ABSTRACT
In this chapter I investigate the imbrication of Zakes Mda’s texts with the visual arts. In an article on Mda, I had traced the relationship between his story-worlds in The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and the story-worlds depicted in Frans Claerhout’s paintings (Fincham 2009). I argued that Claerhout’s and Mda’s refusal of hegemonic ways of seeing induct the postcolonial reader into new understandings of class, race and gender issues. In this essay I extend the examination of visual arts into the arena of landscape, looking at the ways in which She Plays with the Darkness (1995a), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Cion (2007) link the visual in paintings and quilts with a particular understanding of the environment. As Peter J. Ucko and Robert Layton point out,
Denis Cosgrove has linked the concept of landscape in the evolution of European societies to ‘a way of seeing — a way in which some Europeans have represented . . . the world about them and their relationships with it’. This concept of landscape implies ‘an attempt to sustain the moral order [of] pre-capitalist conceptions of human relations with the land and nature against the economic order of industrial capitalism’ (Cosgrove 1988: 252). After the 19th century, squeezed out by economic
and technological forces, this concept of landscape could no longer be sustained.
