SOURCE: Farred, Grant. “Mourning the Postapartheid State Already? The Poetics of Loss in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (spring 2000): 183-206.

In the following essay, Farred argues that Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying is “a flawed work” due to its focus on the transitory and loosely defined values of the post-apartheid era.

What good can come of grief?

—Homer, The Odyssey

Despite their rehearsal of the gestures of resistance theatre, Mda's plays never subscribe to resistance theatre's central dogma, the vision of revolution that will transform utterly the lives of those audacious enough to prosecute it. In the spirit of the doubting anarchists he describes as his lasting influences, Mda leaves the stage with few positive commitments. With its thoroughgoing suspicion of systems of every sort, his drama comes closer to the theatre of the absurd than the theatre of commitment.

—Jan Gorak, “Nothing to...