I believe that Arthur Nortje's poem, "Waiting", is about the speaker's struggle to find meaning and purpose in his life when confronted by "a hole in the mind's foundation"- the possible decimation of all that he believed to be true about the anti apartheid struggle on which he has based his life. The actions he has felt compelled to undertake in order to realize his hopes for his country have come at great cost to himself, resulting in exile from the "roots" that nourish him. The idea that that these actions may have been based on nothing but flimsy sentiment and have ultimately achieved nothing, as purposeless as an empty warehouse, is the source of the speaker's present attitude towards his exile. It is this attitude of bitter disillusionment that I wish to explore in this essay and I would also like to focus on his use of imagery, particularly the interplay between imagery of darkness and light, and what I believe these images represent.
             In line four, the speaker refers to night as being the "beautifier." It transforms the wharf, which in daylight is usually fairly unattractive, into a place of dancing lights. The implication is that darkness hides the ugly reality, and thus provides escape into illusion. I believe that the images of darkness in this poem are representative of the speaker's past illusions about the apartheid struggle and his part in it. The light is representative of the truth, the dawning realisation that his illusions are false, and the crushing loss of innocence and disillusionment that follows this realisation. The speaker welcomes the protection of darkness, hence his ambivalent attitude towards the slow, shimmering, and quick, phosphorescent illumination offered by the introspective process of writing poetry. He paradoxically "peers through the skulls black windows", sightless, yet knowing that only by seeing the truth will he be &...