Zoe Wicomb Research Articles

The Psychological Impact of Apartheid on the Colored Identity in Zoe Wicomb's Playing in the Light and October

The Psychological Impact of Apartheid on the Colored Identity in Zoe Wicomb's Playing in the Light and October

The Real McCloy: Fiction, History, and the Real in Zoë Wicomb's “The One That Got Away”

This article examines the intertextual connections between Zoe Wicomb’s 2008 short story, “The One That Got Away,” and Helen McCloy’s 1945 novel, The One That Got Away , a piece of detective fiction used by Wicomb’s main character as the basis for a work of contemporary art. Drawing concepts from Wicomb’s 2005 essay on setting and intertextuality, I argue that Wicomb creatively interacts with McCloy’s novel to explore issues of authorial ethics, historical representation, and ideological critique. At the heart of both works is a series of triangular relationships between readers, texts, and their corporeal authors that foreground acts of resistant reading and creative reframing. Familiarity with McCloy’s novel reveals new forms of reference and commentary at work in Wicomb’s story.

Sara Baartman and the Ethics of Representation

This paper has as its main concern a reexamination of Stephen Gray’s 1977 poem “Hottentot Venus” in the light of two events that occurred after the poem’s publication: first, the return of the remains of Sara Baartman (Gray’s Hottentot Venus) to South Africa and their ceremonial burial; second, the publication of a biography of Baartman by Clifford Crais and Pamela Scully, a work that has much to say on the production of knowledge and the uses made of this. The paper compares Gray’s poem with a poem on Baartman by Diana Ferrus and with Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus, focusing on the attribution of agency or its absence. This discussion leads into an examination of the ethics of representation (especially the representation of the Other and of suffering), surveying, first, historical studies of the representation of Khoekhoe, Bushmen, and other marginalized peoples of southern Africa, then novels that attempt such representation or that problematize this by Dalene Matthee, Yvette Christianse, and Zoe Wicomb, and addressing views on the ethics of representation by, among others, Antjie Krog, Susan Sontag, and Alice Walker.

Redefining Shared Narrative in Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Questions of ownership occupy a central place in recent South African fiction. On one hand, novelists seek ways to develop a new sense of ownership for those dispossessed by racism and poverty. Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006), Kopano Matlwa's Coconut (2007), and Sifiso Mzobe's Young Blood (2010) exemplify this concern. On other hand, numerous writers struggle to own up to history of apartheid in face of denials that characterized apartheid system. Thus, while literary critics have celebrated freedom to explore a broader range of subjects than apartheid and its legacies (see, for example, Chapman; Frenkel and MacKenzie), a dominant strain in fiction of past fifteen years has nevertheless returned to violence of past in order to analyze nuances of guilt and responsibility. Yet paradoxically, such efforts to confront a history of violence often end in reinscribing a desire for control over that history. Emphasizing a commonality of experience, many of these novels deflect attention from different ways of experiencing same events and ongoing inequalities that underlie such differences. In 2000, Michiel Heyns analyzed how several confessional narratives by white writers, including Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples (1993) and Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1998), exculpated their protagonists--and by extension white beneficiaries of apartheid-while seemingly acknowledging varied forms of complicity apartheid had engendered. Novels with more complex approaches to guilt and responsibility have sometimes left same blind spots. Published in first decade of new millennium, Jann Turner's Southern Cross (2002), Sarah Penny's The Beneficiaries (2002), which was well reviewed by Heyns, and Rachel Zadok's highly praised debut Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005) explore interconnections between privilege, oppression, and culpability as a means of taking ownership for authors' own complicities. But each ultimately relegates questions of responsibility to past. These texts illustrate a pervasive desire to reclaim individual and collective feelings of belonging through shared narratives of past and its implications; yet they also reveal how that desire for belonging can entrench further divisions. Lisa Fugard's Skinner's Drift and Zoe Wicomb's Playing in Light, both published in 2006 by expatriate South African writers, explore alternatives to this quandary. This is not to suggest that Fugard and Wicomb are only South African writers to grapple with importance and risks of shared narrative as a foundation for reconciliation. Their approaches to this issue position them within a literary community that includes authors such as J. M. Coetzee and Achmat Dangor, who interrogate the idea that past trauma may be wrapped up and put to rest and acknowledge that remembered violence does not necessarily lead to reconciliation (Barnard 659-60). Like their contemporaries, Fugard and Wicomb insist on importance of excavating traces of past in order to create new narratives for future. But they consider how predicating reconciliations on shared accounts of past can oversimplify complexities of present. Taken together, novels intimate that shared narratives with power to build new relationships require ceding control over limits of one's story in a necessarily incomplete responsibility for voices of others--the stories they have to tell, experiences they have undergone, and conditions in which they live. At same time, Wicomb complicates this vision. She explores ways in which an ethics of self-dispropriation, whereby a person is dispossessed of his or her identity in order to enact hospitality toward someone else, wars with need for those who still face unequal opportunities to reappropriate their identities and surroundings. …

Thought-Perception Beyond Form or, the Logic of Shame

ThoughT-PerCePTion beyond forM or, The logiC of ShaMe Raji Vallury Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2011, 224ppFew books published recently in the field of postcolonial studies can rival the virtuosic brilliance of Timothy Bewes' The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Dense, challenging and thought-provoking, the work's dazzling erudition, which combines highly inventive readings of an impressive array of philosophers, writers, literary and cinematic texts, opens new critical inroads into the relation between ethics and aesthetics. Bewes' central thesis is that shame constitutes the event which gives material form and expression to the irresolvable tension between the ethical and the aesthetic that is the hallmark of postcolonial literature, indeed of all modern writing. Pace Joseph Conrad, Bewes defines shame as 'the experience of a prolonged incommensurability between a form and a substance . . . in a world of desolate unintelligibility' (pp2-3). Shame in other words, is the text's formal articulation of its ethical, political and representational inadequacy. Sartre's insight into the 'shameful' structure of perception, which destabilises the encounter between the subject of knowledge and the object of its comprehension, functions as Bewes' analytical point of departure, while Hegel, Lukacs, Adorno, Badiou and Deleuze provide the conceptual tools needed to theorise a practice of postcolonial writing 'freed from the shaming, subtractive consciousness of a being who writes' (p192). True postcoloniality, or freedom from the shame built into the very structure of colonialism: such is the radical thought to which Bewes' book attempts to give form. Illuminating the paradoxically inseparable distances, gaps and dislocations between the subject and object of perception, form and event, revolutionary potential and realisation, aesthetics and ethics in the works of writers such as Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, J.M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, and Zoe Wicomb, The Event of Postcolonial Shame seeks to reformulate critical enquiry within postcolonial studies 'not positively, by the presence of certain cultural motifs, identity formations, historical struggles, or emancipatory goals, but negatively, by an incommensurability that is materialized whenever such presences are produced or named as the object or the subject of a work' (p7). As I will suggest a little later, the luminous clarity of Bewes' negative critique, which posits the necessary conjoining of shame and form, and which attempts to shed light on the event of shame as 'a modality of thought that cannot adequately be accounted for by language, or reduced to what is expressible in language' (p14), risks leaving the political in the dark by underscoring failure as the constitutive measure of the success of literature and by privileging the ethical as 'a permanent rendering inadequate of form' (p19).As mentioned earlier, shame is the literary form that emblematises the gap within the perceiving subject, 'between the I as experienced by the self and the self as it appears to and is reflected in the eyes of the other' (p24). Bewes deconstructs the ontology of the subject that sustains Sartre's formulation of the perceptual relation that engenders the structure of shame (a formal relation that cannot be viewed as an ethical response to political inequality, but must be seen as a determinant condition built into the very apparatus of power), by arguing for shame as an experience of the dissolution and evacuation of the self. The vector of this process of de-subjectification, as Bewes demonstrates through his Deleuzian reading of Lawrence, is the negation of perception (and perceptibility) towards nothingness and abstraction (p36). The impossibility of representing the dissolution of the self towards imperceptibility finds formal expression in the shame of the postcolonial novel, of shame as the form of the experience of perceptual dissonance and discrepancy (p46). …

The Specter of Tokkie—Facing the Past, Inventing the Future: Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Zoe Wicomb s novel Playing in the Light, published in 2006, is set in Cape Town in the 1990s at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Its protagonist Marion Campbell, who is the owner of a successful travel agency, is suddenly haunted by the specter of a young woman she does not know, but who seems familiar nevertheless, on the ocean between her flat and Robben Island—where political prisoners were kept—and who seems to strangle her in the muslin curtains of her four-poster bed at night. This face becomes confused with the repressed memory of the family servant of Marion s childhood, Tokkie. When Marion sees the young woman’s face again on the title page of a daily newspaper, she discovers that the woman of her nightmares, Patricia Williams, was an activist in the anti-apartheid struggle who was tortured by the police and has just told her story before the TRC. Yet the conflated specters of Tokkie and Patricia Williams set off a process whereby Marion has to confront her own repressed past as a “play white,” i.e., someone who—although of colored origin—was light-skinned enough to pass for white. Marion has to disentangle the web of lies that her biography was until now and find a standpoint from which to invent a future for herself that will be free of the shame which the fear of her colored status becoming public imposed on her. Using Derrida s Specters of Marx as a theoretical framework, this paper explores how the past is imbricated in the present and how—only by facing it—is the fiction of a fixed, unified self broken up, making room for inventions of the future. This is the emancipation from racial classification which the New South Africa made possible through the TRC.

‘Amanuensis’ and ‘Steatopygia’: The Complexity of ‘Telling the Tale’ in Zoë Wicomb’s <i>David’s Story</i>

Two words, ‘amanuensis’ and ‘steatopygia,’ each burdened with its own history, appear in Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story with a frequency that commands further consideration. This study shows that these two words are in fact narratives which reveal the tension, inherent in all historical narratives, between that which is denotative or factual and that which is connotative or fictional. Similarly, the words also form the shifting horizon from which we may see history as a narrative of the past that is always also a narrative of the present. The link between these words will ultimately show the complex, compromised role of the narrator and, perhaps, of all historians.

The event of postcolonial shame

In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world. Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an event of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoe Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame. Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it. Timothy Bewes is associate professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Cynicism and Postmodernity and Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism.

“Once I was white, now I am coloured": Outside the Dark Closet and through the Looking-glass in Zoe Wicomb’s “Playing in the Light"

“Once I was white, now I am coloured": Outside the Dark Closet and through the Looking-glass in Zoe Wicomb’s “Playing in the Light"

In Search of Tommie

Zoe Wicomb was born and educated in South Africa. She has taught at the University of the Western Cape and is currently Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathcly...

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.

Lessons from the Dead Masters: Wordsworth and Byron in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

As one whose research interests lie in field of Romanticism, most specifically Wordsworth and Byron, I was obviously intrigued by J. M. Coetzee's use of these poets in Disgrace. Subsequent readings of work have convinced me that more attention needs to be paid to deeper implications of their presence in text. Certainly many scholars have explored significance of David Lurie's professional interest in Romantic poets and novel's imbeddedness in what Jane Taylor has referred to as the European Enlightenment's legacy of autonomy of individual as well as a specifically eighteenth century model of philosophical sympathy (1999, 25). Yet I feel that insufficient attention has been paid to significance of Romanticism, Wordsworthian and Byronic in novel. Generally, commentary ranges from seeing Lurie's academic interests as symptomatic of his white colonialist mentality to a more nuanced but insufficiently developed focus on possibilities lying behind Coetzee's startling juxtaposition of two of most famed and yet most overtly antagonistic of Romantic poets. Zoe Wicomb is representative of first approach. In her estimation, Lurie may be rejected since he looks to Europe as centre of reference and our feelings and experiences of nature need not be structured by poetic discourses from metropolis (2000,21ο).1 I feel that such criticisms lead to an inadequate reading of significance of Wordsworth and Byron in novel. Much more is going on in Disgrace than a simplistic anti-Eurocentricism, and ethical and political dimensions of early nineteenth-century Romanticism cannot be

"The Truth lies in Black and White." The Language of Truth and the Search for Coloured Identity in Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story

Cet article analyse la manière dont Zoe Wicomb explore les procédés de construction identitaire et les notions d’inaccessibilité et de multiplicité de la vérité. Ancré dans l’Afrique du Sud peu après la chute de l’apartheid, ce roman reflète les difficultés intrinsèques à un pays en pleine mutation et soulève des questions importantes quant à la (re)construction de l’identité. Par le biais de jeux narratifs et langagiers, Wicomb problématise la notion de vérité et, créant au sein de ce roman des relations intertextuelles avec des textes sud-africains et internationaux, interroge la notion de l’hybridité, proposant ainsi une vision anti-essentialiste de la "Nouvelle" Afrique du Sud

Loose Memory in Toni Morrison's Paradise and Zoe Wicomb's David's Story

This essay compares Morrison's Paradise and Wicomb's David's Story to explore corresponding machinations of memory operating in both novels' featured communities of resistance. Tracing the ways in which women and memory figure as potential threats to stabilized order and established truth, this essay argues that the management of collective memory peculiarly resembles the containment of women in racialized societies, the United States and South Africa. This observation about what is called "loose memory" alerts us to the dangers of foundationalist regimes of Truth and Reality. It also points to alternative, "loosening" narrative strategies that Morrison's and Wicomb's novels model.

Nationalism and the Development of Identity in Postcolonial Fiction: Zo� Wicomb and Michelle Cliff

To many progressive activists in the 1960s, the writings of Frantz Fanon served not only as a source for intellectual development but also as guidebooks for revolutionary praxis. Fanon's critique of neocolonialism and cultural nationalism along with his call for direct political and militant engagement with the enemy as the basis of national culture in the process of decolonization is at the core of the following discussion. This essay locates Fanon's anticolonial view of cultural production as it has been represented in literary texts by African and diaspora women writers. Zoe Wicomb (South Africa) and Michelle Cliff (Jamaica) serve as examples of postcolonial writers who explore the potential of national consciousness as a necessary stage in the politicization of female characters struggling to decolonize their minds.

Nationalism and the Development of Identity in Postcolonial Fiction: Zoe Wicomb and Michelle Cliff

Nationalism and the Development of Identity in Postcolonial Fiction: Zoe Wicomb and Michelle Cliff

Amazing Cityscapes and Contextualized Reading in Zoe Wicomb's ‘You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town’

The aim of this paper is to show how the journey through the suburbs and the city centre of Cape Town of the main protagonist and focalizer of the eponymous story, Sallie Smit, can be perceived differently by a reader who knows the actual topography of the place and by the uninformed reader. Besides, as in many postcolonial texts, the knowledge of the socio-historical background of the story is essential, as is illustrated through the study of the very rich metaphor ‘Desire is a Tsafendas tapeworm’, which is likely to be misconstrued by a reader who, solely interested in stylistics, would disregard the historical reference. As a result, textuality is viewed as the complex blending (or conflation) of contextual, extratextual and stylistic elements.

Zoe Wicomb in Conversation with Hein Willemse

David's Story tells the story of the former guerilla fighter David Dirkse; Sally, his wife; the enigmatic and physically powerful Dulcie, David's comrade and suspected lover. All along, the struggle was his life and now, after the release of Nelson Mandela and the dawn of the freedom Dirkse fought for, the main character finds himself in a difficult situation. His name is circulated on a hit list of uncertain origin. With this imminent threat and in fulfilment of his need for historical representation he tells his story to an unnamed woman writer. Dirkse and his narrator explore his identity as a coloured person (a person of mixed heritage) and his roots in the Griqua community. The peculiar ideas of Andrew Le Fleur, the founder--culture broker of Griqua identity, resonate in Dirkse's search for his place in the new, postapartheid South Africa. The novel has a fragmentary, postmodernist structure with a complexity of historical tales, imaginary relationships, and a mixture of historical and fictional characters who represent the ambiguities of racial identities and political and social life in South Africa.

'A Clearing in the Bush': Teaching South African Women's Writing

This essay takes its title from a short story by Zoe Wicomb (1987), so as to begin to locate and find a way of expressing the experiences of reading, discussing and teaching a selection of South African women's writing to student groups in the UK. This paper looks specifically at teaching South African women's writing on a 'Black and Asian women's writing'module, with some reference to other classes in which South African women's writing has been part of this study. In doing so, post-colonial and feminist critical practices are usefully integrated with the learning theories of phenomenography and experiential learning in order to better explore the developing learning experience. From where we are located, it has been important to find our own voices with which to articulate our responses to these texts. Our own locus of experience, our 'clearing in the bush' is something we have grown gradually to recognize and identify. It is hoped that we have been learning to appreciate the writings available to us without translating them into the discourse of the colonial, nor filling them up with our own particular meanings and the interpretations of a white feminist criticism. The post-colonial imaginary, and the discourses available to us have meshed with our own experiences as students and teacher, learners and readers in the process.