"Crossing Boundaries: History/Herstories, Female Genealogies and the Call of the Earth Mother in Andrè Brink’s Imaginings of Sand".

André Brink, South African writer of Afrikaner descent, sided with the anti-apartheid cause becoming a dissident writer persecuted by the regime. This essay explores the manifold expressions of his longstanding and passionate search for new paths leading towards a definite liberation of South Africa and the creation of a society forged according to a partnership model, in defiance of all systems and forms of oppression and discrimination. In his 1996 novel, Imaginings of Sand, the first written in the post-apartheid period though still set in the crucial years of transition from the tyrannical regime to democracy, Brink defies all dichotomical oppositions at the very roots of the oppressive regime which dominated South Africa up to 1994. Imaginings of Sand thus offers itself as a fruitful occasion to reconsider and re-appreciate the dialogical relationship between male and female, black and white, history and stories, word and silence, culture and nature, life and death. In the novel André Brink offers women the role of the storytellers of silenced histories, both their own and those of all the oppressed in their society. Women who do not simply record the past by filling in the gaps, but reinvent it creatively. The herstories counteract the official version of History preserved by its master narratives, in order to explore the universe of the notalready-said, allowing the ‘feminine’ to emerge in the gaps and the fissures of dominant discourses, defying the unspeakable and the unrepresentable.