Ek en jy bestaan nie

In a conversational, anecdotal voice, the speaker owns up to his part in a past whose taste of blood lingers and wonders whether a white poet should speak at all. He recalls a clergyman grandfather in District Six who never stood in front of the bulldozers, Huguenot forebears whose wrongs stick to him like the juice of a melon, and a seminar where a coloured writer calls him out for chairing a panel on coloured poets. The 1990s in Germany felt like freedom until he saw himself as a bat out of apartheid’s cave; there a coloured engineer, Cecil, told him that people like the two of them do not exist. Now a father in the Stellenbosch suburbs, he turns neighbourhood-watch messages about suspects into poems, and finds through his children a fragile hope.

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About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

128 pages in the original

First published

2024 by Tafelberg

Author's age

53 when first published

ISBN

9780624095002 (original)