Tatamkhulu Afrika, Queer Heroism, Triangulated Forms

Abstract

Tatamkhulu Afrika, lauded writer and South African activist, over the course of his life suffered imprisonments under the Nazis and the apartheid state; he also changed his name five times and won almost every literary award in South Africa. Afrika’s lifetime of moving among categories — whether racial, political, sexual, or religious — has garnered the majority of scholarly attention to his work. However, the form and content of Afrika’s poetry, prose, and autobiography reveal yet unchecked assumptions that govern narratives of heroism and sexuality, in post-1994 South Africa. Afrika’s private experience of queerness expresses the superabundance of desire that he refused to pin to his identity, even as he publicly moved through multiple names and political affiliations. How might we think the conjunction of nation, desire, and literary form — the contours of which have been often tied to the novel, or, in South Africa, the prison memoir? My answer arises from a triangulation of literary forms that also revises the queer erotic triangle as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2016). Rather than obscuring desire, triangulating Afrika’s writings — particularly Bitter Eden, Mr. Chameleon, and “War-Mate” — enables us to trace an emerging model of queer heroism that allows affection, or even love, between men.