The Man, the Woman and the Whale: Exploring the Politics of the Possible in Zakes Mda’s "The Whale Caller"

Abstract

Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller is set in the Western Cape village of Hermanus, which proves to be an idyllic place only for tourists and rich South Africans, framing a story of doomed love for its three chief protagonists, Saluni, the otherwise nameless Whale Caller, and Sharisha, a female whale. The Whale Caller revolves around a love story with a timely narrative which, at a point in South African history when some influential voices have been suggesting that we draw a line below the list of past wrongs, serves as a reminder of the work still to be done, at a local level, in facing the effects of apartheid. The liminal figure that creates The Whale Caller is, on one level, the story of a love triangle with, whimsically, a whale as one of the parties involved. On another level it interrogates the past by focusing on two people whose relationship has been scarred by their marginalised status within the South African context. As so often in Mda’s work, his satire is misleadingly mild, his whimsicality a stalking horse for his unwavering focus on the texture of life in the often forgotten interstices of our society. The violent ending of the narrative, with the death of two of the three main “characters”, is Mda’s dark reminder of how unaddressed dysfunctionality may eventually resolve itself.