TY - JOUR AU - Maessen, Francine AU - Burger, Bibi AU - Smit, Mathilda PY - 2022/04/06 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - In-between spaces in Klara du Plessis’s Ekke: Identity, language and art JF - Tydskrif vir Letterkunde JA - Tydskr Letterkd VL - 59 IS - 1 SE - Review articles DO - 10.17159/tl.v59i1.13298 UR - https://letterkunde.africa/article/view/13298 SP - 7-13 AB - <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this review article, we focus on the depiction of the transnational and translingual as a state of being in-between in Klara du Plessis’s debut poetry collection, </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ekke </span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">(2018). This in-between state has implications for how identity, place and visual art feature in the collection. </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ekke </span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">contains fragments of German and French, but consists mainly of English interspersed with Afrikaans. The creation of meaning through this linguistic slippage reflects the idea of identity as always in-process that comes to the fore throughout the collection. </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ekke </span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">also represents an intervention in South African urban literature, as Bloemfontein, a city not much featured in literature, is represented in several poems. In these poems, the poet/speaker struggles to situate Bloemfontein and its surrounding areas’ histories and symbolism in the transnational networks that she is a part of. The conception of identity and language being constantly in-progress is also conveyed in the collection’s poems about visual art. In these poems, meaning is created through the interaction of language with visual art, a process the poet calls ‘intervisuality'.</span></p> ER -