'Maroon Jersey' by Jeremy Cronin - Dr Mark Espin (University of the Western Cape)

In this lecture, Dr. Mark Espin from the University of the Western Cape analyses the poem ‘Maroon Jersey’ by Jeremy Cronin through a method that insists on poetry as a unique and discrete discipline. Dr Espin explains how the jersey functions in the poem as a symbol of international political solidarity, the generosity of others, communal resource and means for survival. The jersey’s journey from Sweden to South Africa via Tanzania and Zambia spans 25 years, so that when the poem’s narrator wears the threadbare jersey in the final stanza of the poem it remains a symbol of comfort even in a ‘Cape Town winter’ – a metaphor used to describe the eroded political ideals of the new democratic government of post-apartheid South Africa. The jersey, then, is a warning from the past to the present to remember and preserve the spirit of collective action.

Further Reading

Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds., Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995 (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Rita Barnard, ‘Speaking Places: Prison, Poetry, and the South African Nation’, Research in African Literatures 32.3 (2001), 155-176

Robert Berold, ‘Interview: Jeremy Cronin’, New Coin Poetry (1998), 33-41

Jeremy Cronin, Inside (Ravan, 1983)

---, More Than a Casual Contact (Umuzi, 2006)

Gregory Houston, ‘Jeremy Cronin: Tales of Struggle’, in The Fabric of Dissent: Public Intellectuals in South Africa, ed. by Vasu Reddy, Narnia Bohler-Muller, Gregory Houston, Maxi Schoeman, and Heather Thuynsma (Lynne Reinner, 2021), 385-90

Andrew van der Vlies, ‘An Interview with Jeremy Cronin’, Contemporary Literature, 49.4 (December 2008), 515-540