Traces of Identity in the Mirror of the Past

The rewriting of history is a prominent trend in contemporary Afrikaans fiction in South Africa. In the debates and discussions on the narrative texts which take historical situations and events as their point of departure, questions about the relevancy of rewriting the past for the present or the future naturally arise. This essay is based on research done in a larger project concerned with mapping the various ways in which Afrikaans narrative texts, novels and short stories published between 1990 and the year 2000, interact with history.1 This essay focuses on a specific short story ‘Our mouth’ by P.G. du Plessis2in which aspects of individual and collective identity are investigated by reflecting on the history of three generations of a family against the background of the collective national history.