Unburying Silences: Trauma and Recuperative Narrative in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Abstract

Summary This article argues that Wicomb’s novel is concerned with how to represent intergenerational trauma in South Africa. It suggests that an important element of that representation is the concept of “recuperation”. This includes the action of recuperating past events that have been repressed socially and psychologically, and also the use of that “unburying” as the first step towards recuperative healing. Wicomb investigates different ways of representing both the trauma and the recuperation. Her examination is itself a commentary of how South African literature may consider representing the past and using literature as a tool of healing. She engages with different symbolic functions as adequate means of representing trauma, in particular myth and allegory, suggesting that these commonly used tropes may be useful, but are ultimately not fully adequate for recuperative narrative. As an alternative, she explores a symbolic mode which is as “real” to ordinary, traumatic, experience as it is possible to be. The South African writer, she suggests, should not seek meaning in arcane or western mythological modes, but in the traumatic life offered by the experience of the everyday, and in the objects that are strikingly “homely”, symbolic of the actions of those who have found ways to recuperate from trauma.