Shame and Identity the Case of the Coloured in South Africa ZOE WICOMB

Shame and identity the case of the coloured in South Africa ZOE WICOMB ... Also: brown contains black - (?) - How would a person behave for us to say of him that he knows a pure, primary brown? Wfe must always bear in mind the question: How do people learn the meaning of colour names? WITTGENSTEIN, Remarks on Colour In the 1980s South Africans discovered the Khoi/coloured woman Saartje Baartman, once known as the Hottentot Venus, who was exhib- ited in London and Paris from 1810 to her death in 1815. In nineteenth- century Europe, as Sander Gilman points out, the display of her spectacular steatopygia and its generation of medical discourse on the Khoi genitalia established the iconographic link between the black woman and sexual lasciviousness ('Black Bodies, White Bodies', 216). Since the last decade has seen her well referenced in South African visual art and writing, popular outrage has moved the government to apply to France for the return of Baartman, whose remains are still held by the Musee de l'homme in Paris (though they were removed from public display in the 1980s). Having in the New South Africa become an icon of postcoloniality, Baartman's case can be seen as one of several initiatives towards reconstructing a national cultural past. Although the project of recovery is propelled by the ignominy of sexualized display before the imperial eye, the discourse around the return of Baartman is cast in terms of injury rather than shame, and a question which has not as yet been resolved is what we will do with her remains. The popular consensus is that the violated body should be cov- ered with native soil, given a decent Christian burial in her own country, specifically in the western Cape where she originates, a view that is chal- lenged by the people of Soweto for whom the western Cape can hardly seem an appropriate site for a national symbol of cultural reconstruction. Perhaps the more pertinent question is whether her burial would also bury black woman as icon of concupiscence, which is to say bury the shame of having had our bodies stared at, but also the shame invested in Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 13 Nov 2019 at 14:16:31, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511586286.009 ZOE WICOMB those (females) who have mated with the colonizer. Miscegenation, the origins of which lie within a discourse of 'race', concupiscence, and degeneracy, continues to be bound up with shame, a pervasive shame exploited in apartheid's strategy of the naming of a Coloured race, and recurring in the current attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame. We do not speak about miscegenation; it is after all the very nature of shame to stifle its own discourse. What the case of Baartman then shows is how shame, cross-eyed and shy, stalks the postcolonial world broken mirror in hand, repro- ducing itself in puzzling distortions. 'O shame, shame, poppy shame!' Salman Rushdie, narrativizing shame in his novel about Pakistan and postcoloniality, maps its complexity as he tells the story 'in fragments of broken mirrors' {Shame, 16,69). Its English formulation, 'tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners' unrepented past', in other words, by the very shamefulness of colonialism, is replaced by the indigenous term: 'Sharam, that's the word. For which this paltry "shame" is a wholly inadequate translation... A short word but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance' (39). Rushdie, invest- ing shame with materiality, gives an ironic listing of political chicanery, its shamefulness reflected into that which Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, the character who embodies shame, blushes for. Such acts as lies, loose living, disrespect for one's elders, failure to love one's national flag, incorrect voting at elections, over-eating, extramarital sex, autobiographical novels ... throwing one's wicket away at the crucial point of a Test Match ... are done shamelessly. Then what happens to all that unfelt shame? (122) Throughout the novel, shame is connected to concupiscence, to a pathological female sexuality, so that the idiot Sufiya's release of absorbed shame is also finally brought about through the body, in the voracious sexuality and violence of the mass killer. Following Rushdie's nuanced usage, my pro ject is to find a way of dis- cussing the textual construction, ethnographic self-fashioning, and political behaviour of coloureds in South Africa, which is to say our condition of postcoloniality,1 through the concept of shame. Stuart Hall's notion of 1. I locate the meaning of the term postcolonial not in etymology, but rather in discursive fields where it has been shaped through usage and has acquired a variety of meanings, including, for instance, oppositionality, resistance, the practice of radical readings, neocolonialism, as well as the interrogation of the very term. 92 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 13 Nov 2019 at 14:16:31, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511586286.009 The case of the coloured in South Africa transcoding ethnicity, of contesting its meaning within a new politics of representation - 'It is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are' ('What is this Black?', 473) - informs my reading of coloured texts. In order to shift the debate out of a local political discourse into culture in the wider sense, I trace the construction of colouredness through postmodernism's reconceptualization of geographical space and of the body. Not only can the body be thought of metaphorically as a text, as explored in recent Euro-feminist theory, but I also wish to consider the actual materiality of black bodies that bear the marked pigmentation of miscegenation, and the way in which that relates to political culture. Saartje Baartman, whose very name indicates her cultural hybridity, exemplifies the body as site of shame, a body bound up with the politics of location. I adopt her as icon precisely because of the nasty, unspoken question of concupiscence that haunts coloured identity, the issue of nation-building implicit in the matter of her return, her contested ethnicity (Black, Khoi or 'coloured'?) and the vexed question of representation. The Baartman case also neatly exemplifies some of the central concerns of postmodern thought - the inscription of power in scopic relations; the construction of woman as racialized and sexualized other; the colonization and violation of the body; the role of scientific discourse in bolstering both the modernist and the colonial projects - and is thus a convenient point around which to discuss the contested relationship between postcolonialism and postmodernism. In etymologizing terms the death of apartheid and achievement of liberation from settler colonialism signals a condition of youthful postcoloniality. However, the shameful vote of Cape coloureds for the National Party in the first democratic elections throws such a label into question. Our electoral behaviour, which ensures that the Western Cape is the only region without an ANC parliamentary majority, coincides with the resurgence of the term Coloured, once more capitalized, without its old prefix of so-called and without the disavowing scare quotes earned during the period of revolutionary struggle when it was replaced by the word black, indicating both a rejection of apartheid nomenclature as well as inclusion in the national liberation movement. Such adoption of different names at various historical junctures shows perhaps the difficulty which the term 'coloured' has in taking on a fixed meaning, and as such exemplifies postmodernity in its shifting allegiances, its duplici- tous play between the written capitalization and speech that denies or at 93 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 13 Nov 2019 at 14:16:31, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511586286.009 ZOE WICOMB least does not reveal the act of renaming - once again the silent inscription of shame. Yet, within the new, exclusively coloured political organizations that have sprung up in the Cape since the election, attempts at blurring differences of language, class, and religion in the interest of a homogeneous ethnic group at the same time seem to defy the decentring thrust of postmodernism. What the problem of identity indicates, however, is a position that undermines the new narrative of national unity: the newly democratized South Africa remains dependent on the old eco- nomic, social, and also epistemological structures of apartheid, and thus it is axiomatic that different groups created by the old system do not par- ticipate equally in the category of postcoloniality. Theoretically, the situation can be cast in terms of the diverging interests of postmodernism and postcoloniality, or it may indicate the need to revise popular definitions of the latter to include the coexistence of oppositional and complicit forms. However, in practice such an absorption into a single category would gloss over the real threat to the task of establishing democracy, at least in the Cape. The failure, in coloured terms, of the grand narrative of liberation — for how else to describe our vote against non-racial democracy - demands fresh enquiry into the questions of postcolonial 'hybridity' and identity as well as the territorialization or geography of belonging within which identity is produced.

Load more