“We Can Only Remind Each Other of It”

The farm as South African ‘lieu de mémoire’ in the process of building a national collective memory

Abstract

The portrayal of the farm in South African (literary) writing plays an important role as ‘lieu de mémoire’. The dramatic political changes of the early 1990s have made the development of a collective memory in South Africa a pressing issue, and this article explores how two recent texts deal with the notion of power and violence in relation to the notion of the farm in the process of creating a collective memory for South Africans.