Browsing by Author "Moolla, Fatima Fiona"

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    Flirtations with eros from a black-eyed squint: romantic love in the oeuvre of ama ata aidoo
    (Indiana University Press, 2024) Moolla, Fatima Fiona
    What’s love got to do with it? Everything—suggests Ama Ata Aidoo, whose oeuvre, virtually without exception, foregrounds romantic love as part of a woman’s well-being, obstacles to which constitute a decidedly feminist concern. Throughout Aidoo’s career, her fiction highlights romantic love as the human relationship that has the greatest potential to achieve social justice, since it often transgresses boundaries of ethnicity, race, class, and various social taboos. At a personal level, union through love represents a reconciliation of broader political differences. In this sense, as in a range of others to be considered, the personal is shown to be political. Romantic love in Aidoo’s project, furthermore, has the catalytic potential to transform and bring into congruence disjunct social relations, which, in a postcolonial context, disproportionately impact the lives of African women. The earliest recognition of the significance of eros in Aidoo’s meditation was an unconscious one, where she echoed the dominant assumption of the African literary scene at the time, which saw love as a trivial personal concern. In a provocative self-critique, Aidoo reverses her earlier position when she acknowledges her own preoccupation with love across her career. A careful study of Aidoo’s work suggests, however, that despite its power, romantic love finally is beset by obstacles to its realization, which leave social barriers in place and patriarchal structures untransformed. This black-eyed squint clearly does not see the world through rose-tinted glasses.
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    Harreخ at: A novella and reflective essay
    (University of the Western Cape, 2023) Ajouhaar, Quanita; Moolla, Fatima Fiona
    Background: On the 9th of August 1961, an especially cold, rainy day, the five girls were standing outside of their mother, Rhoda’s, bedroom door, waiting patiently for their first brother to arrive, since Rhoda’s belly was unusually large this time around. It looked different from the way it did the five times before. The girls sat against the door in the hallway that was filled with rakams that their mother recently got as a gift from their neighbour. They all thought that it was a miracle to finally have a brother. It had to have been a blessing from Allah, a Makkah baby. “Aaaah,” they heard Rhoda scream from the other side of the door, where the mid-wife stood in front of her open legs repeatedly saying, “Merrem is amper daar.” It was Rhoda’s sixth baby. She thought it would come out easily. “Dit is darem my sesde kind. Ek poep hom sommer uit,” she would say every time one of them spoke about her birth. And she eventually did, “poep the baby out,” and a healthy cry reached the hallway piercing the ears of the girls. They beamed smiles, pushing against the door to come in. Luckily, it was still locked. When the midwife pulled the child out, and Rhoda’s husband, Boebie, got the first peek of the baby, he smiled.
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    Introduction: Reinscribing Nuruddin Farah in African literature
    (Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Association, 2020) Moolla, Fatima Fiona
    The commissioning of a theme issue on the work of Farah in a South African literary journal therefore is noteworthy both in African continental and world literature contexts. Commemorating Farah�s career in Tydskrif vir Letterkunde may be seen as an attempt at a reconsideration of Farah�s position in African literature, and an acknowledgement of the possible reconfiguration of Farah as a South African writer, in addition to his position as a �Somali� diasporic writer.
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    Longing for Love: Eros and National Belonging in Three Novels by Rayda Jacobs
    (Unisa Press, 2022) Moolla, Fatima Fiona
    The female Muslim descendant of Cape slavery is a key figure in the work of South African writer, Rayda Jacobs. Three of her novels, in particular, seem to track the social and political genealogy of the female Muslim descendant of slaves, namely, Eyes of the Sky (1996), The Slave Book (1998), and Sachs Street (2001). These novels trace, through the subjectivity of the female Muslim slave, the emergence of the South African nation from its origins at the Cape, through the hinterland, to its contemporary borders. The novels foreground the personal relationship of romantic love, which, of all the personal relationships, is the most volatile and dynamic, producing unexpected transformations. Love, which produces a child from the erotic encounter in Eyes of the Sky, and social union through marriage in The Slave Book, is presented as having the potential to transcend racial, class and religious boundaries in the colonial state. We see in the declining apartheid state presented in the third novel, Sachs Street, that the national allegorical potential of eros finally is not fully realised, leading to a reconceptualisation of romantic love in a transnational frame, centred nonetheless in Cape Town, South Africa. As much as these novels are historical, since they are written post-1994 reflecting the contemporary concerns of its author, they present a singular vision of the place of the female Muslim descendant of slaves in the South African nation, where the postcolonial nation is implicitly conceptualised as a white dominated derivative European nation-state.
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    The road not travelled: Tracking love in Frank Anthony�s the journey: The revolutionary anguish of Comrade B
    (2023) Moolla, Fatima Fiona
    The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown �struggle� novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People�s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for six years. The novel and its author have been elided from South African history as a racialized literary establishment and the defensiveness of the resistance organization of which he was a member reinforced each other in tacit censorship. Anthony�s novel presents revealing insights into the repression of the personal in the anti-apartheid movement, which reflected the �liquidation� of love in leftist discourse of the period. The importance of love, especially romantic love � the highly volatile emotion which is often boundary-breaking and radically transformative � has been recognized in contemporary post- Marxism and critical race theory. Blindness to the potential of love in dominant struggle politics is reflected in the protagonist of The Journey, whose passion for social justice leads, paradoxically, to repression of the empowerment and emancipation of self(lessness) through other(s), enabled by eros. A final version of this article appears in English in Africa 50.1 (Apr 2023): 73�98, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v50i1.4