Nadia Davids’ ‘Bridling’ (on the Caine Prize Shortlist 2024)
AiW Guest: Tanaka Chidora.
AiW note: Today’s post is the final in our 2024 Caine Prize Shortlist Reviews series (in full, with more coverage, here). Tanaka Chidora reviews the winning story by Nadia Davids, ‘Bridling’, published in The Georgia Review, in 2023.
NB: Our reviews may contain spoilers! Read ‘Bridling’, available via the shortlisted stories page on the Caine Prize website.
After I had read the 2024 Caine Prize-winning short story, ‘Bridling’ by South African writer Nadia Davids, I knew I was not going to write a review right away. The story is that kind that demands patience, not because it’s dense, but because it’s doing so much at the same time and you want to soak it all in. The story’s nuanced approach to how we tend to reproduce the same imagery that we are fighting is both intelligent and mind-blowing, and I will demonstrate why.
I have had heated debates with writerly friends over the years about the power of showing instead of telling. There were some who demanded a clearly annotated description of what showing was. But even then, I couldn’t say exactly what I expected from a writer who showed more than told what was happening in a story. With ‘Bridling’, what Davids does as a way of showing is similar to the African American game called Double Dutch, that is, writing-as-performance. But what is Double Dutch, you might ask? It is a game in which one or more players simultaneously jump two ropes that are being turned in opposite directions. The jumpers may incorporate complex tricks while jumping, including gymnastics and breakdancing (b-boying or b-girling). There is a connection to writing here because such games are also accompanied by songs, chants and rhymes which are ‘written’ into the game.
When a writer creates a piece that blurs the lines between writing and performance, we can call that Double Dutch. If you have read Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins – especially the violent parts – then you would know not just the power, but the hypnotic power, of writing-as-performance. This kind of complexity, which incorporates writing and performing, showing, is what makes ‘Bridling’ a refreshing read. While Morrison and Vera combine writing and orality, Davids incorporates staging into her writing, blurring the lines between reading and watching. For the reader to appreciate what I am saying here, a summary of the story might suffice.
The narrator auditions for a theatre production that reproduces artworks by men – in short, “literally Live Art.” The acting is supposed to reproduce the ‘male gaze’ – what did the male artist see and feel when he made the artwork? Reproduce that! According to the narrator, “We’ll create facsimile tableaus of the works, remaining absolutely still while audiences walk around the staging area viewing us as though we are an exhibition.” The smooth-talking director calls this ‘intersectional’, which means, according to another subtly rebellious character (named Medusa by the Director), “[a] bit of theatre. A bit of museum. A bit of discomfit for everyone involved.” Those who read academic papers and go to academic conferences are likely to suspect what Davids is doing here – she is reproducing trending discourses and testing their limits. In this case, the director of the production is exerting demands on female bodies to portray the male gaze.
He also renames the women. The narrator, for example, is renamed Grace. That, for me, is reproduction. Let me explain: the title of the short story is taken from the scold’s bride, a metal muzzle placed on an incorrigible or gossiping wife as an act of public humiliation in ancient times. The narrator’s part in the production is depicting an artwork of a woman wearing a scold’s bride, as compared to the one she had picked of a woman sitting on a beach with “a restfulness that lived”. In depicting this woman, she has to put on a scold’s bride. The production demands nothing from the women but silence. By silence, I mean being utterly still, sometimes for hours, while the audience moves around the stage, gazing at the still and silent actors. By the time the premiere of the production arrives, many of the women have rebelled against the production itself and only five are left, because (even though we are not told in explicit terms) the production was reproducing the same systems that produced the histories depicted in the artworks. Reproducing the artworks demands more physically and emotionally and that is exactly what the male director wants, making excessive demands of female bodies.
The fact that Davids manages to show all of that in a single, short story makes for a technically sound narrative. Her profession as a theatre practitioner also comes to the fore. The narrator both narrates and performs the story, blurring the lines between the multiple stories that are being told, so that acting and reproducing become one thing. The rehearsal room, which is the story’s main setting, becomes a miniature system in which staging in silence mimics the replication of the same systems that people talk about in fashionable academic and activist language. Think of intersection, unearthing, safe space, becoming, and many of the other intelligent phrases and words that we have coined over the years to explore possibilities of resistance against unjust and oppressive systems. Now, think of all these words being used in a system which replicates what we are resisting against… Nuanced, isn’t it? And where does it position us, as readers, viewers, performers?
Theatre has been a vehicle for emancipation, especially in South Africa where it was a powerful force in the fight against apartheid, but Davids’ subtle depiction also unveils the shadows that lurk in the crevices. And it takes several re-readings of ‘Bridling’ for one to appreciate this nuance and to begin to turn its lens back on us and our own practices of participation.
Tanaka Chidora is the author of Because Sadness is Beautiful? (2019), a poetry collection published to critical acclaim in Zimbabwe. His short stories have been shortlisted for and awarded various prizes, including the Carnelian Heart Publishing Short Story Prize for Africa (2024) and the Intwasa Yvonne Vera Award (2024). Chidora’s debut novel manuscript, Carrying a Country on Your Forehead, was longlisted for the Island Prize in 2023. It will be published as Born Location in 2026. Recently, he translated Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not into Hakuna Zvakadaro, a Shona translation which was published by House of Books in 2023. Chidora currently teaches in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Malawi.
Nadia Davids is a South African writer, theatre-maker and scholar. Her plays (At Her Feet, What Remains, Hold Still) have been staged throughout Southern Africa and in Europe. Her debut novel An Imperfect Blessing was shortlisted for Pan-African Etisalat Prize for Literature. Nadia’s short fiction and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Zyzzyva Magazine. She’s held residencies at Hedgebrook, Art Omi and The Women’s Project, and was a 2023 Aspen Words Writer. Nadia has taught at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Cape Town and is the President Emeritus of PEN South Africa.
Nadia’s latest novel, Cape Fever, will publish in December 2025 with Simon and Schuster.
Photo credit: John Gutierrez.
Tanaka’s is the last in our Reviews series of stories shortlisted for the 2024 Caine Prize, each written for us by AiW Guests based on the continent, commissioned by Wesley Macheso. You can find them, along with our ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ 2024 Shortlist Q&As on the homepage, or collected at this link.
Read Nadia’s ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ 2024 Shortlist Q&A, which opens up more on ‘Bridling’ and her other work, and is also complemented by a ‘twinned’ Q&A with Gerald Maa, the story’s publisher at The Georgia Review.
NB: As with our previous coverage of the Prize, we spoke to our interviewees before Nadia was announced as the winner on September 17th.
Read ‘Bridling’, along with all the stories shortlisted for 2024, via the Caine Prize website, or by clicking direct on ‘Shortlist…The Stories’ image below.
For more on the 2024 shortlist and the changes to the format of the Prize, looking ahead to its anniversary edition in 2025, visit: https://www.caineprize.com/.
Nadia David‘s ‘Bridling’ – ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ 2024 Shortlist Q&As
All our ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ 2024 Shortlist Q&As
– find them, with all our coverage so far, here…
With thanks to all our Caine Prize 2024 Shortlist story reviewers this week; and special thanks to Wesley Macheso; and congrats to all those shortlisted for the 2024 Prize – and to Nadia for her win!
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