'n “Paradise Lost”: 'n Ondersoek na swart arbeid en wit ongemak in stedelike Suid-Afrika: Marlene van Niekerk se kortverhaal “Klein vingeroefening rondom die nosie van hibriditeit”

Abstract

Summary Marlene van Niekerk's short story “Klein vingeroefening rondom die nosie van hibriditeit” (2001) confronts the ambivalence inherent in the legacy of Madamhood which is coupled with a post-apartheid sense of white displacement. This “small finger exercise on the notion of hybridity” offers a productive site to investigate theories of whiteness as an empty signifier and as a social construction. In this article, I trace manifestations of the reification of whiteness and suggest ways in which the narrative reveals the crises of whiteness and paradoxes upon which it is built. I argue that van Niekerk's deployment of layers of self-ironisation evident in her use of first-person narration, and the focalising perspective of the character “Marlene” allows her to examine her own duplicity in resisting and perpetuating normative Western whiteness inscribed in social narratives. This paper examines the narrator's multiple encounters with coloured and black domestic labourers and their white employers. Tracing the noticeable shifts in perspective from first to third person throughout the narrative, I argue that it is precisely during instances in which the narrator feels compromised and/or complicit in narratives of suburban Madamhood that she resorts to the third person, as if watching herself from a distance inevitably acting out a part she genuinely does not want to play. Furthermore, I also show that van Niekerk is vigilant in her interrogation of language and the way in which axioms and truisms (“the tyranny of the transparent”) are used to shore up white hegemony, and to render invisible the real place of power. What van Niekerk resists and subverts is the predictable sense that middleclass, matronly whiteness carries off its own legitimacy, which is reinforced by a concomitant sense of normative neutrality. And she accomplishes this, I suggest, in what may be read as a queering of the dynamics, which emerges most significantly in her treatment of the central image in the text: a pair of fork-tongued snakes, the multilayered symbolism of which exposes the paradoxes upon which whiteness and middleclass normativity are premised.