Indiscriminate grief and prioritizing care: Toloki’s politics of mourning in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying

This article examines how Zakes Mda, in Ways of Dying (1995), creates both a “stranger” artist-protagonist, Toloki the Professional Mourner, as well as the ideal postcolonial subject, Shadrack, local political leader and businessman. It examines the implications of the novel’s didacticism being focalized through Toloki, and not the radical political intellectual. Using Judith Butler’s work on precarity, vulnerability, and grievability, the article argues that Toloki emerges as politically more prescient by supplanting retributive justice with grief, empathy, and care. His ideological premises of mourning are compared with the socio-economic aspirations of his romantic rival Shadrack to demonstrate how they challenge the individual’s hegemonic solipsism. The article further elucidates how Toloki’s creative reliance on mimesis in both his performance of mourning and his interactions with the community not only exposes the indolent acquiescence of the group but also constructs the novel’s vision of meaningful communitarian engagement and transformation for the future.