Traumas and transformations: Fictions which play with what “they say”, by Zakes Mda and Lindsey Collen

Abstract

Summary There has been an ongoing debate on attempts to translate traumatic experiences, both personal and public, into a variety of cultural forms. In fictional accounts, particularly, this has involved a focus on redefined selfhoods, which can be linked to the fluidity of identities during times of acute social transition. Through a comparative study of the strategies used in Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Lindsey Collen's Getting Rid of It (1997), I will explore how these texts raise questions about the relationship between the violence and renewal in provocative ways. However, the focus on re‐invention through narrative raises further questions concerning the shift from realism and the so‐called new aesthetic in recent fiction: how does one avoid trivialising trauma through fictionalising it, or counter readings which co‐opt the texts into a variety of conservative publicdiscourses around reconciliation or rainbow‐nationhood? Finally, to what extent can these fictions point to the possibilities of new ways of “being” in a world which seems to be testing received notions of what it means to be human?