by Zoe Wicomb
WRITING AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
David’s Story is not only about revolutionary struggle; it is also about a revolution in language. Hence the reference to Soweto Day, when the schoolchildren of Soweto, and many other schoolchildren thereafter, rebelled against the language imposed on them by the Bantu Education Act; 16 June is also James Joyce’s Bloomsday, the “day of the revolution of the word” (35).92 (It is on this day that David and Dulcie meet, and on the day after this, in another year, that David disappears.) In 1993 Wicomb wrote of the need for “a radical pedagogy, a level of literacy that will allow our children to read works of literature that will politicise them into an awareness not only of power, but of the equivocal, the ambiguous, and the ironic which is always embedded in power … that will sensitise those whose privilege has blinded them to the ironies of power.”93 Unlike the political slogan, or the propositional statement, or the either-or choices upon which, for instance, the judicial system is based, writing offers ambiguity, ambivalence, and nuance. One of the tasks of the writer is to be both comprehensible and innovative, to represent reality (or the illusion of reality) as it is commonly believed to be experienced, as ordered and sequential, and at the same time to show its actual ambiguities and confusions, the richness of its unknown and unconscious processes, the underside that is not commonly seen. “The oppositionality of writing,” Wicomb has said in her essay “Why I Write,” resides in the unexpected, the hitherto unsaid—“the known which … turns out to be what we had not known.”94
In one of the most tantalising and elliptical of her statements about her own writing, Wicomb has referred to her need to write in a realist mode and at the same time not to impose order on reality: “[P]recisely because there isn’t order, there’s conflict and that’s not only in the South African situation … I think it’s important to have chaos on the page.” She explains “chaos” as “an alternative to the camouflage of coherence that socio-political structures are about,”95 and we may think of it also as that which has not yet entered language as proposition, or as cliché, or as meaning, or truth. This “chaos” is to be both feared and welcomed in reality as well as in writing; Wicomb cites the socio-political disorder in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, with the increase of violence by the state but also by the revolutionary forces that freed South Africa from white minority rule. For the narrator of David’s Story, the physical “chaos” that Dulcie’s body represents, lying peacefully in the writer’s garden, and oozing its honey, may seem to be one thing; the “chaos” caused by the bullet in her computer may seem to be another, as words leak out and lose the kind of relation to one another that produces meaning (212). Yet both dramatise David’s and the narrator’s own fearful relation to writing: the celebration of truth and beauty may look all too like an act of mutilation.
The text makes an acerbic comment about the incapacity of the ANC to handle the truth (140), yet notes its own difficulty. David muses about metaphors such as the truth “in black and white” and “colouring the truth” (136) in a way that leads us to ask: What kind of world do we live in where truth cannot coexist with nuance? How can we be post-apartheid (in the metaphysical sense) if truth is still “black and white”? Moreover, what kind of world do we live in where love constitutes political betrayal? David says of his love for Dulcie, “To indulge in such passion is to betray the cause, and there is far too much of that already” (137). In the world he inhabits, rape and torture seem acceptable, as if the (understandable) paranoia of the political struggle makes them valid forms of behavior. Similarly, nuance may seem to be a betrayal. Wicomb offers a compelling contextualisation of women’s silences here: in the face of Le Fleur’s political accommodations and ethnic divisions, Rachael Susanna’s voice starts fading, her body falls apart, and her buttocks grow vast with despair. This is a foreshadowing of Dulcie’s transfiguration.
Dulcie represents a kind of flux and flexibility that both represents the chaotic act of writing and charts the contradictions and difficulties of her representation.96 Of course, Dulcie is very much herself, too—a woman in political command, and under political subjection—but she nonetheless stands in this novel as an elusive force, the “bewitching phantom” Sterne speaks of in Tristram Shandy when he refers to the endless search for truth.97 Indeed, if her representation fluctuates between the mythic and the real, so too does her name alert us to these two possibilities. For the mythic, a partial prototype is Dulcinea, the imaginary, idealised mistress in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), in whose name Don Quixote undertakes his various enterprises. For the real-life, a partial prototype is Dulcie September (1935–1988), ANC activist, whose murder in Paris still remains officially unresolved. When David and his narrator ponder a way to write about Dulcie, they allude to the possibilities offered by this story. “Perhaps,” says David’s narrator, “the whole of it should be translated into the passive voice. Or better still, the middle voice. If only that were not so unfashionably linked with the sixties and with French letters” (197).98
The novel offers opposing images of writing as truth—the rustle of the bougainvillea, for instance, and “a stack of so many dirty dinner plates that will not come unstuck as each bottom clings to another’s grease” (197). When the narrator asks why Dulcie does not speak, David’s answer, in effect, is that she has not developed the right tongue: “Just as freedom is not the anaemic thing for us as it is for nice, clean liberals, so violence too is not a streaming sheet of blood or gore” (204). All in all, it is a different and a more difficult truth that is being striven for than the one which depends on existing political discourse—and as in all great writing, questions are posed, rather than answers given. Dulcie remains to haunt us with questions about representation, history, revolution, and truth: her protean shape (35) is, as Wicomb has said of language, a “slippery system of signs” which “prevents it from being wholly appropriated by a dominant group as an instrument of repression.”99 She holds onto idealism, however embarrassing it seems; she has been serious as a revolutionary; she has done it too well for a woman; she would do it all again. (180)
Wicomb makes no claims for the material effectiveness of the literary. In a 1992 essay, she asks about the function of writing in a world where “beggars [are] beating at our doors for food.”100 And in “Why I Write” she says, “It seems dishonest to claim that you write in order to bring about political change. There are other shorter and more effective routes to that end.”101 Still, her interventions are profoundly political, like those offered by philosophical deconstruction, in that they work at the discursive formations which order the world. The literary and historical reinscription offered by David’s Story strives for a truth beyond ideological construction yet nonetheless recognizes itself as text.
So all the while Wicomb’s crisply ironic voice infuses the novel, at its sharpest around political orthodoxies or the claiming of authoritative positions: Antjie is “a good Griqua” (97); underground political activity is “boys’ stuff” (187); and when Ouma Ragel insists the Griqua are not a drunken people, we see her “[s]truggling drunkenly to her feet” (95). And through Ouma Sarie’s voice, comes the most distressing irony of all, for within it is embedded a question not only about South Africa’s political future and its entrapment by the past, but also about the capacity of language to manage—and yet not manage, after all—to give harmony and peace and pleasure to the world. Ouma Sarie says, “And now, how everything’s turning out alright, De Klerk letting Mandela out to help him fix up the country nicely and her Sally all settled down decently, herself a mother” (122). The writing does make it sound all right in the beautiful passage that follows, about “the pleasure of all that shimmering water in which her children play like fish knowing their way through the waves” (122). But soon enough Ouma has to “surfac[e] out of the cool blues and greens of sleep,” and a little girl is sobbing (123). As Dulcie would say, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it” (199).
Dorothy Driver
University of Cape Town
October 2000
NOTES
My thanks are due to the University of Cape Town Research Administration for providing research funds to help in the preparation of this essay, and to Meg Samuelson for sterling assistance. My thanks also to Christopher Saunders and Tony Morphet.
1. Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987; New York: Feminist Press, 2000). Morrison’s comments appear on the cover of the first U.S. edition (New York: Pantheon, 1987).
2. See Carol Sicherman’s afterword to the Feminist Press reprint of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Sicherman lists useful critical responses, to which should be added the following: Judith Raiskin, “‘Miskien of Gold Gemake’: Zoë Wicomb,” in Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 205–233.
3. Wicomb, “Comment on Return to South Africa,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994) 576.
4. For an important indication of contemporary debate, see Andrew Bank, ed. The Proceedings of the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference (Cape Town: Institute for Historical Research, U of the Western Cape, in conjunction with Infosource CC, 1998). The Griqua have recently been accorded First Nation status by the United Nations, a status also granted to the San and Khoi people (and in other countries, the Australian Aborigines, the natives of Greenland, and several indigenous American peoples).
The development of Griqua ethnicity may be seen as a reaction to two major indications of official government attitude, one under a white minority government, and the other under a black majority government. Under apartheid, Griqua was a sub-category of Coloured. Following a practice established in the 1904 census, where Coloured and African were differentiated for the first time, the Population Registration Act of 1950 broadly distinguished between White, Coloured, and Native (i.e. African), and allowed for further subdivision according to the ethnicity of the two latter groups. In 1959 the coloured category was divided into Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese, “other Asiatic,” and “other Coloured.” Despite the legal rigidity, confusing practices of racial classification continued to characterise the apartheid era. Classification was based on appearance, on general acceptance and repute, as well as on the idiosyncracies of government officials. Griqua were sometimes classified as African (in which case they would then be educated through the medium of one of the Bantu languages, under the Bantu Education Act of 1954). For this and further information, see Muriel Horrell, comp. Laws Affecting Race Relations in South Africa (to the end of 1976) (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1978) especially 16–17.
The development of Griqua ethnicity may also be seen in the context of a recent speech made by Thabo Mbeki, then deputy president of the country, that the “Bushman” and “Hottentot” had perished as a people. The claim was made in a speech called “I Am An African,” delivered at the opening of Parliament (8 May 1996) on the eve of the Constitutional Assembly accepting the new Constitution for South Africa. Speaking at the Khoisan Identities Conference, advocate Mansell Upham, Khoisan representative, said: “This incident perhaps illustrates best the extent of what I would turn [sic; i.e., term] ‘Our national shame’ … Unfortunately, the negotiated settlement that saw the official demise of apartheid purposely ignored the aboriginal peoples of the land” (Bank 42). A recent newspaper article by wellknown columnist John Matshikiza shows how politically charged Griqua identity remains, for it involves competing claims to the paramountcy, competing definitions of Griqua identity, and increasingly intense canvassing on the part of South Africa’s major political parties for Griqua support. See John Matshikiza, “In Search of the Griqua and their real leader,” Weekly Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) 21 May 1999. In a recent conference paper (publication forthcoming in conference proceedings), Linda Waldman discusses the various different Griqua political groupings in current politics, and their strategic alliances. “No Rainbow Bus for Us: Building Nationalism in South Africa,” paper presented at the conference entitled “Africa’s Indigenous Peoples: ‘First Peoples’ or ‘Marginalised Minorities,’” Centre of African Studies, U of Edinburgh, 24–25 May 2000.
5. See Joseph H. Greenberg, “The Click Languages,” in Studies in African Linguistic Classification (New Haven: Compass, 1955) 80–94.
6. In the context of a rising tide of racial segregation, early proposals that the name Griqua simply replace that of Coloured depended on drawing coloureds into rural communities and establishing their economic independence in self-segregating homelands. In contrast, the African Political (later, People’s) Organization (APO) attracted urban coloured support on the basis of integration into the wider society. (The APO was established in 1903 and flourished under the leadership of Dr Abdullah Abdurahman from 1905 to 1940.) For relevant histories of coloured South Africans, see Ian Goldin, Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Coloured Identity in South Africa (London & New York: Longman, 1987); Gavin Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African ‘Coloured’ Politics (New York: St Martins Press; Cape Town: David Philip, 1987); Mary Simons, “Organised Coloured Political Movements,” in Hendrick W. van der Merwe and C.J. Groenewald, eds. Occupational and Social Change among Coloured People in South Africa (Cape Town: Juta, 1976) 202–237; and R. van der Ross, Myths and Attitudes: An Inside Look at the Coloured People (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1979).
Recent Griqua nationalism distinguishes itself from the more general coloured grouping by being more ethnically understood. At the Khoisan Identities conference, Alan G. Morris felt the need to stress that Griqua identity should depend on “its special history as identifiable political and social communities … and diverse biological origins” rather than the “almost unwavering focus of the GNC [Griqua National Conference] on the Khoikhoi cultural origins of the group” (Bank 371). He also pointed out that the 1980 census figures of nearly 100,000 Griqua was so much higher than the 1860 figures that “a significant in-migration” is suggested, rather than natural demographic increase, due to the prior receptivity of the Griqua to outsiders (Bank 370–71). See also Alan G. Morris, “The Griqua and the Khoikhoi: Biology, Ethnicity and the Construction of Identity,” Kronos: Journal of Cape History 24 (1997) 106–118. In relation specifically to the Nama people, another grouping within the Khoisan, Emile Boonzaier observes that, while they objected in the early 1980s to the label Nama and preferred coloured, by the late 1980s they asserted Nama identity. See “People, Parks and Politics: Resolving Conflicting Priorities in the Richtersveld,” in M. Ramphele and C. McDowell, eds. Restoring the Land: Environment and Change in Post-Apartheid South Africa (London: Panos, 1991) 155–162. For a study of coloured literature, see Grant Farred, Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).
7. Wicomb, “Another Story,” in Sarah Lefanu and Stephen Hayward, eds. Colors of a New Day: Writing for South Africa (1990; New York: Pantheon, 1991) 1–15.
8. Especially important is Wicomb’s essay “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds. Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 91–107. Here Wicomb addresses the white pathologising of black female sexuality and coloured complicity, the ethnocentric mythologising which excludes other cultural and political groups, the replacement of “the narrative of assimilation” (provided through the political activism of the 1970s and 1980s) by the “ambiguous coloured exclusion and self-exclusion from national liberation politics” (98), and the erasure of slavery and the loss of “all knowledge of our Xhosa, Indonesian, East African, or Khoi origins” (100). As her title indicates, she is interested in the operations of shame and silence in ethnic representations and self-representations: “We do not speak about miscegenation; it is after all the very nature of shame to stifle its own discourse” (92). Her essay proposes that instead of denying h
istory and fabricating a totalizing colouredness, “multiple belongings” be accepted (105).
9. See Isaac Schapera, The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa: Bushmen and Hottentots (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
10. Qtd. in Samuel James Halford, The Griquas of Griqualand (Cape Town: Juta, [1949]) 13.
11. See the family tree on pages vi and vii. The genealogy of the Kok family is taken from William Dower, The Early Annals of Kokstad and Griqualand East ed. Christopher Saunders (1902; Pietermaritzburg & Durban: U of Natal P, Killie Campbell Africana Library, 1978) 169. Besides Halford and Saunders’s edition of Dower, I am generally indebted to the following for historical information: Robert Edgar and Christopher Saunders, “A. A. S. Le Fleur and the Griqua Trek of 1917: Segregation, Self-Help, and Ethnic Identity,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 15.2 (1982) 201–20; Richard Elphick, Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985); Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976); Christopher Saunders and Nicholas Southey, Historical Dictionary of South Africa, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md. & London: Scarecrow Press, 2000); Alf Wannenberg, Forgotten Frontiersmen (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1980).
