BOOK REVIEW: Nahem Yousaf.ALEX LA GUMA: POLITICS AND RESISTANCE. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001.

Abstract

In this brisk survey Nahem Yousaf reads Alex La Guma's major fictional works "for the ways in which individuals and communities come to consciousness of the repressive State apparatus that functions to withhold both civil rights and political agency" (17). He argues that we should approach La Guma as a resistance writer whom we can most profitably study in light of the political and literary theory of Frantz Fanon and Mikhail Bakhtin. In his discussion of La Guma's last published novel, Time of the Butcherbird, for example, Yousaf shows how Fanon, who, like La Guma, was born in 1925, allows us to follow La Guma's trajectory toward accepting the necessity of violence in overthrowing oppressive, racially based colonial rule. Simultaneously, Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia and dialogism allow Yousaf to describe how La Guma's literary style resists the individualist norms of the European novel deliberately to undermine the apartheid regime's monologic discourse of power. In this way Yousaf defends Time of the Butcherbird against accusations of weak characterization and so on by arguing that the book presents a "montage of scenes across which the reader travels through the text" and in which characters "cannot stand outside the discourse according to which their affiliation is read" (127).