Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Modern Approaches in Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Conjured Whole: The Queer Assemblage of Maneo Mohale’s Everything is a Deathly Flower (2019)
Simphiwe Mpho Zondani
ABSTRACT:
Historically, it is evident that there is a persistent impulse to renounce the existence and legitimacy of queer bodies, across many spaces – local and global. When considering the African continent in particular, this rejection takes on a different tenor as it is often connected to a certain vanguard whose polemical call for decolonisation habitually positions queerness as alien and ‘un-African’; as something that must be uprooted. In the face of such an elemental crush, the work of queer Africans that dare to inscribe and reinscribe themselves within the chronicles of history takes on an almost political import. One such text which exemplifies this impulse is Maneo Mohale’s debut poetry collection entitled, Everything is a Deathly Flower (2019). Departing from the critical realist tradition, this paper appraises this text using the Deleuzoguattarian concept of an assemblage – which can be simply defined as a group of objects, bodies or forces that comes together to produce a new way of functioning, or, in this case, being (Parr, 2010). What is being plumbed is the work’s singular yet communal nature, and how the speaker draws from a lineage of voices conjure up the wholeness of queer experience with all its discontents.
keywords: Moneo Mohale, assemblage, deleuzoguattarian, Africa, subjectivity