Zoë Wicomb

South Africa boasts an extensive coastline that stretches over 2,800 kilometres and is alternately caressed and pounded by two oceans, which have produced a chain of golden sandy beaches along its shores. Yet compared to other sites, the beach does not feature very prominently in South African literary culture and is even less visible in literary criticism. The farm, the bushveld and the arid karoo; city, town and village: all have accrued layers of inscription while the beach sits almost silent at the edge of the South African literary and critical imagination. Its relative muteness is at least in part dictated by the lack of space accorded to levity and the ludic in South African letters, burdened as they have been with seeking to bear the weight of the experiences of colonial dispossession and apartheid oppression and of representing struggle and strife.

Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? explores the ways in which the imaginative reconstruction of post-apartheid South Africa as a 'rainbow nation' has been produced from images of women that dismember their bodies and disremember their historical presence. From Krotoa-Eva and Sarah Bartmann to Nongqawuse and Winnie Mandela, author Meg Samuelson tackles the figurations of some of the most controversial and significant women in the making of modern South Africa. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and post-structuralist theory, and close textual readings of literary and cultural texts produced during the first decade of democracy, her analysis offers a provocative critique of the formation of nationalist and feminist collectivities. The book explores the constraints of subjection and the performative power of subjectivity, as well as the ways in which women have been able to form collectivities on new terms.

Although once insistent that she could not set fiction anywhere besides in the Cape region from which she hails, Zoë Wicomb has gradually allowed Glasgow, the city in which she has long been resident, to enter her writing. While retaining a focus on the provincial, her oeuvre is thus incrementally pervaded by another perspective. October (2014) offers the most extended elaboration of this perspective to date. Infused with uncanny allusions and an unsettling use of free indirect discourse, the novel conveys the unhomeliness of home and simultaneously dethrones the privileged perspective assigned to the exile.
In his ‘Reflections on Exile’, Edward Said notes that, while it may seem ‘peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile’ given its unbidden and mutilating quality, the ‘detachment’ that it affords can defamiliarise notions of home that otherwise ‘recede into dogma and orthodoxy’. Catapulting its subjects to ‘transcend national or provincial limits’, the state of exile can enable them to evade ‘the exclusions and reactions of prejudice’; at the same time, however, it is a condition ‘predicated on the existence of, love for, bond with, one’s native place’. Thus, exile brings forth a particular perspective that Said describes as ‘contrapuntal’ (or counterpoint). Identifying a type of music in which distinct melodic lines intersect, ‘contrapuntal’, when translated into a literary-critical concept, names a dual point of view that issues, respectively, from home and exile. ‘Most people’, Said observes, are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two’, which ‘plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions’.
Wicomb’s writing encourages a revisiting of Said’s formulation. Rather than producing what Said presents as the contrapuntal vision of the exile, it comes to assemble a provincial-cosmopolitan point of view that articulates a translocal voice. This voice issues from a conjoined perspective that is located, simultaneously, here and there, and which recognises both the limits of the local as well as the ways in which the provincial point of view can also challenge the orthodoxies of the cosmopolitan. It emerges across Wicomb’s oeuvre. [...]

Contributing to recent discussions of temporality in relation to the concept of “world,” this essay asks how thinking “world” with “time” can rejuvenate postcolonial figurations of futurity. The theoretical texts I discuss include Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World?, Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. I retrieve the distinction in these works between the structural dislocations that “found” human being and decompose linear time, and more properly historical decenterings in which the heterotemporal is an effect of social processes of exploitation and (colonial-capitalist) domination. To honor this distinction, I place recent thinkers into dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, suggesting that a post-poststructuralist reclamation of the latter is particularly overdue. The article culminates in an explication of Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story—a work that asks us to live through its form that postcolonial mode of the nonsynchronous with which my argument is concerned.

This article examines the diasporic implications in the fictional works of Zoë Wicomb, who was born in South Africa and migrated to Scotland during apartheid. The ideas of ‘belonging’ to her motherland and ‘rooting’ in her country of adoption play a crucial role in her narrative revealing the ideological fabrication of concepts such as ‘nation’ and ‘home’. I focus in particular on Wicomb’s second collection of short stories, The One that Got Away (2008), set both in South Africa and Scotland.

To read Zoe ̈ Wicomb is to engage simultaneously with a ‘citizen of the world’ and a ‘provincial writer’. Moving between cosmopolitan and domestic settings, or setting in motion recursive structures that enfold the cosmos in the domestic and the domestic in the cosmos, Wicomb takes up the retelling of Cape hi/stories and cosmopolitan visions, presenting us with “another story” of what it might mean to be simultaneously local and worldly. Saturated with textual recursion and uncanny figures, her fictional settings advance and invite renewed analysis of domestic and/or cosmopolitan conditions.

The first collection of nonfiction critical writings by one of the leading literary figures of post-apartheid South Africa The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa's leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume. This compilation features essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as on a wide range of cultural and political topics, including gender politics, sexuality, race, identity, nationalism, and visual art. Also presented here are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb. In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insights into her nation's history, politics, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and right-wing populist movements are the declared enemies of diversity and pluralism, her essays speak powerfully to a host of current international issues.

Invaded, displaced, and dispossessed, the aboriginal Khoisan populations of South Africa were enslaved and pushed to the margins of society well before the arrival of European settlers in the seventeenth century: the Bantu groups which had invaded southern Africa in the previous centuries had colonised various regions, due to their physical and military superiority. In contemporary South Africa, the condition of these people is still precarious, judging from the various forms of political protest reclaiming full citizenship for Khoisan communities. In some cases, however, the re-reading of History on the part of minority groups to obtain social and political recognition tends to reproduce, and therefore to confirm, the stereotypes and simplifications that contributed to their marginalisation in the first place. The case of the Khoikhoi populations in South Africa – classified as ‘coloured’, but still claiming specific ethnic identities of their own – is read here through the lens of literature, and specifically through the novel David’s Story by Zoë Wicomb – a South African writer who has always avoided the trap of simplism both as narrator and as social and literary critic.

The paper engages the grey zone of violent resistance – the morally ambiguous situations facing liberation activists that have generally fallen outside the grasp of transitional justice scholarship. For this purpose, it draws on Albert Camus's artistic sensibility, reconstructing how his artistic appeal to the limits of rebellion can tackle the difficulty of judging violent resistance. The paper demonstrates the relevance of Camus's artistic sensibility on the case of the armed anti-apartheid struggle. It analyses two South African novels, Afrika's The Innocents and Wicomb's David's Story, in an attempt to show how their literary insights can enrich the official vision of reconciliation as propounded by the TRC.

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the 'new' nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa's literature, it understands 'disappointment' both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Attending to contemporary writers' treatment of temporality, genre, and form, it considers a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture-including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers - some known to international Anglophone readers including J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoë Wicomb, some slightly less well-known including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach, and others from a new generation including Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga.

It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as 'South African' in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.

Nudged into a new interpretive approach by a comment in her most recent novel, this essay presents an account of reading Wicomb’s fiction that seeks to move beyond what Ricoeur describes as a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and that responds to it rather as a gathering in which reader and text are mutually composed. Informed by Sedgwick’s distinction between “paranoid” and “reparative” reading, Best and Marcus’s “surface reading” and, particularly, Felski’s “postcritical” and Barthes’s earlier “expressive” reading, it follows Nuttall in locating questions of “how we read now” in a South African context that is framed by race. Drawing on Fanon and Latour, it thus charts how Wicomb’s fiction dislodges race from a “matter of fact” by moving readers to respond to it instead as a “matter of concern” that, for all its fabrication, does things, and thus demands our care.

The first collection of nonfiction critical writings by one of the leading literary figures of post-apartheid South Africa The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa's leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume. This compilation features essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as on a wide range of cultural and political topics, including gender politics, sexuality, race, identity, nationalism, and visual art. Also presented here are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb. In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insights into her nation's history, politics, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and right-wing populist movements are the declared enemies of diversity and pluralism, her essays speak powerfully to a host o...

In post-conflict, post-colonial nations, the relation to the past remains a vexed one, and 'the past' takes on strikingly different aspects depending on whether the referent is the pre-colonial or 'ancestral' past, on the one hand, or the traumatic pasts of colonialism and conflict, on the other hand. Focusing on fictional representations of memory, mourning and melancholia in three post-conflict southern African states - Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa - I address the following questions: How can one relate to traumatic pasts in productive and enliven ways? How can one enrich the present through recourse to the pre-colonial, without reifying the pre-colonial as a nostalgic repast? How can processes of mourning and, thus, healing be approached in the post-colonial world without producing consoling yet amnesiac fictions?

After a brief contextualization of the figure of Sartjie Baartman – the Khoisan woman displayed in London and Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century as the “Hottentot Venus” – this contribution addresses the issue of contemporary discursive practices making use of Baartman’s icon. Starting from Thabo Mbeki’s speech at the ‘funeral’ of Saartjie Baartman as an introduction, the article focuses on the analysis of two very different novels, Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000) and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus. A Novel (2003). Their very dissimilarity can tell us much on the discursive practices concerning Baartman’s figure; yet, the two works permit comparison because they share the same wish to shed light on the relationship between past and present by means of an overall structural complexity. Both novels make use of the postmodern features of a multi-voiced and multi-layered narration, and avoid granting authority to a single version of history. Moreover, both David’s Story and Hottentot Venus engage in a narrative relating to individual and collective trauma; that is why the article briefly introduces the ongoing discussion focused on the application of Western trauma theories to the South African historical and political situation. The literary investigation provided here takes into consideration the aesthetic aspect of both books; I contend that Chase-Riboud’s narrative is unsatisfactory as a novel, and that its literary weakness diminishes the strength of its socio-political stances.

Cet article étudie la spatialité propre au cycle de nouvelles de Zoë Wicomb, The One That Got Away (2008), lequel se caractérise par l’intrication des « franchissements » internes qu’il propose, au niveau thématique comme structurel. En faisant appel à la théorie des subjectivité nomades, articulée par Braidotti, on s’intéresse ici au rôle des dynamiques centripètes et centrifuges qui parcourent le recueil, brouillant et bouleversant les frontières entre chaque nouvelle. The One That Got Away se distingue par sa vision stratifiée des identités itinérantes, ainsi que par le potentiel créatif des stratégies formelles qui y sont mises en place afin de cartographier les schémas de nomadicité. Cette contribution se penche ainsi sur la manière dont les techniques narratives employées, qu’il s’agisse d’effets d’emboîtement ou de trompe l’œil, interagissent entre réalité et illusion, et invitent le lecteur à repenser le processus de perception et d’interprétation. On observe par ailleurs que les parallélismes entre actes de lecture intradiégétiques et lecture du recueil lui-même révèlent les dynamiques de « franchissement » auxquels est confronté le lecteur d’un cycle de nouvelles.

This study is the first book-length analysis of African women's writing of Southern Africa with a focus on writing the body. The thesis is that women are not voiceless, but hold a powerful, liberating potential: they "throw their voices" by implementing a strategic corporeal. Notably, this mode is not carried out in a way of emphasising corporeal difference by lack, but by attributing positive markers to the body. It reaches beyond a speaking which only represents women's thoughts and emotions physically - a mode which might render the impression that they are incapable of expressing their conceptions and sentiments linguistically. It is an empowerment that reflects their skill to break up the bonds between language and body. This study is wide-ranging in its choice of authors and themes.

In this article I analyse the structural representations of death in a selection of contemporary South African novels. In my chosen texts, characters are brought into a close relation to death by having to bear witness to the passing of a parent or relative. Instead of placing emphasis on processes of mourning, these novels utilise melancholic frameworks to mark a discursive shift towards spectrality. I argue that this shift is representative of a ‘post-transitional’ ideology that no longer views itself in terms of radical alterity – as the emphasis on the ‘new’ in early post-apartheid South Africa did – but which instead allows for more fluid appraisals of national development and civil hospitality.

This article offers a close reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2006 novel, Playing in the Light, arguing that it continues a project, evident throughout Wicomb's oeuvre, of exploring the ethics of narrative in the context of the legacies of colonial discursive formations, and of testing the responsibilities of fiction in the particular historical circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. The essay argues that Wicomb's novel points to possibilities for narrative agency that actively plays host to the narratives of others. Using Jacques Derrida's suggestion that a consideration of the virtual archive, that which has been suppressed from the official record, is crucial to the post-apartheid nation, the article explores the idea of the archive both as space of engagement and as metaphor to explore apartheid experience and the construction of race.

My paper will discuss the relationship between the representation of Africa and the diaspora in the works of writer, academic, and theorist Zoë Wicomb, who was born in South Africa and moved to Scotland in the Seventies. Wicomb has spent most of her life in Glasgow, where she still lives, going back to South Africa regularly, since the demise of apartheid. The bulk of her writing - two novels, two collections of short stories and a number of theoretical essays on various issues ranging from culture to identity, gender, nationhood, literature, etc. – is either set in South Africa or discusses issues related to the country. Wicomb is widely acknowledged as one of the leading figures of South African literature and has a key role in the cultural debate raised in the country during and after apartheid. This is the reason why it is particularly relevant to estimate the function of her diasporic position vis à vis her understanding of some of the main dynamics involving her mother-country, which she was able to pinpoint due both to her physical distance from South Africa and to her emotional and intellectual involvement with it. While I will take into consideration Wicomb’s work as a whole, my intention is to focus in particular on her last collection of short stories, The One that Got Away (2008), in which the double setting – South Africa and Scotland – produces an interesting vision of her country of origin.