"A Poetics of Disruption”

this paper reflects on authorial matters regarding Farida Karodia’s A Shattering of
Silence (1993). Like other novels set in times of conflict, A Shattering of Silence can
be seen to deploy what the researcher chooses to call a “poetics of disruption”. This is a
poetics heavily at the service of politics, intended to disrupt and destabilise the blunt
binaries lying at the heart of any armed conflict. In this sense, the main character in
the story, Faith, embodies a poetics of disruption in so much as she problematises the
binary dimension of the political situation in the Mozambique of the period, being a
white woman who sympathises with the anti-colonial struggle. This article claims that,
reproducing the dynamics of the poetics of disruption in a process which can be said to
replicate that of her character, Farida Karodia herself makes the most of her strategic
location in a liminal terrain across nations. Her position as an exilic author can be
defined as dihiliz, that is, as a threshold vantage point which enables her to be both
inside and outside the situation she reflects about. Karodia’s liminality is here more
pointed than is usually the case with the exilic writer, since she chooses to write about
Mozambique, in many senses close to her country of origin yet not her birth-place.