“A Poetics of Disruption”: Farida Karodia’s A Shattering of Silence and the Exiled Writer’s Dihiliz Position

Abstract

Abstract Bearing in mind Edwidge Danticat’s ideas about writing being a dangerous affair, this paper reflects on authorial matters regarding Farida Karodia’s A Shattering of Silence (1993). Like other novels set in times of conflict, A Shattering of Silence can be seen to deploy what the researcher chooses to call a “poetics of disruption”. This is a poetics heavily at the service of politics, intended to disrupt and destabilise the blunt binaries lying at the heart of any armed conflict. In this sense, the main character in the story, Faith, embodies a poetics of disruption in so much as she problematises the binary dimension of the political situation in the Mozambique of the period, being a white woman who sympathises with the anti-colonial struggle. This article claims that, reproducing the dynamics of the poetics of disruption in a process which can be said to replicate that of her character, Farida Karodia herself makes the most of her strategic location in a liminal terrain across nations. Her position as an exilic author can be defined as dihiliz, that is, as a threshold vantage point which enables her to be both inside and outside the situation she reflects about. Karodia’s liminality is here more pointed than is usually the case with the exilic writer, since she chooses to write about Mozambique, in many senses close to her country of origin yet not her birth-place.