KAFKA'S CURSE

by ACHMAT DANGOR

 

If you fuck someone from outside your own class, a toll will be exacted from your very carcass.

Or so goes the moral of the story conveyed by Achmat Dangor in his stunning North American publishing debut, Kafka's Curse.

The South African Muslim prize-winning poet, teacher and politico enthuses on the horn from his digs back home, "Of all the books I have written, I enjoyed this one the most, because I was able to use my own upbringing, my background and my language very comfortably."

His ebullience is apparent in all the book's experiences -- many of them packing excruciating blows to the solar plexus.

Kafka's Curse is based on the ancient Arabic legend of Leila and Majneon, a tale of moral rectitude.

Princess Leila falls in love with her father's gardener, Majneon, and they scheme to rendezvous and flee together -- knowing that this life won't allow their union.

The plan sours and ol' Majneon, a cosmic green thumb abandoned in the forest, turns into a beautiful tree.

Dangor's rendition is set in Apartheid-era South Africa when Mandela was about to be ushered in as its rightful president. So this ain't no damn fairy tale.

The dreamlike chronology unfurls and swings wildly. A cavalcade of folks tromp roughshod over the landscape of the novel, switching religions, swapping lovers, assuming class and cultural identities -- blurring, if not obliterating, the lines of ethnicity.

Dangor explains, "The one conscious political decision I made here is to break out of the artistic and intellectual strictures that being a South African involved in the struggle have imposed on us."

With the penning of Kafka's Curse, a delightfully quirky epic by any standard, Dangor literally lays to rest the age-old accusation that South African literature exalts even the most mundane of characters.

"I attempted to find the anti-hero in a context that was more realistic -- and maybe I overdid it," deadpans Dangor. Not at all.

-- sigcino moyo

original publication: NOW 18/23