by Zoe Wicomb
51. Ellis and Sechaba 112.
52. Ellis and Sechaba 167.
53. Some recent movements harness a slave heritage to their construction either of a unified coloured identity (which threatens to alienate black Africans) or of a specifically Cape Malay past (which exaggerates the number of slaves brought in from Malaya, focuses on a Muslim heritage, and again has an exclusionary bent). See Kerry Ward and Nigel Worden, “Commemorating, Suppressing, and Invoking Cape Slavery,” in Nuttall and Coetzee 201–217.
54. Wicomb, “Zoë Wicomb, interviewed by Eva Hunter, Cape Town, 5 June 1990,” in Eva Hunter and Craig MacKenzie, eds. Between the Lines II: Interviews with Nadine Gordimer, Menan du Plessis, Zoë Wicomb, Lauretta Ngcobo (Grahamstown: National English Literary Museum, 1993) 88.
55. Wicomb, interviewed by Hunter 90. In 1990 Wicomb wrote: “In South Africa the orthodox position whilst celebrating the political activism of women, is that the gender issue ought to be subsumed by the national liberation struggle.… I can think of no reason why black patriarchy should not be challenged alongside the fight against Apartheid.” “To Hear the Variety of Discourses,” Current Writing 2 (1990) 37.
56. Seroke was speaking at a conference called “The Aftermath: Women in Post-War Reconstruction,” 20–22 July 1999, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; qtd. in Vanessa Farr, “How do we know we are at peace? Reflections on the Aftermath Conference,” Agenda 43 (2000) 28.
57. The Federation of Transvaal Women (FEDTRAW) has compiled a list of sexual assaults on women perpetrated under apartheid during the latter part of the 1980s. See their A Woman’s Place is in the Struggle, Not Behind Bars! (Johannesburg: Fedtraw, [1988]).
58. Thenjiwe Mtintso, an MK commander in Uganda during the 1980s, and now Deputy Secretary General of the ANC, has spoken of the expectation in ANC camps that female comrades would provide sex for male comrades. See Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes, “Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” May 1996, www.truth.org.za/submit/gender.htm. Thandi Modise, also a former MK commander and now deputy president of the ANC Women’s League (and chair of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Defence), has referred to women learning karate specifically to protect themselves against men in the ANC training camps. Yet she dwells on sexual insults and leering rather than coercion and rape. Robyn Curnow, “Thandi Modise: A Woman in War,” Agenda 43 (2000) 37–40. It is noteworthy, too, that even in Vanessa Farr’s report, cited in the previous note, there is no specific reference to sexual abuse or torture of ANC women in ANC camps.
59. Chiedza Musengezi and Irene McCartney, eds. Women of Resistance: The Voices of Women Ex-Combatants (Harare: Zimbabwe Women Writers, 2000).
60. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; New York: Penguin, 1988) 79; also 16–18.
61. Fanon’s quotation comes from Black Skin, White Masks (1952) trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986) 232.
62. Although Fanon’s works were banned in South Africa, he had considerable influence on black South African thinking. See Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings ed. Aelred Stubbs (New York: Harper & Row, [1978]) especially the chapters entitled “We Blacks” (27–32) and “White Racism and Black Consciousness” (61–72).
63. Fanon’s chapter “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965), bears interestingly on David’s Story regarding, for example, the ways women transported arms during the revolutionary struggle (Fanon 61, David’s Story 19). For discussion of Fanon’s self-interrogation, see Homi Bhabha, “Foreword: Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1986; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991) vii–xxv.
64. Bessie Head, Maru (1971, London & Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Books, 1987).
65. Head, A Question of Power (1973; New York: Pantheon, 1974).
66. For Wicomb’s discussion of Head’s Maru, see “To Hear the Variety of Discourses,” Current Writing 2 (1990) 43–44; and “Nation, Race and Ethnicity: Beyond the Legacy of Victims,” Current Writing 4 (1992) 17–18.
67. Head, Maru 93.
68. Head, Maru 99.
69. There are other productive connections. For instance, in Maru the two major male characters, each of whom is driven by a startling combination of ruthlessness and tender compassion, are transformed through their contact with Margaret and her paintings. Moreover, Maru addresses rather than erases the topics of slavery and “miscegenation”, and deploys as a narrative strategy an easy movement between the mythic and the real reminiscent of Wicomb’s strategy regarding Dulcie.
70. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York: Routledge, 1989). Wicomb refers briefly to “writing back” in her 1990 interview with Hunter. Speaking of her admiration for Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Njabulo Ndebele, she says: “[Y]ou can’t separate yourself from the products of your culture even if you do write in reaction against certain things” (82).
71. See Belcher (261) who cites two Griqua legends about the origins of the name Kok in the noun cook.
72. The four stories that later made up Marais’s series of so-called dwaalstories (perhaps to be translated as “dream stories”; to dwaal is to daydream or to ramble, as in a kind of walking) were first published in four issues of Die Boerevrou, from May to August 1921; anthologised with other stories in 1927, under the title Dwaalstories en ander vertellings; and saw their first, separate publication as Dwaalstories (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1959). Marais’s separate publication of the poem can be found in his collected works, Versamelde Werke ed. Leon Rousseau (Pretoria: Van Schaik, 1984), vol. 2, 1018–19.
73. Millin’s use of an Englishman entrenches her attack on English liberalism as inappropriate to a South African context. See Michael Wade, “Myth, Truth and the South African Reality in the Fiction of Sarah Gertrude Millin,” Journal of Southern African Studies 1 (1974) 100–112. Millin’s figure is partly based on the Dutch missionary, Dr. J. T. van der Kemp, who came out with the London Missionary Society in 1797, married a Khoi woman, and had four children with her.
74. Millin 107–108.
75. Millin 313.
76. Wicomb, “Another Story” 11.
77. See J. M. Coetzee, “Idleness in South Africa,” in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1988) 12–35. Dutch and, later, British settlers used the apparent idleness of the indigenous people in order to justify their takeover of the land, which was said to belong to those “who make best use of it” (16). Hence Le Fleur’s eagerness to work the land as part of nation-building.
78. In her 1990 interview with Hunter, Wicomb refers usefully to Morrison’s treatment of stereotypes: “I suppose what I’m trying to do [in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town], rather unsuccessfully, is what Toni Morrison now has done in Beloved, where … she’s not concerned about ‘covering up’, but concerned with exposing, actually uncovering the economic and historical bases of such stereotypes” (87–88).
79. See J. M. Coetzee, “Blood, Taint, Flaw, Degeneration: The Novels of Sarah Gertrude Millin,” in White Writing 136–162.
80. Wicomb, “Another Story” 15.
81. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67; New York: Odyssey, 1940) 394.
82. Sterne, Tristram Shandy 397.
83. “What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father’s days—when his powers of imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper’d thine, were drying up; and nothing left to found thy stamina in, but negations” (296); “Now the radical moisture is not the tallow or fat of animals, but an oily and balsamous substance; for the fat and tallow, as also the phlegm or watery parts are cold; whereas the oily and balsamous parts are of a lively heat and spirit, which accounts for the observation
of Aristotle, “Quod omne animal post coitum est triste” (397). See also Walter Shandy’s warnings about the need to prevent the boy child from running into either fire or water, “as either of ‘em threaten his destruction” (398); that is, the destruction of his semen, that vital fluid.
84. Millin 7, 14; Sterne 74–75.
85. “It was as though a veil had been rent…. He [Kurtz] cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—‘The horror! The horror!’” Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; New York: Penguin, 1999) 111.
86. For Marlowe’s lie, see Conrad 121. For pertinent discussion of Heart of Darkness, see Padmini Mongia, “Empire, Narrative and the Feminine in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness,” in Gail Fincham and Myrtle Hooper, eds. Joseph Conrad After Empire (Cape Town: U of Cape Town P, 1996) 120–132; also in Keith Carabine et al. eds. Contexts for Conrad (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1993) 135–150; and André Brink, “Woman and Language in Darkest Africa: The Quest for Articulation in Two Postcolonial Novels,” Literator 13.1 (1992) 1–14.
87. See Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 68–85; Jacques Derrida, “Choreographies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” ed. & trans. Christie V. McDonald, Diacritics 12.2 (1982) 66–76.
88. Wicomb, “A Visit to the Gifberge,” in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town 181.
89. “It grieved [Sarah] that she so often had to haul up the ‘so-called’ from some distant recess where it slunk around with foul terms like half-caste and half-breed…. Lexical vigilance was a matter of mental hygiene.” Wicomb, “Another Story” 7.
90. Responding to Bhabha’s introduction to The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994) 1–18, Wicomb suggests that Bhabha’s theoretical placement of coloured South Africans on “the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality” (Bhabha 13) ignores their actual political positionings (“Shame and Identity” 101–102). This disagreement should not obscure the, arguably, many similarities between Bhabha’s and Wicomb’s thinking on language, literature, and politics.
91. In her essay “Shame and Identity,” Wicomb says: “Gordimer has never missed a chance to comment on the good, strong legs or large buttocks of black female characters” (103).
92. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is the story of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom on 16 June 1904, since then known as Bloomsday.
93. Wicomb, “Culture Beyond Color? A South African Dilemma,” Transition 60 (1993) 32.
94. Wicomb, “Why I Write,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994) 574.
95. Wicomb, interview with Hunter 92.
96. For pertinent discussion, see Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) especially 78–85; Dennis Porter, “Orientalism and its Problems,” Francis Barker et al eds. The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983) 179–93; and Haunted Journeys (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991). In the first of the two cited texts, Porter refers to the “self-interrogating density of verbal texture” and the “textual dissonances” by means of which literary texts measure their distance from the “hegemonic unity” of ideologically less complex and nuanced works. In the second, he notes in some useful ways his indebtedness to Roland Barthes and Homi Bhabha (5–7).
97. Sterne, Tristram Shandy 90. Compare David’s preference for the palindrome trurt (135) with Antjie Krog’s comment in her book on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “I hesitate at the word; I am not used to using it. Even when I type it, it ends up as either turth or trth…. I prefer the word ‘lie.’ The moment the lie raises its head, I smell blood. Because it is there … where the truth is closest.” Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (1998; New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000) 50 (second ellipsis in the original).
98. Dulcie September’s political activities cast back to the early 1960s: as a member of the National Liberation Front, in Cape Town, she was imprisoned for five years and then banned on her release. After she left South Africa for Britain in 1974, she joined the ANC, and in 1984 she was appointed chief ANC representative in France, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Dulcie’s name may also refer to the wellknown line, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country) in Horace’s Ode III.2, which is generally celebratory of manly courage and loyalty.
99. Wicomb, “Classics” [review of Mittee by Daphne Rooke, and At the Still Point by Mary Benson] Southern African Review of Books (Summer 1988) 16.
100. Wicomb, “Nation, Race and Ethnicity: Beyond the Legacy of Victims,” Current Writing 4 (1992) 19.
101. “Why I Write” 573.
GLOSSARY
Aapstert. Literally, monkey tail. Type of whip.
Ag. Exclamation expressing dissatisfaction, frustration, or resignation.
Ant; Anties. Aunt. Also used as an honorific, not necessarily indicating a blood relationship.
Atjar. Vegetable pickle.
Baas. Honorific for white man, used primarily in rural areas.
Bedoeked. Wearing headcloths.
Boboties. Traditional dish of curried mincemeat and dried fruit.
Boerewors. Sausage.
Braaivleis. Barbecue.
Bredie. Stew
Bra. Informal term for brother, not reserved for family relations. Used primarily as a form of address.
Broekies. Panties.
Bubbi. Muslim shopkeeper.
Buchu. Herb.
Coons. Coloured carnival celebrating the new year.
Dagga. Marijuana.
Dassie. Hyrax.
Djolling. Having a good time; partying.
Doek. Head scarf.
Dominee. Minister of religion.
Dorinkie. Little thorn.
Dorp. Very small town.
Frikkadel. Meatball.
Gatvol. Literally, arseful. To be sick and tired of something.
Goggas. Insects.
Goose; Goosie. Mildly derogatory term for a woman.
Harmansdruppels. Old Dutch patent medicine.
Heitse. Exclamation of surprise, delight, or admonishment. One of few words from the Khoi language that still survives in rural areas.
Hotnos. Shortened version of Hottentots. Derogatory name used by many whites for the Khoikhoi people.
Ja-nee. Literally, yes-no. Used, however, to signify a doubly strong affirmative, an emphatic yes.
Kabarra. Khoi dance.
Kaffir. Derogatory term for a black person.
Kak. Shit.
Kaiings. Crisp twists of meat fat.
Kappie. Bonnet.
Karossie. Animal skin worn over shoulders.
Karoo. Semidesert terrain.
Khoikhoi. Collective name for a major group of indigenous peoples of the Cape of Good Hope.
Knobkierie. Stick used as a club; a traditional weapon.
Konfyt. Candy made of melon; a South African delicacy.
Kraal. Animal pen or fold.
Kroeskop. Frizzyhead.
Larnies. Posh people; wealthy whites.
Lekker. Nice. Common modifier.
Lofgedig. Song of praise.
Magou. Fermented mealie-meal drink.
Malva. Geraniumlike plant.
Mamma-se-boklam. Literally, mother’s kid (baby goat). Term of endearment.
Mealies; Mealie-meal. Maize (corn); maize-meal.
Moffie. Derogatory term for an effeminate homosexual man.
Mos. Indeed; at least. Used as an intensifier.
Mtombo. Homemade sorghum beer, brewed in rural areas.
Muis. Mouse.
Nkosi kakhulu. Nguni term equivalent to thank you.
Oom. Uncle. Also used as an honorific, not necessarily indicating a blood relationship, especially in rural communities.
Opperhoof.
Paramount chief.
Ou. Old. Often used to indicate familiarity or affection rather than age. Also used as a noun, the equivalent of guy.
Oubaas. Older white man.
Oulik. Cute.
Ouma. Grandmother. Also used as an honorific for any elderly woman.
Oupa. Grandfather. Also used as an honorific for any elderly man.
Pap. Porridge made of mealie-meal, similar to polenta.
Pensenpootjies. Literally, stomach and trotters. Sitting with feet folded under the body.
Plaasjapie. Country bumpkin.
Pokkenkô. Stiff, crumbly version of pap.
Poeskop. Cunthead.
Pondok. Shack; hut.
Poort. Pass, as in a mountain pass.
Potjiekos. Traditional slow-cooking meal made in a single pot.
Ramkie. Homemade musical instrument, usually similar to a guitar.
Roesbolling. Rough; vulgar.
Rooi. Red.
Rooibos. Redbush; a plant used for tea.
Rooi laventel. Old Dutch patent medicine.
Roosterbrood. Griddle bread.
Sago. Pudding made from the pith of the sago palm plant.
Siss. Expression of disgust.
Sisi. Older black woman.
Skinderbekke. Gossipmonger.
Skokiaan. Home-brewed liquor.
Skollie. Hooligan.
Sommer-so-platlangs. Vulgar; lowdown.
Steek-my-weg. Literally, hide me or tuck me away. A term used ironically to describe a township built at a far distance from any white towns.
Strelitzia. Blue-and-orange flower, commonly known as bird of paradise.
Tokolos. Mythical evil creature of popular superstition.
Toorgoed. Fetishes; magic objects.
Toyi-toying. Engaging in a well-known defiant dance-march developed by black youth during the years of resistance.
Trekgedagte. Yearning or itch for trekking.
Veldskoen. Shoes made of rawhide.
Voetsek. Get away. Imperative exclamation used toward animals.
Volk. The people; the nation.
Volksmoeder. Mother of the nation.
Voorloper. Leader of a team of oxen.