Bøger af Zakes Mda

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "Moving, funny... Here is a man looking back on his life and country with joy and sorrow."-John Freeman, The Boston GlobeSouth African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda's remarkable life story of growing up in South Africa, Lesotho, and America, told with style and gusto.The most acclaimed South African writer of his generation, Zakes Mda's novels venture far beyond the conventional narratives of a people's struggle against apartheid. In this memoir, he tells of a life that intersects with the politics of his country-a story that is, at its heart, the classic adventure of an artist, lover, and bon vivant. Living in exile with his father in Basutoland (now Lesotho) during the first pangs of his country's independence, a series of brutal and poignant initiations ushered him toward the life of a writer-and that of a perpetual outsider. Through the indignity of Boer racism, the turmoil of the Soweto uprisings, not to mention three marriages and his eventual immigration to America, Mda struggled to remain his own man. With Sometimes There Is a Void, he shows that independence opened the way for the stories of individual South Africans in all their variety.

A Picador Paperback OriginalThe hero of Zakes Mda's beloved Ways of Dying, Toloki, sets down with a family in Middle America and uncovers the story of the runaway slaves who were their ancestors.Toloki, the professional mourner, has come to live in America. Lured to Athens, Ohio, by an academic at the local university, Toloki makes friends with an angry young man he meets at a Halloween parade and soon falls in love with the young man's sister. Toloki endears himself to a local quilting group and his quilting provides a portal to the past, a story of two escaped slaves seeking freedom in Ohio.Making their way north from Virginia with nothing but their mother's quilts for a map, the boys hope to find a promised land where blacks can live as free men. Their story alternates with Toloki's, as the two narratives cast a new light on America in the twenty-first century and on an undiscovered legacy of the Underground Railroad.

Cupidity, corruption and conciliation are the themes of the three plays in this collection from one of South Africa's leading writes. The Mother of all Eating, a one-hander, with its central character a corrupt Lesotho official, is a grinding satire on materialism in which the protagonist gets his come-uppance. You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall? is an unbridled study in grotesquerie, reflecting a belief, traceable throughout Mda's work, that government by those who inherit a revolution is almost inevitably, in the first decade or two, hijacked by the smart operators. The Bells of Amersfoort, with its graphic portrayal of the isolation imposed by exile, picks up on the themes of the other two plays but adds to them the concept of 'healing', both of the soul and of the land, in a lyrical work which holds out more hope than do its companions in this volume. The plays are introduced by Rob Amato, who directed much of Mda's earlier work.

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."

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.

International scholars explore one of the most important postcolonial novels of African literature.

Zakes Mda's fine novel Little Suns weaves the true events surrounding the death of Magistrate Hope into a touching story of love and perseverance that can transcend exile and strife.

Jason stops to listen to yet another busker . . . He concludes that it is not for her voice--rather airy and desperate--that her open guitar case is bristling with greenbacks. It is for her strawberry blonde bangs peeping out from under her hat, and her deep blue eyes, and her willowy stature . . . and her bare feet with tan lines drawn by sandals . . . She is trying hard to make her voice sound full-bodied and round, but she was not born for singing. She loses a beat to say "thank you" after Jason deposits a single, and then she tries hard to catch up with the song before it goes out of control. At that moment Jason recognises her. Rachel. Rachel Boucher from Jensen Township . . . Athens County, Ohio, USA. When Rachel Boucher and Jason de Klerk meet again--five years after high school--they immediately renew their friendship. But for Jason their friendship is just a stepping stone to something more--a romantic union that seems to have the blessing of the whole community. That is until Rachel becomes involved with Skye Riley. As Skye and Rachel grow ever closer, Jason's anger at the relationship boils over into violence, violence that turns the community on its head, setting old friends and neighbours against one another. But this is just a taste of things to come as, it turns out, Rachel is pregnant . . .

Through five colourful characters, three of them living out their very individual lives in an unnamed public park in Johannesburg, Zakes Mda explores the plight of women and children in a patriarchal and male-dominated twenty-first century world.

This collection of three plays and one cine poem captures the essence of Zakes Mda's method as a dramatist. Included is the story of two women who meet during a long wait to buy subsidized rice and discover they have more in common than their poverty.