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Book of essays does Zakes Mda justice

October 25, 2009 Edition 1

Zakes Mda is one of a handful of South African dramatists to have sustained an international reputation. On top of this, his six novels have reaped plaudits for their narrative audacity and rich poetic resonance.

The central character of his Ways of Dying - Toloki, the professional mourner - has taken on the status of a folk hero, and reappears, in the latest novel, Cion.

Ways of Writing is by far the most substantial book yet to appear on Mda's work.

The editors' introduction begins enigmatically by classifying Mda as "an important African writer and significant South African writer". The bulk of the 18 essays in the collection are on the novels: there are five on The Heart of Redness alone.

There is no reference to Mda's work as painter and sculptor; there is, though, a folio of colour plates of Frans Claerhout's paintings, providing a back-up to Johan Jacobs's essay on the way the narrative processes of The Madonna of Excelsior draw upon and critique these.

The introduction draws attention to a wide range of features in Mda's writing. These include its experimental quality and the way the plays and novels are energised by his work as cultural theory and activist. As the editors point out, especially intriguing is the way the fiction uses the motif of "closely paired siblings or actual twinning". This they see as reflecting the doubling of Mda's artistic and political personae. They note, too - and this is of crucial importance - that "the social function of his art and its obligation to provide social commentary are grounded in an African aesthetic".

Mda turned to novel-writing in 1995, finding, as he has said, a new aesthetic freedom with the ending of apartheid, however politically charged the environment remained.

Prior to that he was known primarily as a dramatist. Surprisingly, just three of the essays here are devoted to his plays.

David Bell's piece gives only a paragraph apiece to And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses and The Hill, both of which have enjoyed a substantial history of stage production, and there is virtually no comment on their innovative dramaturgy (he does address this when he comes to a later play, The Mother of All Eating).

Where Bell scores is in his discussion of the change in cultural imperatives emerging in South Africa in the early 1990s (foreshadowed in seminal essays by Njabulo Ndebele and Albie Sachs).

The section on the novels begins with an overview chapter by Christopher Warnes, which explores the question of whether Mda can be classified as a magical realist author - that is, one whose work holds the supernatural and the non-supernatural to be equally real.

Rogier Courau and Sally-Ann Murray write that Ways of Dying can be considered a postmodernist text and ways in which it declines to go down that path.

Gail Fincham offers a comparative critique of The Heart of Redness and Heart of Darkness, and N. S. Zulu writes on the use of the collective voice in The Madonna of Excelsior - that voice being a mainstay to Mda's fiction. Wendy Woodward's chapter is on "Whales, Clones and Two Ecological Novels", specifically, The Whale Caller and Jane Rosenthal's Souvenir - both highly innovative works in the South African context. The final chapter, by the editors, is on Cion, recognising this as Mda's most overtly metafictional novel to date; that is, one that "flaunts its fictionality to an unprecedented degree".

To sum up? If this comment isn't too circular, perhaps the most significant achievement of this fine collection is that it affirms how richly Mda's work deserves such expansive, searching attention.