“Home out of home”: South Africa, Central Europe, and “dark nostography”

The essay provides a comprehensive discussion of South African nostographies which are concerned with the nostographers’ return to their Central European father/motherland. The paper not only explores the poetics of nostographic writing but also attempts to identify specific generic signposts that characterise South African nostos narratives about Central European homecoming. Having analysed – with the support of archival records – several notable examples of second-generation nostographies by South African writers of Central European descent (Gordimer, Zwi, Jacobson), the essay focuses on the first nostos narrative by a second generation South African Pole, i.e. Blood and Silver by Jan Glazewski (2022). The proposed reading of Glazewski’s book pays special attention to the way in which the Polish/Ukrainian “home” to which the author returns partakes in negotiating the “anachronoid” identity of the auto/biographical (homecoming) subject – especially in the context of the subject’s multiple dislocations; and in revealing a new, essentially transnational geography of historical and ideological connections between Central Europe and South Africa. Additionally, the essay argues that Glazewski’s book should be recognised as a specimen of “dark nostography,” i.e. a homecoming narrative in which one’s double home (South African and Central Europe) is acknowledged as a site of trauma, while the homecomer is considered the subject implicated in the past and present forms of injustice and violence.