David's Story Research Articles

Cosmopolitanism and Fictions of “Terror”: Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret

With the end of apartheid, cultural commentators anticipated new directions in South African fiction that would place its narratives on a world stage, taking account of global concerns. The portrayal of “terror” is one such example. Yet in contemporary South African fictions of “terror”, this paper argues, postcolonial narratives embed anxieties that profoundly tie the local to the global. Indeed, in the two South African novels explored here, Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2001) and Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret (2006), the cosmopolitan or “worldly” ethos both authors employ is firmly rooted in local contexts in order to expose strategically decontextualized and obscurantist twentieth-century and contemporary State “terror” rhetoric. Through narrative forms that convey a cosmopolitan worldview, these novels refuse to foreclose important questions that connect the colonial past with the “terror” rhetoric of today.

The “Great Coloured Question”1 and the Cosmopolitan: Fiction, History and Politics in David's Story

In this article we set out to interrogate Wicomb's David's Story as a political and historical intervention and to examine its treatment of the “great coloured question” and the relationship between armed liberation struggle and democracy. The novel has the potential to be read as a liberal critique of the ANC's treatment of coloured people and of women in exile and in the transition to democracy, but we argue that one can only arrive at such a reading by closing down meaning within the text. The novel raises fundamental questions about the activities and cosmopolitan reach of the ANC in exile, but also about the relationship between coloured people and the greater South African whole. The novel's narrative complexity and multi-layered portrayal of ethical dilemmas, and ethnic cross-currents, should compel readers to confront the impossibility of discerning a single, simple truth about the history or the future of South Africa.

Zoë Wicomb, the Cape & the Cosmopolitan: An Introduction

South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb has, in two novels (David's Story [2000] and Playing in the Light [2006]), two collections of linked stories (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town [1987] and The One That Got Away [2008]), and a number of extraordinarily trenchant and insightful essays on South African literature and culture, established a reputation as one of the most far-sighted of contemporary postcolonial authors and critics. This essay introduces a special issue on Wicomb in relation to questions of locatedness and dislocation, home and exile, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, arising out of an international conference on Wicomb's work held at the University of Stellenbosch in April 2010. Engaging with the complicated modernity of late-century and contemporary South Africa, Wicomb has long been concerned with anxieties about the ethics of speaking for, speaking over, the many voices of South Africa's multiple communities, and of those who find a home in none of them. The various essays in this collection consider the issues at stake in considering Wicomb's work in relation not only to the place in which much of her work is set, the Cape, but in attending, too, to the transnational and the cosmopolitan energies—and paradoxes—at work in her writing.

Zoë Wicomb, Cosmopolitanism, and the Making and Unmaking of History

This article considers Zoë Wicomb's focus on transnational mobility, the Cape, history, and the writing of history in light of recent theorizing on cosmopolitanism. Theorists often see cosmopolitanism as emphasizing conversation and tolerance across difference, in part because of its association with the kind of enlarged imagination which comes from travel and wider experiences. Cosmopolitanism has conventionally been associated with good manners, with liberal enlightenment: it allows for understanding, even, in Appiah's words, “in a world of strangers.” However, as will be explored in more detail below, recent work on cosmopolitanism suggests the need for a much more radical interpretation of this concept, one which stresses grassroots activism, ongoing projects of self creation, and the rejection of formalist paradigms. Critical cosmopolitanism explores the practice of “getting along” and emphasizes that building social justice is always fraught with multiple possibilities and outcomes. I argue that if cosmopolitanism has any traction in Wicomb's work it is only such a critical cosmopolitanism. In particular, I suggest that in her novels David's Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006), Wicomb upends the conventional interpretation of the Cape as a cosmopolitan site of a special liberalism rooted in able negotiation of difference, and mostly invokes cosmopolitanism in an ironic sense.

Zoë Wicomb's Ghosts: Uncanny Translocations in David's Story and The One That Got Away

This essay analyses Zoë Wicomb's novel David's Story and her latest collection of short stories, The One That Got Away, through the lense of cosmopolitanism and Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘hauntology’. Wicomb is a cosmopolitan author in a very precise sense: an author who embeds locally specific stories in a complex intertextual, historical and transnational web of cross-references. As settings, characters and objects move between Scotland and South Africa, it appears that the histories of these countries are mutually haunted by each other. Uncanny encounters with the past, and with memorials and art objects that take on a spectral quality, evoke an increasing sense of disorientation on the part of protagonists and readers alike. Assumptions about place, history and identity are thus constantly undermined and reconfigured.

The addictiveness of online brokerage services: A first person account

In the story below, David describes the personal challenges he has faced in controlling his on-line stock market investing. Following David's account, Nigel Turner presents some general observations that tie David's story to the research literature on problem gambling. The viewpoints in David and Nigel's sections reflect the ideas and opinions of their respective author-although this account is collaborative, both authors worked independently and take credit only for their contribution1.

Two Stories of David Sparing Saul's Life in 1 Samuel 24 and 26: A Question of Priority

ABSTRACT In a recent article Steven McKenzie argues for the priority of the account of David sparing Saul's life in 1 Sam 26 over that of the parallel account 1 Sam 24. To do this he uses one of the categories of evaluating interdependence of biblical texts, namely, that of “ungrammaticality” as set forth by Cynthia Edenburg in SJOT, 1998. Thus McKenzie opposes my own view for the priority of chap 24, as argued most recently in The Biblical Saga of King David (2009). In this article I critically evaluate the use of his examples of “ungrammaticality” as well as the possible application of the other four Edenburg categories of evaluating evidence for interdependence and priority, as they apply to these parallel texts. Contrary to McKenzie, I conclude that these principles of comparison confirm the priority of 1 Sam 24 over that of 1 Sam 26, and I argue that chap 26 was a later supplementation of the David story for the purposes of polemic and a parody of the earlier account.

The Demise of the Warlord: A New Look at the David Story. Hebrew Bible Monographs 26

The Demise of the Warlord: A New Look at the David Story. Hebrew Bible Monographs 26

David and the Gibeonites

The story of David and the Gibeonites in II Sam 21,1–14 has long presented scholars with a curious puzzle about its literary and compositional character and how it is to be related to the rest of the David story. Is it an ancient tradition that includes historical information about the reigns of Saul and David? Or does it belong to a collection of late additions in the »appendix« of chaps. 21–24? In response to recent studies that seek to remove additions to the story in order to recover an old historical tradition, It is argued that it is a late composition made up of narrative elements drawn from earlier biblical stories to produce the present tale. The result is a totally confusing composition with no historical usefulness and little literary or artistic merit. It was never part of the DtrH or one of his sources, nor of the David Saga (»Succession Narrative«), but only a late addition to the present collection of David stories.

Review of Uriah Y. Kim,Identity and Loyalty in the David Story: A Postcolonial Reading, Hebrew Bible Monographs 22

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the character of David in 1 Samuel 2 Kings 2 is very complicated. Interpretations that picture him either as the purely pious shepherd or solely as the Machiavellian mafioso rising to power by killing anyone in his way do not do justice to this complex character. While many modern interpretations of David are available, Uriah Kim, Professor of Hebrew Bible at Hartford Seminary, has offered a different interpretation: a postcolonial David. In Identity and Loyalty Kim continues his program of a postcolonial reading of the Deuteronomistic History, having set out his program in Decolonizing Josiah: Toward a Postcolonial Reading of the Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2005). In this reading strategy, Kim seeks to allow his own social context, as ‘an Asian American Christian’ (p. 13), to inform a reading of David. Such reading strategies are a helpful aid to better understanding in a field dominated by white, western, mostly affluent voices. In the first chapter, Kim sets up the concept of a postcolonial reading of David. Key factors lie in the concepts of identity, which in Kim's reading means largely who is and who is not considered an ‘Israelite’, and loyalty, which he examines in the David story in terms of the Hebrew word hesed, often translated ‘loving-kindness’ or ‘loyalty’. Kim proposes a reading of David which envisions him as ‘a Machiavellian man of hesed who was willing to cross various boundaries of difference in order to form his kingdom’ (p. 27). He reads the David story through the lens of hesed in order to see ‘neither the David of the narrator (and faith) nor the David of his enemies (and modern skeptics)... [but rather] a post-colonial David who represents a third way of reading the David story’ (p. 30). BOOK REVIEWS

The “necessary silence” of realism in Zöe Wicomb's David's story

ABSTRACT Language is not an Adamic naming of things; it's about discourse in all the senses of the word. The realist novel, like an Adamic language, does indeed claim to reflect things in the world, disguising the fact that it too is in the domain of the literary. But what's the point of reflecting the world; it simply leads to the tautologies of struggle-writing in which the writer rehearsed the already known evils of apar theid. (Wicomb, in Meyer and Olver 2002: 196–7)

An ‘Excess of stretched skin’

ABSTRACT This article explores Wicomb's literary figurations of coloured women (warriors) in her novel, David's story (2000), in relation to the trope of skin. As an interface between psyche and body, skin serves as a symbolic trope to discuss the interchange between self and the world, or between self and other. Through the trope of skin, my project seeks innovative possibilities for literary (and other) conceptualizations of coloured women's identities, which have typically been confined to and silenced within South African history's margins. In this way, coloured women's identities are shown to be identities in transition, as new vocabularies are slowly being constructed to articulate past and present contributions and achievements of these characteristically marginalized figures. Similarly, I analyse how coloured women's bodies come to be marked by racial and sexual differences, focussing specifically on skin as the unstable border between the body and its others, and using it as a tool to discuss the way in which coloured women's identities are represented in language. Excessive inscriptions of the body are ultimately revealed to subvert and contest homogenizing representations of coloured women within colonial and medical discourses. Because skin takes and retains marks, it signifies irreversibility. But, […] because it not only takes and retains marks but can also erase them, it can also signify the possibility that the past might be retrievable in literal fact, in the flesh. (Connor 2001:49)

Identity and Loyalty in the David Story: A Postcolonial Reading – By Uriah Kim

Identity and Loyalty in the David Story: A Postcolonial Reading – By Uriah Kim

Identity and Loyalty in the David Story: A Postcolonial Reading – By Uriah Y. Kim

Identity and Loyalty in the David Story: A Postcolonial Reading – By Uriah Y. Kim

Narrative miscegenation in Zoë Wicomb's David's story

ABSTRACT This article explores the notion that narrativity is a form of miscegenation in Zoë Wicomb's David's story (2001). Narrative miscegenation destabilizes the notion of unequivocal authorial authority by positing a dialogic relationship between the many “authors” of a text. The article, therefore, draws on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to show the ways in which the novel invokes a web of responsibility for authorship. Especially important is the way in which David's story self-reflexively anticipates and invokes the reader as constitutive of the text, so as to show that all texts – including “master narratives,” such as history and the discourse of “shame” associated with miscegenation and coloured identity – are “authored” by us all. Finally this article argues that these master narratives are therefore open to dialogic re-negotiation of meaning and purpose.

Robert Alter and the Art of Bible Translation

The success of a translation, in my view, is defined by the extent to which it is able to move an audience closer to its source text. The integrity of a translation, on the other hand, lies in the faithfulness with which the translator adheres to his or her particular principles. Since these principles—especially in the case of English translations of the Bible—are usually spelled out, serious readers are able to gauge just what a translator has accomplished. In robert Alter’s case, he has made his goal clear in the articulate introductions to his Bible translations. In one passage, he characterizes his work as “an experiment in re-presenting the Bible—and, above all, biblical narrative prose—in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary English” (Alter 2004, xvi). Alter has long demonstrated that he is a perceptive reader of the Hebrew text, and his explanatory notes are often illuminating in their discussion of the text’s rhetoric, style, and tone. But literary criticism is not the same as translation. to put it another way, being a perceptive reader is not the same as being an accomplished performer in print. I have tried on numerous occasions to sit down with Alter’s translations and read them aloud, and to date I rarely experience them as echoes of the Hebrew text. My specific objections fall into several related categories. I will begin by examining narrative, focusing on The Five Books of Moses and The David Story. Alter frequently speaks of “cadence” in both languages, which raises the question of how he hears the text. From the layout in these books, he appears to perceive it in fairly long blocs of material, occasionally broken up into paragraphs, not unlike narrative texts in English. Here is an example from the opening pages of Genesis (1:7-10), within the creation story:

The DNA of the Democratic South Africa: Ancestral Maps, Family Trees, Genealogical Fictions

This article focuses on the discourse of popular science – and particularly that of genetics and evolution – as it has been used in the democratic South Africa to develop and articulate a shared ‘African’ national identity. Analysing speeches by politicians and academics, as well as sites of popular culture ranging from television shows to the Maropeng centre at the Cradle of Humankind, I explore how a new ‘evolutionary family narrative’, in which all humans are understood to have an African ‘mother’, has been harnessed in an attempt to guarantee ‘belonging’ to citizens of all races. I further show how this specific genetic family narrative is one of a larger network of ‘genealogical fictions’ that have been fabricated and produced in part for the purpose of redefining the national community in the post-apartheid era, and which tend to reiterate the basic tropes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation-building projects in the new millennium. Finally, I analyse two novels – Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life – that debate the continuing usefulness of such genealogical fictions in the work of building a contemporary democratic nationalism.

Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible: Figuring Mephibosheth in the David Story (review)

Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible: Figuring Mephibosheth in the David Story (review)

The Violence of the Present: David's Story and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Violence of the Present:David's Story and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Aryn Bartley (bio) SINCE the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1993 (Act No. 200 of 1993), provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterized by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex; AND SINCE it is deemed necessary to establish the truth in relation to past events as well as the motives for and circumstances in which gross violations of human [r]ights have occurred, and to make the findings known in order to prevent a repetition of such acts in future; AND SINCE the Constitution states that the pursuit of national unity, the well-being of all South African citizens and peace require reconciliation between the people of South Africa and the reconstruction of society; AND SINCE the Constitution states that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization . . . BE IT THEREFORE ENACTED by the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa, as follows . . . —Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, South Africa, 1995 I wash my hands of this story. —Zoë Wicomb, David's Story [End Page 103] In his classic 1882 lecture on modern nationhood, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" ["What is a Nation?"], Ernest Renan defines the "âme, un principe spirituel" ["soul, a spiritual principle"] that is a nation as issuing from a past in the form of "la possession en commun d'un riche legs de souvenirs" ["the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories"] and a present, manifested in a "consentement actuel, le désir de vivre ensemble, la volonté de continuer à faire valoir l'héritage qu'on a reçu indivis" ["present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form"].1 The past, and especially for him a past characterized by shared suffering, gives shape to and authorizes present consent to maintain national community. Yet Renan also suggests that while shared memory of the past may bind together a nation, it may also cause ethnic or religious rifts. He claims that L'oubli, et je dirai même l'erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d'une nation, et c'est ainsi que le progrès des études historiques est souvent pour la nationalité un danger. L'investigation historique, en effet, remet en lumière les faits de violence qui se sont passés à l'origine de toutes les formations politiques, même de celles dont les conséquences ont été le plus bienfaisantes. L'unité se fait toujours brutalement. (2) [Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality]. (11) While remembering suffering, therefore, is an important tool for cohering national identity, forgetting suffering is as important. In the example Renan chooses, that of the unification of France, acts of inter-ethnic violence are erased so as to encourage citizen allegiance to a unified nation and state. France's ability to unite across ethnic, religious, and regional differences, he argues, was more successful than in other countries such as Bohemia and Turkey, where ethnic difference remained a source of dangerous conflict. Part of this success was the communal forgetting of various historical massacres (Renan, 11). Yet if institutionalized national construction has often relied on the erasure of previous violence, in the past fifty years—marked as they have been by decolonization movements, the rise and fall of military dictatorships and [End Page 104] the dismantling of apartheid—the...

ARCHIVING RESISTANCE Women's Testimony at the Threshold of the State

Increasingly today, Fanon's imagination of the postcolonial subject of difference is reconceived in the mode of an international human rights discourse along the lines of reconciliation and reparations. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has become the paradigmatic instance of a state mechanism capable of inducing the change from nationalist to politico-social consciousness; so pervasive is its influence that Moroccan and Algerian commissions refer explicitly to the South African example and openly cite it as a model of reconciling the people. This article examines the ways that women's testimony of political violence is called upon in the nationalist postcolony to signify both a primitive sphere outside the boundaries of national memory and public debate and the progressive character of inclusion at the advent of the new state. This paradox is illustrated in the South African TRC's commitment to symbolic reparation and to providing a space for women's testimony despite the refusal of most women to testify. What conceptions of the human are naturalized in state-mandated projects of healing that depend upon such narratives? What new forms of subjection and resistance await the citizens of the modern postcolonial state? It is with these questions about the power of the symbol to deny `voice' while granting the rights of speech that I turn to Asia Djebar's Blanc de l'Algérie, Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull and Zoe Wicomb's David's Story as a counter to the politics of testimony.