Abstract
ABSTRACT In The whale caller, published in 2005, Mda has cast his net, literally as it were, off the Cape coast for his thematic framework. Although the title of his fifth novel accords centre stage to its human protagonist, the presence of the southern right whale, christened Sharisha by the whale caller, vies for equal space with the protagonist and his mistress Saluni. Marshalling the precepts of Jacques Derrida, Victor Turner, and not least of all Coleridge, this paper proposes to explore the uncanny relationship of the whale caller and Sharisha, whose annual dalliance in the bay of Hermanus gives meaning and identity to her surrogate human lover. In problematizing this relationship between the human and the non-human, this paper attempts to come to grips with the ontology of human and non-human relationships in general, and with the relationship between the whale caller and Sharisha in particular.
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