LUSTER’S LOST QUARTER

Abstract

It is ten years since South Africa, emerging out of the darkness of 340 years of colonial conflict, became a new democratic republic. At the swearing in of the new National Assembly in 1994 Desmond Tutu declared: “We are of many cultures, languages, and races have become one nation. We are the rainbow people of God.” Subsequently at his own inauguration President Mandela resorted to the same affective rhetoric: “We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.” In the circumstances it is little wonder that reconciliation has achieved the status of a new state doctrine and religion. It is also highly unlikely that cultural works that question the veracity of the evidence could ever win a prize in our post‐apartheid republic.

In this article, I read South African identities through the prism of works of literature, as products of two societies which uncannily resemble each other: Faulkner’s American South and Coetzee’s South Africa. I explore the notion that identities are constructed by, among other things, an attachment to a particular space, to land; by our relation to each other through race and class, and through access to an inner psychic space available in our domestic arrangement. In this manner our identities are formed, confirmed, or jettisoned in favour of more suitable constructions.

Keywords:

• Faulkner
• J.M. Coetzee
• South Africa
• land
• identity
• loss
• desire

Notes

1 In Coetzee’s novel this point is reached when Magda, contemplating the Coloured maid Klein‐Anna in a “frenzy of desire” wishes what all lovers must sometimes feel during a seizure of unruly passion:

I would like to climb into Klein‐Anna’s body, I would like to climb down her throat while she sleeps and spread myself gently inside her, my hands in her hands, my feet in her feet, my skull in the benign quiet of her skull […] (108–09)

We can also safely say that during the days of apartheid Magda’s dream could only be realized both subjectively and objectively in “the dead of night when the censor snores” (8).

2 Originally quoted in Faulkner (Faulkner in the University 43).