“But still the word became my body". Poetesse sudafricane tra Legge del Padre e disobbedienza linguistica

Reflecting on the dismembering of the social body in apartheid South Africa and on the ambiguities of the current attempts at ‘remembering the nation’, a new generation of South African women poets has recently questioned the role of silence and normativity in the discursive script and accelerated the re-shaping of the public discourse over subjectivity and the body – both collective and individual. Drawing on established psychoanalytical understandings of language and on recent scholarship on the creative text as theory-making, this article focuses in particular on Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia (2017) and Gabeba Baderoon’s The History of Intimacy (2018) as works that helped to impose a political and poetical turn in South African consciousness about memory and language. Variously dealing with bodily, discursive, and social intimacies, as well as with history, identity, and the nation, these collections of poems interrogate old and new violence, explore life in margins, and invite disobedience to the discursive script produced by both historical and current Law(s) of the Father.