This is a story of a quest that begins on a wall of history at a cemetery where Steve Biko was buried. The main character is the writer, who is partly the author, partly a fictionalised everyman. He is on a journey of self-discovery, while at the same time questioning contemporary South Africa.

D.Litt. et Phil. (English) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

After failing his Post Graduate Diploma in Accounting Mangaliso Zolo takes an office job at a large insurance company in Cape Town. Anonymous and overlooked in a vast bureaucracy but with a pay check promising happiness and security, he slides into a series of personal crises that test his grip on what he believes in. When at his lowest ebb he leaves his job, grabs his bible and hits the streets his world closes in on him and he is eventually confined to a psychiatric hospital. Penumbra is a novel that explores the liminal area between faith and avarice, sanity and madness, modernity and tradition, friendship and enmity. It is set in contemporary South Africa, a society defined by alienation and excess.

This is a contemporary mystery novel set in the Eastern Cape. A town’s airstrip, situated between the golf club and the military base, acts as host to the local flying club and an active skydiving school. An amateur investigator uses unorthodox methods and the help of friends to find the cause of aeroplane fires and sabotage. His investigations lead him via geological research and insurance reports into contact with members of the aviation, property development and military fields.

The stories in this collection explore the fantastical, the power of memory, and the human capacity to love. Moving between the surreal, the absurd, the allegorical, and the metafictional, they elaborate on life's ordinary madness and the mysteries of the spirit. By challenging the either/or boundaries of the binary of realism and fantasy, the stories provoke the reader to engage actively with the text. Influenced by experimental US author Stacey Levine, the mid‐century British novelist Barbara Comyns, and the adventurous Chinese writer Can Xue, in most cases, they create a playful, experimental world that exists at a slight angle to the world as we know it.

An analysis of the preoccupation writers of South African fiction display after the process started by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is vital in post-apartheid South African writing. It becomes clear that a fascination with the past is not bound to any one specific racial or gender group within post-apartheid South Africa. Authors can therefore be said to continue the excavation work that the TRC started many years ago. The severe impact that the rigid classification of human beings into different groups based on race had, and continues to have, becomes evident in contemporary South African writing. The fact that white privilege always comes at a cost for those wanting to attain or maintain it cannot be overlooked and whiteness as a construct is examined.

In the aftermath of the Shoah (Holocaust)—the mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews—Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Reflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), in which he concluded that the fate of the Jews, the fate of the individual non-Jew, and the fate of the entire world are inextricably and reciprocally intertwined. Building on Sartre's perception, Portrait of a Jew (1962) and The Liberation of the Jew (1966) describe what the author, Albert Memmi, terms "the universal Jewish fate": that of being the paradigmatic "colonized" Other—insofar as the Jews are a particularly oppressed minority, that is, their marginalization epitomizes the fate of all humanity. Further, Memmi argues both that "to be a Jewish writer is ... to express the Jewish fate" and that a "true Jewish literature" is necessarily one which revolts against the imposition and acceptance of this fate. Sartre's and Memmi's insights posit that Jewish consciousness acts upon both national and world consciousness. Memmi suggests that one means of expressing the Jewish consciousness is through literature. In their imaginative interpretations of the post-Shoah interconnections between the Jew, the nation, and the world, modern Jewish fiction writers of the Diaspora (dispersion) —at least those whose work foregrounds tropes of Jewish sensibility, incorporating Jewish characters and themes—often delineate a world which, in the aftermath of Auschwitz, is socially and existentially even more precarious than it was before the war. This study examines post-Shoah Jewish consciousness and its relation to national/world consciousness,as represented in the English-language Jewish fiction of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, Commonwealth countries whose diverse Jewish literatures have been overshadowed by the predominant English-language Jewish literary culture of the U.S.A. The structure of this study is bipartite. Part B is an indexed Bibliography enumerating primary works by Jewish prose fiction writers of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Part A is a critical commentary on Part B. The Introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the theoretical bases for the study. The three following chapters scrutinize Jewish Australian (Chapter 2), Jewish South African (Chapter 3), and Jewish Canadian (Chapter 4) fiction. Among the writers considered are Australians B.N. Jubal, Judah Waten, David Martin, Morris Lurie, Serge Liberman, and Lily Brett; South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Jillian Becker, Antony Sher, and Rose Zwi; and Canadians Henry Kreisel, A.M. Klein, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Majzels. Each of these three chapters follows a similar format: a description of the origin, history, and demography of the Jewish community; an outline of the important pre-World War II Jewish fiction writers and their work; an examination of representative post-Shoah works; and concluding remarks about the ways in which the works under consideration here contest and revise both the canons of nation and national literature and the very concepts of nation, canon, and canon-making. An Epilogue (Chapter 5) contextualizes the thematic patterns common to the Jewish fiction of the three countries and suggests ways in which this fiction can be located within the larger framework of Jewish Literature.

Lurching from day-today in the months before South Africa becomes a republic, booze-befuddled Indian private investigator Rohit Biswas does not ponder how he can secure his daughter's future after he became a widower and lost his job as police detective when he killed a man who fatally stabbed his wife. Salvation appears when a rich client hires the PI to find evidence proving his son did not rape and murder a white socialite. Fighting against seeming impossible odds in colonial-apartheid Durban and a sanctions-busting conspiracy, Biswas secures his client's acquittal. In the process he defies karma and redeems himself.

These stories are about people’s experiences in relationships and how they overcome and resolve problems with their partners. Some explore myths and unexplained occurrences that raise many questions.

A collection of lyrical, imaginative prose, ranging from prose poems to more formal short stories to flash fiction. I challenge the ordinary or commonplace by exploring the realms between fiction and poetry, realism and fantasy, reality and illusion. I would like reading the collection to be a sensory experience, one that draws the reader deeper into the imaginary. Stylistically, I work elements of poetic language into the narrative in order to express the mystery and remoteness that the stories require.