Mda Delivers Talk on Creative Process
The African Studies Center, an affiliated center of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, hosted South African author Zakes Mda for the Annual Bradford Morse Distinguished Lecture on March 2, 2016.
Mda’s talk, entitled “Culture is the Center of Our Struggles: Intertextuality and the Creative Process,” focused on how writers get their material from the society and culture they are a part of.
The award-winning author of ten novels and Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University discussed the public perception of his writing in post-apartheid South Africa.
“Now that apartheid is gone, what are you going to write about?” Mda asked. “The reason for that of course is because a lot of our literature touched on apartheid. People think we were writing only about apartheid, whereas in fact we wrote about everything even during apartheid. As you know, writers get their material from society.”
Mda said apartheid was a dominant presence in his writing because writers both use societal discourse in their writing, but also help to form the discourse in society.
“What was happening then was that the apartheid system itself was a very absurd system, and obviously it was the dominant discourse in society because it touched every aspect of your life,” Mda said.
In addition to being a Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University, Mda is a playwright and composer. His novel the Heart of Redness won the Richard Wright Zora Neale Hurston Legacy Award. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Cape Town for his contributions to world literature. His novels have been translated into 21 languages.