Zoë Wicomb interviewed on writing and nation

Abstract

Writing and Living in Empire S: Modernity is intimately connected to certain notions of empire, the novel, history, truth, and race we would like to discuss. You live in Scotland, what is sometimes called the first English colony. Your writing, however, centres on another outpost of the British empire. So, could we begin by rephrasing a rather threadbare question in more general terms: given the significance of absence, repression, and longing firstly for language as a system of reference and secondly for the creative imagination, how would you describe the impact of being away from the places you write about? Z: It's a problem--Mphahlele, I think, called it the tyranny of place. I can't write about Britain, and writing about South Africa is arguably a way of coping with absence and longing and a need to belong. (It's not possible for me to belong in Scotland: one couldn't in a place where one's difference is so salient.) In Europe, exile has always been a romantic notion, a glamorous condition we were told, sought by the greats like Joyce and Beckett to achieve that necessary distance and objectivity--those were the litcrit keywords of my undergraduate days. Of course, the fact that they were colonials was overlooked. Nowadays, in the times of postcoloniality, we have a different take on place and displacement, and we know that objectivity is a luxury enjoyed in the northern hemisphere where sense of self or self-worth is a given. You know, I didn't choose to live in Europe, it's an accident of history, and the consequences, such as producing a family here, keep me here. Exile is after all not a state of being frozen in time, where a short thaw is all that stands between you and comfortable insertion back into the homeland. I would prefer to live in South Africa--or so I believe--and it will be possible to do so in two to three years' time. I certainly couldn't write if I did not spend extended periods there, because it's not possible to go on mining memory. I often wonder about writers like Salman Rushdie. His earlier novels, including The Satanic Verses, are absolutely stunning, but the later ones I find, well, disappointing. Is it because he's writing about a culture and a country in which he hasn't lived for some time and nevertheless feels compelled to write about? So then, even for the great writers who are accepted in the Western centres, the problem persists: the problem of writing about home that has for some time not been home. And that subject matter, which is in a crucial sense about absence, comes so often to be articulated through history. As for the stuff about absence feeding the imagination, or distance providing a better perspective, well, it may be true, it must be true for the genre of fantasy, but to me it sounds like a cliche. I couldn't have written David's Story if I hadn't lived in Cape Town between 1990 and 1994. It would have been something else, a novel about the Griquas, but being there, with the issues of the contemporary strand of David's Story all around me, the extraordinary parallels between the two periods insisted on a revision of my original idea. S: Many postcolonial authors live in the former mother countries, close to the heart of darkness, so to speak. What is the significance then of your living and teaching in Britain for your writing? Z: Let's look on the bright side: living in Scotland is possibly what keeps me on my toes. As a black foreigner you have to work that much harder in order to prove yourself; you can't afford to slip up--even in academia. Given how hard it is to write, how little time there is to write once the business of teaching and the daily immersion in bureaucracy is over, I sometimes wonder if it's the desire to prove myself in a hostile culture that makes me write at all. But writing also is a means of saying that which you can't utter: it compensates for the fear of speaking. In Scotland I am often congratulated by strangers on my good English. …