Navigating the Intertextual Landscape: KPD Maphalla’s poetry in Dialogue
The view that a text is an autonomous, hermetic, self-contained system is a myth. Every text is constituted by ‘a mosaic of citations, every text is the absorption and transformation of another text’(Kristeva, 1986: 37). Our purpose in this article is to show that there is an intertextual relation between the later poetry of KPD Maphalla and the earlier poems of KE Ntsane, BM Khaketla and MA Mokhomo; that a text has the meaning it does only because certain things were written before. This calls our attention to the importance of prior texts and how they relate to later texts. Hillis Miller (1979: 225), writing about the symbol of host and parasite in literature, says later texts contain long chains of parasitical presences. This view of intertextual relations suggests that there is cannibalism between texts where the later work simply feeds on the earlier work without shame. On the contrary, the analytical approach we adopt in this paper, derives from the theory of intertextuality as initiated and developed by Julia Kristeva (1966, 1967, 1980, 1986) together with the Tel Quel group. Here, intertextuality is viewed as a dynamic site where earlier and later texts intersect, enter a dialogue, negotiate a plurality of meaning, and enrich one another.
