That’s not to say that Mda is not interested in politics. “I criticize everybody,” he says gleefully from his home in Johannesburg. “I’m quite outspoken about anything I see that’s wrong with this country.” In “The Heart of Redness,” this list includes political patronage, corruption, widening class divisions, the dissolution of traditional cultures, globalization, poverty, land sustainability and development. But not–most emphatically not–the racial fallout from apartheid. “Ultimately I’m just too taken with the number of stories that haven’t been told,” he says.
Mda’s rise is indicative of a new direction in South African literature. While well-known white authors like J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer are still producing eloquent literature, there’s a hunger in the marketplace for new voices–especially black voices. A flood of young black writers has emerged in the past seven years, all eager to talk about what’s going on in South Africa besides racial strife. Phaswane Mpe, 32, writes about xenophobia and AIDS in “Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” his novel about a notorious inner-city district of Johannesburg. Twenty-eight-year-old K. Sello Duiker’s latest novel, “The Quiet Violence of Dreams,” focuses on sexual identity and mental illness. Both writers cite Mda, at 54 the oldest of the “new” writers, as an influence. “He represents an important literary bridge between ‘struggle-fiction’ and what comes next,” says Duiker. What does come next? “We’re still working on it,” he says.
In the process, authors like Mda are experimenting widely with literary techniques. In “Ways of Dying” he flirts with magic realism, which infuses African oral tradition. “Magic realism is found in most traditional cultures, where what happened may not have any objective reality,” he says. “Plus it works quite naturally for the stories I like to tell.” Those stories, an intriguing blend of fact and fiction, delight in the strangeness of a rapidly evolving society. “Ways of Dying” tells the touchingly absurd tale of a “professional mourner” who is paid to moan and cry at funerals. (It’s a job the protagonist invents for himself.) The novel’s larger point is about violence–perpetrated by police, gangs and white overseers, among others–in contemporary South Africa. In “Redness,” Mda describes a tribal chief so enamored of modern technology that he names his children NoCellphone and NoSatellite– “no” being a common prefix for Xhosa names. The story of Camuga, “Redness’s” protagonist, has some important parallels with Mda’s own life. Both men spent most of their lives in exile in America, returning to Johannesburg after the fall of apartheid. Both wander to the small village of Qolorha, where a 19th-century teenage prophetess named Nongqawuse convinced many of the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops for the return of their ancestors, who would rise up and chase the British colonists into the sea. Both men are haunted by the failed prophecy, which tore the Xhosa nation apart, but while Camuga finds solace in fiery women and a cottage by the sea, Mda finds his solace in the story itself. “If you go to those villages, you’ll find that there is no line of demarcation between the distant past and the present,” he says. “I tried to capture that feeling in ‘Redness’.”
For many black South African writers, novels are a new form. “We know how to write about politics, whereas it’s a new world to sit down and work on the craft of a novel,” says Mda. During apartheid, black writers focused on writing short stories and poetry. These works were quicker to complete and more immediate to readers. Also, adds Mda, “you could write a poem and use it in the streets immediately.” Novels, originally designed for a sedentary, bourgeois class, require something different from the author. Phaswane Mpe says the big struggle for new South African writers will be striking a balance between esthetics and politics. “That’s the tricky thing,” he says. “You can’t have an inarticulate book with great ideas, or the reverse. That’s the challenge.” Fortunately, South African writers have learned how to handle those.
