ISBN: 031242325X
Picador, 2004
Author Zakes Mda pairs the mythic with the mundane in his 1995 novel, She Plays with the Darkness. The story takes place in Lesotho - a landlocked nation surrounded by South Africa. There we meet Radisene and his sister Dikosha, twins born and raised in Ha Samane, a mountain village connected to the wider world by a landing strip and an intermittently passable four-wheel-drive road.
Picador, 2004
Author Zakes Mda pairs the mythic with the mundane in his 1995 novel, She Plays with the Darkness. The story takes place in Lesotho - a landlocked nation surrounded by South Africa. There we meet Radisene and his sister Dikosha, twins born and raised in Ha Samane, a mountain village connected to the wider world by a landing strip and an intermittently passable four-wheel-drive road.
Dikosha moves through life with the eerie confidence of a goddess. She's a visionary dancer. She's also a talented scholar who dreams of attending school in the lowlands, an honor won by Radisene in spite of average grades because (you guessed it) he's a boy. When Radisene leaves home for school Dikosha becomes melancholic. She stops dancing, speaks to no-one and takes to wandering the hills of Ha Samane sustaining herself on the meat of snakes she catches with her own bare hands. Her mother, as you can imagine, disapproves.
Although Radisene misses his days of herding cows in Ha Samane he does his best to live up to the opportunities bestowed upon him in the lowlands. After struggling to complete four years of high school he becomes a low paid English teacher at a mediocre night school. By turns proud of this accomplishment and jealous of those doing better, Radisene falls into a gray existence punctuated by bouts of drinking, hangovers and the wearing of flashy clothes. He craves the appearance of success and vows not to return to his home village until he achieves it.
This is just the beginning of a story that spans 25 years, three military coups and some curious surprises. Throughout it all Dikosha remains constant. Like a butterfly in a paperweight she keeps her frozen beauty while those around her cope with never ending change. Mda has done a beautiful job allowing the lives of his flawed but loveable characters to unfold over time against a complex background of political unrest and uneven economic development. I knew little (actually nothing) about the history of Lesotho before reading this book and undoubtedly missed layers of meaning a more informed reader would have picked up on. But because She Plays with the Darkness deals with the universal themes of love, ambition, success and failure, it has a broad appeal.
