The Divided Self in the African South

The novels prefer to examine not the political but the psychological side of these divisions, finding the most crucial dividing line not between village and city, or Africa and the West, but between distinct parts of one troubled individual-the first-person narrator. Whereas heading off to Cape Town...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCanadian Literature no. 240; pp. 169 - 179
Main Author Ney, Stephen
Format Book Review
LanguageEnglish
Published Vancouver The University of British Columbia - Canadian Literature 22.03.2020
Pacific Affairs. The University of British Columbia
Subjects
Literary characters
Literary devices
Literature
Modernity
Narrative techniques
Novels
Politics
Psychological aspects
Readers
Africa
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Summary:The novels prefer to examine not the political but the psychological side of these divisions, finding the most crucial dividing line not between village and city, or Africa and the West, but between distinct parts of one troubled individual-the first-person narrator. Whereas heading off to Cape Town for medical school seemed to promise Kabelo freedom, and whereas it did indeed give him plenty of opportunity for sexual experimentation, his secluded, studious self, his racially and sexually uninhibited partying self, and his pleasing-the-home-community self didn't begin to converge. Repeated hallucinations of a zebra send the desperate Chanda, with three male friends, on a bumpy road trip towards her father's ancestral village, which is almost as foreign to Chanda as it would be to an average Canadian reader.
ISSN:0008-4360