Presence-Absence Dialectics in Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot

Abstract

This article analyzes the Presence-Absence dialectics in Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot (1961). This dialectics is rooted in the racist premise which considers blackness as a hole in being. The two brothers, Zachariah and Morris, fall into this dialectics from the outset of the play and, therefore, are trapped in sado-masochistic interplay. As they start corresponding with a white girl, Ethel, in search of Zachariah’s sexual gratification, their hole in being is revealed in front of Ethel’s symbolic presence, along with her brother’s symbolic presence as a white cop. As a result, the black body recedes into its fixed racialized facticity that intensifies the sado-masochistic relationship between the two brothers. The play articulates an ontological examination of the black body in an antiblack world through the convergence of race and gender. I am engaged in an existential-phenomenological approach to dissect the ways in which the black body oscillates between Presence and Absence.