Sometimes There Is a Void
Memoirs of an Outsider
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda's remarkable life story of growing up in South Africa, Lesotho, and America, told with style and gusto.
Zakes Mda is the most acclaimed South African writer of the independence era. His novels tell stories that venture far beyond the conventional narratives of a people's struggle against apartheid. In this memoir, he tells the story of a life that intersects with the political life of his country but that at its heart is the classic adventure story of an artist, lover, father, teacher, and bon vivant.
Zanemvula Mda was born in 1948 into a family of lawyers and grew up in Soweto's ambitious educated black class. At age fifteen he crossed the Telle River from South Africa into Basutoland (Lesotho), exiled like his father, a "founding spirit" of the Pan Africanist Congress. Exile was hard, but it was just another chapter in Mda's coming-of-age. He served as an altar boy (and was preyed on by priests), flirted with shebeen girls, feared the racist Boers, read comic books alongside the literature of the PAC, fell for the music of Dvorák and Coltrane, wrote his first stories—and felt the void at the heart of things that makes him an outsider wherever he goes. The Soweto uprisings called him to politics; playwriting brought him back to South Africa, where he became writer in residence at the famed Market Theatre; three marriages led him hither and yon; acclaim brought him to America, where he began writing the novels that are so thick with the life of his country.
In all this, Mda struggled to remain his own man, and with Sometimes There Is a Void he shows that independence opened the way for the stories of individual South Africans in all their variety.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It is easy to become immersed in this memoir by the acclaimed and peripatetic South African playwright involved with the Market Theatre, a novelist, poet, visual artist, and musician who today is an academic at the University of Ohio. Throughout these pages is Mda's quest for a form of assimilation while maintaining self-identity and acceptance. He ponders himself as adrift and on the periphery: the ultimate outsider even to family and perhaps, most tellingly, to himself. Growing up in Soweto with four siblings in the 1950s and 1960s, Mda vividly remembers the toe-eating rats and sexual abuse of his childhood; perhaps even more importantly, there was the snobbism of the rich toward the more ramshackle, and the lifelong influence of his stern father, a self-sacrificing attorney who was forced into exile. Mda is drawn into the politics of Lesotho and falls in with a bad crowd, but reads voraciously, everything from Asterix comics to literature on world religions, converting from Catholicism, to atheism. Mda has been three times married, with the unraveling of marriage number two taking up a large swath of the book. In all, Mda's deeper struggles parallel those of all South Africans seeking identity and freedom. Illus. not seen by PW.
