The post-apartheid city, a contact point for people from all over the African continent and, increasingly, the globe, is a space that affords young South Africans greater freedom of movement and identity. This freedom is reflected in a new style of poetry, sometimes referred to as “kwaijazz,” which is characteristic in its similarity to hip-hop and its disrupted/disruptive syntax.
A focus on language as medium draws attention to the opacity of language and the constructed nature of tropes and myths that have become naturalised. Young urban poets use rhetoric as activism, constructing poems that resist closure, thereby forcing the reader-listener into an encounter with the limits of their own understanding. Thus, these texts require of the reader to be a producer, not a consumer of meaning. By engaging the role of producer, the reader-listener becomes an activist, and the act of producing meaning is by its very nature an act of resistance to received meaning.
The paper investigates the formal preoccupations of contemporary Southern African poetry and attempts an analysis of this poetry with particular focus on the operation of the signifier; the playful possibilities of language; the foregrounding of form and the interest in symbolic mediation apparent in “new” South African poetry. In particular, I will focus on the works of Kgafela oa Magogodi, Lesego Rampolokeng and Dambudzo Marechera.