Metamorphosis is Kafka's Curse's answer to this problem, its version of a politics of transitional translation or translational transition in which persons and texts can be seen doubly, both as the possessors of lives, histories, and voices firmly their own and as the agents of recombinant processes continually yielding something rich and strange. Kafka's Curse extends its metamorphic mode from the crafting of individual sentences in which competing national idioms—English, Afrikaans, Hindi, Xhosa—are rendered contiguous with one another, and of plot lines in which family trees similarly hybridize, to the larger construction of national stories of markedly mixed origins.

It is to this task that the very first chapter of the novella turns, recounting a tale of star-crossed love that Omar/Oscar, a Cape Malay Muslim passing for a white Jew, once told to his white wife Anna. In its original form, written by the renowned twelfth-century Arabic poet Niz_m_, the romance of Layl_ u Majn_n describes a mad lover who allows himself to be so thoroughly consumed by passion that when his beloved finally, after several years of waiting, appears before him, he cannot reconcile the real woman with his idealized image and rejects her, leaving her to die of grief.31 Traditionally the lover Majnun is associated with the sterile desert where he flees to wait for his beloved Layli, herself associated with the fertile gardens of her father's kingdom. Although "desert triumphs over garden" in the original version, as Julie Scott Meisami observes, in Omar/Oscar's prescient retelling of the tale the reverse holds true.32 In the version Anna remembers Omar/Oscar telling, Majnoen is a gardener who falls in love with the king's daughter, arranges to meet her in a forest so that they may elope, and when she does not arrive, waits for days, weeks, months until he eventually becomes a tree. In a subsequent chapter of the novel, narrated in her husband's own voice, he admits to "l[ying] a little more than necessary." Yes, he acknowledges, there are no forests in Arabia, and yes, no one in the original Arabic romance becomes a tree.

"So," he asks himself, " what are the real origins of the legend? A trivial incident, sentimentalised and exaggerated to heroic proportions by slaves from India or Java or Malaysia to sustain themselves? A coping mechanism—that's what you call it, no? It might have been African? This continent is fecund—yes, fecund—with the kind of foliage which gives birth to the secret lives that are the very substance of magical parable."

In this version of the romance it is not the Arab woman but the African continent that is associated with fertility and fecundity. Such a gesture typifies magical realism’s popular premise that the very nature of certain parts of the world forces the word to transform itself in order to capture their descriptive abundance and fantastically protean histories. Omar/Oscar's voicing of the hypothesis that the legend "might have been African" appears to shape his story to fit a generic model first advanced by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, canonized by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, and turned into a veritable industry by the Indian Salman Rushdie. But Omar/Oscar pulls back from this particular set of transnational affiliations and the style of national reading they enforce. If his wry allusion to an Africa “fecund—with the kind of foliage which gives birth to the secret lives that are the very substance of magical parable" ventriloquizes the metropolitan will to find magical realism, no less than national allegory, in the Third World text, his subsequent statement arrests that desire. " Making this tale African would have been too obvious. Everybody wants to make our little room theirs, make their destiny ours. It was Muslim, that much I know". To make the tale African would be to nationalize it first in order to transnationalize it second. Read thus, Kafka's Curse becomes yet another instance of the creeping spread of an expressive genre turned global literary commodity and the historical and cultural specificities of its local content become a mere footnote to the homogenizing sameness of its global form. As dangerous as the possibility that critics may globalize too much in their reading of national literatures, it is equally dangerous that they may not globalize enough, that they may focus so intently on the national character of these allegories that they miss their transnational cast. Once again, it is Kafka's Curse's contribution to find the middle ground.

Ironically, in Dangor's South African novella it is the sign of Arabia not Africa that nationalizes. Omar/Oscar's self-proclaimed "Muslim" tale intertextually cites an Arabic tradition outside South Africa that is also a powerful force in the Indian and Cape Malay populations inside South Africa. To say the tale is Muslim is thus tantamount to saying it is South African, part of a nation defined by the histories and identities of a diverse and diasporic citizenry. This transnational circuitry in the opening pages of a novella dedicated to the imagining of a new nation also in its way constitutes a metamorphosing, a conscious blurring of oppositional schemas that render the national and transnational, the local and the global, as one another's antagonists. As a national allegory, Kafka’s Curse repeatedly requires transnational form, from the Arabic romance whose metamorphosized retelling fuels one subplot, to the magical realist techniques that inform the larger story of Omar/Oscar's metamorphosis into a tree, to the implied historical border crossings that bring Afrikaners and Cape Malays, Indians and the English, blacks and Jews together to mix on South African soil. What Kafka's Curse ultimately accomplishes is a boundary-breaking, binary-confounding instance of writing that declassifies itself, writing that is neither white nor black, neither myth nor history, neither nationally territorialized nor globally deterritorialized, but rather flits between being both, all, and none in the same moment and often in the same sentence. In this mobile address and double vision, the fruit of what I have called the novella's metamorphic mode, lies its deepest debt to Kafka and all he signifies in South African and world literature.

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