‘Does the Girl Think of Nothing but Food?’

Abstract

The preparation and the consumption of food constitute integral parts of the idealized representations of domesticity and home. What we eat and how we eat it defines our sense of individuality, as well as our collective sense of cultural belonging. However, in this era of transcultural migration, the notion of “authentic” food is fraught with ambiguity. This paper examines the ways in which October, Zoë Wicomb’s most recent novel, dismantles the concept of home and renders it dangerous through inscribing food as a site of cultural inauthenticity and violence. Returning to South Africa from Scotland at the behest of her ailing and alcoholic brother, Mercia Murray, the novel’s protagonist, is forced to confront her family’s history of violence, as well as her own complicity in it. Mercia, a colored university lecturer, has been living in Glasgow in Scotland since before South Africa’s transition to democracy, and has been left for a younger woman by her long-time partner, Craig. The present-time of the novel details Mercia’s interactions with her brother, Jake, and his wife, Sylvie. Food becomes the manner in which both women perform their identity. However, because food acts as a marker of both personal and cultural difference, Wicomb’s depiction of it as unhomely undermines this performance at the same time. I will demonstrate how the representation of food as uncanny causes Mercia to re-examine her relation to the concept of home, and to restructure her understanding of her individual identity, as well as her alignment to a more general sense of cultural identity. Wicomb thus demonstrates the violence inherent in notions of cultural essentialism through the representation of food.

Keywords:

• Zoë Wicomb
• food
• home
• cultural authenticity
• violence
• unhomeliness

Notes

1. In “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa”, Wicomb (1998) critiques Bhabha’s use of the term “hybridity” in describing colored identity. She argues instead that:

‘multiple belongings’ could be seen as an alternative way of viewing a culture where participating in a number of coloured micro-communities whose interests conflict and overlap could become a rehearsal of cultural life in the larger South African community where we learn to perform the kind of negotiations in terms of identity within a lived culture characterized by difference. (105)

In my argument below, I use Bhabha’s (1992) understanding of “unhomeliness” as indicating difference not in relation to the in-betweenness he associates with hybridity, but rather as informing the kind of cultural performance to which Wicomb alludes above.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antoinette Pretorius

Antoinette Pretorius received a PhD from the University of Pretoria in 2015. She is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of South Africa. Her research explores the relationship between notions of culture, gender, identity and food in contemporary South African literature.