Dr. Roger Michael Field
University of the Western Cape, South Africa
The long short story “Waiting for Leila” (1981), in an early collection by the South African writer and poet Achmat Dangor (1948-) is the focus of my paper. Dangor experiments with Nizami’s classical story of the two lovers by placing it in Cape Town, South Africa, in the 1960s and 1970s. The backdrop to his re-interpretation is the destruction of District Six, a multiracial community on the edge of Cape Town’s central business district, and an affront to the policies of strict racial segregation that the then apartheid government imposed. Dangor also weaves in plot lines and characters from Homer’s Odyssey and the persona of the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy. The result is a complex story, which demands the reader’s attention as it moves between fantasy and reality, madness and sanity, the past and the present.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Second International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2018, Ahwaz.
