Elleke Boehmer - a short biography and bibliography of this KwaZulu-Natal author.
Elleke Boehmer was born of
Dutch parents in Durban, South Africa in 1961. She was
educated in South Africa
and at Oxford University. She taught at the School of
English at Leeds
University and has published three novels: Screens
against the Sky
(1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993) and
Bloodlines (2000). She has
also published short stories in magazines, journals and
anthologies. Her
research is in postcolonial writing and theory, feminism
and the literature of
empire, and at the moment she is the Hildred Carlile
Professor in Literatures in
English at the University of London. Amongst her non-
fiction works are
Altered state? (1994); Colonial and
Postcolonial Literature: Migrant
Metaphors (1995), Empire, the National, and the
Postcolonial,1890-1920:
Resistance in Interaction (2002). Boehmer edited the
anthology Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial
Literature,
1870-1918 (1998), Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for
Instruction in Good
Citizenship by Robert Baden-Powell (2004) and Cornela
Sorabji’s India
Calling (2004). She produced a special edition in the
journal Kunapipi
on the writings of the Anglo-Boer War (1999) and her
study Stories of
Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation
is due to be
published in 2005.
(Sources: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/English/about-
us/Staff/Boehmer/EllekeBoehmer.htm, 27.06.05 ;
http://people.africadatabase.org/en/profile/15829.html,
27.06.05) Selected WorkExcerpt from
An Immaculate Figure (1993):
Sipho
took up the story-telling thread from Rosandra. It was a
good thread, he said,
but maybe he could bring it down to earth. He told a story
of his grandmother,
an upstanding fierce old woman who was a devout Catholic
and yet went about the
amulets of her ancestors’ faith sewn into the hems
of her
church dresses. This
woman, Lindiswe Frances Nyembe, lived in a township close
to the place where the
old Indian prophet, the man who believed in justice and
peace, what was his
name, Gandhi, once set up a communal centre. She used to
tell the children in
that area – there were many children, many houses in
all
directions – about this
old prophet. She would tell them that his spirit still
lived there in that place
and they should honour it. But as the years went by the
pressure on that land
grew very great. There were so many people, so little
land, and so much anger in
the people that it became more and more difficult to tell
them to show respect
for that special piece of earth and the spirit of the man
who onced lived there.
And so the day came, Sipho said, that the people were so
severely pressed
against the walls of their shacks and – even though
their
bellies looked like
balloons – so hungry, that they moved and built their
tin-can homes and
cardboard-box shacks even where the prophet’s house
had
been. And so they forgot
about him. And then the grandmother, feeling the anger and
distress of the
people but also the distress and sadness of the spirit of
the place, asked why
in this land must everything that was good and strong and
long-lasting be
trampled into the earth? Why could the prophet’s
place not
be preserved while at
the same time giving room to the people? She asked her
children and her
grandchildren this question, over and over again, and she
went also to the city
authorities and asked it there. People could not
completely ignore her because
she was an old woman and demanded respect. Every so often
–
to this day, Sipho
imagined – she went into town to visit the municipal
offices and ask these
difficult questions, and every day she prayed, and so she
tried to keep a piece
of history surviving on the land. (pg. 205) BibliographyFiction
1990. Screens against the Sky. London :
Bloomsbury.
1993. An Immaculate Figure. London : Bloomsbury.
2000. Bloodlines. Cape Town : David Philip.
Non-fiction
1994. Altered state?
1995.Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant
Metaphors
2002. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial,1890-
1920: Resistance in
Interaction
1998. (Editor) Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial
Literature, 1870-1918
2004. (Editor) Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for
Instruction in Good
Citizenship by Robert Baden-Powell.
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