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The verbal and visual mirrors of postcolonial identity in Breyten Breytenbach's all one horse

Summary This paper explores Breyten Breytenbach's repeated reference to mirrors and mirror images in both his verbal and visual texts and asks how they are engaged by the author to tease out the complexities informing the formation and representation of personal identity. It argues that Breytenbach postulates the mirror as a model space where personal identity is at once instated and contested through the inevitable interplay between the real subject and its reflected other. An analysis of some of the portraits reproduced in All One Horse: Fictions and Images (1990) serves to illustrate concretely how the mirror is incorporated into Breytenbach's texts to evoke in his readers a sense of the paradoxes informing personal identity.