Ways of Living

South Africa's professional mourner has moved to Ohio.

CION

By Zakes Mda

Picador. 312 pp. Paperback, $14

One of the most prolific black writers of post-apartheid South Africa, Zakes Mda, has now cast his roaming, wry and satirical eye upon the United States, in particular the rural southeastern Ohio community outside of Athens, Ohio (where, incidentally, Mda teaches at Ohio University). Readers of his first novel, Ways of Dying, will immediately recognize Toloki, the narrator of Cion, a professional mourner who has now become somewhat of an itinerant because of "the lack of interesting deaths in a South Africa that had become a stable society." He hopes to create "more exciting deaths from the tombstones of the world."

Toloki arrives in Athens on Oct. 30, 2004, three days before the presidential election. He idly joins a Halloween parade and accidentally encounters a costumed character: "a tall young man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, with a dusky complexion and long black hair tied in a ponytail. He would have been classified a colored in my country. He is barefoot and is wearing a bloody tattered shirt and knee-length pants that are also bloody and frayed. He has red wheals on his bare arms, face and legs, some of which have caked blood."

"I'm a fugitive," he solemnly informs Toloki, "from the slave breeding farms of Virginia. My name is Nicodemus. I escaped on the Underground Railroad to freedom."

This is Obed Quigley, and this chance encounter draws Toloki into the universe of Obed's eccentric family and its complicated racial history: Ruth, the mother, who devotes most of her time to preserving food, cooking and quilt making; Mahlon, the taciturn father, who spends hours on his front porch studying the statues of gnomes he has planted in his garden; and Orpah, Obed's older sister, who confines herself to her bedroom, playing the sitar, reading and drawing quilt designs that are never turned into quilts.

Toloki becomes a house guest of the Quigleys for about a year. The residents of the community, Obed announces, are called the WIN people, " 'Cause we got three bloods in all of us, homeboy. We got the White blood and the Indian blood and the Negro blood. Get it? WIN people." Obed claims Nicodemus, the character whose identity he assumes on Halloween, as one of his ancestors; and one important dimension of the story Toloki tells in Cion revolves around his attempt to unravel and connect the various strands of the Quigley family history.

Mda is clearly familiar with the body of contemporary writing that some critics have dubbed "neo-slave narratives," a significant genre of fiction -- by writers as diverse as Ishmael Reed, David Bradley, Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison and, most recently, Edward P. Jones -- that dramatically re-enacts the vicissitudes of slavery in the United States, including incidents of slave-breeding and sexual abuse, the disruption of families and harrowing escapes. And Mda acknowledges his debt to the assertion in Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard's book Hidden in Plain View that the designs of traditional African American quilts contained secret codes that guided fugitive slaves on the route of the Underground Railroad. Quilt-making occupies a central place in Cion: The art of quilting is the basis of the strained relationship between the mother, Ruth, and her daughter, Orpah; Toloki begins to take quilting lessons at the local community center, further burrowing into community history and memory. And he does not hesitate to weigh in on Tobin and Dobard's argument, offering his own nuanced perspective.

In fact, Toloki is somewhat of a meddler and a busybody, albeit a genial and engaging one. Early in his sojourn, he recognizes that "Sooner or later I'll be grappling with the problem of shaping my life in a meaningful way in this strange culture." Open and curious about everything he sees and hears, Toloki produces a narrative that is part sociological observation and part anthropological investigation, replete with topical references to George Bush, the Iraq War and American media practices. But Toloki's interventions in the lives of the Quigleys inevitably create trouble. He frequently upbraids Obed, who spends most of his time and energy scheming ways of profiting from his mixed racial heritage; he confronts Ruth about her treatment of Orpah, unwittingly exacerbating the tension that already exists between them; and he harbors suspicions about the possibility of an incestuous relationship between Mahlon and Orpah.

Like its affable narrator, Cion leisurely ambles from one episode to the next. As the various strands of the novel begin to coalesce, however, it becomes clearer that, in his capacity as a professional healer, Toloki has performed an important function for the Quigley family and, by extension, the larger society that continues to neglect the tangled web of its history. The sensibility through which Toloki refracts this story embodies the spirit of ubuntu -- the term so frequently invoked by Archbishop Tutu and others during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation hearings to denote "the universal bond of sharing that connected all humanity." In the end, Cion strongly suggests that ubuntu may well offer a way for America to confront the ghosts of its racial past. *

James A. Miller is a professor of English and American studies at George Washington University.