Reconfiguring Ocean Life by Thinking with Oceans and Whales Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider and Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller

Abstract

Whales are stranded along the Atlantic Ocean in North America, the press spread the news in February 2023. Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Whale Rider (1987) frames a similar episode: “Two hundred whales, lifeless on the beach and in the water” (1987, 85). Stranded whales are protagonists in Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller (2005), too. Here, a whale is the pretext to explore gender issues, role models in traditional indigenous societies, capitalist economy and tourism, the perception of chieftainship, shamans and spirituality. Making use of acoustic ecology (Carson 1955; Shafer 1994), whales ‘speak’ of relations between humans, non-humans (Huggan 2021) and oceans (Regazzoni 2022).