Back to Africa: from Natal to natal in the locations of memory

Keywords:

South Africa, Natal Memory, Zulu, Irma Stern, Charlotte Salomon, Memory-mapping, Walter Benjamin, Childhood

Available in:

JVAP 5.1 - about JVAP

Funded by:

NAFAE - about NAFAE

Pulished:

July 2006

Article abstract

Using an unexpected attachment to the film Zulu as a springboard to recovered attachment to a landscape in South Africa where I was born, this article explores the concept of natal memory - itself a pun on the place of birth and earliest memories of place and the association resulting from being born in South Africa with what is now the province KwaZulu-Natal where I spent summer holidays. Working from family album photographs in which an anonymous African woman disappeared into the uniform of domestic servitude is unexpectedly captured in a family snap of myself and my mother, I slip down a further chain of associations to the artist Charlotte Salomon who created a single vast artwork of 1325 paintings that restaged her own childhood through urban and holiday spaces that relate to Walter Benjamin's ideas of bio-mapping, mapping memory. Through the connection to German-Jewish expressionism and modernist painting, I am able to bring into view a South African-born German-Jewish artist Irma Stern, a contemporary of Charlotte Salomon, who returned from Europe to South Africa, to Natal, and attempted to find a means of painting her difference into a space of non-originary origin - being born where you do not belong - shared with women of many African nations and cultures, represented in ways completely contrary to the African nursemaid who haunts my family album without name or identity under the first years of apartheid. Not belonging through migration or diasporic subjectivity in places whose populations colonialism dispossessed is placed in unrelieved tension around the power of the child's co-emerging sense of self and place: what happens then to natal memory?

Written by: Griselda Pollock

Other articles in: JVAP Volume 5 Issue 1