In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chaPTer one Zakes MDa’s consTrucTion of The ‘cross-borDer’ reaDer Introduction This chapter concentrates on the readership that Mda creates for his fiction, and considers particularly Mda’s construction of the ‘cross-border’ reader. What does the term ‘cross-border’ mean? Does it refer primarily to the characteristics of an author’s works or to the cultural positioning of the works’ readers? Are we to understand the concept geographically, psychologically or generically? Borders define the boundaries of real spaces as politically and topographically constituted. Equally, borders can invoke culturally constructed notions — conceptual spaces that shift. Nowhere is this shapeshifting more apparent than in the genre of the novel, for Mikhail Bakhtin teaches us that the novel is a protean genre, staging dialogues between older, conventionally accepted literary forms and newer forms born of changing socio-political conditions. Generic instability is thus a defining characteristic of the novel. This chapter seeks to unravel some of the complex and often contradictory meanings of the term ‘cross-border’ in relation to the novels of Zakes Mda — playwright, painter, musician and literary performer of the ‘new’ South Africa. Maps, writers, readers and communities under apartheid Writing in 1994, on the eve of the creation of the ‘new’ South Africa, Lewis Nkosi doubts that black writers are in a position to construct a ‘crossborder ’ readership: Black writers have had very restricted access to institutions of higher education and until recently enjoyed almost no contacts with the outside world through travel and other cultural exchanges … even in their own land such public facilities as libraries and writers’ workshops, elsewhere taken almost for granted by many aspiring writers, have until recently been denied to black South Africans (Nkosi: 1994, 39). Reading this cultural exclusion as the inevitable consequence of the rigid imposition of apartheid boundaries, he quotes John Stotesbury: Dance of Life 2 [A] map of South Africa can be read, like any map, in terms of a complexity of ambivalences. For example, it consists of a combination of geopolitical spaces separated by geopolitical divisions. In addition, the spaces its borders separate may conventionally be described in terms of inclusion (national territory) and exclusion (foreign territory). The anomaly of South Africa’s self-created dilemma … is the degree to which its inclusive space has been designated exclusive space (Nkosi: 1994, 42). Pursuing the question of how South African authors construct their readers, or ‘what kind of audience they envisage’, Nkosi remarks: ‘South Africa emerges … as a country of borders, existing both internally and internationally, separating it from the outside: a network of “geopolitical lines” carving up “geopolitical spaces”’ (Nkosi: 1994, 45). Just as the black writer under apartheid had been excluded from effective communication with the oppressed in the ‘geopolitical spaces’ of South Africa, so white writers opposed to apartheid have turned to a readership largely outside the country: Any literature which lays claim to being ‘contra’ apartheid within the South African conditions, especially the realist ‘protest’ text, can never be exclusively addressed to [the] internal community of oppressed readers for that would make no sense: such a text would be continuously telling people who already know it that they are oppressed (Nkosi: 1994, 47). He concludes: ‘The character and identity of South Africa is determined somewhere else, by people outside of the community in whose name the writer claims to be speaking’ (Nkosi: 1994, 48). From pre- to post-apartheid South Africa Nkosi was writing in 1994. From the time of Zakes Mda’s first South African novel, Ways of Dying (1995), the situation of black writers in South Africa and the audiences they target began to undergo a radical change. I will be arguing that in all of the novels written between 1995 and 2009, Mda situates himself both outside and inside the communities for whom he speaks. In arguing that Mda creates a ‘cross-border’ readership, I do not underestimate his commitment to a style of writing that frequently incorporates non-standard English, nor to his insistence that international readers must learn to interpret a South African context. Andrew van der Vlies notes that Mda writes ‘primarily for the South African audience’. When challenged by an editor about the particularly South African nature of some expressions, Mda replied that his overseas readers ‘were not morons’. If they did not understand ‘South African expressions in a South African novel they would go and find out’; he ‘certainly was not going to refashion [his] novels to suit American and European tastes’ (Van der Vlies: 2007...

Share