SOURCE: Carpenter, William. “‘Ovals, Spheres, Ellipses, and Sundry Bulges’: Alex La Guma Imagines the Human Body.”¹ Research in African Literature 22, no. 4 (winter 1991): 79-98.

In the following essay, Carpenter discusses La Guma's metaphorical language about the human body as a way of exploring what it means to be human.

Observations on La Guma's figurative language tend to occur haphazardly in the midst of more general discussions of his work. Individual figures are interpreted, usually in terms of the social relations fostered by apartheid, but attention to the figures as such is limited to praise for his “memorable similes” (Wanjala 209), which have been described as “both arresting and yet artistically functional” (Roscoe 240), or is simply absorbed into an admiration for his “painter's eye” (Whitman 113) and the “controlled manner” with which he can “accurately depict a moment of intense activity” (Ngara 93) like “the exquisitely described fight” in The Stone Country (JanMohamed...