Transfiguring

Abstract

The silenced, wounded body of the colonized is a pervasive figure in colonial and postcolonial discourses, but its valencies differ significantly. In the process of postcolonial rewriting the trope of the dumb, oppressed body undergoes significant translations. In this article I want to look at aspects of this process of translation or transfiguration. Maru, a novel by the South African writer, Bessie Head, stakes out a number of epigraphic moments with which to begin the discussion. Maru recounts the tale of a woman who learns to paint-to figure-and in so doing undergoes significant changes of status and position in her society: from being given no place or recognition she becomes a figure in the community.2 This character, named Margaret Cadmore, is marginalized on a number of counts: she is a woman, an orphan, and above all a Marsarwa (more commonly known by the derogatory term Bushman). Her experience exemplifies what Head understood as the hierarchies of prejudice that can operate within communities, including those which are themselves prejudiced against.3 Margaret Cadmore is orphaned at birth and she is brought up by a white woman, by and for whom she is named. This woman, the first Margaret Cadmore, is inspired to adopt her namesake when, during a visit to a hospital and following an idiosyncratic habit, she sketches the child's dead mother, and is confronted by the incontrovertible evidence of the woman's humanity. The humanity contrasts starkly with the prejudice expressed by the wider Botswanan community for the Marsarwa. In an unusual chain of impacted replications, Margaret Cadmore, the adoptive mother, reproduces an image of the real mother, while also, in her act of adoption, possessing and reproducing the child. She projects her values and her vision upon the child: environment everything, heredity nothing is the creed she lives by (13). Lowest of the low, the negation of the negated, the second Margaret Cadmore is granted selfhood insofar as she is reproduced, as image, like her