Browsing by Author "Huigen, Siegfried"

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    Verhalen van Matsombo : Jef Geeraerts’ beeld van de “Kongo-crisis” in Het verhaal van Matsombo
    (AOSIS Publishing, 2001-04) Huigen, Siegfried
    Matsombo’s stories: Jef Geeraerts’s representation of the “Congo crisis” in Het verhaal van Matsombo The so-called Congo crisis (1960-1965) received a great deal of attention internationally. A literary response in Dutch to what happened in the former Belgian colony is Het verhaal van Matsombo (Matsombo’s story) by Flemish writer and former colonial civil servant, Jef Geeraerts. Until now, little critical attention has been given to Het verhaal van Matsombo, despite regular reprints of the text. This article researches how the Congo crisis is represented in Geeraerts’s novel. Although Geeraerts’s depiction of colonial conflict is, in certain respects, close to that of Franz Fanon, Geeraerts’s is ultimately a Western view.
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    Wachten op de barbaren : metageschiedenis in het werk van Peter Blum
    (Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Association, University of Pretoria, 2013) Huigen, Siegfried
    This article explores metahistory in the poetry of Peter Blum. In many of Blum’s poems Western civilisation is confronted with the forces of barbarism, without civilisation necessarily being given preference over barbarism. By focussing on the metahistorical aspects of Blum’s work, it is possible to illuminate the dialectical relationships between apparently disparate cultural domains in his work—past and present, Europe and South Africa—which critics up till now have treated as self-contained entities. From this angle, Blum appears to be a poet who was highly critical of white South African culture of the 1950s. Keywords: Peter Blum, Afrikaans poetry, metahistory, civilisational discourse, barbarians.