Reclaiming Masculinities: Migrant Realism in Bheki Maseko's Stories

TLDR: In this article, the authors consider the significance of storytelling in mediating the depersonalisation that is caused by migrancy in Maseko's Mamlambo and Other Stories (1991).

Abstract: Summary “[L]ike other phenomena of spiritual culture … [that] preserve for a long time old forms under new conditions”, a Bheki Maseko story reads like “folklore” (Propp 1984: 13). This article considers the significance of storytelling in mediating the depersonalisation that is caused by migrancy in Maseko's Mamlambo and Other Stories (1991). The first section considers the interrelatedness between the aesthetic strategies deployed in the stories and their ability to conjure up possibilities of wholeness. Proposing that this narrative style is “migrant realism”, the discussion shows that integral to Maseko's stories are the representations of how textures of everyday life are reutilised in projects that critically imagine completeness and its possible reinsertion into the forms of bondedness such as the family. The family is presented as severely affected by apartheid's migrant labour policies. It is interesting to observe that those stories in which Maseko deploys skaz, narrators strongly emphasise the ...