Nostalgia as Response to a Society in Transition: The Work of the South African Writer, Dana Snyman

First described in the seventeenth century as an illness caused by homesickness amongst Swiss soldiers on service in foreign territories, nostalgia in general positions the subject in response and in relationship to certain spatial contexts removed from it in time and/or space. In the writings of the South African author Dana Snyman, the awareness of worlds that are irretrievably lost or fading away in post-apartheid South Africa inspires both a sense of loss and ironical detachment, highlighting the distance that separates the remembering self and what is remembered. The narrator observes and records the dilemma of South Africans who feel themselves alienated from what they perceive as almost a foreign country. Many of the characters, objects and events narrated are part of the collective memories of South Africans who grew up between the 1960s and 1990s, but Snyman's narrator remains ambiguous towards identification with these images from the past.