Academic literature on the topic 'Gabeba Baderoon’s poetry'

This dissertation explores the ways in which the poetry of Gabeba Baderoon, Ingrid de Kok and Makhosazana Xaba challenge the sexist discourses that allow for the exploitation of women‘s bodies. It will also examine how they re-imagine the script 1 of heterosexual romantic love which places women in a submissive position and closes down possibilities for human connections which do not fit within the narrow strictures of this notion of love. The poems selected come from Baderoon‘s two collections, The Dream in the Next Body (2005) and A Hundred Silences (2006), an anthology of Ingrid de Kok‘s poetry spanning all her previous collections entitled Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems (2006), and Makhosazana‘s Xaba‘s first poetry collection, These Hands (2005). All three of these contemporary, South African, woman poets present critiques of the sexual exploitation of women and offer explorations of romantic love, relationships and sexual intimacy alternative to contemporary, patriarchal heteronormativity. This analysis will take cognizance of the influence of apartheid and colonial history on the formation of gender politics. It will also examine the representation of women as sexual objects and the spectacularized and graphic depictions of sex and how these poets can be seen to re-present women and re-script sex. Whilst Baderoon and De Kok are concerned with re-imagining heterosexual romantic love and sexual intimacy, their rethinking of love can also be read as useful in engaging with 'queer'2 sexuality and romantic love outside of the heterosexual norm along with Xaba, who is concerned with lesbian desire. Finally, all three poets experiment with traditional poetic form and techniques and it is through this experimentation with poetic language, and the employment of what Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic, that these poets are able to re-imagine love and intimacy. Thus they might be said, to use Kristeva‘s phrase, to stage a 'revolution in poetic language'.

This dissertation examines the relation between embodiment and language, knowledge and memory, as explored in the poetry of South African poet Gabeba Baderoon. In her three published collections of poetry, namely, The Museum of Ordinary Life, The Dream in the Next Body and A Hundred Silences, she depicts seemingly trivial and everyday events or experiences with acute attention to detail, all of which are connected by her unique portrayal of their embodied nature. In doing so, her work illustrates that intellectual activities typically associated with the mind, such as language, knowledge and memory, in fact require the incorporation of the body. Therefore, this dissertation studies the mind-body relation represented in her work with regard to these thematic concerns, since it is a crucial aspect of her poetry and aids not only in understanding and interpreting her work, but also the discourse on embodiment in general. These concerns do, moreover, not remain on a thematic level, but are evident in her poetry itself; that is, her poems too act as a form of embodiment. Furthermore, Baderoon’s poems are able to transcend the supposed mind-body dichotomy in a way that shows much in common with phenomenology, and especially the perspective held by authors such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This dissertation incorporates phenomenological ideas on the body and embodiment, as these assist in interpreting Baderoon’s work, as well as for the reason that her poetry sheds new light upon the understanding of such phenomenological ideas, too. Thus, this dissertation seeks to elucidate the manner in which Gabeba Baderoon’s poetry transcends the mind-body dichotomy by means of her exceptional employment of the notion of embodiment on a thematic as well as formal level.
Thesis (MA (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012