Chick lit politics in a post-truth era: tricksters, blessees and postfeminist girlpower in Angela Makholwa’s The Blessed Girl

ABSTRACT

The possibility of an emancipated politics in chick lit novels remains a contested question among postfeminist critics. Drawing on definitions of postfeminism as a transnational sensibility, this article examines South African chick lit in relation to what has been termed post-truth or trickster politics in the context of the rise of politicians, such as Donald Trump. I read Angela Makholwa’s novel The Blessed Girl as an example of African chick lit that features a blessee narrator, a young woman who lives a luxurious lifestyle financed by older men, who is deeply influenced by a Trumpian mode of self-making. By employing a trickster aesthetic and narrative strategies, such as unreliable narration and reader address, the novel, I argue, however also unsettles established parameters of neoliberal girlpower, moving beyond its assumed anti-politicalness, as well as a simple understanding of the blessee figure through either a lens of victimhood or amorality.

KEYWORDS:

• (South) African chick lit
• postfeminism
• post-truth
• trickster figure
• girlpower
• sugar daddy/blesser phenomenon

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Makholwa, The Blessed Girl, 4. Further references to the novel will be provided in the main body of the article.

² When Trump allegedly asked in a meeting in January 2018 why the US should allow immigration from “shithole countries” such as Haiti and African nations, South Africans, as Nivashni Nair writes for the Sunday Times, “lashed out online against Donald Trump […] so much so that it was among the top five countries in the world to vent at the US president” (Nair, “How South Africans”).

³ In his book The Art of the Deal, Trump lays out his entrepreneurial abilities to make deals leading to his economic success.

⁴ Griffin, “The ‘Morning/Mourning’ After,” 141.

⁵ For instance, Angela McRobbie in “Anti-feminism, then and now” suggests that “Trump’s unapologetic sexism seems to give carte blanche to an insurgent patriarchy which can now reassert itself with confidence.” Barbara Stark highlights that the behavior Trump boasted about on the Access Hollywood tape “clearly constituted sexual harassment as well as sexual assault” (“Mr. Trump’s Contribution”, 325).

⁶ Ferguson, “Trump Is a Feminist,” 53.

⁷ Ferguson (“Trump”, 58) describes neoliberal feminism as “a political ideology grounded in a view […] that women are liberated when they are free to make their own choices – about career, reproduction, sexuality, politics and so on.” This idea becomes aligned with neoliberalism, she surmises, when combined with three further propositions: the neglect of structural inequality in women’s empowerment discourse, the rendering redundant of collective political activism “as individuals are responsible for any gender inequality that results from their free choices” and, finally, the idea that “women’s liberation is achieved through participation in free market capitalism” as consumers and entrepreneurs. For a discussion of Ivanka Trump’s feminism, see Filipovic, “Ivanka Trump’s Dangerous Fake Feminism.”

⁸ Ferguson, “Trump”, 57.

⁹ Martin and Krause-Jensen, “Trump: Transacting Trickster,” 6.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Frenkel and Spain, “South African Representations of ‘America’,” 187.

¹² Gupta and Frenkel, “Introduction: Chick Lit in a Time of African Cosmopolitanism.”

¹³ Harzewski, Chick Lit and Postfeminism, 8.

¹⁴ Mißler, The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit, E-book.

¹⁵ See, for instance, McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism; and Scharff, Repudiating Feminism.

¹⁶ See Butler and Desai, “Manolos, Marriage and Mantras.”; and Ommundsen, “Sex and the Global City.”

¹⁷ Mathew, “The Pretty and the Political.”

¹⁸ Dosekun, “For Western Girls Only?,” 965.

¹⁹ Giraldo, “Coloniality at Work,” 169.

²⁰ Gill, “The Affective, Cultural, and Psychic Life of Postfeminism,” 612.

²¹ Newell, “Introduction,” 4.

²² Newell, Ghanaian Popular Fiction, 4.

²³ Spencer, “Writing Women in Uganda and South Africa.”; see also Spencer, “In Defence of Chick Lit.”

²⁴ Newell, Ghanaian, 144. See also Boyce Davies, Black Women.

²⁵ Gill, “Post-Postfeminism?,” 621.

²⁶ Fuller and Driscoll, “HBO’s Girls,” 253.

²⁷ Donkor, Spiders of the Market, 72.

²⁸ See Priebe, “Soyinka’s Brother Jero.”; Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa; and Lynn, Chinua Achebe.

²⁹ MacKethan, “Trickster,” 951.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Smith, Writing Tricksters, 2.

³² Provost, “Becoming Afrekete.” Efua Sutherland’s play The Marriage of Anansewa, although not featuring a female trickster, uses the figure to “expose the faults in the marriage payment system” (Newell, The Power, 102).

³³ Pieterse, “Trickster Tropes,” 76. Hlakanyana shifts between taking on the form of an animal and human and also appears in female form.

³⁴ Genz and Brabon, Postfeminism, 6.

³⁵ Landay, Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women, 11.

³⁶ Armbrust, “Trickster Defeats the Revolution,” 33; see also Salman, “Sherry Salman on Persona,” 89.

³⁷ Fish defines the workings of post-truth politics as “a willingness to issue warnings regardless of whether there is any real sense of the events being likely to come about, or make promises that there is no real commitment to keeping, or make claims there is no real reason to believe are true, all for the purpose of gaining electoral advantage (“Post-Truth”, 211). The OED highlights: “Rather than simply referring to the time after a specific situation or event […] the prefix in post-truth has a meaning more like ‘belonging to a time in which the specific concept has become unimportant or irrelevant.”

³⁸ Hyde cautions against readings of modern politicians as tricksters, maintaining that “the trickster belongs to the periphery, not to the center. If trickster were ever to get into power, he would stop being trickster” (Trickster, n.p.). Donkor (Spiders) reads former Ghanaian president Jerry John Rawlings as a trickster figure who utilizes trickery for political validation.

³⁹ Armbrust, “Trickster”, 227.

⁴⁰ Martin and Krause-Jensen, “Trump”, 5.

⁴¹ See Coates, “The First White President.”

⁴² Gökariksel and Smith warn against views that position Trump as “an aberration”, highlighting that “Trump is a more colorful example of the country’s foundations in exclusionary violence and the centering of heroic white masculinity (as a savior to vulnerable and pure white femininity) as a means to write a script justifying conquest, exclusion, hardened borders, and gendered, racialized, and xenophobic politics” (Steinberg et al., “Reassessing”, 210).

⁴³ De Cock et al., “What’s He Building?”, 4.

⁴⁴ Ogola, “Africa,” n.p. February writes that in “South Africa, we seem to have inhabited post-truth world long before it became [&] fashionable. The governing ANC and the Zuma administration are old hands at this” (February, “SA”); see also Olaniyan, “Africa, Post-Global,” 331.

⁴⁵ Achebe, A Man of the People, 66.

⁴⁶ Christensen, “Managed Risk,” 320.

⁴⁷ Warnes, “Writing Crime in the New South Africa,” 982; and De Kock, Losing the Plot, 9.

⁴⁸ Spencer, “Writing,” 110–111.

⁴⁹ Murray, “Constructing Gender,” 23.

⁵⁰ Myambo, “Notes on Chick Lit in the New South Africa.”

⁵¹ Harris, Future Girl, 17. In her book, Harris traces the development of the girlpower idea from its origins in the punk and alternative music movements largely based in the UK and the US to articulations of neoliberal girl culture with its focus on individual empowerment and consumption. Whereas the earlier “riot grrrls” actively fought against the exploits of the capitalist system, the later mainstream girlpower, embodied by pop groups such as the Spice Girls, “was a product of that very system” (Tormulainen et al., “Explosive Self-Confident Femininity,” 52).

⁵² Harris, Future Girl, 17.

⁵³ Harzewski, Chick Lit, 144.

⁵⁴ Spencer, Writing Women, 95.

⁵⁵ Harzewski, Chick Lit, 11.

⁵⁶ Newns, “Renegotiating Romantic Genres,” 296.

⁵⁷ Mißler, The Cultural, n.p.

⁵⁸ As Makholwa notes in an interview, “[l]ove takes a backseat in a lot of these arrangements. The main thing for a blessee is that ‘I need to get as much as possible, materially, from this relationship’” (Sibanyoni, “How Love Takes a Backseat,” n.p.). Other contemporary South African novels centering on the phenomenon are Nape’a Motana’s Hamba Sugar Daddy (2016) and Jackie Phamotse’s Bare: The Blesser’s Game: The Breeding of an Underdog (2017).

⁵⁹ Butler and Desai, “Manolos,” 2.

⁶⁰ Ligaga, “Thinking,” 236.

⁶¹ Smith, Writing Trickster, 13.

⁶² Newell and Okome, “Introduction,” 6–7.

⁶³ BBC Trending, “Fighting,” n.p.

⁶⁴ Ibid., n.p. “Blesser finder” and “sugar loving” dating sites such as Blesserfinder Dating Service, BlesserClub South Africa, Best Blessers in Mzansi, Blesser-360 started cropping up on the web and newspapers and television stations dedicated numerous articles and broadcasts to the phenomenon. See, for instance, ENCA’s Checkpoint, May 11, 2016.

⁶⁵ Gqola, Reflecting Rogue, 137.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 136.

⁶⁸ Stoebenau et al., “Revisiting the Understanding of ‘Transactional Sex’,” 186.

⁶⁹ Shefer and Strebel, “Deconstructing,” 59.

⁷⁰ Harris, “The Trickster”, n.p.

⁷¹ Ballinger, “Ambigere,” 34.

⁷² See Lynn, Chinua Achebe, 43.

⁷³ Entwistle and Wissinger, “Keeping up Appearances,” 782–783.

⁷⁴ Winch, “Brand Intimacy,” 21.

⁷⁵ Bontle’s conduct here echoes that of Khotso Sethuntsa, a legendary South African herbalist who became a millionaire during apartheid. In her discussion of Sethuntsa as a trickster figure, Felicity Wood draws attention to his close relationship with National Party leaders. While he was viewed with suspicion on the grounds of his allegiances with white power, “he succeeded in luring leading representatives of the apartheid establishment into his own terrain and then exerting his influence over them, as he shifted, chameleon-like, into a figure that blended oddly into their political terrain” (Wood, “The Shape-Shifter on the Borderlands,” 79).

⁷⁶ Mailula, “The Pitfalls,” n.p.

⁷⁷ The glossary at the beginning of the novel defines the term as referring to a “black person who has a light or fair complexion. Also refers to those who have artificially altered their skin to achieve said complexion” (n.p.).

⁷⁸ Hunter, “Buying Racial Capital,” 158.

⁷⁹ Tate, “Skin,” 210.

⁸⁰ Ibid.

⁸¹ Mailula, “The Pitfalls,” n.p.

⁸² Makholwa here alludes to Hugh Masekela’s visit to Rhodes University in 2015, where he refused to take pictures with female students who were wearing weaves or hair extensions (The Citizen, “I don’t,” n.p.).

⁸³ Smith, Writing, 14.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 11.

⁸⁵ Herman, “Textual ‘You’ and Double Deixis,” 380–381.

⁸⁶ For a definition, see DelConte, “Why You Can’t Speak.”

⁸⁷ Newell, “Corresponding with the City,” 16.

⁸⁸ Nünning, “Conceptualising,” 10.

⁸⁹ Weaver Shipley, “Selfie Love,” 404.

⁹⁰ Dobson, Postfeminist Digital Cultures, 159.

⁹¹ Schmeichel et al., “Selfies as Postfeminist Pedagogy,” 1.

⁹² Kuntsman, “Introduction,” 14.

⁹³ Ibid.

⁹⁴ In her feminist cultural study of emotion and affect, Sara Ahmed shows how certain identities, such as the “feminist killjoy”, that have become symbols of non-conformity with the ubiquitous happiness script become read as causes of unhappiness, jeopardizing the social order and threatening what she understands as the “happy objects” of the “normative family, community and nation” (Ahmed, The Promise).

⁹⁵ Shipley, “Selfie Love,” 407.

⁹⁶ Mailula, “The Pitfalls,” n.p.

⁹⁷ Finnegan, Oral Literature, 343.

⁹⁸ Mailula, “The Pitfalls,” n.p.

⁹⁹ Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster in the System, 12.

¹⁰⁰ McRobbie, The Aftermath, 120.

¹⁰¹ Cvetkovich, Depression, 12.

¹⁰² Van Der Vlies, Present Imperfect.

¹⁰³ Ballinger, “Coyote,” 23–24.

¹⁰⁴ Weaver Shipley points out that even though the Akan trickster figure Ananse fails in most trickster tales and contemporary adaptations thereof, he, “as an antihero”, paves the way for “new possibilities” (Shipley, Trickster Theatre, 230).

¹⁰⁵ Babcock-Abrahams, “A Tolerated Margin of Mess,” 161

¹⁰⁶ Smith, Writing, 23.

¹⁰⁷ Brasch, Brer Rabbit, 75.

¹⁰⁸ Lynn, Chinua Achebe.

¹⁰⁹ Newell, Ghanaian, 150–151.

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Rebecca Fasselt

Rebecca Fasselt is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria, where she teaches African and postcolonial literature. She is particularly interested in literary and cultural connections between South Africa and other parts of Africa. Her articles can be found in English Studies in Africa, Research in African Literatures, Ariel, Journal of Southern African Studies and Poetics Today.