Reading the Garden(ing) Trope in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Abstract

This article examines how gardening in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light is symbolic of efforts to cultivate white identity. It argues that gardening is a significant trope in the novel where the Campbells’ meticulous tending of their garden echoes their efforts to cultivate and nurture white identities by repressing their coloured past. The article employs Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of “the gardening state” to appreciate the Campbells’ attempts to cultivate whiteness in an apartheid environment that encouraged the cultivation and maintenance of whiteness as a superior racial category. The article also refers to Hellen Lynd and Gershen Kaufman’s postulations about the visual/public nature of shame as well as Freudian idea of the uncanny to explain a sense of shame and fear of the repressed that underlies the Campbells’ passing for white.