Alert! Critic Stephen Gray has stepped into the fray of the Zakes Mda plagiarism row, having just published an excoriating piece on Mda and the burden that Mda’s novel, The Heart of Redness, bears in relation to historian JB Peires’ The Dead Will Arise.
Gray’s piece is somewhat belated, in that the main actors in the saga - Mda, Peires and academic Andrew Offenburger, who first brought the charges to light - would seem to have laid their pugilists’ equipment aside for the time being. The story first broke in The Weekender in July; BOOK SA followed up with two pieces gathering statements from Offenburger and Mda, plus Peires, who attempted to absolve Mda by expressing his satisfaction with the acknowledgment Mda gives him in Redness.
Poppycock, says Gray, who, after reviewing Offenburger’s article, writes how a “lazy-minded Mda must have merely taken gobbets of Professor Jeff Peires’s magisterial Alan Paton Award winner… grafting them into a work the public has all along supposed his own”.
If pens were daggers, and daggers ornaments, and ornaments collected in museums with different wings, each signifying different moments in the history of art and weaponry (this actually happens), then you’d find Gray’s piece listed under “rococo”:
Overlook the split infinitives, incorrect tense changes and the incessant authorial directions that often make Mda’s work look like a first draft. Here was a manifest authority hectoring us on Xhosa usages as well, as author Peter Becker used to do, just to assert how far above the unlettered in tribal jargon he was. Never mind that whenever Governor Grey opened his mouth, this epic seemed to descend to the level of cartoon. The Heart of Redness was also into serious structural problems, having to backtrack into the pluperfect far too often. But Mda’s exuberant bluster pulled him through with the usual appealing brio.
Except that an American historian, Andrew Offenburger of New Haven, Connecticut, has found out that the basis of The Heart of Redness is not Mda’s own intellectual property. Beginning as a devotee of Mda’s with a visiting fellowship at the University of Cape Town, he thought to check out the master’s sources in the local archives. These Mda evidently never bothered to visit himself, despite the fact that the photo of his woeful hysteric comes from there. Nor did he ever take the trouble to visit, for example, the piles of Brownlee material in the Johannesburg Public Library, of which he is an honorary patron.
In fact, as Offenburger deduced, instead of playing some fashionable game of so-called intertextuality and cross-referencing and trendy borrowings, as quite a few sophisticated post-colonialist critics had assumed, Mda simply lifted his whole underpinning, holus-bolus, from one single source.
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Photo courtesy talatu-carmen
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September 30th, 2008 @22:00 #
Perhaps when the 'aggrieved' party, in this instance JB Peires, decides to take these word-thieves to task, we will see acclaimed writers actually having to do the hard work of writing for themselves.
One has to wonder what motivates writers to sit back and watch their work being lifted wholesale - perhaps a resurgence of interest in their own work that hasn't been on the shelves for a while?
October 1st, 2008 @11:35 #
I've been following this saga with deep interest, and am waiting for the online article. I've always restrained myself from comment before because it presents an interesting ethical question -- should editors chip in with inside info when an author or text they've worked with is the subject of controversy? Or does doctor-patient confidentiality apply? What do others think?