the context of American blues music. Although blues is an intrinsically American genre of Western popular music, it has its roots (along with other African-American forms of musical expression such as ragtime and jazz) in African culture, and as a South African musician and writer, I am intrigued by the possibilities of exploring African-American blues in the context of South Africa. This project therefore attempts some hybridity between these two cultural expressions, and to ascertain what kinds of lyric might be possible in modern South Africa in terms of the formation and perpetuation of a South African identity. Blues songs traditionally have a rather narrow focus as far as lyrics are concerned, but the genre’s melodic structure, its instrumentation and its very specific vocal qualities have over the last century formed the bedrock of the whole of modern Western popular music.
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.
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.
The price of liberty: A collection of poems and prose that explore the interplay between freedom and sacrifice
(University of Western cape, 2020) Schmidt, David; Moolman, Kobus
The Price of Liberty: A collection of poems and prose that explores the interplay between freedom and sacrifice. David Schmidt This mini-thesis explores the interplay between concepts of freedom and sacrifice. It comprises a collection of 28 original poems as well as a reflective essay that explores some of the themes that emerge through the creative work. The premise of the collection is the notion that freedom is necessarily ambiguous and inevitably involves some countervailing sacrifice or loss. The act of exercising freedom in an oppressive context by transgressing prescribed norms, for example, has its countervailing consequences of shame, humiliation or punishment. Struggles for political freedom similarly involve many forms of sacrifice. The attainment of political or social freedom conversely comes with its own losses – loss of meaning, certainty, innocence, solidarity or even integrity. Relationship itself always involve a tension between obligation and agency – freedom is constrained by values.
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 ...

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