The Poetics of Post-Exile as ‘Fantastical’: Watersheds in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story

Abstract

This article investigates interconnectedness in a portrait of a South African post-exile subjectivity. It proposes that, in an application of Édouard Glissant's notion of Caribbeanness or the ‘Antillanité’ (1997. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press) to an examination of a ‘new’ South Africa identity, Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2006. Roggebaai, Cape Town: Kwela Books) gives impetus to an exploration of the leitmotif of masculinity within the discourse of national consciousness. According to Glissant, the ‘Antillanité’ is a camaraderie of Creoles that enunciates diversity and limitless possibilities. The thesis is that, in Wicomb's novel, the ANC protagonist's reclamation of the multitudinous black subaltern histories, leaves him, paradoxically, in a dilemma. This is because of his probable sense of complicity in how, as an ANC warrior, he repressed these histories in favour of a gendered nationalist discourse. In examining him, the essay thus further expands on what a deployment of the ‘Antillanité’ might reveal. This is that this soldier's story can be considered ‘fantastical’, as he is at once hegemonic, Janus-faced and tormented. The extended part of the article closely analyses how, as a result of these ruptures, this soldier's accidental conjuring up, centring and re-bonding with these histories that his loyalty to the dominant ANC dominant order has sidelined, articulate positions that slide into and destabilise one another in ways that problematise his sense of identity.

Keywords:

• ‘Antillanité’ or ‘Caribbean-ness'
• childhood identity
• errantry
• fantasy
• opacity
• representations of trauma
• South African nationalism

Notes

For a detailed documentation of these alleged atrocities, see, for instance, Ellis (1994), Twala and Bernad (1994) and Trewela (2009).

Gqola (2009, 64) uses this phrase to ‘refer to the hypervisible, and self-authorising performance of patriarchal masculinity in public spaces, or where such performance hints at masculine violence or a contest between forms of manhood’.