Abstract
In the first of three case studies, Seeff analyzes André Brink’s linguistic tour de force, Kinkels innie Kabel (1970), a burlesque transposition into Kaaps of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Seeff argues that Brink offers a radical critique of apartheid’s obsession with linguistic and ethnic purity. Kaaps, a hybridized mix of English and Afrikaans, used by the “Cape Coloured” population, marked class and political disenfranchisement. Brink’s production, very much under the shadow of apartheid’s restrictive legislation, focuses on the creolized “Cape Coloured” population and their local Kaaps carnival setting, and proposes a mestizo citizenship/identity for all South Africans. Seeff concludes that Shakespeare’s farce accommodates the translator’s Kaaps to forge a new South African identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Brink was born in 1935 to conservative parents in a small town in the Orange Free State, at that time the epicenter of rightwing Afrikaner nationalism and historically home of the Trekker Boers.
- 2.
The young company performed under the aegis of the government-funded Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal (PACT), which was reserved, according to the 1965 Group areas and Separate Amenities Act, for white-only actors and white-only audiences. In spite of these constraints, the PACs did offer a forum for new dramatic writing in Afrikaans, not all of it supportive of the regime. They were not interested in new South African work in English. The “alternative” theater movement outside the governmental sphere was born in the 1970s after Brink’s production. That story of independent politicized theatrical producers and their theater spaces is outside the scope of this chapter.
- 3.
Kinkels innie Kabel, Preface to published version of the piece, 1971, unnumbered page, in André P. Brink. Kinkels innie Kabel, a Play in Eleven Scenes (with Apologies to William Shakespeare) (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1971).
- 4.
Brink’s resumé at age thirty-five included six novels, two volumes of short stories, seven plays, three critical studies, three children’s works (all in Afrikaans), and thirty-eight translations into Afrikaans of writers ranging from Cervantes, Camus, and Marguerite Duras to Henry James. Translations into Afrikaans of Julius Caesar and Richard III belong in this list. He began writing in English after the banning of his novel, Looking on Darkness, in 1974.
- 5.
See Charles Whitworth, ed., The Comedy of Errors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Introduction, 57, for his list of complementary states such as spellbinding and spell breaking, condemning and pardoning. All quotations are taken from this edition.
- 6.
I realize that the term mestizo/mestiza is applied to Latin Americans (although not exclusively) of mixed racial or ethnic ancestry, particularly Spanish and indigenous peoples. It seems a useful shorthand here.
- 7.
Louis Eksteen, Hoofstad, 16 April 1970 (My translation).
- 8.
Whether or not the Carnival is a signature event of the Coloured population is a matter for controversy and depends on class position and on attitudes toward the apartheid designation of “Coloured.” Setting his adaptation amid Carnival suited Brink’s purpose in 1970.
- 9.
Their members included Uys Krige, Jan Rabie, André Brink, Barto Smit, Breyten Breytenbach, Ingrid Jonker, and Etienne LeRoux.
- 10.
“An Introduction to the Die Sestigers,” Die Sestigers, https://diesestigers.wordpress.com/about/, accessed September 2015. See also SAHO, “Towards a People’s History,” http://www.sahistory.org.za/, accessed November 2016. See Ampie Coetzee, “Afrikaans Literature and African Nationalism,” in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Martin Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990), 322–66, esp. 343–46. Poet Peter Blum, credited by Ampie Coetzee as a precursor of Die Sestigers, produced “Kaapse sonnette,” a sonnet sequence written largely in Kaaps and satirizing white, bourgeois values. Blum is the “first modern Afrikaans writing from an awareness of class and in the language of a proletariat” (344). Brink had several literary models.
- 11.
Eksteen, Hoofstad.
- 12.
Raeford Daniel, Johannesburg Star, 3 December 1970.
- 13.
How successive generations of audiences experienced the production, particularly after the coming of democracy in 1994, is not my topic here. Nor can I offer any evidence about who, beyond the reviewer in Boeke Rapport, 5 March 1972, read the 1971 published version which omitted some of the politically barbed jokes—always left to the discretion of the director at the time.
- 14.
Kinkels is largely understudied except for Rohan Quince, Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Productions During the Apartheid Era (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000), 78–90; Quince, “Crinkles in the Carnival: Ideology in South African Productions of The Comedy of Errors to 1985,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa: Journal of the Shakespeare Society in Southern Africa 2, no. 4 (1990–1991): 73–81; Temple Hauptfleisch, “Carnival Shakespeare: Kinkels in die Kabel at the Nico Malan,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 3, no. 1 (1989): 90–101; occasional mentions by Robert S. Miola, ed., The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 1997) and theater reviewers of the period in both Afrikaans and English.
- 15.
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981), 70.
- 16.
Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 76–77. See also R. A. Foakes, ed., The Comedy of Errors (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1968), xlv, “The sense of loss or change in identity in these characters goes together with a disruption of family, personal, and social relationships.”
- 17.
See Zoë Wicomb, “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 105, for lack of a political Coloured identity. See also Deborah Posel, “Race as Common Sense,” African Studies Review 44, no. 2 (2001): 87–113. One of her theses is that the categories of apartheid separatism have outlasted the coming of democracy. One of the sidebars on this discussion is the way that the Xhosa have held onto leadership positions following the dismantling of apartheid.
- 18.
Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 14.
- 19.
They are easily the largest population group in Cape Town.
- 20.
James C. Armstrong and Nigel A. Worden, “The Slaves, 1652–1834,” in The Shaping of South African Society 1652–1840, ed. R. Elphick and H. Giliomee (Cape Town: Masker Miller Longman, 1989). See 109 ff.
- 21.
See Robert Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan and University Press of New England, 1994), and “The Tower of Babel: Slave Trade and Creolization at the Cape, 1652–1834,” in Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier 1652–1834, ed. Elizabeth Eldredge and Fred Morton (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 11–39. See esp. 11. S. A. Tishkoff, F. A. Reed, F. R. Friedlander, et al., “Genetic Studies Suggest the Group Has the Highest Levels of Mixed Ancestry in the World,” “The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans,” Science 324, no. 5930 (2009): 1035–44.
- 22.
Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 101.
- 23.
See Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past and Present (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1999), 55, for the origins of the population.
- 24.
The Coloured population has maintained a silence, an amnesia, according to some scholars, an effacement of their history of slavery stretching all the way back to “the very memory of our origins,” according to Wicomb, 99. See p. 100, for “we have lost all knowledge of our Xhosa, Indonesian, East African, or Khoi origins.”
- 25.
Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 101.
- 26.
This is a matter of some controversy among Afrikaans linguists. See Armstrong and Worden, “The Slaves, 1652–1834,” 121. See also Isabel Hofmeyr, “Building a Nation from Words: Afrikaans Language, Literature and Ethnic Identity, 1902–1924,” in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (London: Longman Group UK, 1987), 95–123, for her cite, note 48, “Afrikaans is no bastard tongue. …It is a true white man’s language, Dutch to the core.” Emphasis original. Hofmeyr cites van Rijn as the author of this statement.
- 27.
See Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 97, for her comments on the fluctuations of Kaaps. Scorned by some as shameful in the 1970s, because, in her words, Kaaps is a “local and racialized variety of Afrikaans,” it was claimed by some poets in the 1980s as a literary language.
- 28.
Robert Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 17.
- 29.
See Kay McCormick, Language in Cape Town’s District Six (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), an excellent study. See also Fritz Ponelis, The Development of Afrikaans (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Publishing, 1993).
- 30.
McCormick, Language in Cape Town’s District Six, 92–94. McCormick’s example of Kaaps as a local dialect of Afrikaans illustrates the use of insertional language-mixing: “Ek dink nie dis stupid nie. Kyk hier: ons het opgegroei om te praat kombuistaal, ne? Which is Afrikaans en Engels gemix,” 93. “I don’t think it’s stupid. Look here: we grew up speaking kitchen talk, right? Which is Afrikaans and English mixed.” McCormick defines code-switching as language-switching when the switch carries with it the other language’s code, that is, the formal associations associated with that language. The code switch might be determined by the need to speak in a more formal language, such as English, perhaps at work, perhaps at church, or in the local dialect of Afrikaans (considered less formal) for reasons of solidarity. See esp. McCormick, 192–93. Kaaps is spoken by working-class South Africans.
- 31.
This policy became a practice for universities too. Thus, there were “Afrikaans” and “English” universities throughout the country. Nationalist government “Bantu education” policies for black South Africans housed in townships, and the political and social consequences of those policies, are referred to in subsequent chapters. Coloureds do not speak indigenous languages. Linguistic separation, as we have seen, was achieved among all population groups, with the exception of the Coloured population who spoke their own vernacular without any investment in the symbolic purity of either Afrikaans or English. However, their lack of access to any indigenous languages denied them access to the black African world.
- 32.
See Robert Ross, Cape of Torments, 1–22.
- 33.
Armstrong and Worden, “The Slaves, 1652–1834,” 143.
- 34.
Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 92.
- 35.
The political rights of Coloured people have varied by location and over time. In the nineteenth century, they theoretically had similar rights to Whites in the Cape Colony although income and property qualifications affected them disproportionately. In the interior of the country, they had few rights. Coloured members were elected to Cape Town’s municipal authority and, when the Union of South Africa was established, Coloured people could vote. By 1930, however, they were more or less disenfranchised and were restricted to electing White representatives only. Their voting powers were stripped during the apartheid regime. After 1983, the Constitution was amended to permit Coloured and Asian minorities limited participation in separate and subordinate houses in a tricameral Parliament.
- 36.
V.A. February, Mind Your Colour: The “Coloured” Stereotype in South African Literature (London and Boston: Kegan Paul International Ltd., 1981), 123. In a largely negative review, February remarks that this novel represents the most daring treatment of the “colour question” (122) in Afrikaans, and is one of a handful of novels in which a Coloured protagonist is given so dominant a role. A small sampling of other representations of Coloured protagonists include Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night and Other Stories (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1976); Richard Rive, Buckingham Palace, District Six (Cape Town: David Philip, 1986); David Kramer and Taliep Petersen, Kat and the Kings, recorded 1995; and Musical District Six, recorded 2003.
- 37.
Richard Elphick and Robert Shell, “Intergroup Relations: Khoi’khoi, Settlers, Slaves, and Free Blacks, 1652–1795,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, 2nd ed. (Cape Town: Masker Miller Longman, 1989), 194.
- 38.
There is now a considerable literature on the confusion and controversy currently surrounding expression of Coloured identity; on the links between the Coloureds and indigenous peoples, the Khoi and the San; on changing interpretations of the nature of Coloured identity; on the need to rearticulate what it means to be Coloured in post-apartheid South Africa. For a small sample, see Mohamed Adhikari, “‘Not Black Enough’: Changing Expressions of Coloured Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” African Historical Review 51 (2004): 167–78; Mohamed Adhikari, “From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-modernist Re-imagining: Toward a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa,” African Historical Review 40, no. 1 (2008): 77–100; Zimitri Erasmus, Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001); and Pumla Dineo Gqola, What Is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010).
- 39.
“Die Sestigers,” https://diesestigers.wordpress.com/about/, accessed September 2015.
- 40.
Kinkels innie Kabel, Preface, unnumbered page. All quotations from Kinkels innie Kabel, a Play in Eleven Scenes (with Apologies to William Shakespeare) are taken from André P. Brink’s published edition (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1971). I thank Philip Hare for his help in translating this text. Many translations are my own, and, if they are less than true to the spirit of this piece, my apologies are offered to the memory of André Brink. I know of no English translation at this time.
- 41.
See Chris Bongie, “Resisting Memories: The Creole Identities of Lafcadio Hearn and Edouard Glissant,” SubStance 26, no. 3 (1997): 153–78. See also Zimitr Erasmus, Coloured by History, Shaped by Place; Sarah Nuttall, “City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 4 (2004): 731–48; Douglas A. Jones, Jr., “Black Politics but Not Black People: Rethinking the Social and ‘Racial’ History of Early Minstrelsy,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 21–37; Chinua Thelwell, “The Young Men Must Blacken Their Faces: The Blackface Minstrel Show in Preindustrial South Africa,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 66–85; and Nadia Davids, “‘It Is Us’: An Exploration of ‘Race’ and Place in the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (2013): 86–101, for other views of creolization. See also Catherine M. Cole and Tracy C. Davis, “Routes of Blackface,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (2013): 7–12; Tracy C. Davis, “‘I Long for My Home in Kentuck’: Christy’s Minstrels in Mid-19th-Century Britain,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (2013): 38–65; Tracy Davis, “Acting Black, 1824: Charles Mathews’s Trip to America,” Theatre Journal 63 (2011); and Tracy Davis, ed., The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Performance (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2012).
- 42.
André Brink, “Interrogating Silence: New Possibilities Facing South African Literature,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21. See also Ampie Coetzee, “Afrikaans Literature and Afrikaner Nationalism,” 352, for his statement that Brink “finds his roots in history” but it is a history which, despite its recognizable familiarity, has been placed in a new context: fiction.
- 43.
See Rajend Mesthrie, ed., “South Africa: A Sociolinguistic Overview,” Language in South Africa, rev. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–26. South African English (and this applies to Suzman’s production of Othello) is itself a set of dialects with huge social and regional variation. There are three variants of South African English: “Cultivated” or Received Pronunciation, spoken by the upper class; General, spoken by the middle class; and Broad, spoken by the working class and closer to Afrikaans English. This account completely omits variants of Black South African English, a focus for the next chapter.
- 44.
The encounter between the Ephesians and the visiting Syracusans in Errors is represented by two communities of Witbaai near Cape Town and Die Pêrel. The latter are spying illegally on the former in hopes of improving their chances in the Carnival competition.
- 45.
The phrase belongs to poet Breyten Breytenbach. See also Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza La Frontera (San Francisco, CA: Spinsters and Aunt Publisher, 1987). See also Zoë Wicomb, Writing South Africa.
- 46.
See Lisa Baxter, “Continuity and Change in Cape Town’s Coon Carnival: The 1960s and the 1970s,” African Studies 60, no. 1 (2001): 87–105. See esp. 87, for her history of Carnival and a clear introduction to Carnival. She is slightly more recent (2001) than Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival.
- 47.
See Vivian Bickford-Smith, “Meanings of Freedom: Social Position and Identity Among Ex-Slaves and Their Descendants in Cape Town, 1875–1910,” in Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, ed. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994), 289–312. See esp. 297–302.
- 48.
See Martin’s entire book, Coon Carnival, particularly the extraordinary photographs, Davids, Bickford-Smith, and relevant articles in the Drama Review collection (2013).
- 49.
December 1, 1834 marks the abolition of slavery in Britain.
- 50.
See Martin, Coon Carnival, 50, for this striking representation.
- 51.
Shamil Jeppie and Crain Soudien, eds., The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present. A Project of the Hands Off District Six Committee (Cape Town: Bichu Books, 1990), 73.
- 52.
Ibid., Shamil Jeppie, “Popular Culture and Carnival in Cape Town: The 1940s and 1950s,” 67–87. See esp. 68.
- 53.
See Vivian Bickford-Smith, “Meanings of Freedom,” in Breaking the Chains, 302.
- 54.
Bill Nasson, “Oral History and the Reconstruction of District Six,” in The Struggle for District Six, 44.
- 55.
Wicomb has asserted that District Six was, by no means, synonymous with Colouredness. It was fully multiethnic.
- 56.
See Henry Trotter, “Trauma and Memory: The Impact of Apartheid-Era Forced Removals on Coloured Identity in Cape Town,” in Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2009), 49–78, and Lisa Baxter, “Continuity and Change” in relation to romanticizing District Six. In his interviews with past residents of District Six, Trotter finds evidence of a “commemoration narrative” as residents tend to glamorize what were slum conditions. See also Don Pinnock, The Brotherhoods: Street Gangs and State Control in Cape Town (Cape Town: David Philip, 1984). There has been some controversy surrounding Pinnock’s ideas.
- 57.
Vivian Bickford-Smith, “The Origins and Early History of District Six to 1910,” in The Struggle for District Six, 43.
- 58.
Richard Rive, “District Six: Fact and Fiction,” in The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990), 110–16, esp. 112.
- 59.
Bill Nasson, “‘She Preferred Living in a Cave with Harry the Snake-Catcher’: Towards an Oral History of Popular Leisure and Class Expression in District 6, Cape Town c.1920s–1950s,” in Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in 19th and 20th Century South Africa, ed. P. L. Bonner et al. (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989), 285–309. See also Nasson, “Oral History and the Reconstruction of District Six,” in The Struggle for District Six, esp. 47, 63–64 for District Six as the most “diverse and culturally innovative community South Africa had known.”
- 60.
The District Six Museum was built in 1994 as a memorial to apartheid and to the culture and history of the area before the forced removals. A huge street map of District Six covers the ground floor, handwritten notes from residents indicating the streets where they once lived. This ghostly testament to the past speaks to the living in its own continuing performance of loss. The other canker on apartheid history is the razing of Sophiatown, begun in 1955 and concluded in 1960. According to Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1994), Sophiatown just outside Johannesburg was the most “diverse and culturally innovative community South Africa had known” (11). According to Nixon, “the destruction of Sophiatown remains the country’s most symbolically charged memory of forced removal” (11).
- 61.
I thank Catherine Gira for pointing out the similarity between the forced displacements from District Six and the family in The Comedy of Errors who are “displaced,” separated, and lost at sea.
- 62.
See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) for his discussion of cities of the dead as performative possibilities for the living through the evocation of memory.
- 63.
See Kay McCormick, Language in Cape Town’s District Six. See also Fritz Ponelis, The Development of Afrikaans.
- 64.
See Kay McCormick, “The Vernacular of District Six,” in The Struggle for District Six, 88–109, particularly 100–105.
- 65.
Ibid., 105.
- 66.
Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 81.
- 67.
Brink preserved Shakespeare’s addition of a second pair of twins. There is thus another pair of brothers to be re-united at the play’s conclusion. The final impression which Errors leaves on the spectator/reader is the reunion of the Dromios, even more poignant in Kinkels than in Errors. Brink also followed Shakespeare’s addition of a sibling for Adriana, thereby creating another pair of siblings—Luciana and Adriana—and, thereby, strengthening the family motif. In addition, Brink had two “doubled” language pairs: Afrikaans–English in Kaaps, and Kaaps–Shakespearean English, in the appropriation.
- 68.
See Alexander Leggatt, “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love: The Comedy of Errors” (London: Methuen, 1974), 134–53. He speaks of the effect of dislocation created by the “mingling—and, at times, the collision—of dramatic styles” (137).
- 69.
Barbara Freedman, “Reading Errantly,” in Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 79. I would not want to press unduly on the point, but this disjunction would equally be a key effect of apartheid relocation, language policies, and job discrimination.
- 70.
Barbara Everett, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet,” London Review of Books 30, no. 9 (8 May 2008): 12–15. See 12.
- 71.
All quotations from The Comedy of Errors are taken from Charles Whitworth, ed., The Comedy of Errors.
- 72.
Whitworth, The Comedy of Errors, 2.2.116–221. I have cited Brink’s version of Shakespeare’s text, which differs slightly orthographically from Whitworth. See Kinkels, 17, “The time was—or have you forgotten—when you behaved like a poet—when you swore:” In Errors, Adriana has a 36-line speech; her argument in Kinkels is reduced to 24 lines that code switch between citations from Errors cited above and Kaaps prose.
- 73.
“Husband and wife are one flesh” from Ephesians 5:31, citing Genesis 2:24.
- 74.
Kinkels, 17: “I’m asking you nicely” (My translation).
- 75.
A number of critics have written about the nightmare at the heart of the loss of identity in Errors. A small sample includes Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze; Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies; Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins; Kent Cartwright, “Coasting Homeward to Ephesus: The Eastern Mediterranean,” in The Comedy of Errors and Pericles, unpublished paper; Cartwright, “Language, Magic, the Dromios, and The Comedy of Errors,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 47, no. 2 (2007): 331–54; Alexander Leggatt, “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love: The Comedy of Errors”; R. A. Foakes, The Comedy of Errors; Charles Whitworth, The Comedy of Errors; and Kent Cartwright, ed., The Comedy of Errors (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017).
- 76.
Kinkels, 17. “So mixed up with this high-falutin’ language and all” (My translation).
- 77.
Joseph Addison, Spectator, 15 December 1711, cited in Richard W. Schoch, Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17.
- 78.
This self-reflexiveness, a kind of literariness, is a distinctive quality of Brink’s prose writing.
- 79.
Kinkels, 42–43.
- 80.
Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 15.
- 81.
There are two exceptions to this: Brink Afrikanerizes “chain” to the diminutive, “chaintjie.”
- 82.
Kinkels, 57, “A mystery.”
- 83.
Brink dispensed with Shakespeare’s romance frame, a feature of Shakespeare’s play remarked on as long ago as 1974 by Alexander Leggatt in “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love: The Comedy of Errors,” and Arthur F. Kinney in “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds,” both articles in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, edited by Robert Miola and followed by many literary critics.
- 84.
Pass Law legislation for black South Africans was an attempt, punishable by arrest, to restrict freedom of movement; a worker in one city could not travel to another city. Brink is riffing on the trade war between Syracuse and Ephesus in Errors.
- 85.
Kinkels, 58, “I am so excited I think it’s good-bye to virginity” (My translation).
- 86.
Kinkels, 58, “There’s a fly in the ointment.” Or, “there’s a twist in the cable.”
- 87.
Kinkels, 59.
- 88.
Kinkels, 59. “We came into the world as brothers, let’s walk through the world hand in hand. How else?” (My translation).
- 89.
See Errors, 5.1.427–28 for the closing couplet: “We came into the world like brother and brother, / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another. How else?” “Dis hom” (Kinkels, 59) translates as “That’s it!” (My translation).
- 90.
Deborah Seddon, “The Colonial Encounter and The Comedy of Errors: Solomon Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho,” in Shakespearean International Yearbook, South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century, ed. Graham Bradshaw, T. G. Bishop, and Laurence Wright (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 78.
- 91.
Ibid., 81.
- 92.
Errors, 1.2.35–40.
- 93.
Kinkels innie die Kabel, 8. The song appears as I have transcribed it: all in English with the interjection of the Afrikaans word, droppie, a small drop. The words of the original song are “My bonnie lies over the ocean / My bonnie lies over the sea / My bonnie lies over the ocean / O bring back my bonnie to me. Chorus: Bring back, O bring back, O bring back my bonnie to me.” Following Shakespeare’s Errors, Brink transposes “bonnie” to “droppie” and transposes “over” to “inside.” The original song is associated with the Jacobite uprising against the Hanoverians of 1746, Charles Edward Stuart’s defeat, and his return to France. This is an excellent example of the piece’s intertextuality as Brink moves between Errors, Kinkels, and a historical British song that evokes the British colonials who first occupied the Cape Colony in 1795.
- 94.
Without empire, the Cape would have no tradition of Christmas gifts or of Boxing Day as an annual holiday on the day after Christmas Day. Slang, as a social practice, assists in the promotion of a particular cultural identity.
- 95.
Kinkels, 17. “And now, buffalo, blockhead, scumbag, chicken arse, scoundrel, asshole, tramp, do you think perhaps that I am carved out of your little rib?” Philip Hare, translation. This string of invective is worthy of Shakespeare. See Kenneth Muir, ed., King Lear (London: Methuen, 1952), 2.2.13–21, for Kent’s exchange with Oswald, or Marcellus’ “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things,” in Julius Caesar.
- 96.
Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, 76–77. See also her Literary Fat Ladies, 14–15, for a discussion of the way in which a rhetorical figure can assume structural implications for meaning.
- 97.
See Kent Cartwright, ed., The Comedy of Errors, 18.
- 98.
Kinkels, 12. “He’s in no great hurry to please his wife, it seems to me” (My translation).
- 99.
Kinkels, 41. “In this land every man is a free man. It’s because of all this freedom that we all look like this” (My translation).
- 100.
In 1955, a small group of White, English-speaking, middle-class women established the Women’s Defense of the Constitution League. Liberal-leaning women, wearing black sashes, opposed apartheid government policies by marches, demonstrations, and silent vigils outside public buildings. Called the Black Sash because of black sashes draped over one shoulder, their movement’s initial impetus was to protest the Separate Representation of Voters Bill, a bill designed to remove Coloureds from the common voters’ roll. See note 35. Brink’s reference to the Black Sash is, therefore, particularly apposite in the fictive world of Kinkels.
- 101.
Terry Herbst, “An evening of fun, laughter, enjoyment,” Cape Times, 5 April 1971.
- 102.
Kinkels innie Kabel, Preface to 1971 published version, unnumbered page.
- 103.
Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 48.
- 104.
Kinkels, 5. “An apartheid is not such a good thing” (My translation).
- 105.
Ibid., 3. “But I am not mixed. I am pure. I can trace my family tree back to the Freeburgers and the Huguenots.” The ironic joke is on the oxymoronic “pure Coloured,” signifying “pure mestizo/a.” The population can, indeed, trace their genealogy back to the Huguenots, but the statement completely ignores their slave origins and the concomitant miscegenation that produced a people of mixed linguistic and ethnic origins, or, as Kaaps would express it, gemix. Note the word “gemix,” typical of Kaaps’ grammatical conflation of English and Afrikaans: the English word “mix,” preceded by the Afrikaans prefix “ge” to signify past tense.
- 106.
Arthur F. Kinney, “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds,” in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed., Robert Miola, 155–181.
- 107.
The identification as farce comes initially from Coleridge, who defined Errors as farce because of “the license allowed, and even required in the fable in order to produce strange and laughable situations.” See Whitworth, The Comedy of Errors, 43–44, for the difference between farce and comedy. Whitworth identifies the “increasingly hectic and crazy action in the middle two acts” as farce (43). See also R. A. Foakes, The Comedy of Errors, xl; and Kent Cartwright, ed., The Comedy of Errors.
- 108.
Northrop Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays (1948): 61.
- 109.
Wylie Sypher, Comedy, 1956, 220. Cited in Foakes, The Comedy of Errors, l.
- 110.
See Rohan Quince, Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Productions in the Apartheid Era, 85, for the humorous exchanges between White and Coloured audience members and the ushers. In a carnivalesque topsy-turvy world, the ushers treated the Coloureds with exaggerated respect and the White audience with indifference. So, the spirit matched the subversive production on stage. I could find no evidence for a blacked-up cast after the opening production in 1970 Pretoria. It is possible that the Trichardt/Brink production was the only time they used blackface.
- 111.
The reader should consult recent scholarship on the use of blackface in the Carnival street procession. See Catherine M. Cole and Tracy C. Davis, “Throughout its history, blackface has been at once potent and slippery, notoriously difficult to control as signification. When one race impersonates another and bills it as entertainment, reception becomes a barometer of ethnic hegemony, interracial politics, and power,” in “Routes of Blackface,” 7–12. See other relevant pieces in this collection, esp. Nadia Davids, “‘It Is Us’: An Exploration of ‘Race’ and Place in the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival,” 2, para. 2, “The Cape Town Minstrel Carnival’s use of blackface does not indicate an explicit investment in questions of settler/indigenous identity formation; rather it exists on a continuum with the lived experience and cultural memory of slavery and its subsequent processes of creolization and ‘interculturalism.’” See also Davids, 2, for “identity is erased through a painted mask.” See David Coplan, In Township Tonight: South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (Braamfontein: Ravan Press, 1985), 37–38.
- 112.
The most helpful insights came from Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance; Helen Gilbert, “Black White and Re(a)d All Over Again: Indigenous Minstrelsy in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Theatre,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 4 (2003): 679–98; Susan Gubar, Race Changes: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Felicity Nussbaum, “The Theatre of Empire: Racial Counterfeit, Racial Realism,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71–90. See also Catherine M. Cole and Tracy C. Davis, “Routes of Blackface;” Tracy C. Davis, “I Long for My Home in Kentuck;” Davis, “Acting Black, 1824: Charles Mathews’ Trip to America;” Davis, The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Performance; Douglas A. Jones, Jr., “Black Politics but Not Black People: Rethinking the ‘Racial’ and Social History of Early Minstrelsy;” Richard Burt, ed., “To E- or Not to E-: Disposing of Shlockspeare in the Age of Digital Media,” in Shakespeare After Mass Media (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 1–32; and Burt, “Civic ShakesPR: Middlebrow Multiculturalism, White Television, and the Color Bind,” in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 157–85, and Davids, both of whom suggest in slightly different ways that blackface in the instance of Carnival works to deconstruct categories and ideologies of race. Nadia Davids sees blackface as a powerfully transformative mask, not a racial caricature, and as optional, which it certainly is today. In contemporary South Africa, minstrels use brightly colored paint and many use no paint at all on their faces.
- 113.
Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, 18–25. I am indebted to Roach in the foregoing discussion.
- 114.
Ibid., 21.
- 115.
Gubar, Race Changes, 259.
- 116.
The Coon Carnival does not resemble Mardi Gras, and, nor is there, to my knowledge, anything else like the Carnival in South African culture.
- 117.
See Douglas Lanier in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola, 306.
- 118.
Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 151.
- 119.
One can raise questions about the success of such a rhetorical move. “The more important question is to what extent Brink is able to speak the voices of the oppressed without ventriloquising them, or speaking his own positions through them.” See Leon de Kock, Obituary for André Brink: “André Brink: A Master of Words of Form,” https://mg.co.za/article/2015-02-13-00-andre-brink-a-master-of-words-of-form, accessed 9 June 2017.
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Seeff, A. (2018). André Brink’s Kinkels innie Kabel: Political Vision and Linguistic Virtuosity. In: South Africa's Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity. Global Shakespeares. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78148-8_4
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