................The Ubuntu Tradition in the White Cat books ................
Most serious novels can be read on different levels. We can read them for the stories they tell - after all, they are intended as entertainment in the first instance.
But, if we choose, we can also listen for what lies just below the surface, the nuances in the characters, the patterns in the action, the philosophy which underpins the author’s portrayal of life.
This short guide is intended to offer pointers to what lies just below the surface of the White Cat Books, perhaps for individual use, perhaps to prompt discussion topics in a group. It does not give away the plot, so that it can be something that might be dipped into at any point, or left till the end.
But, if we choose, we can also listen for what lies just below the surface, the nuances in the characters, the patterns in the action, the philosophy which underpins the author’s portrayal of life.
This short guide is intended to offer pointers to what lies just below the surface of the White Cat Books, perhaps for individual use, perhaps to prompt discussion topics in a group. It does not give away the plot, so that it can be something that might be dipped into at any point, or left till the end.
The Writer as Artist with Words
Shakespeare’s canvas is the tableau of human life and interaction - the motives and schemes of his players circumscribed as they happen to be by the stage on which they find themselves; his invitation to the onlooker to find resonances within themselves of the universal themes he paints for them.
The delicate spaces of the haïku of Yungen-Chu, circumscribed in their shapes by rules and formalities, become a ground for the paintings readers themselves create as evocations from within.
The canvas of White Cat is the winding path of events through four generations of a family, traced across a tapestry of war and upheaval with a narrative which, like the haïku that illuminates hidden affinities within a natural perspective, searches out a consistency in the humanity of individuals for whom others are as important as they are themselves.
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Nobomi's Dream
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Nobomi’s dream has the dualistic extremes we could put in the context of racial (and therefore political) turmoil, or, link to the existential reality for a mother, a sole guardian, whose own being was a vacuum (through the loss of her beloved) and whose child her very physis.
The linked symbolism of the mbulu, the mythical monster of the Xhosa, which could appear in horned animal representation complete with tail, but also masquerade in human form, is perhaps both the source of confrontation and its resolution. We are forced to watch the iniquity of intra-species conflict - the monsters’ claws reminiscent of imagery of violence elsewhere in the book, and the child fought over by the mbulu the very incarnation of its resolution.
Was Harry’s death also a (self-)sacrifice on this altar?
The waves retreating leave smooth sand… resolution or concealment?
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