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,
Landscapes are … ways of expressing conceptions of the world and they are also a means of referring to physical entities. The same physical landscape can be seen in many different ways by different people, often at the same time … the term may refer both to an environment, generally one shaped by human action, and to a representation (particularly a painting) which signifies the meanings attributed to such a setting (Ucko and Layton 1999: 1).
