"Ik de kameleon". Hibriditeit in Henk van Woerden se trilogie oor Suid-Afrika

Abstract

Since the publication of Een mond vol glas (1998), Henk van Woerden's study on the life of Demitrios Tsafendas in Afrikaans and English translation, his work has attracted considerable interest in South Africa. This article is a critical investigation of three aspects of hybridity in Van Woerden's South African trilogy. Van Woerden freely combines different genres (the bildungsroman, the travelogue, the autobiography, reportage and the biography) to create hybridised textual forms. In Tikoes (1996) he uses the chameleon as a metaphor for cultural translation, a survival strategy embraced by postcolonial migrants. In Moenie kyk nie (1993) and in Een mond vol glas, Van Woerden gives careful consideration to the relation between hybridity and psychological instability. In this article it is argued that Van Woerden's scrupulous views on hybridity and his critique of the "professional literary exile" provide an important corrective to the mainly positive and emancipatory view of hybridity in postcolonial theory.