Dance of Life: The Novels of Zakes Mda in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Gail Fincham (review)

The first monograph devoted to the study of Zakes Mda's fiction, Gail Fincham's Dance of Life, should be a useful resource to scholars and students of the South African writer and to those interested in contemporary fiction, African literature, postcolonial studies, and the relation between literature and performance more generally. Fincham offers a comprehensive account of Mda's eight novels published between 1995 and 2011, reading them as a sustained commentary on the state of South Africa after apartheid, with a particular focus on their performative dimensions. Fincham shows that Mda's fictional characters perform his narrative designs by drawing on songs, theater, sculpture, painting, quilting, and music and must in turn be interpreted creatively by the reader as well. Thus, writer, characters, and readers are all involved in a "dance of life," an aesthetic performance with strong ethical and political import. Mda's rewriting of history links together landscape with culture, memory with dispossession, and community with storytelling. Revealing a breadth of knowledge in judicious and meticulous readings, Fincham takes up the reappropriation of urban space in Ways of Dying (1995), the rewriting of Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Redness (2000), the refiguring of the sexual and the sacred in The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), ecology and mourning in The Whale Caller (2005), and quilting and diaspora in Cion (2007). In contrast, Mda's latest novel, Black Diamond (2009), receives criticism for departing from the collaborative performativity of his earlier works, as well as for its focus on the newly rich black South African middle class.

While the study serves as a welcome consideration of an important and challenging writer, and offers useful readings of Mda's narrative strategies, it relies far too much on existing critical readings, patiently summarizing various critical analyses of the novels, laboriously so at times (especially drawing on the collection of essays on Mda, Ways of Writing). Moreover, it frequently refers to various theoretical paradigms but relies on summaries of these works rather than turning to the source itself. Some of the readings could be developed further, as Fincham ends up flattening some of the problems, contradictions, and provocations that give Mda's novels their unique interest. For instance, Fincham never resolves the question she raises about the workings of gender in Mda's novels—at times claiming that he overturns patriarchal perspectives, while noting elsewhere that his female protagonists are all voiced through male narrators and lack autonomy and agency. Similarly, it would be worth reckoning with Mda's satire of the middle class in Black Diamond further, not just as a departure from his focus on the underclass, but as a new exploration of the politics of class and consumption in contemporary South Africa. In Fincham's treatment of Cion, rather than turning to Paul Gilroy's influential account in The Black Atlantic, Fincham relies on its brief summary in a reader and consequently is unable to account for the complexity of identification, desire, and distance enacted in the diasporic encounters in the novel, leaving lingering questions about its metafictional aspects, its exploration of the notion of African origins, and the uses of the memory of slavery.

While Dance of Life does cover a great deal of ground—orality, diaspora, realism, ethics, and the concept of ubuntu and African humanism, to name just a few—its conclusions are sometimes expected and cumulative, rather than innovative or subtle. What is remarkable about the book is its reproduction of several artworks with which Mda is in dialogue, including Frans Claerhout's paintings that form the core of The Madonna of Excelsior and one by Mda himself. Less successful is the unusual strategy of replicating several pages of student analysis of The Heart of Redness, which are uneasily integrated into the book. Precisely those qualities—neat sections, frequent signposts and summaries, condensed and wide-ranging reference to critics and scholars—that make...