Emily Van Kley, Marijka Belgum-Gabbert, Cheri Green
South African Literature
Dr. Jonathan Steinwand
7 December 2001
Zoë Wicomb’s Re-Vision: Sexuality and Race in a Postmodern ‘Coloured’ Context
Her story was forgotten for centuries, buried under mounds of
dusty racist documents by the Afrikaner government of South Africa, sloshing
in a jar of formaldehyde in a museum in Paris. But slowly she has
been rediscovered, by women in South Africa, in England, in the United
States. They have written plays and poems, made films and speeches
telling her story in the hopes of reclaiming her torturous past.
Her name was Saartje Bartmaan, or at least that’s what her captors called
her. She was a probably a Khoi women, indigenous to South Africa,
although her race has been contested: she has also been called ‘black’
and ‘coloured’ (“Shame,” 93). She had swelling buttocks and a vagina
whose inner lips extended maybe three, maybe four inches. In the
early nineteenth century, when the study of Khoi women became fashionable
in European society, she was convinced to leave her home to become a dancer,
with a contract that she may or may not have seen. A man from England
promised her that she could make money to bring home to her tribe.
What followed was five years of exhibition in museums and at fashionable
parties, her spectacular buttocks and breasts bare, French and British
men and women clustering around her, mocking her at the same time that
her body made them uncomfortable with their own desire. Her days
were punctuated by rape and scientific examinations. She died, probably
of syphilis, and her body was given to Georges Cuvier, a French scientist
who made a plaster model of her brain and preserved her buttocks and vagina
to be displayed at the Musee de l’Homme. They remained on display
until ten years ago. (“Heretical” and “Hottentot”)
One of the women who has been interested in Saartje Baartman,
or the “Hottentot Venus,” as she was called by the people who made money
from her appearance, is South African author, Zoë Wicomb. Baartman
appears in both her fiction and her academic work. As she says of
Baartman in her essay, “Shame and Identity: the Case of the Coloured in
South Africa,” “Saartje Baartman, whose very name indicates her cultural
hybridity, exemplifies the body as site of shame, a body bound up with
the politics of location” (93). This sense of shame as it relates
to “cultural hybridity” is a major issue in all of Zoë Wicomb’s work.
The main characters in her fiction are ‘coloured,’ meaning that they have
ancestors of different ethnicities and races: Khoi-San, Afrikaans, British,
French, Griqua. She uses this ‘coloured’ viewpoint to deconstruct
many of the sexual and racial hierarchies we generally associate with South
African society. Centering her reflections in a ‘coloured’ context
changes the focus of our examination of South African society from a well-ordered
system that places whites above ‘coloureds’ above ‘Indians’ above ‘natives’
to an approach that acknowledges the way that racial and sexual discrimination
create a tangled web within and among these racial groups.
Wicomb accomplishes this deconstruction of our expectations about
sexuality and race in South African society by using a postmodern writing
style––especially the techniques of writing in contradiction, refusing
to supply clear-cut definitions of characters, setting, and theme, and
treating as important perspectives that have often been ignored in writing
in and about South Africa. The fact that this style often creates
confusion for the reader causes the reader to question her or his definition
of ‘literature’ and then parallel that rethinking with questions about
the clear racial and sexual distinctions in South African society.
In order to explore Wicomb’s techniques, we will consider mostly her two
book-length fictions: David’s Story, a novel about a Griqua man who begins
a search for his ancestry, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, a work that
consists of short stories so related they can also be read in novel form.
We will also consult shorter works such as short stories and critical essays,
as well as God’s Stepchildren, a racist novel written by Sarah Gertrude
Millin which Wicomb refers to in much of her work.
One of the most obvious ways that Wicomb uses her postmodern
style to create a clearer picture of South African society is by simply
changing the perspective found in racist literature. She acknowledges
the influence books like Millin’s have had on both white views of ‘coloured’
people as well as on ‘coloured’ people’s ideas about themselves.
In God’s Stepchildren, Millin traces the genealogy of a ‘coloured’ family
from their British ancestor, the Reverend Andrew Flood, to his great-great
grandchildren. She calls the women and men who are products of this
miscegenation, “nothing but an untidiness of God’s earth––a mixture of
degenerate brown people, rotten with sickness, an affront against Nature”
(Millin 304). This book and other writings like it, combined with
spectacles like the one of Saartje Baartman being displayed naked to Europeans
who did not understand her body shape, except that it was different from
their own and therefore obviously “freakish,” were the roots of shame for
the ‘coloured’ community in South Africa. As Wicomb writes in her
essay about shame, the mark of miscegenation is on the very visage of each
coloured person (“Shame,” 93). This means that there is no escape from
this shame without first confronting it through re-vision of the texts
and situations that created it.
Wicomb therefore rewrites God’s Stepchildren in several ways.
First, she makes Deborah Kleinhans––Andrew Flood’s daughter––the main character
of “Another Story,” a short piece that in its very name suggests its goal
not to simply refute Millin’s book. She knows its influence cannot
be simply undone, but rather she must re-view the story, revealing its
one-sided nature and offering another story to diversify this perspective.
Suddenly, as we see Deborah taking a trip to visit her niece who is a professor
in Cape Town, we see the tensions between ‘coloured’ South Africans and
their society, through the eyes of a character who has no choice but to
notice how these tensions affect her. For example, Deborah is concerned
about fitting into her newly urban surroundings, as we see her agonizing
over which compartment of her airline lunch is the correct first course,
comparing it to her experience serving in white households as a model of
what is proper and, therefore desirable (“Another,” 4-5). At the
same time, she dismisses the fact that the white woman next to her turns
her back to Deborah the moment she sits down: “‘Ag, it’s the way of the
world,’ she consoled herself, ‘these whites don’t know how to work things
out, can’t even run their blooming homes’” (“Another,” 4). Although
Deborah wants to eat in the proper ‘white’ fashion, her ideas of race cannot
be reduced to her simply wishing to be like a white person because simultaneously
with her thoughts about the order foods are served in white households,
she acknowledges that white people have no ability to administer order
in those households. This change in perspective from God’s Stepchildren
demonstrates the multiplicity inherent in ‘coloured’ experience and in
so doing condemns Millin’s work for its failure to acknowledge it.
Because of the complex postmodernist style that Zoë Wicomb
uses in David’s Story, the reader is forced to view sexuality in both a
‘coloured’ context, and through the references to Baartman, a white context.
The driving concept behind this examination of sexuality is steatopygia.
As the narrator of David’s Story says, “David falters over the word [steatopygia]
that has fired his imagination, that has set the story on its course” (17).
Steatopygia defines, for the white male colonizers of South Africa, ‘coloured’
sexuality and the ‘coloured’ woman’s role within it. It is the excessive
accumulation of fat upon the buttocks and applies to indigenous South African
women. However, it should be noted that this is not the Khoi definition
for that part of women’s anatomy; the definition was written by a
member of the colonizing race and was intended to be read by other members
of that same race. Therefore, any accumulation of fat on the buttocks
that surpassed the norm for the white women that these people encountered
is regarded as an excess, when in reality, steatopygia was not abnormal
for Khoi women. It was natural, beautiful and sexually attractive.
White people, however, have long considered indigenous South
African women and their descendants, the ‘coloureds,’ as over-sexed beings.
Perhaps the origins of these stereotypes came from the steatopygia of the
Khoi women, as well as their genitalia which is large compared to white
women’s genitalia and occupies a prominent position in the pubic area.
White European men, when they first viewed these anatomical differences
between Khoi and European women, associated the size of the organs involved
in sex with the amount of desire these women felt and the amount of sex
they desired. This link made by whites ‘proved’ that steatopygia
was evidence of ‘coloured’ concupiscence.
Saartje Baartman, taken from her homeland of southern Africa,
provided the physical evidence of ‘coloured’ lasciviousness and became,
simultaneously, an object of desire and revulsion for white men in the
late nineteenth century. In attempting to explain why people in England
and France found such a foreign physical feature attractive at all, we
must remember one fashion of the nineteenth century, the bustle.
How did this wire creation relate to the large bottoms of the Khoi women?
Did the white men who took it upon themselves to judge women’s sexual appetites
relate the two?
In David’s Story, Eduard le Fleur, the first of David’s white
ancestors to arrive in South Africa, is torn between his disgust and his
lust when he first sees pictures of steatopygia, drawn by his mother’s
lover––and perhaps his father––Georges Cuvier. These sexual
feelings mix with his passion to convert the bearers of steatopygia to
his religion. On the ship he imagines “clumps of disfigured steatopygous
people” but at the same time, he is ‘perversely’ attracted to the
‘freakish’ anatomical phenomenon of steatopygia (“David’s,” 37).
“It was the buttocks that made the boy sigh deeply, as the silver fish
fountained out of the sea, those mountains of insensible flesh that would
have to be infused with a love for God” (“David’s” 37-38). Upon first
reading, the reference to the silver fish seems to only draw attention
to the fact that young Eduard is ship-bound (and very ill because of it).
However, the description of a silver fountain out of the sea suggests the
orgasmic intensity of Eduard’s––and by association, all white people’s––attraction
to the magnificent steatopygia of those Khoi women.
David finds steatopygia sexually attractive, and the two most
important women in his life, his wife Sally, and his “lover” Dulcie both
display fine steatopygia. “Steaopygous Sally, turning to the tune
of the collapsed springs of the mattress, presses a buttock into David’s
thin hip, offering warmth and well-being that brings a sleep-smile to his
lips” (16). Because of miscegenation in both Sally and Dulcie’s ancestries,
their steatopygia was probably a watered-down version of Saartje Baartman
and other pure Khoi women, however, the reader is given the clear impression
that Sally and Dulcie are desirable for this feature. However, this
provides a sad comparison to the Hottentot Venus, Saartje Baartman.
Sally, first changed her name from Saartjie to Sarah in high
school, and then, as she was being recruited by the ANC, to the even more
anglicized Sally. Wicomb deliberately forces the reader to connect
Saartje Baartman to Sally when she tells us that Sally was named Saartjie
by her mother. One of the most plausible literary explanations for
Sally’s change of name is her rejection of steatopygia and the implications
of ‘coloured’ concupiscence that it symbolizes.
Perhaps Sally’s choice to change her name is a reflection of her desire
to “start afresh” as a ‘coloured’ women only, not as a woman with mixed
French and Khoi, or Afrikaner and Griqua, or any other mixed-race ancestry.
She wants a name that does not identify her racial identity beyond separating
her from Afrikaner culture (“David’s,” 28).
Sexuality in a ‘coloured’ context is not exempt from the sexual
roles which also pervade white sexual encounters. But here, using
postmodernism to upset structural expectations within the text, Wicomb
also upsets the hierarchy of sexual rapport, similar to the way in which
she discards the idea of a hierarchical form of racial discrimination.
First Wicomb acknowledges that ‘coloured’ women are not free from the boundaries
of sexual discrimination (just as white women are not free). But
when Wicomb chooses to recognize the fact that the power structure for
‘coloured’ women is not standardized, she gives her women characters the
power to create––subversively––their own sexual agency within their relationships
with ‘coloured’ men. If women feel free to varying degrees from this
power structure then some are able to avoid feeling restrained within their
relationships with men.
This complexity is found not only within characters but also
within the social context of those characters, especially in regards to
sexuality. Wicomb shows that sexuality cannot be reduced to a predictable
system of exploitation based on race. There are many differing power
structures within the relationships in You Can’t get Lost in Cape Town
and the sexual hierarchy as we know it within races and between racial
groups is illuminated and also shifted when viewed from a ‘coloured’ perspective.
In the story “A Clearing in the Brush” Frieda is attending what
seems to be a ‘coloured’ University in Cape Town. Issues of sexual
desirability figure largely in this story, as Frieda describes a scene
where she is desperately trying to write an overdue essay on Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Frieda’s professor, Retief, has condemned
Tess’s sexual crimes: losing her virginity to a man other than her husband
and then killing her lover. Frieda, however, begins her essay with
hopes of rebelling against her professor and his ideas about fate in the
novel and instead “exonerating” Tess, a postmodern move on Frieda’s part.
However, when the ten o’clock coffee-break begins and the canteen starts
to fill up with mostly male students, Frieda finds it impossible to continue
writing. As she walks to her table from the bathroom, the men whistle
at her, an action she expects; she does not know of any women who do not
illicit at least one short whistle when they move across a room.
She begins to analyze the whistles because of her lack of confidence in
her own attractiveness, wondering if the men are obligated to whistle because
she is a female in their presence, or if they are whistling because they
find her sexually attractive. She describes the manner in which she
and the other woman at her school must react to these whistles: “you cannot
possibly look, since you drop your eyes demurely or stare coldly ahead,
and while you shiver deliciously to the vibrations of the whistle, there
can be a nagging discomfort,” which she attributes to a fear that the admirer
might be “some awful country boy with faltering English and a feathered
hat” (“Cape Town,” 50).
It is also noteworthy that not only do these men stop her as
she writes an insightful essay with distinct, if subconscious, postmodern
tendencies, but their whistles also stop Frieda and her friend, Moira,
from engaging in conversation with the group of men. Moira and Frieda’s
friend, James, is among the men talking in the canteen. But as Moira
insists they go over and talk with the men, Frieda points out that if they
do, she and Moira will be whistled at. In this moment of realization
Moira instantly decides that Frieda is correct and they stay at their own
table (“Cape Town,” 50-51). Here Wicomb works with the traditional
sexual hierarchy which suggests that Frieda and Moira will be objectified
by the men, and these expectations are fulfilled when the women are reacted
to not as people, with conversational acknowledgment, but with whistles.
In this instance of sexual harassment, Wicomb again writes in
contradiction to draw attention to the fact that sexual relations, even
in the same racial category, are not necessarily characterized by an equality.
In the racial hierarchy, ‘coloureds’ should all have the same degrees of
power, but even within this, men still manage to put themselves in the
dominant role, a role which dictates the women’s actions. At the
same time that Frieda is embarrassed to walk across a room as men are whistling
at her, she would be absolutely mortified were she to have no recognition
at all. Similarly, Frieda and Moira want to talk to the men yet they
do not because of the whistles they will inevitably receive. This
reminds us how completely Frieda must live within the complexities of sexuality
in a ‘coloured’ context. Though she does not feel comfortable being
so objectified by the whistles of her fellow students, she knows of no
other way to gauge her own sexual attractiveness. However, Wicomb
does show Frieda having some sexual agency even in this situation, when
Frieda decides what kind of man she would or would not like to whistle
at her. This demonstrates that even this power structure is not absolute,
that even while being objectified, she has a chance to make some decisions
about sexuality.
There is also a significant power structure between white and
‘coloured’ relationships. The title story from You Can’t Get Lost
in Cape Town shows Frieda’s relationship with a white man named Michael.
The story places Frieda on a bus through Cape Town where she is trying
to meet up with Michael so that he can take her to the abortion clinic
during a busy time of day. Before the trip, Michael tells Frieda
that “you can’t get lost in Cape Town” (“Cape Town,” 73). This
is a contradiction because the judgments of both Frieda and Michael are
completely different, and this is to be expected, because in South Africa,
the two races are almost completely separated, and their experiences are
necessarily dissimilar. As Carol Sicherman writes in the afterward,
when Michael says “you” can’t get lost, he can only be referring to his
own experience of never getting lost in Cape Town. Therefore, “you”
must imply “I” in that statement and Michael’s “I” does not include Frieda’s
‘coloured’ perspective. Frieda does eventually find the spot where
she is supposed to meet Michael but his assumption that she could find
the place does not allow her to feel the confusion of being lost.
Wicomb uses this situation to show that racism by whites includes not only
intentional actions and derogatory remarks, but also the issue of white
privilege which allows Michael to assume that his experience with Cape
Town should be universal.
When Frieda goes into the clinic for the abortion she has to
pass as white in order to receive the operation. When asked, Frieda
tells the proprietress of the clinic that she is white. Frieda does
not expect to be believed, but the proprietress does believe her and says,
“‘What do they think of me, as if i would do every Tom, Dick and Harry.
Not me you know; this is a respectable concern and I try to help decent
women, educated you know. No, you can trust me. No Coloured
girl’s ever been on this sofa’ ” (“Cape Town,” 79). This white women
has internalized the idea of ‘coloured’ women as concupiscent women who
would dirty her couch.
The ‘coloured’ servant girl in the clinic recognizes Frieda’s
lie, and “starts from her trance and starts at [Frieda] with undisguised
admiration” (“Cape Town,” 79). The duel nature of the word “admiration”
is postmodern in this context. The reader is forced to come to two
conclusions. Either the servant girl admires Frieda’s white characteristic
of cultured speech and accent, or she is impressed that Frieda could trick
the white woman into believing that Frieda is white herself.
In “Behind the Bougainvillea” Frieda has a sexual experience
with a man, Henry Hendrikse, who Frieda’s father says is “almost pure kaffir”
(“Cape Town,” 123). Henry and Frieda were childhood playmates who
exchanged semisecret love letters and even a kiss, all without ever speaking.
Many years later, Frieda runs into Henry while she is sitting outside the
doctor’s office waiting for ‘coloured’ to be allowed in after all the whites
have been seen. In this chance encounter she does not recognize Henry
right away. She finally recognizes him when she hears him speaking
to a stranger in Xhosa, which she mistakes for Zulu (“Cape Town,” 119).
Her confusion of the two languages is her only description of Bantu culture
in relation to a person with whom she interacts. Henry takes her
to a friend’s house nearby to recover. While she is laying on the
bed, he reminds her of their childhood relationship and a sexual encounter
begins. Frieda claims that Henry “would like to fuck me without my
noticing” and from that point it is unclear what the nature of the encounter
is (“Cape Town,” 123). Frieda mentions only Henry’s actions; her
reactions to them are a combination of fear and disgust with a desire to
feel something in connection to what is going on between their bodies.
She describes the climax: “or perhaps it is the urgency of the bulge as
he deftly unzips his trousers and flicks out the terrifying thing of which
I catch as a glimpse only. I relax at his haste and correctly predict
that it will not take long. My body registers a fleeting disappointment
so that I have every reason to be pleased with the transaction” (“Cape
Town,” 123).
The nature of the encounter remains ambiguous. Frieda’s
body is unfulfilled by the brevity of the sex and the fact that it provides
pleasure only to Henry. Yet, she says it relaxes her to know that
it will not take long. More importantly, she is pleased with her
disappointment. What can she mean by this? Is she glad not
to feel obligated to having a more intimate encounter with a lover whose
identity she does not understand, even to the point of not knowing what
language he speaks? Or, is she pleased that she cannot be connected
to the stereotype of the concupiscent coloured woman, who enjoys all sexual
activity because it is in her steatopygic nature to do so? The sentence
that elicits these questions is a postmodern construction. It is
an explanation that does not seek to answer the question it raises.
It only creates confusion and more questions, so that the reader must become
involved in interpreting what this encounter means for Frieda as a coloured
woman and Henry who she sees as being almost ‘native,’ and what it means
for sexuality between the two groups.
Wicomb’s stories center around the issues of racial conflict
and miscegenation that have haunted South African society since the first
settlement of Europeans in 1652, but she collapses the traditional hierarchy
in which race and racism are usually analyzed by defining these terms through
the perspectives of her ‘coloured’ characters. The racial hierarchy
we have come to associate with South Africa, most obviously during the
apartheid era in which whites oppress ‘coloureds’ who oppress ‘natives,’
is deconstructed. Rather, the characters speak to us from the middle
of a sort of ‘race soup.’ In other words, we cannot predict
the degree of oppression each character experiences simply by positioning
her or him within this racial hierarchy. Neither can we predict or
evaluate the racist situations and remarks in Wicomb’s works according
to the race of the characters involved. Instead we must realize that
each characters’ race and racial philosophy have been formed by her or
his often-changing status in a racist society. Indeed we are confronted
with the fact that South Africa––though its history is one of white supremacy
with an obsessive focus on racial purity––is a country in which the boundaries
between races have been constantly blurred by illegal marriages and sexual
liaisons, urbanization (consider the difference between a petty bourgeois
with Zulu ancestry in Cape Town and a domestic servant from the same tribe
on the Karoo), as well as by political resistance movements.
Wicomb never feels the need to define her characters completely,
thereby confining their actions or thoughts. The postmodern style
that she utilizes allows for fluidity of character within their traditional
racial boundaries. Wicomb accomplishes this more complex analysis
of race and racism first of all by leaving her reader to struggle through
the racial identities of many of her characters, often offering confusing
or seemingly contradictory explanations of their ancestries. In David’s
Story, the characters occupy such a tangled web of relations that it often
takes a second and third reading to understand who is ancestor to whom.
For example, David begins a quest to understand his family history and
focuses on his Griqua heritage, eventually tracing back through his bloodlines
to the first instance of miscegenation in his family which is, in fact,
not a sexual union between two races. Rather, David’s great-grandfather,
a French visionary named Andrew le Fleur, marries a Griqua woman named
Rachel Suzanna Kok, and has a telegenous affair with another Griqua woman,
Antjie Cloete who becomes David’s great-grandmother. In other words,
Andrew merely touches Antjie, who is pregnant with her Griqua husband’s
child, and her child somehow inherits Andrew’s traits and becomes Andrew’s
child. Does this mean that David has French ancestry? Or, since
the affair between his great-grandfather and great-grandmother was a miraculous
conception without any sexual contact, does it mean that David’s race and
ethnicity have not been influenced by le Fleur?
In You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town the reader may be confused
about the racial identities embraced by each individual character.
Throughout the book, Frieda’s father stresses the importance of Frieda’s
British rather than her Griqua or Khoi ancestry. He also claims superiority
over the other ‘coloured’ people who live near their family, the Shentons,
because the Shentons’ white blood is British rather than Boer. Frieda
is taught to speak English rather than Afrikaans, both at home and with
other children (“Cape Town,” 4). She tells how her father would not
let her become romantically involved with Henry Hendrikse, because his
racial history did not meet her father’s standards: “we, the Shentons,
had an ancestor, an Englishman whose memory must not be defiled by associating
with those beneath us. We were respectable coloureds” (“Cape Town,”
116). However, in, “A Trip to the Gifberge,” the last of the short
stories that make up You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Frieda’s mother calls
her father’s people Boerjongens, or country bumpkins. She talks
about how they sip their drinks from saucers, a habit that the English
tried to prevent by “cast[ing] their cups with saucers attached so they
didn’t have to listen to the Boers slurping their coffee” (“Cape Town,”
165). Whether or not Frieda’s mother means by these references that
her father does have Boer ancestry or that his family simply acts like
Boers is debatable. In either case, it casts doubt on her father’s
assertion of his own racial affiliation is with the British rather than
the Afrikaners.
Sometimes it is the characters themselves who are confused about
the racial identities of those around them. In the story, “You Can’t
Get Lost in Cape Town,” Frieda arrives at a clinic where illegal abortions
are performed. The white proprietress asks to be sure that Frieda
is not “coloured” before she agrees to perform the procedure. Frieda
cannot believe that her dark skin and “bushy” hair do not make it obvious
that she is not white. Then she realizes, “the educated voice, the
accent has blinded [the proprietress]” (“Cape Town,” 78). In Frieda
we see an identification with the perceived mannerisms of another racial
group causes a fluidity in racial categories that does not parallel physical
appearance and that places a character outside of traditional hierarchies
of race. Wicomb forces us to acknowledge the complexity of race in
South Africa, showing through the confusion that both her readers and her
characters feel about race that it is not a concept to be confined within
a distinct hierarchy such as that which the National party set up under
Apartheid. It is sometimes very difficult for her readers to keep
up with the amounts of Khoi, or Griqua, or British, or Afrikaner blood
in the veins of her characters, nor are her characters sure of the racial
categories represented by those around them.
Wicomb also allows her characters the agency to choose which
areas of their racial ancestries they wish to focus on while at the same
time calling those choices into question. This postmodern technique
also serves to illustrate the complexity of race in South African society.
It shows that, while the characters have every right to decide which of
their ancestors they wish to identify with, at the same time, they have
the responsibility to acknowledge other parts of their heritage and to
move into the current era with an idea of how these parts must interact
in a modern way. In David’s Story, David chooses to analyze his Griqua
ancestors rather than examining his French heritage. His wife, Sally,
becomes exasperated with the search, which she sees as “rubbish”:
Next thing you’ll be off overseas to check out your roots in the rubbish
dumps of Europe, but no, I forget, it’s the African roots that count .
. . Ours are all mixed up and tangled; no chance of us being uprooted,
because they’re all in a neglected knot, stuck. And that I’d have
thought is the beauty of being coloured, that we need not worry about roots
at all, that it’s altogether a good thing to start afresh. There’s
nothing to reclaim. We are what we are, a mixture of this and that,
and a good thing too . . . (“Cape Town,” 27-28).
The last short story of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, calls
upon the reader to make a protest like Sally’s. In “A Trip to the
Gifberge,” Frieda returns home from England after her father’s death,
and drives with her mother up the mountain behind her home. Her mother
finds bushes of proteas on the top of the mountain and Frieda, revolted
by them because they have been chosen by the Afrikaners as the national
flower, jokes bitterly about singing “Die Stem” (“Cape Town,” 181).
Her mother’s response is one of scorn: “We know who lived in these mountains
when the Europeans were still shivering in their own country. What
they think of the veld and its flowers is of no interest to me” (“Cape
Town,” 181). Of course her mother makes a good point; how can the
Boers claim the flowers as their own, since the flowers existed thousands
of years before the Boers laid any claim in South Africa. At the
same time, as we’ve discussed earlier, Frieda’s mother makes allusions
to possible Boer blood in her husband’s ancestry a few pages before this
scene. And, the very word she uses to describe the place where she
finds the flowers––veld––is an Afrikaner word. Because of this the
reader must pose a challenge to Frieda: how can she completely reject everything
that symbolizes Boer culture when she may have Boer ancestors? What
does it mean to hate your ancestors so completely? Or, perhaps more
relevant to this situation, what does it mean to pretend as if certain
of your ancestors simply do not exist?
Wicomb’s postmodern style of writing also allows the reader to
overturn the traditional hierarchy of racism and discrimination.
Wicomb does not pretend that ‘coloureds’ as a group do not display racist
tendencies. She demonstrates this by showing racism away from the
traditional structure. Instead of only showing whites discriminating
against non-whites and blacks being discriminated against, she also shows
‘coloureds’––normally in the middle of the hierarchy––using racial slurs
and displaying discriminatory attitudes, not only against blacks and whites,
but also against other ‘coloureds.’ This upturning of the traditional power
structure within the racial hierarchy is an example of postmodern writing
style.
In David’s Story there are instances of racism between ‘coloureds.’
As David searches for a more complete knowledge of his Griqua ancestry,
he comes across diary entries from Andrew le Fleur in which le Fleur declares
his desire for Griqua separation from other ‘coloured’ groups, from ‘natives,’
and from whites. He is seemingly speaking to the Governor of Rhodesia,
telling him that the Griqua will not leave their homeland “. . . oh no
you can’t buy me off I am no coloured cur we have fashioned ourselves into
a proud people a grand Griqua race no coloured nameless bastards I Paramount
Chief of the Griquas . . .” (“David’s,” 146). Le Fleur also states
that he is “grateful for being a Griqua rather that a currish coloured”
(“David’s,” 146). Racism is evident in this example because le Fleur
insinuates that having this value––not able to be bought––is a quality
unique to the Griquas, one that other ‘coloureds’ do not possess.
Le Fleur is assuming that the Griqua ‘race’ is not only separate from the
‘coloured’ race, but that Griquas are superior to the ‘coloured’ people.
By showing the racist attitudes that are held within one catagory––‘coloured’––Wicomb
is breaking down the traditional hierarchy of discrimination. Making distinctions
within the ‘coloured’ group is another example of postmodernism in Wicomb’s
works.
We can observe another example of the breakdown of the racial
hierarchy in David’s Story when David discovers in his great-grandfather
diaries, le Fleur’s so-called “solution to the great colored problem” (“David’s,”
161). He proposes that the Griqua people leave the Union of South
Africa to the whites and “kaffirs” who must “learn” make their own arrangements
with each other (“David’s,” 161). Le Fleur also writes: “here, good
people, is the solution for God’s stepchildren: absolute separation.
From white and from black . . . a separate Griqua nation” (“David’s,” 161).
In this example, Wicomb renders the traditional hierarchy ineffectual through
showing Griqua racism not only against people they are usually grouped
with, the ‘coloureds’ but also with the white and ‘native’ populations.
This also introduces a new perspective on racial separation, which we commonly
associate with the whites in South Africa.
Wicomb uses a postmodern style to overturn the traditional hierarchy
of racism and discrimination in You Can’t get Lost in Cape Town as well.
In the story “When the Train Comes,” Frieda is at the train station with
her father as they wait for the train to arrive and take Frieda to St.
Mary’s, a boarding school previously attended by only white students.
When Frieda’s father leaves her to check on the train’s arrival, she has
a significant confrontation with a ‘coloured’ boy who approaches her during
her father’s absence. At the beginning of the conversation, Frieda
thinks that he is interested in her sexually. The ‘coloured’ boy
asks her if she is going to the white school and when she replies that
she is, he tells her, “there are some people who bury dynamite between
the rails and watch whole carriages of white people shoot into the air.
. . perhaps that is why your train has not come” (“Cape Town,” 34).
After this conversation we realize that the boy’s intentions do not demonstrate
a sexual attraction; the reason the boy feels malice towards Frieda is
because he knows that she is going to a white school. By attending
this school, Frieda is identifying more strongly with her English ancestry
rather that her “coloured” ancestry. Wicomb draws our attention to
the intricate nature of the way racism works, even within the same racial
group.
As may have become evident in this examination of race and sexuality
in Zoë Wicomb’s work, one of the first things her reader feels upon
finishing each piece is confusion: so many
characters undefined, so many statements unexplained, so many structures
re-worked. But this confusion is perhaps the most effective of her
postmodern techniques. The reader must sort through it, make wild
connections between characters and themes and in this way come to a greater
understanding about the society about which Wicomb writes. In her
essay, “An Author’s Agenda,” Wicomb writes that the phrase “author’s agenda”
is innacurate in describing her work, but that she approves of the idea
of a “reader’s agenda,” meaning that the reader is actively involved in
constructing meaning from her work (14). She writes, “the rubric
of this paper can be extended to foreground the role of the reader, whose
activity is of equal significance” (“Agenda,” 14). A reader of Zoë
Wicomb must therefore embrace her or his confusion, realizing that it is
through the elements of her postmodern style that she is able to show the
complexity of such issues as race and sexuality for her characters and
for South Africa’s society.
Works Cited
Baker, John R. “The Hottentot Venus.” Heretical.
30 Nov. 2001.
<http://www.heretical.co.uk/miscella//baker4.htm>.
“Bring Back the Hottentot Venus.” Daily Mail and Guardian.
Rev. 15 June 1995. 30 Nov. 2001. <http://sn.apc.org/wmail/issues/950615/wm950615-12.html>
“Hottentot Venus Illustration.” English Department of Emory University.
Rev. Aug. 1998. 30 Dec. 2001. <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Hott.html>.
Wicomb, Zoë. “An Author’s Agenda.” Critical Fictions:
The Politics of Imaginative Writing. Mariani Philomena, Ed. Seattle: Bay,
1991. 13-16.
---. David’s Story. New York: Feminist Press, 2000.
---. “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa.”
Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy
1970-1995. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly,
Eds. Cambridge UP, 1998. 91-105.
---. “Untitled Extract.” World Literature Today.
7.1 (1996): 150-156.
---. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. 2nd ed. New
York: Feminist Press, 2000.