ATHOL FUGARD’S SORROWS AND REJOICINGS: THE NOSTALGIA OF AN EXILE
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Abstract
The paper focuses on Athol Fugard’s play Sorrows and Rejoicings (2001) which depicts the fate of Dawid Olivier, a white South African poet, who returns to die in his home country after spending years in exile in London. Using Lacan’s concept of the Other, which in postcolonial theories is reconceived as the Other (colonizer) and other (colonized), together with Said’s concept of exile which posits it as “the unhealable rift” between the Self and its true home, the paper explores the traits of Dawid’s identity so as to figure out how a brilliant young poet and university professor ended up in final decadency, alcoholism and despair. Dawid turns out to be an embodiment of reflective nostalgia based on his feelings of uprootedness, uselessness and fear of forgetting his mother tongue. Dawid’s character is revealed through a prism of the stories told by the three women in his life, Allison (his wife), Marta (his black lover) and Rebecca (their illegitimate daughter). They turn out to be nostalgic exiles in the world of post-apartheid, where the identities continue to be constructed by the racist/gender discourse that labels people as Other/other alienating them from the Self, which remains unattainable fiction.
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