The question of how to define madness recurs across the works of Duiker, as he experienced a mental breakdown himself. He suffers episodes of mental distress that result in his admission to a psychiatric hospital. He moves in the company of upwardly mobile South Africans in an interracial consumerist urban culture.īut Tshepo bears the scars of childhood abuse and violence at the hands of gangsters. Although he drops out of college and endures some financial hardship, he is never destitute. Tshepo, however, is from a middle-class family, cultured and artistically inclined. It is the story of Tshepo, a young black man who, like Azure, lives in Cape Town, and, at some point, resorts to gay sex work for survival. ‘THE QUIET VIOLENCE OF DREAMS’ BY K SELLO DUIKERĭuiker’s next major book, The Quiet Violence of Dreams, (2001) contemplates this ambiguity of madness. Some readers consider Azure’s dreams and visions as evidence of a psychotic break others see it as Duiker’s masterful combination of hyperrealism and magical realism. The boy, however, possesses insight into a supernatural realm that offers possibilities beyond his confining circumstances. Readers of his award-winning Thirteen Cents (2000) will attest to the haunting power of his exploration of coming of age in post-apartheid Cape Town as a street child.Īzure, the 13-year-old blue-eyed black protagonist of the novel, is an orphan forced to fend for himself in a ruthless city still riddled with the unrelenting inequalities of race. One or more of these appear in each of the three novels he wrote.
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