Ella Fox-Martens
The Free State | Fiction
Ella Fox-Martens
The way he finds out that Antjie is dead is through a short, harried phone call with his uncle Pieter, who rings him from the side of the road in Maritzburg. Traffic roars by, cutting out his words at inopportune moments. Pieter has to say “body” three times before Jaco understands. After the conversation, during which he mindlessly and methodically tears each page out of his roommate’s nearby notebook, Jaco...
Lost in Translation | On J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole
Ella Fox-Martens
When my grandfather started to die, the first thing he lost was language. Like most people in South Africa, he had been multilingual, fluent in English and isiZulu, competent in Afrikaans and isiXhosa. This ease of passage remained a continual point of pride for him, as the spoken fabric of the country was rewoven after the end of apartheid. When Nelson Mandela, the son of a Xhosa chief, ascended to...
