We are yet to kill the cattle

Abstract

My novella comprises inter-linked fragments that combine fiction, autobiography and creative non-fiction. Ranging fluidly from pre-colonial times to the present, and largely set in South Africa but cutting across the native/diaspora divide, the project draws on historical and archival documents, found and fictive letters, oral testimonies and inadmissible facts, mythologies, ghost voices and fictional speculation. It uses the slim slippery voice of autobiography to cast a big shadow of doubt on the certitudes of authorial truth, harnessing multiple voices to disorient settled notions about self/other, black/white and man/machine. My intention is to explore possibilities of being that exceed the human. I draw inspiration from Zoë Wicomb's novella, You Can't Get Lost In Cape Town, Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter and Mikhail Shishkin's letter-narratives in Maidenhair. The narrative voice that threads stand-alone fragments seeks to express the demotics of subjects in search of a language for their unlanguaged 'grammar of suffering'.