English in Africa

Making black creativity visible: reading the intermediality of Zakes Mda’s fictions

Lauren Isaacs — 2025-01-17

Zakes Mda’s fictions have been widely recognised for their performative elements, and this article expands on such readings by using an intermedial lens. Our analysis focuses on moments in Mda’s fictions which invoke, refer to, describe or mimic different media, such as photographs, painting, sculpture, performance and music. It will be argued that at such points in the fictions a creative sense of black subjectivity is enacted, made visible or audible, thereby staging a transformative aesthetics. Through an embedded intermediality, Mda is able to narrate his characters not as mere objects of colonial or apartheid oppression, but as the subjects in control of their own narratives, art and creativity. In drawing from the ideas that arise from the framework of intermediality, we read these fictions as staging a transformative, aesthetic re-imagination of black subjects, giving insight into the interiority of the protagonists and their lives. The lens of intermediality can serve as a vital tool in understanding Mda’s larger project which dismantles representations of black people as inherently unagentive and unimaginative victims trapped in their past.

‘There might be no bottom to it’: unplumbed depths and uncanny emotions in Damon Galgut’s The Quarry

Marek Pawlicki — 2025-01-17

This article offers an affective reading of Damon Galgut’s first post-apartheid novel, The Quarry (1995). Adopting a socio-historical approach to emotions, as understood by Bede Scott, Sara Ahmed, and Ato Quayson, the discussion focuses on three emotions central to Galgut’s novel: anger, guilt, and shame. In the first part of the discussion, I concentrate on anger, showing that this dysphoric emotion is governed by the mechanisms of displacement and projection. The second part of the article explores guilt and shame, as experienced by the novel’s nameless protagonist. While the logic of the narrative points to guilt as the main emotion experienced by the protagonist, a deeper analysis reveals that shame is the real trigger of his actions. Shame results from the protagonist’s failed attempts to integrate himself into the patriarchal and racist town community at the expense of suppressing his sexual identity and political convictions. This emotional reaction, stemming from the inner conflict experienced by the main protagonist, sheds light on the position of Galgut as a writer who rejects the racist and homophobic culture of the apartheid period and, at the same time, knows that – as a white South African – he is implicated in its legacy.

‘A sense of longing she had nowhere to put’: heterotopic suburbia in Yewande Omotoso’s The Woman Next Door

Kim Daniells — 2025-01-17

In this article I analyse how Yewande Omotoso’s depiction of the suburb as a heterotopic space is instrumental both in exposing its feuding protagonists to discomfort and forcing them to re-evaluate their memories and identities. It is through these experiences that the characters are compelled to contemplate alternative pathways towards a collaborative and symbiotic future. I argue that a heterotopic interpretation of the novel discloses an alternative cognitive-spatial realm in which established modes of thought are suspended and there is an opportunity for nuanced exploration of global histories, transnational encounters and trajectories for comprehension and conciliation.

The paradox of silence and ‘dark swoops’: unmooring women’s language in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

R. J. Lim — 2025-01-17

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is set during the harrowing period of the contentious Biafran War. This novel delves into the bifurcated destinies of the Igbo twins, Olanna and Kainene. My study seeks to unravel African women’s articulation of trauma and its silencing effects through elucidating unmoored language. Even though Adichie writes in the Anglophone medium, her writing I argue, speaks directly from its localised African context. Half of a Yellow Sun is intrinsically framed via a narrative animated by women-centric lenses. It negates hegemonic historiographies which have long suppressed the memorialisation of Biafra, by muting marginalised voices, including those of women. Adichie’s unmoored writing, I contend, enables the paradox of women’s internalised vocalisations to arise, attaining audibility, despite being restrained by a leitmotif of silence and enveloped in the depression of ‘dark swoops’. Half of a Yellow Sun foregrounds Adichie’s homage to the silenced of Biafra and demonstrates how unmoored language articulates trauma in African women’s literature.

A call to return: rerouting healing pathways in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater

Cristovão Nwachukwu — 2025-01-17

Recent scholarship on the novel Freshwater (2018) by Akwaeke Emezi has compellingly argued for approaching this work as a postcolonial trauma narrative, depicting the alienation from African spirituality with the material and spiritual worlds constantly colliding, restructuring their borders. In this narrative, Akwaeke Emezi illustrates the psychospiritual impacts of trauma by using a Nigerian Igbo worldview to weave Ada’s journey as an ọgbanje, a spirit child that dies and comes back repeatedly. However, scholarship on Emezi’s debut novel has yet to analyse the different pathways of healing that African cosmology offers as Ada strives to survive multiple ordeals before eventually encountering harmonious communion with the deities that influenced their life. This article argues that the physical, psychological, and spiritual traumas Ada encounters not only mirror the ọgbanje cycle but also demonstrate efforts to heal from the lack of cognizance of their spiritual self. To develop this analysis, this article combines trauma theory, African diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies. It prioritises African diaspora studies due to trauma theory’s limitations when it comes to identifying and analysing modes of healing that transcend material bounds and experiences from Western points of view. Thus, this article highlights the healing potential of diasporic African cultures.