Zakes Mda introduced us to the funeral follower Toloki in an earlier novel, Ways of Dying, set in South Africa. In Cion (Penguin), Toloki is mortified to learn that he could not have introduced the concept of professional mourning — a practice he now realises existed in the old Greek, Roman and Middle Eastern worlds. Instead, he thinks he has a chance to introduce the concept of the “itinerant mourner” and thus finds himself in Athens County, Ohio, in the United States.
One of the reasons Toloki leaves South Africa is because “his professional mourning practice was in a rut”. This desire for a career change makes him pine for more challenging professional prospects. A chance meeting at a Halloween festival, in the novel called a “parade of creatures”, takes him to Kilvert, home of descendants of those who fled slavery in Virginia and other slave-holding states.
It is as strange a journey for Toloki as it is for the reader. For his part, Toloki is pleasantly surprised to see Americans who revere their forebears and talk of the “pull of ancestors” in ways he thinks are naturally and exclusively African.
This motley community of whites, Native Americans and Africans also exults in the past and heritage. Some even entertain the forlorn hope that some day “the whole world will look like us”. Because of intermarriage, they don’t quite know to which indigenous tribe they belong. A son claims a Shawnee ancestry, an assertion that his mother dismisses out of hand.
Mda deals with these issues of tenuous identities, and shows how they have blurred through the interminable mixing of bloods over the centuries on the slave-breeding farms. He also deals with the naming process as both a way of creating and wiping away identities.
Cion examines how some people in the West who claim an African heritage are sons and daughters of kings and queens, while others claim ancestry that is simply not there. Those who yearn to excavate a buried identity have not only created make-believe identities but have enriched whatever wasn’t thrown overboard from the slave ship.
This is something Ruth — one of two matriarchs who straddle the centuries — won’t allow her child to do. Ruth would rather have her daughter Orpah create artistic patterns as they were made centuries back. Ruth views tradition as something static, and wants her child to stick to the script as dictated by tradition. Orpah, on the other hand, with youthful stubbornness insists that she won’t have anything to do with patterns that wallow in the past, a past that is, in many ways, radically different to the present.
Cion thrives on flashback and uses clever methods of revisiting the past. That past harks back to the slave days and two boys born to the Abyssinian queen (the other matriarch from the 19th century), who dream, talk and breathe tales and possibilities of freedom. The queen makes quilts, a symbol of folk wisdom, on to which she inscribes symbols to be used as codes if the boys ever escape.
One of the would-be escapees is a mulatto sired by Fairfield, owner of the farm. Fairfield didn’t see much economic sense in crop farming and thought he would rather invest in swarthy, glistening boys who copulated with African and Irish slaves “to meet the demands of the market”. One of the boys, wearing a “self-satisfied smirk”, is reluctant to leave the farm, as he is enjoying his stud status, but circumstances hasten the inevitable, forcing him to flee.
It’s not all historical and the narrative manages to answer some contemporary puzzles such as how people like George W Bush win elections.
It also examines the media in the United States, the war-mongering lobby, the relations of the African to America and the American; the American to Africa and the African and that particular and strange strand of American fundamentalist Christianity. Even Hugo Chávez gets a mention.
Cion is well researched, but the hours that went into that do not make the book weighty and unreadable as the pages are laced with philosophical turns of phrase that don’t look at all contrived, and are at once humorous and incisive.
Another issue the book grapples with is commitment to craft. Toloki seems to argue that a craft that does not move with the times does not accept new infusions of life, and is steeped in a past — no matter how pristine — that is at the risk of disappearing.
Cion is also about spontaneity of the artistic spirit, improvisation and the kindred soul of most, if not all, art. It is an unusual book — as unusual as they come.
At times the scenes are so moving, the descriptions so precise, and tones of wailing so emotive that, without doubt, it adds to the pantheon of the slave narrative.
A timely paean to the committed artist, Cion is also a spirited meditation on identity, the past, memory and how it is yoked to the present. Ultimately, it is a daring, well-executed attempt by an African to unravel and make sense of the US.
Cion is a Homebru 2007 selection