- Title
- The frightened
- Creator
- Msimang, Lethokuhle
- Subject
- South African fiction (English) -- 21st century
- Date Issued
- 2020
- Date
- 2020
- Type
- text
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144004
- Identifier
- vital:38302
- Description
- My novella tells the coming of age story of a young woman battling the trauma of objectification. It explores the intimate relationship between a woman and a man, the young and the old, and the camaraderie between women. Having spent the greater part of her youth in various parts of the world, my protagonist faces the stark reality of returning home to her native country. This triggers an angst which causes her to leap between lived experiences and memories. An elegy on how difficult it is to love while dragging the long shadow of shame, it uses short prose and prose poetry to reveal the intimacies and intricacies of self hate and clandestine romances, and to unravel the complexities of memory and forgetting. Built from non linear fragments it seeks to refuse cliches regarding love and to question easy assumptions around gender, family and the innocence of youth. I draw inspiration from Vita Sackville West’s’ All Passion Spent , which eloquently portrays the placid and flickering thoughts of an old woman taking leave from the frivolity of youth. I’m similarly inspired by the sincerity and confessional aspects of Virginia Woolf and French poet and photographer Alix Roubaud ’s journals and Van Gogh’s letters, as well as Lydia Yuknavitch, Max Porter and Elena Ferante’s autobiographical fiction. I also draw from J’Lyn Chapman’s chapbook A Thing of Shreds and Patches and finally Dostoevky’s Notes from Underground , for their blurring of life and writing, and their exploration of grief and death as a lingering thought, together with the oppressive urge to create. In addition I’m inspired by the poetry of a new generation of South African female writers like Vangile Gatsho.
- Format
- 132 pages
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Humanities, Institute for the Study of English in Africa
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Msimang, Lethokuhle
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Collections
RU Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA)
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | MSIMANG-MA-TR20-237.pdf | 67 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |