The Storytelling Quilt: Ethnic Narratives in Zakes Mda’s Cion

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze the quilt in Zakes Mda`s novel Cion as a Benjaminian storytelling. As a communal heritage from the time of slav ery, the quilt bridges two stories, the one of the Quigley family in the present time and the other of their ancestors from the nineteenth-century Virginia slavery plantation. The slaves stitch their memories, escape accounts, and folktales on their quilts to assist with their fellow slaves` journey to freedom. Rather than merely communicating cartographic information, however, the quilt affects its carriers/readers as a spiritual guide and facilitates further interpretation and addition, thereby exempli fying a storyteller according to Walter Benjamin`s theorization. According to him, the storytelling does not transmit verifiable information or an indi vidual author`s consciousness but combines collective myths, undocu mented voices, and talks of spiritual wisdom. The quilt also helps to ren der the residents` ethnic identity as a storytelling. For the Quigley family and neighbors of a mixed racial background, the ethnic identity that the quilt represents is not one that is determined from the beginning by an essential origin or a particular author but one that new generations reinter pret and rewrite to cope with their present concerns. The quilt-like open, collective, and mnemonic narrative of ethnic identity is of the nature to be constantly reinvented through collective efforts so that it allows encoun ters between different times and between different spaces, and thus invokes new forms of intimacy, belonging, and solidarity.