MEMORY IN LIMBO: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN MATING BIRDS (1986) BY LEWIS NKOSI

Abstract

Lewis Nkosi’s novel, Mating birds (1986) offers a significant intervention in a history as dispersed and fragmented as South Africa’s, by focusing on those specific and critical episodes of South Africa’s past. This much-colonised country has had an extended history of perennial violence under colonialism and apartheid Some fiction by Black writers on this phenomenon may be seen to be reactive, what Njabulo Ndebele (South African writer) terms ‘Protest Literature’-and seeks to show black people as victims (Ndebele 1994). Nkosi’s novels, Mating birds (1986) in particular reverse this order through the narratives of different characters, illustrating that black people were not the passive victims of apartheid but played an active role towards its opposition and eradication. This is achieved through complex portrayal of the first-person narrative technique and interstices of memory and recall. This article explores how identity as a porous and fluid, and fragmented and fractured concept that could be used to describe the individual or communa traits of some characters, and space (prison) are portrayed in Lewis Nkosi’s Mating birds (1986).