Browsing by Author "Coovadia, Imraan"

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    A Secretary's Wife
    (2022) Owen, Catherine; Coovadia, Imraan
    A Secretary's Wife is a work of historical fiction that draws from real events and people who emerge from the journals and letters of Lady Anne Barnard while she was in the Cape for the period 1797–1802. Lady Anne Lindsay marries a younger man without title or fortune. When he lands a position as secretary to the governor of the Cape, she is determined to go with him. They make the journey on a crowded ship to Cape Town and, on arrival, find the Cape expensive and turbulent. Narrow-minded people complain incessantly, slavery and hangings are rife, and shortages of wood, flour and other commodities are commonplace. Life improves after they are offered accommodation in the abandoned old Government House at the castle. They set up a home and try to understand the culture, the people around them and each other. Barnard begins to thrive leaving Anne to her own devices. At the same time, she come to terms with being barren within the context of her society. The use of a country cottage called Paradise helps the Barnards reconnect, but when Lady Anne suspects Barnard's infidelity with a slave woman and, due to ill health, the governor leaves the Cape, life can never be the same again. In writing this work, I have attempted to reimagine Lady Anne Barnard's life, in particular the personal aspects to which she may have made fleeting references, otherwise it is entirely fictional.
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    Bad luck chicken
    (2023) Baker, Naomi; Coovadia, Imraan
    Bad luck chicken
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    Bin collection day and other stressful events
    (2023) Tennant, Megan; Coovadia, Imraan
    Elizabeth is six when the ANC wins the first democratic elections in South Africa. While most of the country celebrates freedom, the only difference she notices is the growing intensity of her fears. Fear remains a faithful companion to Elizabeth as she grows up. She fears the rubbish trucks in her childhood, the Valentine's Dance in high school, and the remote possibility of passing out in a gutter somewhere in her first year of university. The short stories in this collection feature a similar (and often contradictory) version of the protagonist, from Elizabeth's childhood in eastern Johannesburg to her early adult years in an uptight Cape Town neighbourhood. Each story deals with a dilemma unique to each life stage and should be read in isolation. But its neighbours in the collection reveal the recurring tensions that influence an identity. In Elizabeth's case, these include the role of her religion, her repressed racism, and the bizarre benefits of gross inequality. All of these contribute to her urge, as a white girl in post-apartheid South Africa, to peer across from her and check if she should be somewhere, or someone, else.
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    The blank space on the map
    (2013) Minster, Jonathan; Coovadia, Imraan
    From the cold shores of Marion Island to the plains of the Great Karoo, this is a story about four South Africans, by birth or circumstance, who are marooned on the outskirts of society and trying to find their way back. Livhu is a scientist who has been sent to a remote research station to study ocean currents. Besides the challenge of adjusting to the frozen island landscape, she also grapples with her feelings for a young seal researcher. When the relationship takes an unwanted turn, Livhu is forced to search deep inside herself and find the strength to survive a lonely year very far from home. Casper is a sub-editor who works for the most trashy tabloid in Johannesburg. He’s on cruise control, plugging away at a job he doesn’t really enjoy, full of regret about previous opportunities he thinks he’s squandered. When a strange assignment comes his way, and a new friend with it, he sees the hazy outline of a map that will lead him away from previous hurt towards a brighter, more ambitious future. Garrick is a ski-boat skipper from Durban. He once captained cargo ships, but when his family fell apart and the rum took over, this was the only job he could get. Now he has a rare opportunity to make good money delivering a catamaran to the Seychelles and rekindle the bond with his estranged son at the same time. On the open ocean, however, tempers fray under skies brimming with thunderclouds, and the threat of pirates is ever present. Jamal walked out of war-torn Somalia as a teenager with his brother. Now his brother has been killed in a xenophobic attack in a Johannesburg township and Jamal is all alone. With no other prospects, he carries on walking, south towards Cape Town, where he has a cousin who might be able to help him. Along the way, desperate and dehydrated, he is taken in by an elderly loner in a small Karoo town who has secrets of his own. Unbeknownst to each other, the lives of these four strangers will touch each other in unexpected ways, suggesting that we are all closer than we’d like to admit, held together by the universal desire for redemption.
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    Borderlord Scuttle
    (2021) Cromhout, Luke Jacob; Coovadia, Imraan
    Borderlord Scuttle is set in an alternate version of South Africa's Eastern Cape based on the fictional papers of a thief named JB Niemand and the story follows his first adventure. After the end of a relationship with an artist named Rebekah, JB Niemand's own artistic aspirations dashed. He is uninspired and directionless with no way to sustain himself, let alone pursue a career as a painter. To solve both problems he turns to a life of crime. With his profits he plans to complete a pilgrimage to Alice to see a Walter Battiss artwork that Rebekah claimed would finally make him the artist he dreamed of becoming. However, he is no master criminal. The story begins when JB Niemand finds himself in prison. At Middledrift Corrections JB Niemand develops a dependent and ambiguous relationship with Stix, a career criminal who will end up abandoning JB in the bush shortly after their escape from prison. Stix's betrayal catalyses JB's becoming and he is propelled into a journey that sees him attempting to join a gang of hill bandits who call themselves the Ninevites, drinking in a small town bar in The Settler Flats, and eventually making good on his plans to go to Alice.
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    The common reader and the modernist Bildungsroman : Virginia Woolf's The Waves
    (2016) Timlin, Carrie-Leigh; Higginbotham, Derrick; Coovadia, Imraan
    In this dissertation I intervene in and challenge already-existing critical studies of Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) that focus on ideas of imperialism, empire and subject-making practices in the novel by arguing for a revisionist reading of The Waves as a Bildungsroman. Unlike the Bildungsroman of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which utilised standard novelistic conventions to explore the relation between form and reality, I contend that The Waves is a thoroughly modernist reinvention of the Bildungsroman form designed to capture a rapidly industrialising and modernising English society. To capture the socio-political unrest in twentieth-century England at this time, Woolf deviates from the convention of a single-protagonist narration, using multiple perspectives to expose the contradictions in processes of self-formation, especially with regard to the relation between the self, nation and national identity. The correspondence between self, nation and national identity is explored through the silent seventh character, Percival, who I argue is characterised as a hero in the medieval romance tradition to expose the romantic and heroic fictional narratives that provided the framework for ideas of empire and imperialism, then at the core of nationhood and national identity in England. Conversely I argue that the character who narrates a third of the novel's narrative, Bernard, provides us with an alternative to empire and imperialism in subject-making practices. I argue that in the final section of The Waves Bernard deviates from the direct-speech narrative of preceding sections of the novel and engages the reader directly. The reader is thus alerted not only to his or her role as a reader, but also to Bernard's overarching role as primary protagonist in the novel. The reader has progressed alongside Bernard through the narrative in keeping with the genre designation of the Bildungsroman which encourages the progression of the reader alongside the progression of the primary protagonist. The reader is further encouraged in his or her progression by an aesthetic education present in the music and poetry that Woolf incorporates not only in the content, but in the very structure of the text. Two of the novel's characters, Louis and Neville, use poetry to locate their subjectivities within larger historical narratives, while Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B♭ major, Opus 130, informs the structure of the text, contributing to the interactive sonic and non-sonic landscape that actively invites the participation of the reader. The reader's participation in the novel is most fully realised when Bernard addresses the reader directly in the final section of The Waves. This interaction explains and thus concretises Woolf's overarching critiques of empire and imperialism in the novel alongside her proposed methods - which directly oppose the ideology of imperialism - for developing a subjectivity formed in relation to the common, and the individual experience of the common as a historically and materially determined phenomenon. The common in this sense is a community of 'common reading subjects', who like Woolf are not formally educated, but develop a subjectivity through reading premised on an equality of intelligence which enables them to engage critically with, order and make sense of the society and politics of their surrounding world. In this way, I show that Woolf challenges the already existing subject-making practices in twentieth-century England by exposing the contradictions - the exclusion of the marginalised, the poor and women - in ideas of Englishness. She proposes an alternative form of subject-making that is as diverse as her reading public and premised on a non-exclusionary acknowledgement of an equality of intelligence that defies class, gender and social boundaries.
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    Crossing borders: conscious journeys with my family
    (2015) Kamies, Nadia; Fox, Justin; Coovadia, Imraan
    This work of creative non-fiction encompasses episodes of travel motivated by the author’s desire to expose her children to different cultures and philosophies as an antidote to her own experiences of growing up during apartheid. The journeys are undertaken over a period of 18 years, starting in 1993, just before the birth of a democratic South Africa. Crossing borders refers to both personal and physical expansion, juxtaposing the isolation of apartheid with the freedom to explore that which was foreign. The main theme is that of leaving home to extend one’s view of self in relation to the world, inculcating the possibility of a global community of mutual respect. Minor themes are identity and searching for roots and a sense of belonging; religious tolerance, equality, respect, climate change and children’s rights are some of the issues grappled with in countries as diverse as Cuba, Greenland and Sweden. Although each chapter focuses on a different country, themes of dispossession, discrimination, colonialism and struggle run throughout. The author uses travel as the vehicle to educate her children beyond the borders of a family and a country emerging from a repressive past , teaching them to challenge stereotypes and showing them that people are not that different on the other side o f a man -made divide. Underpinning this family memoir is the joy of travel and discovery of a wealth of culture, history and mythology through the children’s eyes. The children’s development is traced from infancy through adolescence to early adulthood and concludes with the hope that the foundation has been laid to make a constructive contribution to a more empathetic society.
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    Devouring the father: family and recuperation in Triomf and the Native Commissioner
    (2013) Emmett, Christine; Coovadia, Imraan
    This thesis seeks to account for the largely unprecedented vigour of white writing in post- apartheid South Africa. Though there are a number of contributing socio-economic factors, it argues that there is an inherent ambivalence in many texts written by white South African authors. Texts that are generally designated as 'reconciliatory' or 'reconstitutive' have a latent imperative. The ambivalence of these texts is exposed by my analysis of two prominent South African novels, Marlene Van Niekerk's Triomf and Shaun Johnson's The Native Commissioner. Alongside this concern, is the fact that the white South African family, regulated and constructed by apartheid legislation, provides one means through which post-apartheid white identity can be anatomized. Therefore, the methodology of this thesis is acritical application of Freud's Oedipal family structure and its attendant primal scene. Through this application we find that Van Niekerk's novel is preoccupied with subverting patriarchal Oedipal structures. This is expressed by the dysfunction of the Benade family. One aspect of this subversion is the dissipating and illegitimate patriarch, and his unremarkable death Mol, the mother, is analysed in terms of her disruptive and chaotic power, as well as her dispensation of narrative. The problem with Van Niekerk's text is that itis incapable of suggesting a post-apartheid Afrikaner (white) identity. This is indicated both by slippages in her portrayal of Mol, and by her attempt to counter-position lesbianism as a viable post-apartheid identity. Therefore, the text exposes an anxiety about paternal authority, suggested by the patriarch's death on voting day. Ten years later, I argue, Shaun Johnson attempts to recuperate this paternal white power in his text, The Native Commissioner. In Johnson's novel, George Jameson is represented as a benevolent bureaucrat and a loving father. I argue that though Johnson attempts to represent George's profession as encroaching upon the benign space of family. This is a false opposition in that colonial paternalism is implicit in George's identity as a father. By focussing on the recurrent image of the garden, I proceed to indicate that this novel is primarily about negotiating the Oedipus complex. By reliving the conflict through narration, the narrator identifies with the dead father. In the Oedipus complex, identification results in remorse and guilt, enacting a transmission of power from father to sons. I argue that this text is latently invested in this transmission of power. This indicates that at the heart of the text is an imperative to recuperate the lost paternalistic white power which the narrator's father represents. Therefore, through these analyses I show that the ten year trajectory represented by Triomf and The Native Commissioner latently enacts a process of loss and recuperation which concerns itself with white illegitimated power. This positions mothers in the novels as representing the illegitimacy of this power, and has the capacity to reflect on the ambivalence inherent in post-apartheid white narratives.
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    Femme feral: a novel
    (2024) Beckbessinger, Samantha; Coovadia, Imraan; Beukes, Lauren
    A hyper-competent tech CEO thinks she's going through perimenopause, but there's a different reason for the sudden hairiness and seething rage threatening to destroy everything she's worked for: she's become a werewolf. --- The novel Femme Feral explores what happens when rage is repressed for too long and finally bursts out as wild violence. The story centres on Ellie, a hyper-competent leader in a tech company. Like most 46-yearold women, she is already juggling too much: a job that doesn't appreciate her, the care of her ageing father-in-law, a depressed daughter, and the million other large and small tasks modern middle-class life seems to require. When she finds herself beset by strange physical changes (hair sprouting in new places, trouble sleeping, losing time, finding bloodstains in her clothing, and persistent boiling anger), she attributes everything to perimenopause. She tries solution after solution offered by the booming menopause care industry, but nothing helps. Nearby, a short-tempered older woman named Belinda discovers that her cat has been killed, mutilated, and left on her neighbour's front steps. She swears to find the person responsible. Belinda begins an obsessive investigation across her rapidly gentrifying London neighbourhood and discovers something impossible: a werewolf stalking the city on nights of the full moon. Ellie. Once she realises what's happening to her, Ellie is thrilled by her new lycanthropic powers. She discovers that some problems can be solved with violence. She removes a business rival to take his job as CEO. She savages her daughter's stalker. She scares away catcallers. As she becomes more unapologetic, she gets more of what she wants. Only … Ellie soon realises that the beast within isn't easy to control. With Belinda on her trail and a growing fear of what she's becoming, Ellie has to find a way to yoke her fury before she tears through the people she loves. Femme Feral is a Jekyll-and-Hyde horror story about middle age rage
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    Gardenia
    (2022) Selig, SarahBelle; Coovadia, Imraan
    Ellen is 29 and disillusioned with her advertising job in New York when she receives an email from a woman named Isa, for whom Ellen's mother Lacey abandoned her family fifteen years prior. In the email, Isa attempts to explain her affair with Lacey, who was almost two decades older than her at the time, and what happened in the years following the affair's discovery that led to Lacey's eventual mental and physical collapse. As Ellen travels back to coastal North Carolina to discover what happened to Lacey after she disappeared and face the one woman she has long blamed for it, she must confront the responsibility she, her father and brothers share in pushing her mother towards Isa, and reconcile with the abuse her family has inflicted on Isa in the years since. Gardenia is told in three intertwined novellas. In "Dig", Lacey begins a string of reckless acts in an attempt to assert herself amidst her lonely motherhood, including an affair with the young, black Isa. In "Sow", Isa recounts the story of her relationship with Lacey to her now husband, detailing her attempts to save the woman she loved from addiction while coping with her own increasing isolation from friends and family. Finally, in "Reap", Ellen contemplates her mother's decisions amidst the rapidly changing landscape of women's rights post-#MeToo, while battling her own demons and justifying to her younger brother her decision to find Isa. In each novella, the main character makes a different choice on what to do with her trauma, when faced with the opportunity to leave it behind. A reflection on the unbridgeable distance between the sexes, culminating in a meeting between the two women most haunted by Lacey's absence, Gardenia explores victimhood, women's sexuality, how we leave each other and—as each woman discovers—how we never really do.
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    Goodbye, Hallelujah!
    (University of Cape Town, 2020) Brown, Jesse; Coovadia, Imraan
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    Haram Means Forbidden
    (2023) Charles, Zubayr; Coovadia, Imraan
    The thesis titled ‘Haram Means It's Forbidden' primary deals with the intersectionality of the religion of Islam and Homosexuality within a South African setting. The main narrative that arises within the thesis is the notion of “Can one be homosexual and Muslim?” In Islam homosexuality is known as haram (forbidden) and being gay is strongly frowned upon and believed to send one to hell. Many homosexual Muslim men live their lives filled with mental health issues, stemming from the idea of not being accepted by God, and the communities that they belong to. In many modern Islamic communities, men that identify as homosexual are still ostracised and ridiculed, and this thesis provides insight into the mind and life of a character struggling to find balance between religion and sexuality. This thesis centres the protagonist, Muhammad Gilbert, recounting his initial experience experimenting with his sexuality. He thereafter experiences a toxic relationship – which many young gay men experience. Furthermore, Muhammad has a co-dependent relationship with his mother, which the thesis explores. Through the character of Muhammad Gilbert, the thesis provides a much-needed narrative that exhibits the life of a gay Muslim subculture prevalent in a Cape Coloured community. There are less than twenty novels around the world that with the specific topic of the intersectionality of the religion of Islam and Homosexuality, and out of those twenty stories, none have a South African setting, despite there being approximately 600 000 Muslims living in South Africa. With this thesis, I hope to start a much-needed conversation surrounding the treatment of homosexual men, and others identifying with the LGBTQ+ spectrum, within Muslim Communities. It is evident that there is still a vast change that needs to occur within the mindsets of Muslims that justify their hatred towards the LGBTQ+ community because of religion.
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    The Havoc of choice
    (2014) Koinange, Wanjiru; Coovadia, Imraan
    Kavata knows one thing to be true: when it comes to politics, there is no such thing as holy ground. So when she starts a family of her own, she does everything possible to distance herself from her unscrupulous father, and strives to raise her children as honestly and modestly as she possibly can. When her father, Honorable Muli, retires from government claiming that he would like to spend more time with his grandchildren, Kavata indulges him. She allows him to weasel his way back into her life hopeful that her children might have the relationship with her father that she never had. By the time she realizes what Honorable Muli is really up to, it is too late. He has already persuaded Ngugi, Kavata’s husband, to contest the upcoming election for the same seat that he himself held for sixteen years. It’s election time and for a fleeting moment, Kenyans can once again taste sweet power as they make their choices at the polls. In the days leading to the election, Kavata is forced to make a different, more drastic kind of decision; one with repercussions much greater than she could have imagined. The Havoc of Choice is a story about family, politics and journeying through a fractured country in a delicate time. Based on events around the historical election of 2007, the book follows the lives of Kavata and her family at a time when their country was going through one hundred days of violence, shortly after the poll results were announced.
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    How to build a home for the end of the World
    (2020) Shinners, Keely; Coovadia, Imraan
    How To Build a Home for the End of the World is a magical realist dystopian road trip novel by Keely Shinners. Donny is a carpenter who renovates houses nobody lives in. His daughter, Mary-Beth, is hell-bent on donating her organs to her chronically ill ex-girlfriend, Aida. Together, they go on a road trip across a waterless American wasteland, populated by a peculiar cast of angels and ghosts, revolutionaries and academics, performance artists and desert hippies. Formulated as a case history of post apocalyptic times, How To Build a Home for the End of the World investigates the ways in which people understand memory, healing, and redemption in the throes of of ever-unraveling crisis.
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    Last gangster of the old school a novel
    (2013) Arderne, Mia; Coovadia, Imraan
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    Letters of stone
    (2015) Robins, Steven Lance; Plummer, Robert; Coovadia, Imraan
    As a young boy growing up in Port Elizabeth in the 1960s and 1970s, Steven Robins was haunted by an old postcard-size photograph of three unknown women on the mantelpiece. Only later did he learn that the women were his father’s mother and sisters, photographed in Berlin in 1937, before they were killed in the Holocaust. Having changed his name from Robinski to Robins, Steven’s father communicated nothing about his European past, and he said nothing about his flight from Nazi Germany or the fate of his family who remained there, until Steven, now a young anthropologist, interviewed him in the year before he died. Steven became obsessed with finding out what happened to the women in the photograph, but the information from his father was scant. The first breakthrough came when he discovered facts about their fates in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and the Landesarchiv in Berlin, and the second when he discovered over a hundred letters sent to his father and uncle from the family in Berlin from 1936 to 1943. Steven was finally able to read the words of the women who before had been unnamed faces in a photograph. Letters of Stone tracks Steven’s journey of discovery about the lives and fates of the Robinski family. It is also a book about geographical journeys: to the Karoo town of Williston, where his father’s uncle settled in the late nineteenth century and became mayor; to Berlin, where Steven laid ‘Stumbling Stones’ (Stolpersteine) in commemoration of his family who were victims of the Holocaust; to Auschwitz, where his father’s siblings perished. It also explores the complicity of Steven’s discipline of anthropology through the story of Eugen Fischer, who studied the “Basters” who moved from the Karoo to Rehoboth in German South West Africa, providing the foundation for Nazi racial science; through the ways in which a mixture of nationalism and eugenics resulted in Jews being refused entry to South Africa and other countries in the 1930s; and via disturbing discoveries concerning the discipline of Volkekunde (Ethnology) at Steven’s own university Stellenbosch. Most of all, this book is a poignant reconstruction of a family trapped in an increasingly terrifying and deadly Nazi state, and about the immense pressure on Steven’s father in faraway South Africa, which forced him to retreat into silence.
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    “Milano” a fictional novella
    (2022) Corbett, Nicholas; Coovadia, Imraan
    “Milano” is a fictional novella set in Milan, Italy, in 1992. The story takes place against the backdrop of a country that is grappling with the ideas of nationalism, immigration and power. Italian prosecutors have begun the mani pulite, a countrywide judicial investigation that aims to bring to justice businessmen, politicians and others who have aided corruption in multiple industries. The story follows the protagonist Louis Richardson, a 24-year-old Englishman, who has received news that his mother is requested at the reading of the last will and testament of an Italian man he has never met. Margaret Thatcher's government has left Louis' family – who are working class British citizens – in a state of financial ruin with little prospects outside of crime to earn a living. In his mother's stead, he travels to Milan with the hope that a lucrative inheritance may provide fortune. “Milano” envisions Louis' awe and wonder as an outsider in the country over the course of several days. He meets Nigerian and Polish immigrants as well as a powerful and politically connected Italian family, the Garavaglias. Through the eyes of the protagonist the reader is exposed to fictional accounts of attitudes and beliefs in Italy at the time. Over the course of the novella, Louis' own ideas of a new life comes crashing down as he learns hidden truths behind the wealthy Garavaglia family, as well as his own.
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    Nothing is certain but death and taxes
    (2019) Cain, Lyndall; Coovadia, Imraan
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    Paradise Valley
    (2010) Bell, Suzy; Coovadia, Imraan
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    Self-Consciousness: a novel story
    (2020) Clarke, James; Coovadia, Imraan
    This document is the result of work probably better suited to a psychologist than a literary scholar, so I make my apologies in advance if what follows seems at times inappropriately confessional, but I'm afraid that my interest in the subject is less academic than it is personal. Though it was never included as part of his academic work, the attached typescript for a graphic novel, Kariba, is the work of James C—, for a time one of my most promising students. Under my supervision for the MA within the Department of Language and Communication, he was engaged in writing a novel (the traditional kind, sans illustrations) of which, tragically, only fragments remain. James took his own life in late 2019 after a long struggle with depression. As his supervisor, I saw first-hand the progress of this terrible disease. Despite the encouragement I gave, James suffered from a lack of self-belief that many will recognise as symptomatic of our age—in which the good lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.