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Diary: J. M. Coetzee, (1) Mother Tongue

A writer who made his name writing in English tries to leave it behind

In my case, descended from Germanized Poles on my mother’s side and Dutch-speaking settlers in South Africa on my father’s, I grew up in Cape Town in an environment where English—the master tongue—seemed to be the way of the future, and an English-language education the best way of ensuring that a child would prosper. The current that had borne so many Afrikaans speakers into anglophony began to be reversed; and a cohort of children like myself was left stranded, at home neither among the Afrikaner-nationalist majority nor among the suddenly powerless Anglo minority. Some Book Post writers: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Jamaica Kincaid, Marina Warner, Lawrence Jackson, John Banville, Álvaro Enrigue, Nicholson Baker, Kim Ghattas, Michael Robbins, more.

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