“It Was a Brutal Land”: Exploring the Personal and the Political in Damon Galgut’s Small Circle of Beings (1988)

Abstract

This article is a critical discussion of Damon Galgut’s Small Circle of Beings (1988) from the perspective of Elleke Boehmer’s postcolonial poetics. The discussion concentrates on the story “The Clay Ox” and the eponymous novella of the collection. It is argued that both the story and the novella convey a tension between the personal and the political by describing the subtleties of human relationships while at the same time showing that even this intensely private dimension of the characters’ existence is shaped by forces that affect the entire nation. As it is shown, Galgut’s collection of stories is representative of white writing in the times of the interregnum insofar as it depicts isolated, conflicted protagonists, includes the theme of physical and mental disintegration, and explores the state of personal and political precarity.

Keywords

• damon galgut
• south african literature
• postcolonial short story
• south africa
• apartheid