Lyric Poetry and Community Good*Kaaps and the Cape FlatsDerek Attridge

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The area of Cape Town known as the Cape Flats (or Kaapse Vlakte in Afrikaans) is an extensive, low-lying sandy plain bordered by mountains and sea which, not surprisingly in view of its unsuitability for settlement, saw little habitation until after 1948. The Nationalist government that took power in South Africa in that year set about, in obedience to apartheid dogma, the displacement of ‘non-white’ South Africans from urban areas to new townships in less desirable areas, and thus the 1950s and 1960s saw the forced removal to the Cape Flats of large numbers of Cape Town residents who did not qualify as ‘white’. Their new accommodation was in subeconomic housing lacking many basic amenities, on small plots along dusty streets that boasted few facilities. A significant proportion of them were Capetonians whom the apartheid policymakers classified as ‘Coloured’, a label given to those with a mixed heritage, including the original Dutch settlers, slaves from South and South East Asia and East Africa, the indigenous KhoeKhoe and San peoples, and Bantu-speaking Africans from the east and north of the Cape. The term ‘coloured’, without the upper case, continues to be used for the members of a community that should be understood as based on many shared features other than the spurious notion of race. Grant Farred, in his account of being coloured in South Africa, observes that

South African colouredness is, arguably, best understood as a quasi-ethnic identity: a racially indistinct — including in its ranks several different physical ‘types’ — community bound together by cultural practices, mores, values, and traditions, all of which have evolved in the face of racist white hostility.22Grant Farred, Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), p. 6.

As Farred implies, the policy of apartheid was one factor in producing a strong sense of community among those whose daily existence was affected by its exclusions and injuries, including individuals and families forced to start new lives together in difficult circumstances. The recently released results of the 2022 census reveal a total figure for Cape Town approaching five million inhabitants,33See ‘Census 2022: Statistical Release’ <https://census.statssa.gov.za/assets/documents/2022/P03014_Census_2022_Statistical_Release.pdf> [accessed 11 October 2023]. many of whom — perhaps a million — live in the various neighbourhoods of the Cape Flats. Among these neighbourhoods are Manenberg (the title of a well-known song by the coloured jazz musician Abdullah Ibrahim, formerly Dollar Brand), Mitchell’s Plain, and Bishop Lavis. (The Flats are also the site of some of the largest and oldest townships created for people classified as ‘Black’ rather than ‘Coloured’, such as Langa, Nyanga, Gugulethu, and Khayelitsha.) The legacy of apartheid is evident across these townships in high levels of poverty, unemployment, crime, and drug use, in the lack of educational opportunities, and in widespread health problems.

The sense of community among the coloured population of the Cape Flats springs in part from, and enhances, the use of a common language. The highly distinctive demotic tongue to be heard on the street has a history that goes back to the seventeenth century, when the Dutch of the original settlers began to be modified for communication with slaves and with the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape. As Isobel Hofmeyr observes,

in confronting the language of the slaves — Malay and Portuguese creole —along with Khoesan speech, this Dutch linguistic cluster had partly creolised. In later years it picked up shards of German, French and Southern Nguni [Xhosa] languages and a goodly layer of English after 1806.44Isobel Hofmeyr, ‘Building a Nation from Words’, in The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. by Clifton Crais and Thomas V. McClendon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 160–68 (p. 160; square brackets in original).

This language was known by a number of terms which, as Hofmeyr points out,

all pointed to a strong association with poorness and ‘colouredness’. Some of these terms included ‘hotnotstaal’ (Hottentot language), ‘griekwataal’ (Griqua language), ‘kombuistaal’ (kitchen language), ‘plattaal’ (vulgar language) and ‘brabbeltaal’ (patois/lingo).55Ibid., p. 161.

The more neutral Dutch term was ‘Afrikaansch’, which became ‘Afrikaans’ in the language it named.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a group of Dutch descendants who identified themselves as ‘Afrikaners’ worked hard to establish the language as the proper tongue of white speakers. This entailed ridding it of its non-Dutch heritage as far as possible, a process aided by the compilation of a dictionary and grammar, a translation of the Bible, and the establishment of an academy to oversee and police it. The prestige of this ‘suiwer’, or ‘pure’, Afrikaans grew with the emergence of significant poets and novelists. Formal recognition was achieved with the passing of the Official Languages of the Union Act of 1925, according to which Dutch was to be understood as including Afrikaans. Eventually, the 1961 constitution of the newly declared Republic of South Africa demoted Dutch and made Afrikaans one of two official languages, alongside English. Varieties of the language that did not conform to this model were consistently regarded as impure dialects — although coloured speakers make up more than half the number of the roughly six million individuals for whom Afrikaans is a home language.66The most common home languages are isiZulu and isiXhosa, and the fourth most common is Sepedi. For a comprehensive account of South Africa’s languages, see Language in South Africa, ed. by Rajend Mesthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Twelve languages are currently recognized as official in South Africa, all varieties of Afrikaans being considered as a single language. Among these denigrated tongues was ‘Kaapse Afrikaans’, or Cape Afrikaans, spoken by the coloured inhabitants of the Western Cape, with the greatest density of speakers on the Cape Flats.

Over the past two or three decades, the enterprise of gaining for the Afrikaans of the Flats a status equal to that of the purified form has grown in strength and visibility.77Some of the opposition to this championing of Kaaps comes from speakers of other varieties of non-standard Afrikaans not based in the urban areas around Cape Town. For a comprehensive discussion of poetry in non-standard Afrikaans across diverse regions since 1955, see Bernard Odendaal, ‘Omgangsvariëteite van Afrikaans in die digkuns sedert Sestig’, Stilet, 27.2 (2015), pp. 32–62. Known just as ‘Kaaps’, or sometimes ‘Afrikaaps’, this version of Afrikaans has shrugged off its denomination as a dialect, a categorization that was, in any case, a dubious one, since the languages of the world constitute a continuum rather than a group of standard languages surrounded by satellite dialects.88I discuss this question in relation to Kaaps in Derek Attridge, ‘Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature: A South African Example’, in The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 25–55 (pp. 25–30) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_02>. Long regarded as an inferior form of Afrikaans, just as its speakers were regarded as inferior citizens (and indeed humans),99Hein Willemse, ‘Emergent Black Afrikaans Poets’, in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. by Martin Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990), pp. 367–401, quotes a 1938 study of what later became known as Kaaps, J. H. Rademeyer’s Kleurling-Afrikaans: ‘The coloured language of our country has […] all along served one purpose only: to amuse!’ Rademeyer’s view of the speakers of the language is not untypical: ‘Suffice it to say that they are today a wretched and degenerate group of human beings, whose laziness, lewdness and tendency to waste seem to be innate’ (quotations on pp. 396–97). Kaaps now has many champions who see it as a key to the struggle to achieve status and rights for the coloured community. (Some advocates of Kaaps spell the word ‘coloured’ to reflect the way it is pronounced by its speakers, and to escape the association with apartheid racial classifications: ‘kallit’, ‘kullit’, and ‘kallid’ have all been suggested.)

Pride in Kaaps as a distinct language with capabilities and resources as great as any other grew in tandem with an increasing sense of the distinctiveness of coloured identity after the democratic elections of 1994. Among the factors causing this increase was the arrival of majority rule, which created a concern among the coloured population that they would suffer in the new dispensation for not being authentically ‘Black’. This fear, and the identification with other Afrikaans speakers, contributed to the electoral success of the Afrikaner nationalist party in the Western Cape in 1994 that came as a shock to many observers.1010See Zoë Wicomb, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 91–107.

One striking characteristic of Kaaps is the frequent use of English vocabulary, a feature which of course had to be eliminated from the standardized form of the language, ‘Anglicisms’ being one of the ‘impurities’ that had to be eradicated. This feature is usually described by linguists in terms of ‘code-switching’, but I avoid this term for the same reason that I avoid the term ‘mixed-race’: it implies the pre-existence of pure, separate entities — in this case the linguistic systems of Afrikaans and English — that are then brought into coexistence within speech. Speakers of Kaaps don’t hold in their heads two distinct linguistic systems from which they choose the words they use; as with many other creoles, this way of speaking has its own distinctive lexicon and grammar.

In a replay of the struggle to establish Afrikaans in the nineteenth century, activists in the Coloured community are encouraging the use of Kaaps in education, broadcasting, and publishing.1111See e.g. Michael le Cordeur, ‘Kaaps: Time for the Language of the Cape Flats to Become Part of Formal Schooling’, Multilingual Margins, 3.2 (2016), pp. 86–103; Hein Willemse, ‘Soppangheid for Kaaps: Power, Creolisation and Kaaps Afrikaans’, Multilingual Margins, 3.2 (2016), pp. 73–85. The campaign for Kaaps has developed on many fronts: conferences, sessions at book festivals, articles, dissertations, and translations. A trilingual dictionary is in progress, and a number of novels have been published. And — the focus of this essay — several collections of poetry in varieties of Kaaps have appeared, the work of poets who grew up during the period of post-apartheid affirmation of coloured identity.1212A valuable early appreciation of the potential of Kaaps as a medium for poetry was Willemse, ‘Emergent Black Afrikaans Poets’; see esp. pp. 377–81.

The positing of a distinct language with its own name is an important weapon in the struggle to acknowledge the speech habits of this section of the population as having equal worth with other recognized languages — which is, of course, also a struggle to gain respect for the culture of this community. For instance, there’s a move to acknowledge Kaaps in schools, where, traditionally, only standard Afrikaans was taught. (There are echoes here of the campaign to recognize African-American English, sometimes called Ebonics, in American schools; the promotion of Singlish, in the face of official disapproval, in the Singaporean media; and the project to make the widely spoken Patois of Jamaica — also known as Patwa, Creole, or simply Jamaican — an official language alongside English.) One of the leading writers in Kaaps, Nathan Trantraal — to whom I will return — comments sardonically on the situation in a short text titled ‘Skryf ’it soes jy praat’ (Write It as You Speak).1313Nathan Trantraal, ‘Skryf ’it soes jy praat’ <https://www.litnet.co.za/poolshoogte-skryf-i-soes-jy-praat/> [accessed 4 October 2023]. See also Adam Cooper, ‘“You Can’t Write in Kaapse Afrikaans in Your Question Paper. … The Terms Must Be Right”: Race- and Class-Infused Language Ideologies in Educational Places on the Cape Flats’, Educational Research for Social Change, 7.1 (2018), pp. 30–45. Asked as a boy in his Afrikaans class to write about ‘a day that I will never forget’, he is reluctant to give an honest account of the violence and psychological abuse that mark his most vivid memories, so he lets his imagination take over to recount a perfect day at the beach. Trantraal explains that if you fail Afrikaans, you fail the entire year, even if you pass all the other subjects,

wan Afrikaans is jou hystaal, wat of course ironic was, wan Afrikaans wassie ôs se hystaal ’ie. In fact die Afrikaans wat ôs op skool gedoen ’et, het net ’n passing resemblance gehad to die Afrikaans wat ôs byrie hys gepraat ’et.

(because Afrikaans is your home language, which of course was ironic, because Afrikaans wasn’t our home language. In fact the Afrikaans that we did at school had only a passing resemblance to the Afrikaans that we spoke at home.)

When Trantraal much later finds himself teaching Afrikaans at his old high school, his class is stunned and baffled when he asks them to write an essay ‘as they speak’.

As was the case with ‘white’ Afrikaans in the early twentieth century, writers of literary works using Kaaps have played, and will continue to play, a crucial role in securing for the language the prestige and stability it requires in order to advance the interests of the community. The most important pioneer in using the language of the coloured community for literary purposes was Adam Small, who died in 2016 at the age of seventy-nine.1414Small played a significant role in promoting the dignity and standing of Kaaps. ‘Kaaps is nie ’n grappigheid of snaaksigheid nie, maar ’n taal’ (Kaaps is not a joke or a comedy, but a language), he writes in the introduction to Kitaar my kruis, 2nd edn (Cape Town: Haum, 1973), p. 9. For an assessment of Small’s importance in the development of Kaaps as a literary language, see Nicole Devarenne, ‘The Language of Ham and the Language of Cain: “Dialect” and Linguistic Hybridity in the Work of Adam Small’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 45.3 (2010), pp. 389–408. Another was Peter Snyders, whose debut collection in Kaaps, ’n Ordinary mens, appeared in 1982. (The story is told of Snyders submitting a poem in Kaaps to a competition in 1976 in some uncertainty about the appropriate category; he ended up choosing ‘foreign languages’.) An important cultural endorsement of Kaaps occurred with the growth of Cape Flats hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s: several hip-hop bands used Kaaps in their lyrics (the best known are Prophets of da City and Brasse van die Kaap), and their writing has been the subject of academic research at the University of the Western Cape (the university designated for coloured students by the apartheid government).1515See Hein Willemse, ‘Black Afrikaans Writers: Continuities and Discontinuities into the Early 21st Century — a Commentary’, Stilet, 31.1–2 (2019), pp. 260–75. Kaaps has featured in television dramas, films, musicals, stand-up comedy, and popular song.

Recent years have seen a burgeoning of writing in Kaaps. Trantraal and his wife Ronelda Kamfer are two of the leading writers: at the time of writing, they have published seven collections of poems between them.1616Nathan Trantraal, Chokers en survivors (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2013), Alles sal niet kom wôd (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2017), Oolog (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2020); Ronelda Kamfer, Noudat slapende honde (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2008), grond/Santekraam (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2011), Hammie (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2016), Chinatown (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2019). For a very full dossier of material on Trantraal in Afrikaans, see Erika Terblanche, ‘Nathan Trantraal (1983– )’ <https://www.litnet.co.za/nathan-trantraal-1983/> [accessed 10 October 2023]. Trantraal is also the author of a collection of essays, White issie ’n colour nie,1717Nathan Trantraal, White issie ’n colour nie (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2018). and, with his brother André, several graphic novels; and Kamfer is also the author of a novel.1818Ronelda Kamfer, Kompoun (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2021). Trantraal has translated the American author Jason Reynolds’s novel Long Way Down into Kaaps.1919Jason Reynolds, Lang pad onnetoe, trans. by Nathan Trantraal (Pretoria: Lapa, 2018). Another writer championing Kaaps by example is Olivia M. Coetzee, who is undertaking a translation of parts of the Bible into Kaaps, and in 2019 published a novel, Innie shadows.2020Olivia M. Coetzee, ‘Bybel in Kaaps’ <https://www.litnet.co.za/category/nuwe-skryfwerk-new-writing/bybelinkaaps/> [accessed 5 October 2023], Innie shadows (Cape Town: Modjaji Books, 2020). Coetzee’s variety of Kaaps uses relatively few English words; its distinctiveness lies primarily in the choice of vocabulary and the pronunciation of Afrikaans words. A Kaaps novel entitled Kinnes (‘kinders’, ‘children’) by Chase Rhys appeared in 2018; the endorsement on the cover reads: ‘’n character study van kinnes innie warzone vannie Cape Flats. Maa ook veel meer. Baie, baie funny en intensely moving.’ Not surprisingly, perhaps, the endorsement is by Nathan Trantraal. Recent additions to the growing body of poetry in versions of Kaaps are Ashwin Arendse’s Swatland (in which Arendse uses the Arabic letter ghayn to represent the characteristic r sound of the Malmesbury area) and Ryan Pedro’s Pienk ceramic-hondjies. A more recent addition to the growing body of poetry in Kaaps is Veronique Jephtas’s Soe rond ommie bos.2121Veronique Jephtas, Soe rond ommie bos (Cape Town: Protea Boekhuis, 2021). Trantraal no doubt speaks for all these authors when he writes:

My Afrikaans lyk soesie mense wat it praat. Die geskiedenis van Coloured mense is heeltemaal locked up innie Afrikaans wat hulle praat. Is Engels, Dutch, Malay, Indonesian Arabic, Khoe. Dis ’n version van Afrikaans wat unedited is, sône gatekeepers en sône affectations.

(My Afrikaans looks like the people who speak it. The history of coloured people is completely locked up in the Afrikaans they speak. It is English, Dutch, Malay, Indonesian Arabic, Khoe. It’s a version of Afrikaans that is unedited, without gatekeepers and without affectations.)2222Quoted and trans. by Anastasia de Vries, ‘The Use of Kaaps in Newspapers’, Multilingual Margins, 3.2 (2016), pp. 127–39 (p. 134).

The question I want to raise in considering verse production in Kaaps is: can this poetry contribute to the advancement of the community it arises from and depicts? And this implies other questions, such as: Who is it addressed to? Who actually reads it? How does its content relate to its potential role in, and on behalf of, the community?

The choice of Kaaps as the language in which to write and publish poems is not without its problems. The use in poetry of what is thought of as dialect is often a choice made for comic purposes, a practice encouraged by the social and economic disparity frequently to be found between speakers of the ‘standard’ or ‘received’ version of a language and those versions spoken by lower classes and in regions distant from the capital. Adam Small, quoted above, insisted that Kaaps was not a comic language (see note 14); nevertheless, Trantraal accused him and Snyders of using it as a ‘joke-language’,2323Danie Marais, ‘Middagtee met Nathan Trantraal: Kaaps is nie ’n joke-taal nie’, Die Burger, 2 August 2013, pp. 2–3. an accusation — though it was only an offhand remark in an interview — that was met with much displeasure among the other supporters of the language. Contemporary poets writing in Kaaps certainly draw on its comic potential from time to time, but it is usually comedy laced with irony, self-mockery, or satire, and does not spring from anything inherent in the language.

One way in which the use of Kaaps in published works of literature may advance the interests of the community is through giving its members a sense of pride in the language. Those in the community who are aware that their way of speaking is denigrated by speakers of the standard form of Afrikaans — an awareness heightened by the educational practices already mentioned — are able to point to literary works published by well-thought-of presses. This impact of publication on the Flats should not be exaggerated, however; owing to the economic and educational deprivation of the area, most members of the community would not be likely to come across the few novels and plays written in Kaaps, and even less likely to read poetry in this (or any) language. On the other hand, poems in Kaaps undoubtedly mean a great deal to those coloured readers who do encounter them; Trantraal observes: ‘There are Coloured people who are not what you would consider readers but will read Kaaps books because they see their lives reflected for the first time in literature.’2424Nathan Trantraal, email to the author, 31 July 2023. A small number of coloured students have been able to pursue degrees involving Kaaps literature, and many of them have gone on to publish works in the language. Kaaps is also to be heard occasionally in performance (along with poetry in other languages) at several venues, both on the Flats and in the Western Cape more widely: there is an annual Cape Flats Book Festival in Mitchell’s Plain, and annual events are organized in Cape Town (e.g. the Open Book Festival and the Suidooster Festival), Stellenbosch (the Woordfees), and the small town of McGregor (McGregor Poetry Festival).

However, there is no escaping the fact that the greater part of the readership of Kaaps poetry is, inevitably, white, middle-class, and standard-Afrikaans-speaking. Trantraal is fully aware of this: ‘If we are talking about a market, access, reading culture, etc. then yes, I would say white middle-class Afrikaners are definitely our biggest audience.’2525Ibid. Trantraal is also known to this readership through his column in Kaaps in Rapport, a widely read Afrikaans Sunday newspaper. English-speaking South Africans who (like myself) studied Afrikaans as an obligatory school subject, even if they have had little use in their daily lives for the language, also find Kaaps readable, as do many speakers of one of the Bantu languages who know Afrikaans as a second, third, or even fourth language. Attendance at cultural festivals is bound to be largely middle class, and it is middle-class readers, too, who are more likely to respond to the many high-cultural references in poetry like that of Kamfer and Trantraal — the former, for instance, refers to, among others, Dostoevsky, Simone Weil, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes, while the latter (one of whose collections features a drawing of Bernini’s St Theresa on the cover) assumes a knowledge of Donatello, Kafka, Picasso, Borges, and many more. Both make mention of poets in the elite Afrikaans canon, such as N. P. van Wyk Louw, Elisabeth Eybers, and Ingrid Jonker. (There are also, it should be added, an even greater number of references to figures and works from popular culture.) The prestige associated with the lyric is what’s important here: a way of speaking associated with poverty and lack of education is granted the status of the genre more usually associated with poets like Spenser and Milton, Wordsworth and Dickinson.

To be read largely by middle-class white Afrikaners does not harm the project of gaining for Kaaps, and the community that speaks it, increased respect, therefore; on the contrary, it offers an invitation to these readers to see themselves as part of a much larger Afrikaans-speaking population and to value the cultural productions of places such as the Cape Flats. Alongside the making of a dictionary, the translation of the Bible, the availability of songs, films, plays, novels, and journalism, poetry in Kaaps — and poetry of a high quality — makes a statement that is hard to ignore.

What, then, of the content of this poetry? Writers of Kaaps naturally deal with their own experience, reflecting the challenges of living in a community still feeling the effects of centuries of discrimination as well as the more recent material impoverishment caused by the policies of apartheid and by the failures of the post-apartheid government. Much of the work of these writers reflects the hardscrabble conditions of the community to which they belong. We hear of the effects of dagga (marijuana) and tik (crystal meth), the prevalence of crime, gang activities, illness, joblessness, gambling, prostitution, police, and prisons. Trantraal writes of a diet of jam-and-peanut-butter sandwiches with weak tea, Kamfer of a paedophile uncle. Colourful township characters — lost souls, small-time gangsters, scroungers, petty entrepreneurs on the make — are described with the generosity born from life in a close community. Evangelical Christian sects proliferate. Family ties are strong, though familial conflict is widespread.

Such poetry receives different responses in the two types of readership I have identified. Fellow coloureds living in the kinds of environment which the poetry describes may be dismayed at having the harshness of their daily existence exposed in this way, though perhaps the gratification at seeing their travails recorded in poems in their own language counters this feeling. The darkness of the content is often alleviated by the warmth with which the characters, however shady, and events, however unpleasant, are described. And those coloured readers who have, at least to some extent, escaped this environment are more likely to applaud the exposure of its conditions as a form of protest.

Middle-class white readers, on the other hand, have to tread carefully. We too register many of these poems as a form of protest, in the long tradition of literary works that expose harsh conditions and struggling existences. And when qualities of generosity, endurance, and courage shine through the poetry, full acknowledgement of what is depicted can be a humbling experience for those whose lives are safer and more comfortable. At the same time, there is a danger that readers whose lives are totally different may take a dubious pleasure in these portrayals of poverty and resistance, especially given the tendency already mentioned to find the use of Kaaps a source of comedy. An examination of a selection of poems by Kamfer and Trantraal will begin to suggest some of the ways in which their work operates in these diverse ways, as a celebration of community, as a protest, and as an invitation to understand and appreciate lives lived in a different environment.

2

The only Kaaps poet included in the 2014 anthology In a Burning Sea: Contemporary Afrikaans Poetry in Translation is Ronelda Kamfer. The following short work exhibits the qualities of many Kaaps poems; its wry humour does not detract from the protest it makes against the conditions prevalent in the Cape Flats:

The published translation is by Charl J. F. Cilliers:

(A note explains that ‘jol’ means ‘to have a good time’; a better translation for this example might be ‘flirt’. Shoprite is a chain of South African supermarkets that emphasize economy.)

Characteristic of Kaaps is the use of English vocabulary — ‘pregnant’, ‘weed’, ‘taxi drivers’, ‘cleaners’, ‘Cape flats’ — and the elision of verbs followed by ‘nie’ to create a negative — ‘raakie’ for ‘raak nie’ (don’t become), ‘roekie’ for ‘rook nie’ (don’t smoke — Kaaps also evinces a typical loss of a diphthong here). There is a similar elision of ‘die’ in ‘oppie’ for ‘op die’ (on the). The spelling of ‘djol’ rather than the more usual ‘jol’ reflects a Kaaps preference for what we might think of as the English pronunciation of j.

What the translation loses, of course, is the sense of a distinctive voice identifying the speaker with the place named in the poem: this is not, as the language of the translated version suggests, an outsider’s view of the Cape Flats. (The use of the formal ‘do not’ in every line but one contributes to this sense.)2828See Attridge, ‘Untranslatability’, for a discussion of the challenge of translating Kaaps into either standard Afrikaans or English. This translation also misses the point of line 8, which follows on from the previous line: the reference is not to cleaners in general but to ‘the cleaners’, i.e. those who work for Shoprite. Not only do the girls in question not work at the checkouts or on the shop floor, they are not even the cleaners. The inescapability of early pregnancy, drug use, inappropriate sexual liaisons, and unemployment is not observed from a distance but from within, with both anger and humour.

Many Kaaps poems celebrate family ties in the midst of adversity. The figure of the mother emerges from Trantraal’s poetry as a formidable individual. The following is an excerpt from ‘Hammie’ (a Kaaps word meaning ‘mother’ or ‘mummy’),2929When Kamfer published a collection that includes many poems dealing with her relationship with her mother, she chose to call it Hammie. a poem which occurs in the section of Chokers en survivors entitled ‘Mitchell’s Plain’ (where Trantraal spend his childhood):

Translated into regular English, with all the losses that this entails, we get:

In this example, the humour is in the service of warm admiration, although as so often the background — the easy transition between churchgoers and gangsters — is a dark one. Trantraal has put a great deal of effort into achieving a consistent orthography for the distinctive pronunciation of Kaaps, many examples of which occur in these lines, including the use of a circumflex for the distinctive vowel sounds in ‘kêk’ (for ‘kerk’, ‘church’) and ‘sôg’ (for ‘sorg’, ‘care for’). English words are drawn into Afrikaans conjugations: thus the usual indicator of past tense, ‘ge-’, is used with an English word in ‘gepawn’.3131There is as yet no standard orthography for Kaaps; every writer has developed a system to reflect their pronunciation. There are also regional variations, even within the Cape Flats. For a comparison of three Kaaps writers who use slightly different versions of the language and different spelling conventions, see de Vries, ‘Use of Kaaps in Newspapers’. Trantraal observes that the biggest challenge in writing in Kaaps is ‘that there are no dictionaries in Kaaps. And there is no autocorrect in Word for Kaaps words. It is hard to stay consistent in terms of spelling and grammar, etc. And you consume much energy in the whole process of reading everything a hundred times to see if you have spelled one word the same everywhere. That is energy that belongs to the creative process. Sometimes I feel I am a language engineer more than a writer’ (‘dat daa nie woordeboeke in Kaaps issie. En daa is niks autocorrect in Word vi Kaapse woorde nie. It is swaa om consistent te bly in terms van spelling en grammar, etc. En jy gie baie energy weg annie hele process van alles ’n honned kee te lies om te sien of jy een woord dieselfde spel orals. Dai is energy wat annie creative process behoot, soms voel ek soese taal engineer meer asse writer’; quoted in Carolyn Meads, ‘PEN Afrikaans: Om boeke in Kaaps te publiseer’ <https://www.litnet.co.za/pen-afrikaans-om-boeke-in-kaaps-te-publiseer/> [accessed 11 October 2023]).

Occasionally, Trantraal and Kamfer write poems which deal directly with the issue of the relation between the coloured, Kaaps-speaking poet from an impoverished background and the largely white and middle-class poetry-reading public. One instance is Trantraal’s poem ‘Cash for Gold’. The use of an English title — reflecting the sign on a shopfront typical of a poorer area — indicates that this is not in any simple sense an Afrikaans poem.

Once again, a translation into standard English loses the strongly colloquial colouring of the original and its creative employment of both Afrikaans and English vocabularies:

(Lavis is the Cape Flats township of Bishop Lavis, about an hour’s walk from Cape Town Airport. Potch is Potchefstroom, a university town in the north of the country. Annemarie is probably Annemarie van Niekerk, an Afrikaans writer and editor living in the Netherlands. Oranjezicht is an upmarket, arty suburb of Cape Town on the slopes of Table Mountain. Cash Crusaders is a chain of South African pawn and second-hand shops.)

Trantraal’s language is, again, redolent of the spoken language of the Flats. In standard Afrikaans, the opening might read:

The original is more immediate, catching the Kaaps enunciation in its Afrikaans and using English phrases almost as quotations — one can imagine the phrase ‘prize-winning poet’ in a laudatory news article, and ‘copper wire’ in a crime report. My English version is no better, losing the colloquial force of the Kaaps. One translator, Alice Inggs, has valiantly attempted to capture the original’s colloquial qualities in English, but the result seems to me to illustrate the problems of such an undertaking:

It’s not clear what this version of English is meant to represent; sometimes the spelling does not appear to indicate anything different about the pronunciation (‘onna Wednesday’, ‘Iffits copper’); at other times it replaces the Kaaps elision of ‘die’ with an elision of ‘the’ that doesn’t work in the same way (‘I’ma only’, ‘aftera literary festival’, ‘inna mouths’, ‘a award’).

In Trantraal’s poem the contrast between being feted at a literary festival in the Afrikaner heartland and having to leg it home after disembarking at the airport is conveyed without self-pity, as is that between a residency in Amsterdam and the pawning of the gift given to his wife there. The irony running through the poem, of course, is that, as we have seen, it is the owners of coffee tables with strategically placed books of poetry who are the most likely readers of this poem. Is Trantraal biting the hands that feed him?

The ending of the poem, moving as it does from more public scenes to a private one, provides a personal vignette that contains a slight touch of self-mockery. Our poet is now a son at a loose end on a particular day — it happens to be a Wednesday — playing with his award. The poem comes full circle as we return to the possibility of copper providing funds for food (there’s no chance that it’s a matter of cash for gold), but the equal possibility that the prizes the poet receives will not contribute to the family’s daily needs.

Ronelda Kamfer’s poem ‘Volkspele’ also bears on the topic of the coloured writer taken up by the white bourgeoisie. Kamfer is less linguistically catholic than her husband; most of the Afrikaans she uses is the standard form, and English vocabulary occurs with somewhat less frequency. In this poem the moneyed white people — the ones who are more likely to read her poems than members of her own community — are treated with contempt.

An English translation loses a good deal of the emotional forcefulness of the original:

(Bitterkomix was a deliberately offensive Afrikaans comic, a badge of middle-class unshockability.)

This, too, is a poem about the gap between the poet and her readers or potential readers; but here the implication is that Kamfer speaks from and for a genuine community, albeit one that — as many poems in Kaaps reveal — is constituted not by unity and similarity but by rupture, mutual exposure, and shared mortality (a community, perhaps, as defined by Blanchot and Nancy).3535Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. by Pierre Joris (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. by Peter Connor and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Although Blanchot’s and Nancy’s interpretations of community are by no means identical, they both resist the idea that it signifies homogeneity and transcendence. By contrast, the bourgeois white world is one of hypocrisy, misery, one-upmanship, and a community feeling that is only pretended. The paradox remains: by capturing the contrast between these groups in lyric poetry, Kamfer makes a bid to enhance the standing of her community in the eyes of those who read such work, even while denigrating their way of life.

Trantraal also writes of his discomfort in middle-class white company, in a poem titled ‘Grahamstown’, the seat of the historically white Rhodes University, where Trantraal currently teaches creative writing. (The post-apartheid name of the town is Makhanda; the change involved replacing the name of a British general responsible for the slaughter of Xhosa warriors with the name of a famous Xhosa figure.)

In standard English:

Translation into standard English fails to capture the tonal complexity of the poem, signalled initially by the epigraph from Osborne: the complaining outsider knows that he thrives on complaints, and that he cuts a somewhat comic figure in this white middle-class community. As so often with these poets, a serious point — this unfamiliar and somewhat repellent lifestyle is preferable to the violence and danger at home (both situations are described in exaggerated terms) — is made with humour and self-mockery. The poem ends with an image that implies, finally, full assimilation into this society, yet the cliché works against this to sustain the mockery to the end. In the original, the use of English for ‘old country’ — hardly an expected term for the Cape Flats — heightens the comedy.

The poems of Trantraal and Kamfer invite readers, whether members of their community or outsiders, to empathize with those who suffer from the deprivation of the Flats but at the same time to enjoy the wry humour that gleams through accounts of that suffering. Kaaps may not be a joke-language, but it is a superb medium for this combination of protest, pain, and laughter. These poets exploit its many dimensions in highly skilled writing, adding a dimension of readerly pleasure to the most painful of depictions. While poetry alone is not going to improve conditions in this disadvantaged part of South Africa, such a powerful demonstration of creative subtlety and sophistication may help to counter in some small degree the prejudice that still colours many responses to it. Poetry in Kaaps demonstrates the potential of the language as an expressive resource, and in so doing not only exposes the harm done by centuries of exclusion and denigration — of a people as well as of their language — but makes a powerful claim for the vitality, closeness, and self-awareness of the community.