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chaPTer nine soMe concLuDinG ThouGhTs We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. — T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding I have learned a great deal from working on Mda’s novels and from the theorists whose ideas have enabled mine. But my explorations are beginnings rather than conclusions. I hope readers will build on these beginnings, in the performative spirit that animates this book. For Dance of Life is all about the performative in Mda’s fiction writing — in relation to author, characters and readers. In the autobiographical mode which sits next to his fiction, this dimension is suggested in the story of ‘Zakes the Artist’, who as a child paints a picture of the Zulu warrior uPhosozwayo and wins an essay competition for his first story while still at primary school in Lesotho. In adulthood, Mda moves from writing plays about democracy for a largely non-literate audience to writing fiction about the new post-apartheid South Africa. He has developed increasingly sophisticated techniques of juxtaposition that link the past with the present, the imaginary with the real and the individual with the social. Crucial to these depictions is his evocation of place and setting, which animate his characters and which reflect an indigenous concept of landscape as opposed to Western notions of landscape. All Mda’s writing demonstrates generic instability and narrative innovation. Characteristic also is his deployment of intertextuality, based on his familiarity with other writers’ texts, and his use of an African resource base derived from oral traditions. Typically, Mda’s texts enact the performative in their textual strategies and their orchestration of divergent voices. I have argued, as have other critics, that Mda’s awareness of the dynamics of performance evolved out of his earlier experience of working with the Maratholi Travelling Theatre in Lesotho. Mda’s characters are all involved in performance. When his first protagonist, Toloki in Ways of Dying, learns to become a Professional Mourner, his performances enable psychological and geographical mastery as the Dance of Life 160 performativity of his art establishes a new territoriality. In The Heart of Redness a whole cast of characters demonstrates, through storytelling, singing and dancing, their historical connection with — and contemporary independence from — theXhosanationinthenineteenthcentury.InTheMadonnaofExcelsior, protagonists — ‘ordinary people doing ordinary things’ — are rescued from the political oppressions of the Miscegenation Trial by their involvement in the visionary world of Claerhout’s paintings. Cion plays with metafictional tropes to illustrate the coming of age of Toloki, both as Professional Mourner and as Master Storyteller, while the Whale Caller’s singing and dancing with the Southern Right whale, Sharisha, dramatises the challenges and problems of ecological connection in a political world that forbids community. And what of Black Diamond? Despite its deployment of multiple modes and its reliance on the media, I have argued that the performative dimension enacted by protagonists and demanded of readers throughout Mda’s fiction is largely absent in this parable of the ‘new’ South Africa. Whereas Mda’s previous vivid settings have staged dances of life, Black Diamond’s bland settings culminate in a dance of death. But it is the response of readers to Mda’s texts that best illustrates the performative dimension. I have tried to demonstrate that Mda’s depiction of individuals always brings collective contexts into play. In exploring written texts and oral storytelling devices, I have assumed readers’ cultural flexibility in their conversations both with literature and orature, with social realism and magic realism. The notion of a ‘cross-border’ readership assumes an ability to move between geographical, cultural and political horizons, to identify with African humanism or ubuntu and to recognise the hybridity of the author’s styles. Since Mda’s deployment of intertextuality (demonstrated in Chapters Two and Three) is essential to his writing, his ideal reader must also be prepared to grapple with Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, to register contrasts between Conrad’s and Mda’s depictions of Africa and to respond to the ‘singularity’ for which I argue both in The Heart of Redness and in Peires’ The Dead Will Arise. Equally, Mda’s ideal reader will be receptive to the visual and perceptual repertoires enacted in his techniques of focalisation, ‘seeing’ the juxtaposed worlds of Claerhout’s colourful paintings as opposed to the black-and-white of the media reporting of Excelsior’s Miscegenation Trial (see Chapter Four). Readers of Mda’s texts as...

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