ZOË WICOMB’S HOME TRUTHS

Abstract

Zoë Wicomb’s 2000 novel David’s Story appeared at the same time as a number of South African novels in which genealogy and location play an important part. Wicomb’s representation of some of the troubling aspects of the liberation struggle and of Griqua identity was written in Glasgow, a location which might have played a part in her ability to achieve a certain distance from events in South Africa, and which, for readers who are aware of it, affects the reading of the novel. The most powerful element of the novel, however, is the treatment of Dulcie, the truth of whose story remains unreachable.

Keywords:

• Wicomb
• place
• genealogy
• identity
• home
• South African fiction

Notes

1 Wicomb’s earlier collection of stories, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), also mixes autobiography and fiction, and provides some vivid vignettes of life in a small Griqua settlement.

2 I am quoting from the English translation, published in 2002.

3 For a discussion of Coetzee’s relation to modernism and postmodernism, see Attridge (2–6).

4 This family tree, like David’s historical narrative, has an error in its marking of centuries; Adam Kok I is shown as having died in 1875, when the correct date is presumably 1775.

5 Dorothy Driver, in her Afterword to the Feminist Press edition of the novel, spells out some of what is known about the treatment of dissidents and suspected traitors in the ANC; she also provides useful background information about the history of the Griqua people.

6 “Truth” is a word that becomes oddly defamiliarized in the scribbles David has given the narrator: he changes it to “the palindrome of Cape Flats speech”—TRURT—and repeats it over and over again (136).

7 There is also the strange business of the hit list: David scores out her name, adds a comment, and finally passes it to the disguised security operative.