The year of opportunity

I finished my honours degree this year at the University of Pretoria specialising in Afrikaans, but it was the most difficult and busiest year I have ever had.

At first I was on my way to do an honours in Translation at Stellenbosch University, but they never contacted me again. I assumed I haven’t gotten in which was actually not the case. In late January they contacted me about the first date we will meet with our lecturers. So, I was accepted, but their communication was way too late. In the bigger scheme of things it was definitely with reason.

I became a tutor at the University of Pretoria and did some odd jobs for a few people. One of them being a type of participation in a PhD student’s study. I had to analyse sentences which in total would’ve been over 600 sentences. She made every participant a co-author in her study which is really sweet. It was such fun, I would definitely do it again. I cannot say too much about the study because it is in for review.

On top of that, I was one of twenty people chosen to participate in a workshop at Media24. I remember I wrote the application letter at our holiday by the ocean and in some way I got in. I was the youngest, everybody had already finished their honours degree and even their masters degree so I was a bit intimidated. It was such a cool experience. When I was young I always read the Huisgenoot at my grandfather’s home, but in the present I was featured, together with the other people, as an intern editor. One of the editors of the magazine organised it as a type of thank you.

Our Professor also took us to a congress at the University of the Free State where we met some of the biggest names in the Afrikaans academic culture. I talked to some of my future lecturers from the University of Stellenbosch (yes, I am going to do a second honours. Why? I don’t even know why after this year). It was really nice to mingle with these people and see how they are normal and not at all what you would imagine they would be like.

The honours

Now we get to the real story. I had six modules. Three were compulsory which consisted of one Language module, one Literature module, and the big research project. The other three modules I chose were a creative writing module, another literature module, and the last module was the study of language in politics. I didn’t read that much books for this year, but my goodness did I write. I added the word count of all of my assessments. Can you guess the total number of words? 40 000 maybe? NO! For only the assessments, excluding planning and drafts, I wrote 84 870 words… that is a whole PhD in ten months time. I had +-38 assessments and the research project which was 10 000 words. And guess what, through all of the trials and tribulations (there were a lot of them) I got a distinction for every single module! In total my average is 80% which I think is pretty good.

These books are some of the books I had to read for my modules. I read more articles and online short stories like Eugene Marais’ Dwaalstories and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Imitation”.

For my research project I had the smart idea to compare and Afrikaans story to a Korean story, but my goodness did I make my life difficult. NO ONE has done research on it, not even the two stories on their own. I read Bora Chung’s “Goodbye, My Love” last year December and thought it was weirdly similar to Jan Rabie’s “Ek het jou gemaak” ( in english known as “I made you”). The stories differ +-60 years and are in two different languages and countries. How is this possible? Well that is what my research project was about and the answer laid in the old myth of Pygmalion written by Ovid A.C. 10. This myth inspired so much famous literature for example Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (better known as the musical “My Fair Lady”). Furthermore, I looked at the reponse of these stories to artficial intelligence. There was a word limit, that is why my Professor wants me to carry this study on in a Masters degree. But I don’t know if I want to yet, but who knows what the future holds…

For one of my exam questions I compared, yet again, an Afrikaans classic Toorberg by Etienne van Heerden with the famous One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez to look at the definition of magic realism. Most people know magic realism as a realistic world with magical elements, but there is another way to understand it. A magical world with realistic elements where the realistic are seen as the “magical” because the people of the magical world see their world as normal which is thus realistic to them. A very interesting way to look at magic realism :)

I also did other exam questions for example reading “As die katjiepiering blom” by Audrey Jantjies through a Lacanian lens and looking at San and Khoi elements and issues regarding authorship, categorization, and so forth in Dwaalstories.

There were a lot of drama… All I am going to say, which I think sums it up quite nice, I had a breakdown against the very pink wall of the bathroom one afternoon on campus.

End

So yeah, that is why I was gone and why I feel like this fish. Thank you for reading! I appreciate it a lot.

(The ramblings and photographs are all my own)