Yvette Christiansë

Yvette Christiansë(born 12 December 1954) is a South African-born poet and novelist. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at Barnard College.She has also taught at Fordham University, also in New York City. Quotes I was born in South Africa and grew up with stories about slaves, although no real history class dealt with this subject when I was going to school. You might say that I wrote the novel in what felt like a large silence—felt because, if one takes the time and really listens and researches, that silence is not what it seems. There are always traces, signs, glimpses. So, while researching a larger, scholarly project about the direct, first-person slave narratives of the Cape Colony, I came across some records of Sila van de Kaap. It is tempting to seize upon these traces of slave voices and treat them as evidence of resistance to slavery. But my fiction was born of another speculation: what if there had been a slave narrative, and what if it was not in a familiar form? How might one imagine the voice of a person who was not writing her own story? I wanted a form that would do justice to this woman’s story and ended up with a novel that begins in third person which is interrupted by the first person appearance of Sila, who speaks for the rest of the novel. The decision liberated Sila’s voice from that same, imprisoning archive. The other benefit was that, because the novel is so fragmented, the truth of colonialism’s and slavery’s violence is visible—the fragmented nature echoes what is in fact a truth; namely the colonial archive was only interested in keeping only, in Sila’s case, a small, criminalized record of a life. External links Category: Living people