Sometimes There Is a Void
Memoirs of an Outsider
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
But who, really, is this multi-talented man? And how did he come to achieve recognition in so many different creative spheres? Sometimes There Is A Void, a disarmingly candid account of the life of Zakes Mda, provides us with some answers. In this memoir Mda weaves together past and present to give an intensely personal story of his development in life, in love and in learning, and the events and people who shaped him. Forced to follow his father, PAC 'founding spirit' A P Mda, into exile in Lesotho (then still Basutoland) at the age of fourteen, Zakes initially finds freedom from close parental discipline irresistible and becomes a frequenter of shebeens and an exponent of fast living, but he also becomes politicised during this time. We are given a fascinating insight into the growth and development of both the PAC and the ANC in exile, as well as contemporary social history. Mda's musical and artistic talents develop at an early age, a little ahead of his literary gifts. But his poetry and playwriting soon take precedence, as Mda's early plays win awards and are performed and published in South Africa. On the strength of his published work, Mda is accepted by Ohio University where he earns two master's degrees and, later, a doctorate at the University of Cape Town. His doctoral thesis is published internationally, and he writes his first novel in 1993. Although based in Athens, Ohio, he travels to South Africa regularly to visit the beekeeping collective he founded for the economic empowerment of people living in his former ancestral village in the Eastern Cape and to work with members of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust which he established in Sophiatown. He continues to be actively involved in the development of indigenous South African theatre through his work with local playwrights.
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.
