Reclaiming Masculinities: Migrant Realism in Bheki Maseko's Stories

Abstract

Summary “[L]ike other phenomena of spiritual culture … [that] preserve for a long time old forms under new conditions”, a Bheki Maseko story reads like “folklore” (Propp 1984: 13). This article considers the significance of storytelling in mediating the depersonalisation that is caused by migrancy in Maseko's Mamlambo and Other Stories (1991). The first section considers the interrelatedness between the aesthetic strategies deployed in the stories and their ability to conjure up possibilities of wholeness. Proposing that this narrative style is “migrant realism”, the discussion shows that integral to Maseko's stories are the representations of how textures of everyday life are reutilised in projects that critically imagine completeness and its possible reinsertion into the forms of bondedness such as the family. The family is presented as severely affected by apartheid's migrant labour policies. It is interesting to observe that those stories in which Maseko deploys skaz, narrators strongly emphasise the performance of a sense of belonging. The narrators deploy fantasy since, according to Jacqueline Rose, it provides “grounds for licence and pleasure” (quoted in Peterson 2003: 197) allowing the storytellers to regale their mine migrant colleagues with anecdotes of how black men survive repressive apartheid contexts. These “aggregate[s]” and “attribution[s]”, according to Ong, are typical of the expressions and values that recur in oral narratives that seek to represent experience (1982: 38-39). The second part of the discussion examines five stories from Mamlambo and Other Stories.