Zakes Mda’s novels are characterised by a discursive doubling/twinning. First, the narratives derive their main thrust from a historical narrative, combined with a narrative set in the present, in essence a thinly plotted fictional social, political and cultural debate. Second, in addition to the fictional mode of narrative dialogue/counterpoint between these two narratives, the novels are also performative in that the dialogue between past and present is mediated by means of cultural/artistic performance, which is narratively enacted in the fiction (the song and dance traditions of the Basotho in She Plays with the Darkness; Xhosa split-tone singing in The Heart of Redness; Flemish Expressionist painting in The Madonna of Excelsior).
Mda’s latest novel, Cion (2007) continues this discursive doubling, but with a significant difference. Cion is Mda’s most overtly metafictional novel to date, self-reflexively foregrounding a debate about ways of writing in a dialogue between Mda’s character, Toloki the professional mourner from Ways of Dying, and his author. In this novel, Toloki draws on his (South)African backstory to engage with various African American and Native American traditional and innovative forms of cultural expression in a community in present-day Ohio in order to engage with African and American issues of cultural hybridity in a hybrid work of fiction.