Poetry
It Is Time to Go Home
Christopher van Wyk · 1979
Synopsis
Poems of the generation of 1976, marked by Black Consciousness, in which defiance and wit go together and political poems alternate with love poems of great tenderness. The best known, “In Detention”, takes up the explanations the government gave for the deaths of political detainees in custody, first in the tone of a plain statement, then combining them to the point of absurdity, so that official language undoes itself.
Context
The collection appeared in 1979 from Ad Donker, when its author was twenty-two, in the surge of Black writing that followed the Soweto uprising; it shares the concerns of Serote, Sepamla and Gwala. It was his only collection: five of his poems later passed into his memoirs, and a large part of it was reprinted in 2020 in the posthumous selection My Mother's Laughter. The 1979 edition is now out of print and hard to find.
Who it is for
Short poems in English, in simple, lively language, often funny; not translated into French.
Prizes and reception
Olive Schreiner Prize in 1980; “In Detention” is counted among the most quoted anti-apartheid poems.