Reading the Garden(ing) Trope in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Abstract

This article examines how gardening in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light is symbolic of efforts to cultivate white identity. It argues that gardening is a significant trope in the novel where the Campbells’ meticulous tending of their garden echoes their efforts to cultivate and nurture white identities by repressing their coloured past. The article employs Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of “the gardening state” to appreciate the Campbells’ attempts to cultivate whiteness in an apartheid environment that encouraged the cultivation and maintenance of whiteness as a superior racial category. The article also refers to Hellen Lynd and Gershen Kaufman’s postulations about the visual/public nature of shame as well as Freudian idea of the uncanny to explain a sense of shame and fear of the repressed that underlies the Campbells’ passing for white.

Keywords:

• Wicomb
• South Africa
• ‘coloured’
• ‘white’
• cultivation
• gardening
• shame
• repression
• uncanny

Notes on Contributor

Emmanuel Ngwira teaches literature in the English Department at University of Malawi-Chancellor College. He has been a research fellow at University of Cape Town. His research interests are Malawian literature, South African literature and Transnational African fiction.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Professor Meg Samuelson for the invaluable comments she made on several drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. In one of her short stories titled “Another Story” (2008: 173–90), Wicomb refers to Millin’s novel when Sarah, a character in that story, describes the farm where her grandmother grew up in the exact words used by Millin. This confirms Wicomb’s continued engagement with Millin’s novel.

Additional information

Funding

I would like to thank All Africa House (AAH) at the University of Cape Town for funding my three months research fellowship during which I worked on the initial draft of this paper.