Elements Of Magical Realism In Zakes Mda S Novel She Plays With The Darkness

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Duisburg-Essen, course: Magic Realism in Recent British and South African Novels, 6 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Hauptmerkmale und Sekund rmerkmale des magischen Realsimus sollen in dieser Arbeit genannt und anschlie end an dem s dafrikanischen Roman 'She plays with the darkness' von Zakes Mda erl utert. In dem ersten Unterpunkt wird die Geschichte des magischen Realismus behandelt. Anschlie end werden die Haupt- und Sekund rmerkmale des magischen Realsimus genannt. Der Focus der Arbeit lieg auf den Elementen des magischen Realismus in dem Roman 'She plays with the darkness'.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Duisburg-Essen, course: Magic Realism in Recent British and South African Novels, language: English, abstract: Hauptmerkmale und Sekundärmerkmale des magischen Realsimus sollen in dieser Arbeit genannt und anschließend an dem südafrikanischen Roman 'She plays with the darkness' von Zakes Mda erläutert. In dem ersten Unterpunkt wird die Geschichte des magischen Realismus behandelt. Anschließend werden die Haupt- und Sekundärmerkmale des magischen Realsimus genannt. Der Focus der Arbeit lieg auf den Elementen des magischen Realismus in dem Roman 'She plays with the darkness'.

In a remote mountain village in Lesotho, the beautiful Dikosha lives for dancing and for song, setting herself apart from her fellow villagers. Her twin brother, Radisene, works in the lowland capital of Maseru, struggling amid political upheaval to find a life for himself away from the hills. As the years pass, Radisene's fortunes rise and fall in the city, while Dikosha remains in the village, never leaving and never aging. And through it all, the community watches, comments, and passes judgment.

A startling novel by the leading writer of the new South Africa In The Heart of Redness -- shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize -- Zakes Mda sets a story of South African village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation. As the novel opens Camugu, who left for America during apartheid, has returned to Johannesburg. Disillusioned by the problems of the new democracy, he follows his "famous lust" to Qolorha on the remote Eastern Cape. There in the nineteenth century a teenage prophetess named Nonqawuse commanded the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops, promising that once they did so the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers and Unbelievers, dividing brother from brother, wife from husband, with devastating consequences. One hundred fifty years later, the two groups' decendants are at odds over plans to build a vast casino and tourist resort in the village, and Camugu is soon drawn into their heritage and their future -- and into a bizarre love triangle as well. The Heart of Redness is a seamless weave of history, myth, and realist fiction. It is, arguably, the first great novel of the new South Africa -- a triumph of imaginative and historical writing.

A new novel by a towering presence in contemporary South African literature In 1971, nineteen citizens of Excelsior in South Africa's white-ruled Free State were charged with breaking apartheid's Immorality Act, which forbade sex between blacks and whites. Taking this case as raw material for his alchemic imagination, Zakes Mda tells the story of a family at the heart of the scandal -and of a country in which apartheid concealed interracial liaisons of every kind. Niki, the fallen madonna, transgresses boundaries for the sake of love; her choices have repercussions in the lives of her black son and mixed-race daughter, who come of age in post-apartheid South Africa, where freedom prompts them to reexamine their country's troubled history at first hand. By turns earthy, witty, and tragic, The Madonna of Excelsior is a brilliant depiction of life in South Africa and of the dramatic changes between the 1970s and the present.

Ways of Dying tells the story of the eccentric but dignified professional mourner, Toloki. His odyssey takes him from a rural village community to the shabby, vibrant outskirts of a contemporary South African city, where the tenderness that springs up between him and the beautiful and tragic Noria helps them to heal the past. By turns magical, brutal, and funny, this compelling work is a major new contribution to South African writing.

As Zakes Mda's fifth novel opens, the seaside village of Hermanus is overrun with whale-watchers--foreign tourists determined to see whales in their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home, the whale caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he has named Sharisha with cries from a kelp horn. When Sharisha fails to appear for weeks on end, the whale caller frets like a jealous lover--oblivious to the fact that the town drunk, Saluni, a woman who wears a silk dress and red stiletto heels, is infatuated with him. The two misfits eventually fall in love. But each of them is ill equipped for romance, and their relationship suggests, in the words of The Washington Post, that "the deeper, darker concern here is not so much the fragility of love, but the fragility of life itself when one surrenders wholly to the foolish heart."