Ruinscapes and Temporalities in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

ABSTRACT

Zoo City is set in an alternative Johannesburg, in which animals and humans, and magic and science, co-operate and co-exist. In this alternate setting, people who commit murder are “animalled” with spirit animals that remain attached to their hosts for life. Despite its fantastical setting, Beukes’s novel challenges the hectic rhythm of Johannesburg by presenting the urban space as a temporal palimpsest, with each layer informing the city’s present. While evoking the detective mystery, the novel unfolds as a narrative of Zinzi’s political maturation. In this paper, I argue that Zoo City explores South Africa’s historical past through the novel’s fantastical ruinscape, which brings to the surface the colonial and apartheid national infrastructure of twenty-first-century Johannesburg. The palimpsestic textures within this ruinscape prompt a desire in characters to connect with the historical present against the amnesia-inducing time of hustle.

KEYWORDS:

• Ruination
• urban
• speculative
• neoliberalism
• temporalities

Author's Note

This article is based on research conducted for my PhD thesis titled “The Temporalities of Ruinscapes in Twenty-First-Century South African Fiction,” completed at University of Otago in 2023. The ideas and findings presented here are largely derived from that thesis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Colonial modernism refers to both modernity during the apartheid regime and the modern movement in urban planning and architecture that reflected the political ideals of progress and urban integration. As Errol J. Haarhoff (2011) argues, the standardisation of urban design during the modernist movement in South Africa further enabled the spatialization of race and highlighted inbuilt racial inequalities. For Haarhof, the visible remains of the modern movement’s legacy confront the urban planning of post-apartheid South Africa.

2 In their work Ponte City (2013), photographers Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse utilise photography and archival methods to capture the juxtapositions between the building’s historical expectations and the current narratives that surround it.

3 In Shona, shavi means “spirit which comes at times to possess a living butt unrelated person” (Dale 1982, 200). Mashavi is the plural of shavi. In the text, the term shavi is used for the magical aspects that one gains from an animal. Being a mashavi, however, implies being an aposymbiot (an animalled person in the novel’s universe), and therefore having more than one spirit.

4 I utilise Mbembe’s concept of the “topography of the unconscious” (Mbembe 2004, 375), which encompasses both physical forms of architecture and psychic experiences that are composed of different temporalities from various periods. Mbembe argues that urban experiences do not exist in an ahistorical time-space: “Metropolitan built forms are themselves a projective extension of the society’s archaic or primal fantasies, ghost dances and the slave spectacles at its foundation” (Mbembe 2004, 375). By bringing the unconscious of the topography to the surface, the novel’s urban ruinscape allows the characters to engage with the diverse modes of time within the palimpsestic textures of the city.

5 Banerjee defines chronopolitics as “the politics through which colonial modern societies seek to make a time of their own, in negotiation with the time of modernity that permits the future only as a deferred, and only so different, replication of a present already played out elsewhere” (Banerjee 2006, 1). In other words, chronopolitics is the frame where power relations are produced through temporalities.

6 Martin J. Murray argues that the new democratic state in South Africa curated a form of collective memory that generated selective amnesia: “In the absence of a full-fledged political commitment to expose the long-term effects of the structural violence of apartheid and to seek ways to offer compensation, an “insubstantial culture of distraction” has filled the void. Concerns with making money and the lure of conspicuous consumption have contributed to a cultural of amnesia” (Murray 2013, 7). The financial priorities of the new state, and the culture of forgetting supported each other.

7 It is important to note that the imagery of the swimming pool with Huron’s crocodile in it implies the persistence of empire in white middle-class spaces. As Bethlehem states: “In Zoo City the pool as a metonym for white middle-class domesticity has been corrupted; its domesticated water contaminated” (Bethlehem 2022, 348).