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Ginger Wang, Kwang-Wu College, TaipeiLost and Found in Cape Town: South African Dilemma in |
To write under the sway of postcolonial imperatives would never be an easy task for South African writers particularly when the issues of gender, race and language are taken into serious considerations. The white privileged write either to problematize postcolonial relationships or to substantialize postcolonial predicaments in South Africa, say, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. For the black majority, especially for the coloured female writers who are discriminated as objects of men and the colonial other, their purpose to write down autobiographical South African stories is primarily based on the anxiety of being silenced and excluded. As one reads Zoë Wicomb's You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, therefore, a strong sense of "borderline existence" (Homi Bhabha's term) is revealed and the coloured woman's struggle for self-assertion in the apartheid regime is empathized. As we dissect South African postcolonial situation in assistance with Zoë Wicomb's literary creation, two questions referential and crucial to the Coloureds' awkward situation in Cape Town would have to be considered. To what extent can Cape Town be regarded as a postcolonial site where the coloured identity is proclaimed and then reclaimed? How does Zoë Wicomb inscribe the resisted into the contextualization of the resisting and develop her concept of resistance as subversion? To understand Wicomb in a fuller range, it is cardinal to begin with the dissection of the multiplicity implied in South African context, that is, its discursive alternatives produced by white writing and by coloured autobiographical stories.
J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer are the most representative South African writers in light of their concerns on the economy of Manichean allegory in apartheid regime. A white male author writing in English, J.M. Coetzee presents oblique challenges to the particular form of postcolonial violence embodied in postcolonial South Africa. His recurrent theme is centered on the problematic postcolonial relationships, such as hybridity, ambivalence, and mimicry in the age of political transition, of decolonization. He also concerns about the extent to which the majority of South African people tolerate the apparatus of state power, censorship and apartheid in particular. His preoccupation with the colonial domination and its politicized aesthetics draws our attention to the miscellaneous postcolonial situations in South Africa. Through Coetzee's insightful works, readers are encouraged to consider the South African postcoloniality with a mode different from the West/Third World contrast particularly when the concept of a new nation in neocolonial South Africa is involved. He also brings forth the existence of a new space beyond colonial writing, that is, to subvert the colonial authority with postcolonial aesthetics as it is shown in two of his metafictions, Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1995). To be precise, the South Africa Coetzee deals with is an ambivalent postcolonial site where "decolonization is process, not arrival" (Tiffin 17). His writing is "generated by the concerns of people no longer European, not yet African" (Coetzee, White Writing II). Such a "postcolonial time-lag," a term Homi Bhabha employs when tackling with the issue of "postcolonial contramodernity" (252), problematizes the aesthetics of contamination and complicity in a politicized context where the intimate and rival relationship between the censor and writer in terms of readership is revealed. Even after the demise of apartheid, Coetzee pessimistically maintains that the sense of guilt created by complicit structure of apartheid remains as the same situation as personal and the nation's "disgrace," shown in his latest novel Disgrace (1999), relating both his protagonist's and his country's disgrace in a post-apartheid account. In this respect, Nadine Gordimer shares a common subject but with a different strategic move from that of Coetzee's when she treats writing as her means to substantialize postcolonial predicaments in South Africa. Unlike Coetzee's referential and metafictional works, Gordimer's realistic stories deal with women's and the black natives' inarticulation and the intimate inter-racial relationship between white women and black native men. My Son's Story (1990) and July's People (1981), for instance. By so doing, Gordimer interrogates and challenges domination exerted not simply by political enforcement but also by a more subtle power over the economy and state apparatuses such as education and the media. She also explores the possibility of a social choice free from ideological determination, though she also takes a pessimistic view of such an imperative choice in a world full of complicity with racial injustice. The implication of conspiracy carries on in her latest work House Gun (1999).
Exposed to and educated by the dominant white culture, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer are recognized as distinguished white South African writers who create white writings to raise the question of political commitment and accuse the authority for not being able to deliver promises. In contrast to Coetzee and Gordimer who have achieved international prestige (Coetzee wins 1999 Booker's Prize for his Disgrace and Gordimer Nobel laureate in 1991), "Coloured" Zoë Wicomb finds herself trapped in a South African dilemma. To represent an autobiographical story in her own fashion becomes a way out of legitimized discrimination, of facing her interstitial existence in postcolonial South Africa.
The discriminating usage of the capitalized "Coloured" for neither white nor indigenous black people directly indicates the coloured people's fragmented inbetweeness in South Africa's apartheid regime. The Coloureds are not recognized as part of the white culture, nor are they identified by the black nationalists for liberation struggles. In order to deal with this awkward situation, Wicomb employs Frieda Shenton, a colourd girl growing up in Cape Town, to reveal her sense of "borderline existence" in which she finds herself not quite African, not yet European in the first place. By the end of the initiation story, she realizes that she would never find out her location of culture if she keeps allowing herself to get lost in the maze of culture displacement.
The postcolonial theorizing of the Coloured marks an inbetween reality that s/he is "not a white person or a Black," declares the Nationalist government's Population Registration Act of 1950. Although the coloured's miscegenation origin is denigrated as "taint and degeneration" (White Writing 136), their "borderline existence" marks a displacement that represents "a hybridity, a difference 'within' a subject that inhabits the rim of an inbetween reality" (Bhabha 13). To Africanize their fragmented origins, they look for a location of belonging within which identity is produced. But the question is that how do people living in segregated communities displace the "rim of inbetween reality" to represent the coloured hybridity at the Cape, where the African majority are in fact the Coloured? As Homi Bhabha suggests in his critical reading of Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story, the Coloured South Africans have to turn their "inbetween diasporic origins" into "the symbol of the disjunctive, displaced everyday life of the liberation struggle" so as to enable a form of subversion (13). Unfortunately, the necessary subversiveness is transformed into "coloured complicity" as the coloured South Africans agree to the National Party's expedient use of "Brown Afrikaners" in an attempt to fabricate a traditional past and further to foster the notion of a coloured nation (Wicomb, "Shame and Identity" 102-3). Aware of and distressed by this postcolonial dilemma, Frieda Shenton, the coloured female protagonist in Wicomb's You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, bearing shame and anger, chooses to exile herself to EnglandÑ-the metropolitan centerÑ-as a signification process to her coloured identity formation.
Zoë Wicomb's "semi-fictionalized autobiography"1 (Wisker's terminology 74) severely targets at an accusation that the cruel and disgraceful racism endemic in South Africa has much to do with apartheid. In You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, Wicomb connects her life stories to that of Frieda, a mixed-race girl who accepts the government's equation of self-worth with racial classification as "Coloured," 2 and her predicament is exposed from the inception of the first story, "Bowl like Hole."
The Shentons are the only English speakers in their community, whereas it is the Afrikaans language that the coloured urban working class uses as their lice-infested neighbors, the Dirkses. English is the language of the colonizer, of the white dominance, but English is identified by the Shentons as "a way out of oppression" (Wicomb, Between the Lines II 89). It is treated as a cutting sword that Mr. Shenton wields to occupy a "respectable" comprador position to interpret Afrikaans for Mr. Weedon (a white mine supervisor) because for people born in England the g's and r's of the Afrikaans language are "impossible, barbaric" (2). English has therefore become a pass for the Shentons to go through the bewilderment of being Coloureds in apartheid South Africa. Paradoxically, it is their choice of English underlines the "inbetweeness" for a group of people not quite African, not yet European. "Fowl, howl, scowl, and not bowl," as Frieda's mother keeps checking the pronunciation of every word she has taken for granted. In order to occupy a solid middle position with the whites above and blacks below, it would take the coloured no time at all to say "bowl like hole, smoothly, without stuttering" (9).
Rob Gaylard has also noticed the significance of the process of language acquisition for the Shentons. In assimilation the language, they simultaneously "assimilate the culture, the values, and the ideology which the language brings with it" (180). For Frieda's parents, who speak Afrikaans as their native tongue, English is the language of culture and opportunity. This explains why Frieda's father is thrilled with the heaven-sent opportunity "When the Train Comes" to take her to St. Mary's, a previously all-white girls' school in Cape Town: "You'll have the best, the very best [English] education" (32). That the Shentons' striving for social equality through language acquisition, ironically, demonstrates at this moment how lost they are. Fridea's parents are lost in the search of being recognized as part of the white culture because of their reminiscence of the Shentons' English ancestor "whose memory must be kept sacred, must not be defiled by associating with those beneath us. [The Shentons] were respectable coloureds" (116; emphasis mine). As for Frieda, she is lost in the maze of being objectified by her ambitious father who implants his English-trance to Frieda's inherited colouredness. To renounce her Griqua inheritance, Frieda straightens her hair and studies the map of Wessex and the trails of Hardy's Tess to learn to adjust herself to the English culture that is neither African nor indigenous. More intriguingly, she dreams about "driving a white car" (24) as the day when Mr. Weedon comes. Undoubtedly recognizing and submitting to the Englishness en-gendered by patriarchal society and the white hegemony, Frieda Shenton cannot but lost in Cape Town.3
Frieda's awakening from her identity crisis triggers from her awareness of gender conflicts. She never consciously deals with her borderline existence until she has developed an unlawful interracial affair with Michael, a blond young man, in Cape Town. This shameful experience is laid bare in the title story, "You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town." An interracial relationship is prohibited by the white hegemony; meanwhile, it is seen as a "disgrace" among her coloured people and "there's no place in [the coloured] house for a girl who's been used by white trash" (66). Bearing this secret guilt and double oppression, she can do nothing but procure an abortion and refuses Michael's proposal for a "happy" marriage in England because she does not want to "be duped by a dream" (74-75). How can she be contented with who she really is if she deliberately ignores the difference between the white and the coloured culture production even she is far away from the postcolonial Cape Town? "You can't get lost in Cape Town. ThereÉis Table Mountain and there is Devil's Peak and there Lion's Head, so how in heaven's name could you get lost?" Although Michael tries to bridge the gap by reiterating her location in Cape Town, it is the act of re-placing that brings forth Frieda's awareness of her culture displacement that "there are," Frieda supposes, "things that even a loved one cannot overlook" (73-74). What she has once lost now is found through her ambivalent relationship with Michael. She realizes that she cannot get lost in Cape Town on account that she is not allowed to get lost in the monkey business with the white trash on the one hand. On the other, she is not able to get lost in Cape Town because there is no fixed position for the coloured in a polarized world of either black or white. She exists in the postcolonial thirdspace4 of South Africa. "I will not come back. I will never live in this country again," says Frieda in "Home Sweet Home" (90). Because of the claustrophobic sense of inauthenticity and alienation, she chooses to leave South Africa for England.
Not until has she returned from England after ten-year self exile and taken "A Trip to the Gifberge" with her mother can Frieda find an expedient way out of her South African dilemma. In the final chapter, Frieda makes rapprochement not only with her mother's attachment to and knowledge about the land, but also with her own disappointed identification with English culture. Mrs. Shenton's search for protea blossoms in the mountains at the inception disturbs Frieda
since the protea is the chosen national bloom of Afrikaner South Africa: "You must take up a little white protea bush for my garden," she says as we walk back to the bakkie.
"If you must," I retort. "And then you can hoist the South African flag and sing 'Die Stem'" (181).
But later she realizes, unlike her mad cousin, Jan Klinkies, who refuses to take anything labeled with symbols of Afrikaner culture ("Jan Klinkies," 17), that her mother manages to maintain her South African attributes in her resistance to nationalistic uses of them:
Don't be silly; it's not the same thing at all. You who're so clever ought to know that proteas belong to the veld. Only fools and cowards would hand them over to the Boers. Those who put their stamp on things may see in it their own histories and hopes. But a bush is a bush; it doesn't become what people think they inject into it. 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 (181).
Mrs. Shenton offers Frieda her mode of resistance different from her perspective. As Raiskin observes that "while they acknowledge the power of the dominant culture to name and define, these older people have learned to claim that power for themselves" (230). Through the application of the ambivalent mother-daughter relationship, Wicomb seems to treat this trip to Gifberge as Frieda's personal emancipation to assert her hybrid Griqua origins. It also helps Frieda to learn that identity is constructed rather than given, advocated rather than announced in a postcolonial site as complicated as in South Africa.
The ending story intensifies Frieda's identity crisis, it also calls for an affiliation among the Cape Town Coloureds to negotiate their ambiguous location in the colonial power operation system constructed by European cultures. The Coloured cannot get lost in Cape Town as s/he realizes that resistance is not necessarily "an oppositional act of political intention, or is it the simple negation or exclusion of the 'content' of an other culture," as Bhabha suggests. Resistance is "the effect of ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they articulate the signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within the deferential relations of colonial powerÑhierarchy, normalization, marginalization, and so forth" (110-11). In the case of Frieda Shenton and of Zoë Wicomb herself, if I may say so, the coloured woman's way out of her South African dilemma is to inscribe her initiation story into the apartheid culture. It also opens up possibilities to reclaim and assert coloured identity in South Africa.
Notes
- 1 As Huma Ibrahim observes, the most striking element in works created by black South African women writers is their autobiographical content which is devised to counteract the metaphysical concepts of an artwork's creativity and imagination. The autobiographical element also helps to demonstrate postcolonial women's still-colonized states where the personal is the political (122). Whereas Carol Sicherman maintains that there is no reason to read You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town in its direct relation to Zoë Wicomb's life story. Frieda returns to South Africa in 1984, while Wicomb returned in 1991, taking a teaching position at the University of Cape Town (111). It is to this extent I employ Ibrahim's use of "semi-fictionalized autobiography" to echo Frieda's South African experience with Wicomb's.
- 2 Zoë Wicomb is, Dorothy Driver observes, the first South African woman writer who focuses on this particular colouredness and contextualizes it into a collection of stories (45-46).
- 3 Michel Cliff, another coloured from Jamaica, has shared Wicomb's recognition of English in her "Caliban's Daughter: The Tempest and the Teapot." Cliff's identification with Wicomb is, Raiskin observes, based on their "shared racial status as 'Coloured,' their shared acknowledgment of the ironies of their English literary educations, and their skepticism about English as the language of their own writing" (205). Raiskin's observation may initiate an analysis expressive of the subtle difference between the "Coloureds" from one end of the Empire to the other.
- 4 Thirdspace, according to Edward W. Soja, is "a purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings" (2). Soja's concept of thirdspace can be broadly used to highlight the othering of geographical space and social spatiality as he manifests in "Thirding-as-Othering" (60-70).
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