Some influences from isiXhosa literary texts on Sindiwe Magona’s When the Village Sleeps

Abstract

The title of Sindiwe Magona’s book, When the Village Sleeps, draws on the
old African proverb: ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, reflecting that the text
is rooted in African and more specifically isiXhosa language and culture. The
book challenges convention. Its use of ancestral voices, not only as characters,
but also as literary influences is unique. The voice of a foetus joins the
ancestral voices as they weave a powerful image of current living conditions
in poverty-stricken areas. Sindiwe Magona makes frequent use of isiXhosa in
the novel, often without translation, and sometimes inserts excerpts from the
work of S. E. K. Mqhayi and A. C. Jordan into her text. This essay explores
Sindiwe Magona’s use of the “ancestral” and Mqhayi’s and Jordan’s themes.
Drawing on Bhekisizwe Peterson, I suggest that Magona, together with S. E.
K. Mqhayi and other African novelists, is “inaugurating an underappreciated
method or genre of creative meditation: that is, creatively thinking through
a range of difficult historical, political and social questions and challenges”
(125).