HOUSES, MEMORY AND THE NIGHTMARES OF IDENTITY IN ZOë WICOMB'S PLAYING IN THE LIGHT

Abstract

This article aims to map out the spatial strategies of Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light (2006) through the discursive construction of the house, understood in its multiple functions as location, setting, metaphor and affective trope. In particular, it highlights the way houses, often represented as haunted spaces of denial, act in the novel as spatial embodiments of the painful dialectics of collective amnesia, emplaced memory and restorative re-membering which was at the core of the healing agenda of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and still inspire the ongoing project of a reconciled national community re-networked through storytelling.

Keywords:

• Wicomb
• racial passing
• transition
• liminality
• memory
• storytelling

Notes

1 On this issue see Driver (2010: 538); Van der Vlies (2010: 597–98), and Coetzee (2010: 569).

2 Samuelson (2010: 553) interestingly discusses Wicomb's representation of the sea in terms of a fluid repository of repressed narratives. Van der Vlies (2010) provides a thoughtful deconstruction of the text building on Derrida's writings on the archive.

3 For the trope of the photograph as an ‘object’ bidding affective recognition, see Wicomb's short story ‘In search of Tommie’ (2009: 52–3).

4 On the symbolism of this bird's plumage among white anti-apartheid dissidents, see Wicomb (1998b: 370).

5 This scene undermines the well-established iconic opposition between Table Mountain and Robben Island as, respectively, the unencumbered view from the rich white areas and the closed-off space where black activists were confined.