Caritas and Habitus in Dan Jacobson's 'The Zulu and the Zeide'

Peer reviewed article published under Inkanyiso, Volume 4, Issue 1, Jan 2012, p. 1 - 9Dan Jacobson is a prolific writer whose oeuvre spans some 65 years, and includes a range of different texts. He has lived in Britain for most of his adult life, but his roots are South African, and he set much of his early work in this country. It has however fallen into relative critical obscurity. His 1959 story ‘The Zulu and the Zeide’has been widely anthologised, but deserves more serious and more specific critical attention that it has recently received, because it evinces at an elemental level the ways in which, and the extent to which, human caring was able to challenge, arrest and undermine the public proscriptions set up to define and control interaction between people in our country during the apartheid years. This essay explores the embodiment of caritas in the story, the spatialisation that reflects the boundaries (and the crossing of boundaries) of the apartheid world he depicts, the micropolitics of power between the characters in the story and within the complex of relationships that develop between them, and the ethics of our reading of the stor

The silence at the interface : culture and narrative in selected twentieth-century Southern African novels in English.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.The primary intention of this study is to establish the theoretical significance of silence within the sphere of the twentieth-century Southern African novel in English. Clearly a feature of recent writing, silence is less overtly thematised in earlier work. Since relatively little critical and theoretical attention has been paid to silence as a positive phenomenon, however, modes of reading it are sought within the broader sphere of the social sciences, and specifically its tradition of social constructionism. Care is taken to address the pressures of the local context, identified in terms of the postcolonial paradigm as relating to language and to culture. A deliberate theoretical innovation is the renunciation of the trope of penetration in favour of the notion of an interface between intact language-culture systems, given an understanding of culture as existing between subjects in relations of power. Fictional narrative which addresses cross-culturality is thus read as a process of cultural translation, and the volitional deployment of silence as an act of resistance to its power. The significance of language is registered in the use of speech-act theory, in the insistence on meaning as generated in spatially and temporally situated conversation, and in the exploration of the influence of pronominal relations on identity. Emerging from my investigation is a recognition of the measure offered by silence of the autonomy of character as subject, and a corresponding recognition of the constitutive capacity of the reader to site the power of narration amongst the polyphonic voices within the culture of the text. The postcolonial paradigm indicates the need for a regional rather than a national perspective; thus the interfaces considered in the case studies include, in Plaatje's Mhudi, orality and literacy, tribal membership and non-sectarianism, Tswana and English; in Paton's Too Late the Phalarope the private domain and apartheid as public hegemonic discourse, narration as possession, and the tragic as structuring textual relations; and in Head's Maru the constitution of a postcolonial identity that resists and transcends the discursive hostility of racism, and the dislocation, displacement and alienation of exilic refuge from apartheid

Mia Couto and the enchantment of rain

In his preface to Rain and Other Stories, Mia Couto refers to the remaking of the world following the Mozambican civil war: ‘we soak our faces in this rain of hope, this water of benedreamtion’. Pluvial rain, as Nuttall terms it, can bring huge destruction, as can drought, its absence. Scholars have insisted on the agency of water, including African ecocritics who argue for an ‘animist conception of the world’ which transposes and transgresses boundaries and identities. Garuba specifically refers to the ‘persistent re-enchantment of the world’ whereby the ‘rational and scientific are appropriated and transformed into the mystical and magical’. This article explores the range of roles, agentic and enchanted, which Couto accords rain in his stories. Although he rejected the label ‘magic realist’, his translator Chabal argues that in his stories the fantastic ‘transmutes the fictitious into the factual’ so that ‘all boundaries are put into question’: between past and present, far and near, material and spiritual. And he seeks to regain the ‘brotherhood’, the ‘relation’, the ‘link between nature and humanity’. Ashcroft says Couto’s vision as a writer is to ‘give back to the word its divine power … the power to enchant things, be these trees, birds, or landscapes’. Samuelson too claims that Couto’s stories ‘invoke an enlivening ecocritical method’ that draws readers into a ‘sacred web’, an ‘indivisible body, an ‘interconnected world’. While the notion of enchantment is not unproblematic, the interconnections it entails between human and environment, material and spiritual, generate a receptive matrix in which to understand and recognise the agency of rain. Contribution: This article engages with ecocritical readings of the stories of Mia Couto by examining his treatment of rain and his approach to the issue of enchantment. It thus contributes to criticism of his work as well as to the growing field of ecocriticism in this country

The rhetorics of audience consciousness: A dialogic approach to reading Donne in Zululand

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