Zoë Wicomb’s Angels of History: Literary Historiography and Historical Materialism in Still Life

Abstract

The creative and critical work of the South African-born, Scottish-resident writer and public intellectual Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948) has spanned the sociocultural epochs we now label "transitional," "post-transitional," and perhaps even "post-post-transitional" in South African literary historiography. Her work has repeatedly explored collective political inheritances refracted through the consciousness of characters who are writers (or writers manqué), from Frieda in the linked stories of her debut, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to the academic Mercia Murray in October (2014), via the unnamed narrator-amanuensis of David's Story (2000) and several writer-characters in the stories collected in The One That Got Away (2008). Wicomb's fictions repeatedly cast projects of writing as problematically complicit acts of witnessing that require readers to consider what is occluded from foundational narratives—whether these be racial or ethnic, parochial or cosmopolitan, or even anti- or decolonial. The author's range of reference has always looked to the future and beyond the borders of South Africa, as much for the trajectories of her characters as for the intertextual allusions with which the works engage. Wicomb's most recent novel, Still Life (2020), revisits many of these preoccupations, although predictably with a twist.