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Pasts in Post-Apartheid South African Fiction: Slavery, Gender, and Anachronism

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Pasts in Post-Apartheid South African Fiction: Slavery, Gender, and Anachronism “Coloured” Pasts in Post-Apartheid South African Fiction: Slavery, Gender, and Anachronism by Theresa Harney A major thesis presented as full requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Maynooth University School of English, Media and Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts, Celtic Studies & Philosophy st 31 October 2014 Head of Department: Prof. Emer Nolan Supervisor: Dr. Íde Corley Summary This dissertation examines a set of novels concerned with the history of slavery, “coloured” identity and the politics of gender and sexuality in post-apartheid South Africa: Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney, Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book, and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light. Each writer’s engagement with the history of slavery highlights discursive and material continuities between the colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid eras. By investigating, or making visible, figures of anachronism, these novels qualify the celebratory rhetoric of the “new” nation by pointing to the continued challenges facing the democratic state, particularly in relation to the social position of “coloured” women. In doing so, they challenge the narrative of progress implicit in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which moves from the horror of the apartheid past to the multi- racial democracy of the “rainbow” nation. Representations of the female slave in these texts raise questions about the construction of contemporary “coloured” identity and the logic of raced reproduction in post-apartheid South Africa. Through their examinations of motherhood, domestic labour and domestic space, these literary works reveal the persistence of a gendered and racialised logic of reproduction in contemporary South Africa that was first generated under slavery and thus marks the state as anachronistic. While deploying the work of American critics such as Hortense Spillers, Lee Edelman and Valerie Rohy, this dissertation remains attentive to the historical specificity of the South African context. At the same time, the novels considered here demand a reconsideration of the space of the nation itself. Invoking a broader history of slavery through their allusions to the North American slave narrative and to the types of forced migrations that occurred under slavery, these texts invite a reconception of the nation state and ask us to consider South Africa’s place within transnational networks of capital. Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... i Introduction: ............................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Slavery, Sexual Violence and Narrative Truth in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit .............................................................................................. 24 Chapter Two: History, Narrative and Disavowal in Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney ............................................................................................... 77 Chapter Three: “Coloured” Identity and Citizenship in Rayda Jacobs’s Historical Fiction .................................................................................................. 134 Chapter Four: Maternal Cosmopolitanism and Narrative Identity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light ............................................................................ 178 Notes .......................................................................................................................233 Bibliography .......................................................................................................... 271 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Íde Corley for her help and guidance in completing this dissertation. I am grateful for the support of the English Department. My thanks to the Head of Department, Prof. Emer Nolan and the administrative staff Amanda Bent and Tracy O’Flaherty for their help. I would also like to thank Prof. Margaret Kelleher, Prof. Chris Morash, Prof. Joe Cleary, Dr. Conrad Brunstrom, Dr. Conor McCarthy, and Dr. Stephen O’Neill. Particular thanks to Dr. Oona Frawley, Dr. Sinéad Kennedy and Dr. Moynagh Sullivan. I gratefully acknowledge receipt of a Postgraduate Scholarship from the Irish Research Council from 2009-2012. I could not have completed this dissertation without the support and friendship of fellow postgraduate students. My thanks go to Dr. Bridget English, Dr. Margaret O’Neill, Dr. Deirdre Quinn, Dr. Ciara Gallagher, Claire Brophy, Sarah Byrne, Dr. Declan Kavanagh, Dr. Sonia Howell, Alan Carmody and Colleen English. The friendship of Thérèse, Lianna, Laurel, Carlo and Aisling made this process considerably easier. Thanks also to Harry and Kev for all the Scrabble. Particular thanks go to Ruth and Carla for making Maynooth home for so many years. Special thanks to John for his endless patience, optimism and encouragement. I could not have completed this project without the support of my family. I would like to thank them all for putting up with me over these last few years. My parents Michael and Elaine in particular have been sources of irrational and unwavering belief in me, while my brothers Patrick and Christopher made sure I never got too big for my boots. i Introduction In his 1989 lecture to the ANC seminar, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom: 1 Culture and the ANC Constitutional Guidelines”, Albie Sachs argued that, in order for South Africa to build a truly multi-cultural and liberated society in the aftermath of apartheid, culture could no longer be considered merely a political “weapon” or tool of the anti-apartheid struggle. Sachs, a prominent anti-apartheid activist, was appointed by Nelson Mandela to serve as a constitutional court judge in 1994 and subsequently played a key role in the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2006. While he is thus more closely associated with the state judiciary and the legal transformation of South Africa, in his lecture he identifies culture, and literature in particular, as a key medium through which South Africans can potentially “remake [them]selves” (189). Significantly, Sachs played a key role in establishing the South African Truth 2 and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) : established by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995, the TRC was the central mechanism by which South Africans attempted to come to terms with apartheid in the immediate 3 transition period. The Commission was mandated to use the testimony of both the victims and perpetrators of human rights violations to investigate the apartheid past in order to help the nation overcome the traumatic legacies of apartheid, so that its peoples could be reconciled and South Africa could move forward into a democratic future. The TRC constructed a narrative of the apartheid past that attempted to deny its power in the present. At the same time, the Commission’s hearings were marked by an urge towards inclusiveness; they aspired to represent the whole range of South African experiences under apartheid—black, white and “coloured”, men and women, victim, perpetrator and collaborator. While setting out to uncover the “truth” of apartheid, the TRC was a fundamentally narrative project whose work of witnessing and uncovering hidden 4 histories has been continued in the literature of the transition period. By engaging with the history of slavery, the fictions I examine here complicate the linear narrative of 1 progress from apartheid to democracy produced by the work of the TRC by highlighting the perpetuation of forms of social organisation first established under slavery, particularly in relation to race, gender and sexuality. This dissertation examines post-apartheid fiction that is concerned with the previously repressed history of slavery. More specifically, I consider four novels published between 1998 and 2006: Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney (1998), Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book (1998), Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2004) and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006). Dangor and Wicomb are the best known of the writers considered here; both began publishing during the apartheid era and their post- apartheid writing has received considerable critical attention. Jacobs and Landsman, on the other hand, emerged on the literary scene only after the end of apartheid and while Landsman’s second novel, The Rowing Lesson (2007), garnered significant critical acclaim, Jacobs’s work remains less well known. These writers also represent a wide variety of South African identities: while Dangor, Jacobs and Wicomb were all classified as “coloured” under apartheid, Dangor is South African Indian, Jacobs identifies herself as a Cape Muslim and Wicomb was raised in a Griqua community in Little Namaqualand; Landsman, the only white writer considered, is Jewish and thus occupies the privileged space of whiteness liminally. Together, the work of these writers engages, both literally and figuratively, with the history of slavery in a variety of rural and urban contexts. While Bitter Fruit and Playing in the Light are set in contemporary South Africa, The Devil’s Chimney represents both the post-apartheid and colonial periods. The Slave Book, on the other hand, is a work of historical fiction set in the early nineteenth-century in the years before the emancipation of the slaves. While these novels taken as a group by no means provide a complete representation of post-apartheid fiction dealing with the history of
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