by Zoe Wicomb
Borrowing metaphors from Head, Wicomb draws attention to Dulcie’s potentially transformative powers. Dulcie has a vision of her own heart rising over the city of Cape Town, hovering on the horizon and then bursting “to bathe the world in soft yellow light,” and she hopes David might “see that heart in the eastern sky and feel his own drawn into its embrace of light” (115). In Maru, Margaret sees Moleka’s love as “half suns glowing on the horizons of her heart”; the half suns represent her beloved’s glance “like the early morning sunrise” into her heart.67 As she stares “deep into her own peaceful heart,” she imagines a new kind of male-female relation: “Maybe it was not even love as people usually think of it. Maybe it was everything else; necessity, recognition, courage, friendship and strength.”68 These connections emphasize Wicomb’s interest in what can only be called a shared being between women and men, a love which has nothing to do with subordination or humiliation, and which involves a cooperation between women and men far from the asymmetrical relationship that in reality exists.69 Of course, David is too “preoccupied” to accept what Dulcie offers (115). Wicomb’s ironic sword comes down once again.
WRITING BACK
Wicomb refers in her epigraphs and in the narrative itself to a large and wide ranging set of texts: colonial and South African texts by William Dower, Andrew le Fleur, Eugène Marais, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, J. M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, Thabo Shenge Luthuli, among others, as well as a more geographically and historically dispersed set of writers, such as Miguel de Cervantes, Hart Crane, Laurence Sterne, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Frantz Fanon, and Toni Morrison. Some of these writers are named in the novel; others remain unnamed. While the narrative allusions have a diverse function, the epigraphs, usually ironic, indicate the resistance offered by Wicomb’s own text to a (mostly South African) literary tradition. For instance, early South African texts (Millin’s, Dower’s) act as a reminder of the English liberal tradition that preceded apartheid and is often indistinguishable from it, and later ones (Breytenbach’s, Luthuli’s) are placed to suggest a continuing racial bias.
There is a particular postcolonial satisfaction in seeing so much racist thinking from the past so smartly dispensed with. Within the presented world, too, we are given comforting representations of spirited rejoinders. Thus, for instance, soon after its publication in 1902, Le Fleur writes to the press objecting to the lies, omissions and slurs in Dower’s The Early Annals of Kokstad and East Griqualand. Many of the intertextual references function, then, as part of the novel’s strategy of “writing back,”70 which occurs on three levels: that of the author, or the novel itself; that of the two major storytellers, the narrator, and David; and that of Le Fleur and other characters as well, if we include verbal retorts.
The postcolonial interest in “writing back” often involves not just the native writer’s response but also the writer’s representation of the native’s existence prior to the coloniser, and hence his or her prior authority. Thus the term back may function in two ways: to mark the assertive retort, and to mark a temporal shift back to precolonial days. Yet Wicomb’s intertextual references are usually more complex than this, weaving richly through the novel in an exploration of authority, memory, and truth. As we know, for example, from David’s two different memories of meeting the old man to whom he gives, or does not give, his precious stone (23-24, 142), the novel is deeply engaged with questioning memory, and thus with the authority to which personal experience lays claim. Furthermore, when the text asserts that boerewors is not the sausage of the Boers at all, but was invented by “the Kok ancestors, those slave cooks who would go nowhere without their spices” (132),71 it is not the precoloniality of Griqua identity being asserted.
The intertextual use Wicomb makes of a poem by the Afrikaans writer, Eugène Marais (1872-1936), suggests one kind of complexity and play. As the narrator and David tell us, Le Fleur derives his rainmaking tradition from the poem “Die Lied van die Reën” (The Song of the Rain), which Marais first entitled “Die Dans van die Reën” (The Dance of the Rain).72 In the narrative leading up to the poem, apparently based on a tale told Marais by a “Bushman” informant, Krom Joggom Konterdans (krom means “crooked”) plucks at his four-string violin, making songs that sound like the rain. Around his neck is a copper necklace from Heitsi-eibib, the Khoi God, given him by the old woman Nasi-Tgam. (Antjie’s and, later, Ant Mietjie’s and Ouma Rhodes’s expletive “Heitse” comes from this name.) At the end of the story he sings a song which Marais later published as a separate poem under the new title, changing the name Joggom to Jan. The song evokes the rain as a young girl whose bracelets and beads sparkle as she moves; she wears a copper ring round her neck and on her forehead a bright feather; her light footprints are the drops of the rain. The wild animals of the region race across the plains, and bend to see the footprints; the little folk under the earth hear her feet, too.
The novel’s allusion to Marais’s use of indigenous narrative incorporates Le Fleur’s borrowing, David’s borrowing, and its own borrowing from Marais and elsewhere, and is actually a smart joke about hybridity, authenticity, and the impossibility of true origins (to say nothing of its sly invitation to the critic to pursue these trivial issues of scholarship). David’s rendition of the first two stanzas and final lines of the poem is faithful to Marais’s poem. But when the narrator refers to an additional line—the “stampede of antelopes as they race to see her footmarks in the sand” (159)—it is remembered through its reference not to “big game” (grootwild), which is the term Marais uses, but through “antelopes,” which gives more detailed substance to the image used by Marais, and also seems to assert the prior reality of the indigenous, remembered world. But this prior reality is itself marked as fictional, not least since the word “antelopes” derives not from Antjie but from the English translation of Marais’s poem by Jack Cope and Uys Krige, found in The Penguin Book of South African Verse (1968). In another instance, too, the text both asserts a prior vision and destabilises it. In typical Wicomb irony, Antjie has simply been hearing goats (97), neither antelopes nor even part of Marais’s (or Konterdans’s) “big game,” so that Le Fleur’s invented tradition is additionally undercut. In all this, as part of its thematising of memory and true origin, the text offers a dizzying relation between “fiction” and “reality” which is, after all, no more than a relation between texts. It is simply the novel’s “illusion of reality” which points to the indigenous past as a source for Marais’s poem in a clever destabilisation of the notion of origin.
Another kind of “writing back” exists in the intertextual relations between David’s Story and God’s Step-children. Eduard la Fleur being placed in the progenitive Griqua position, instead of Andrew Flood,73 Wicomb’s (imagined) historical fact precedes Millin’s and thus topples the authority of Millin’s account—quite sensibly, since this kind of racial mixing in South Africa dates properly from the seventeenth century rather than 1821, which is when Millin placed Flood’s arrival.
In God’s Step-children, Millin generally approves the Griqua choice of a separate homeland from which to build an “uplifted,” obedient Griqua nation. Following Dower on the Griqua, she also offers some patronising praise to the political order developed by the Kokstad community—“it was crude, but it worked”—yet sneers at the spectacle of idleness and of grasping entrepreneurship she manages simultaneously to create.74 Heading a section set in Kokstad in 1991, Wicomb includes as epigraph a quotation from God’s Step-children that ends: “but here, round about Griqualand West, they were nothing but an untidiness on God’s earth—a mixture of degenerate brown peoples, rotten with sickness, an affront against Nature” (63).75 The same passage from Millin is used in Wicomb’s 1991 short piece, “Another Story,” where the main character, Deborah, like Ouma Sarie, does all she can, as a good coloured woman, to be tidy and godly and not like Millin’s type.76 Yet Deborah’s and Ouma Sarie’s refusal to fit the stereotype is obedience, as well,
as they subject themselves to the fundamental thinking from which racism springs, believing as they do (in the European Calvinist tradition) that “tidiness is next to godliness” (202).
Therefore, Wicomb’s use of Millin is more complex than mere rebuttal, for it addresses notions of “implicatedness,” even of contamination. Le Fleur in his later days is also in some ways a figure who has strayed from Millin’s text. Following European definitions of “savagery,” his vision of Griquaness repudiates, for example, the drawing of patterns on dung floors: “[W]e are no cousins to Xhosas; we are a pure Griqua people with our own traditions of cleanliness and plainness and hard work” (94). Le Fleur’s social pronouncements direct the Griqua to behave oppositely, especially as regards idleness, a stereotype so frequently launched against indigenous South Africans.77 Yet this reactive behavior does not free him from the racist symbolic order at root.
Wicomb sees the stereotype as part of a historical discursive tradition inherited by all South Africans. This insight is, of course, not new, and can be said to be a dominating interest in postcolonial writing. But Wicomb’s focus is on the way this discursive order causes characters to behave in a certain way. Their reactions against racist slurs and predictions—by nature of being reactions—cannot suggest liberation from the symbolic order which gave rise to them. Wicomb then examines possible ways out of the characters’ merely oppositional stance in an effort to produce alternative forms of identification. This constitutes an important intervention on her part, and, as we shall see, directly impacts on the reconstruction of memory to withstand damaging stereotypes.78
Wicomb’s treatment of “shame” is a case in point. The notion of shame, its repression on the one hand, and its exorcism on the other, informs the novel in more ways than can be dealt with here. Most economically, however, we can refer back to Millin. Shameful, according to Millin, are the sexual unions that give rise to racial mixing, and in God’s Step-children she developed a powerful and insidious “poetics of blood,” relentlessly tracking down the “degenerate seed” from one family to the next.79 Le Fleur anticipates Millin’s notion of shame—“we whose very faces are branded with their shame will remove ourselves from their sight” (161)—in a gesture which enacts the racial separatism which white colonisers and settlers imposed on blacks. In contrast, for Rachael Susanna, birth can never be shame: it is not the “degenerate seed” that threatens to be spread, but instead “the infection of shame” (162). Thus Wicomb neatly transfers back to Millin obsessive notions about taint and flaw. Shame, instead, on those who spread such words!
And then, following through on this gradual liberation from oppressive discursive formations, Wicomb has David remember lying in his Ouma Antjie’s lap, in so “ancient” a sleep that he can retrieve a different kind of thinking than that offered by white racism. Enmeshed with David’s recall of his grandmother’s lap is a memory of a visit to Cape Town’s Natural History Museum, where he saw a diorama representing a wrinkled Khoi woman squatting by a fire (100). Wicomb depicts the same museum scene in “Another Story,” but her character Deborah cannot speak of it, so shameful does it seem, even though she recognizes its absurdity: what Khoi woman would sit at an unlit fire?80 In David’s Story the diorama combines with a living scene, where Antjie is busy at the fire. David reclaims the stereotype from its stasis or timelessness, and at the same time exorcises shame, banishing it without denying its presence or power.
Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1759–67) is another important intertext for David’s Story. Sterne parodies through Walter Shandy the Elizabethan belief in the four humours—the bodily fluids supposed to determine temperament and health—by referring to “the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture.”81 In David’s Story, these words are recited (152) and are said to come from Sterne’s fictional manservant, who is indeed named in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) as La Fleur. Eduard, whose ill health keeps him in “darkest Africa,” practices his uncle La Fleur’s medical advice, and passes his sage words on to Andries (88). But in the process, the Irish writer’s parodic voice has been lost, divested of its ironic signifying tones. So when Andries le Fleur encounters Walter Shandy’s words—“O blessed health! … health depending upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture”—and the word radical rushes like wine through the young boy’s mind (88), it is a confusion of decontextualised words and discredited science about the humours that guides Le Fleur to his mad and community-disrupting vision—a vision of water springing from rock (152). And it is this discredited science, too, which urges Le Fleur to combat the radical heat of the newly settled land by deploying women’s bodies as bearers of radical moisture (153). Secular texts have by now, we are told, largely replaced hymns (88). Wicomb’s intertextual reference signifies thinking from Europe that knows nothing of the South African climate, and should be of no use to the Griqua. It is Dorie, and not Rachael, whom we hear repeat, “[A]ll will be well when we find the radical moisture” (96). Her voice is not her own.
Tristram Shandy is more extensively used in David’s Story than can be addressed here. When Dulcie’s steatopygous fat oozes from her body like the “oily and balsamous substance” Walter Shandy describes as the body’s “radical moisture,”82 Dulcie’s body is asserting its own physicality, an assertion made against the kind of masculinist vision promoted by Walter Shandy in which “the lively heat and spirit of the body” is understood to be semen.83 Le Fleur’s associating this moisture with women’s bodies may be radical in this context, yet he uses women’s bodies as cultural signs rather than letting women speak for themselves. The representation of Dulcie’s body, which is sometimes associated with beehives, bees, and insects attracted by honey, not only addresses Millin’s references to Hottentots “swarming”, and to their huts as being like “hives”, but also echoes the language used in Walter Shandy’s digression on methods of characterisation, in which he posits a dioptrical beehive as a device for truly observing the human soul with “all her maggots from their first engendering to their crawling forth,” a soul seen clearly through its “dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood.”84 Dulcie’s uncannily oozing body partly stands as a mockery of this kind of truth; partly, too, it suggests the disturbing psychic return of the betrayed body—betrayed by male comrades who stole her honey, and by David’s representation, as she becomes a “glittering mummy of his making” (128).
There are other kinds of equally rich intertextualities which, again, often direct themselves into questions about authority, representation, writing, and truth. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) is used to remind us that the truth about empire is its unspeakable horror.85 It also indicates David’s refusal to hear—or inability to bear—the truth about the political world he inhabits, and, further, emphasises his incrimination in the political horrors he attempts to disclose: “Has he, the intended, been directed into acting, into becoming the agent for others?” (117). In Heart of Darkness, the woman Kurtz intends to marry is placed as the feminine ideal, so unsullied by the business of empire that she may not be told the truth about the colonial exploitation of Africa. At the same time she is the purpose to which Kurtz’s endeavor is (or pretends to be) directed: the proxy of Empire.86 Wicomb’s surprising genderswitch—Conrad’s “Intended” become male—is underlined by the fact that the hit list is written in a “girlish hand” (113). Readers may even feel invited to turn the reference back to a question about Dulcie, that other “intended” in David’s Story, and from there to move into a metafictional question about the use the text makes of Dulcie as the signifier of an unrepresentable excess, sometimes figured as “the feminine” in deconstructionist criticism.87 And from there we may voice some anxious questions that tremble beneath the text itself: Is the narrator (and behind her, the woman writer) herself producing a preordained script, writing through Dulcie yet another version of the idealisation of the feminine? Or is this idealisation negated by
the blood on Dulcie’s hands? These are not the critic’s questions, but the text’s. Erasing Dulcie’s name inscribes her into the plot, just as in the cases of Krotoa and Saartje Baartman. In an attempt to deny his responsibility for Dulcie’s “erasure,” David writes her name on a fresh piece of paper, claims, “It is they who obliterate her name” (119), and hands the hit-list (back) to the waiter (171).
“Writing back,” for Wicomb, relates crucially to the rewriting of stereotypes, which undergo reversals, shape changes, and historical reorientations in her hand. The pernicious stereotype of the idleness of indigenous people, for instance, is instead made applicable to the “ladies in the Logan Hotel” (117) in a sharp joke about who works in this place. Wicomb celebrates the sounds of words: carnelian, for instance (175) and steatopygia (17). But, as David points out, the term steatopygia has become tarnished by white people’s pathological interest in Khoi women’s bodies. Wicomb’s text renews the term, so that what is signified—“the natural fat padding of the buttocks” (17)—is often lovingly regarded instead. Steatopygia is linked by colonialists to concupiscence, and the narrator lightly suggests that indeed it is (96), and elsewhere ensures its erotic appeal (46), while at the same time questioning the colonialist linkage through the opposing term windbroek (34, 204 et passim), which also designates concupiscence, and an altogether more cowardly response to social realities that have to be faced. There are many other textual engagements with the word, which Wicomb restores as rich, complex, nuanced: changing shape, as it were, as it changes context.
The corruption of words, and their recuperation, is a focus of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, too. The last story, “A Trip to the Gifberge,” divests the protea bush of the symbolism given it by the colonizer: “a bush is a bush; it doesn’t become what people think they inject into it.”88 Cleansing language of its history, or cleansing history of its language, is not an easy task, nor can it be an unproblematic desideratum of writing. In “Another Story” Wicomb presents a nervous reminder of some of the difficulties attendant on cleansing language of its past; as she suggests in her character’s treatment of the apartheid label “coloured” and the reactive qualifier “so-called,” political correctness does not necessarily offer a model.89 Certainly, however, the horror of the stereotype depends on who is doing the talking. In what we may take as a reference to Homi Bhabha’s essay on Morrison’s Beloved and Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, to which Wicomb has made a sharp retort,90 Sally complains that “there is always something to read about the tragedy of being coloured and therefore, it would appear, in limbo,” and about black women’s “great sturdy hams,” yet she herself refers to her “very own good heavy hams” (117).91 Similarly, Wicomb is happy to use the term “woolly” for hair (64). Context is all. Moreover, meaning depends on the angle one adopts: Rachael Susanna Kok’s tying of her bonnet strings reads to her husband like obedience, but to her it is the reverse (48).