Towards a Dialogic World: Mediums at Work in Post/Colonial South Africa

Abstract

This essay aims to explore how the concept of a medium serves as a productive narrative device in mediating the ghostly other/otherness and in re-imagining a dialogic society in two Southern African postcolonial novels: J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness. Noting the medium’s affinity—as a figure or a person who acts as go-between of the living and the spiritual world, I use the term more figuratively as an attitude that presupposes a mode of negotiation through which a subject approaches his or her internal and external alterity and establishes a mutual understanding with it. Since every ghost or haunting has its specificity as it appears in specific moments or locations, mediums also perform their work in a differentiated way. In the article, I elaborate how the main protagonists in these two novels represent two different kinds of mediums—the passive medium and the active one—as they encounter different historical and social situations. In other words, I demonstrate the varied ways in which these characters negotiate binary entities, such as the living and the dead, self and other, tradition and modernity, nature and culture, in order to settle down the present crisis and provoke a dialogic world.