Moving in “a forest of hieroglyphs”: Enigmatic and mutable signs of identity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

ABSTRACT

This article analyses Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, focusing on protagonist Marion’s process of coming to terms with her coloured identity as she puzzles over secrets and signs, struggling to endow them with meaning, but finding they only work as ghostly and elusive traces of the past. Wicomb’s engagement with colouredness is framed by a recognition of semiotic and hermeneutic processes of identity construction and material representation – rejecting fixed and essentialized conceptions of identity in her special focus on racial identity. She privileges, instead, visual materializations of identity characterized by metamorphosis, opacity and semantic elusiveness. In the context of post-apartheid concern with the recuperation of damaged, oppressed or hidden identities, Wicomb rejects a logic of empirical verification, referentiality and closure, presenting identity-making and representation as an ever-open performative process, dependent upon imaginative projection and reconstruction, and hence endowed with provisionality and indeterminacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Zoë Wicomb
• identity
• colouredness
• secret
• sign

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Liani Lochner for her help and illuminating comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See “Shame and Identity” (Wicomb 1998) for Wicomb’s best-known analysis of coloured identity in South Africa, in relation to the question of shame.

2. Herrero (2014) makes a detailed and acute analysis of trauma in the novel according to Abraham and Torok’s theory of the phantom.

3. Wicomb’s interest in the photograph as trace of the past, representation of identity and medium through which one character tries to get access to another one is found in other texts such as “In Search of Tommie” (Wicomb 2009), in which TS carefully studies Chris Hallam’s photograph, and in October (Wicomb 2014), in which Mercia’s discovery of Sylvie’s photographs makes her radically question her previous conception of her: “There is knowledge that crosses over from the ghostly world of the photograph, that flicks across eerily into the real, now a flickering shadow across Mercia’s heart. A shadow of fear and awe. Who is this apparition who rises out of the darkness, whose bright, ironic grin haunts the viewer? Who is Sylvie?” (167). Wicomb has shown an interest in the relations between writing and visual representation, from a more general perspective (see Wicomb 1995).

4. As analysed by Ownbey (2017), Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative is another South African text that uses photography – in this case, actual photographs – and the motif of the ghost to engage with official South African history and the TRC hearings.

5. See De Michelis (2012), Klopper (2011) and van der Vlies (2010) for an analysis of the ghostly dimension of the novel.

6. See Strauss (2013) for a discussion of the concept of “creolization” in relation to coloured identity in South Africa.

Additional information

Funding

This article is part of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness [Ref. FFI2016-75589-P].

Notes on contributors

María J. López

María J. López is senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Córdoba. She is the author of Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee (2011) and has co-edited J.M. Coetzee and the Non-English Literary Traditions (special issue of European Journal of English Studies, 20.2, 2016) and New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finite, Singular, Exposed (2018). She has written articles for the Journal of Southern African Studies, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, English Studies in Canada, the Journal of Literary Studies, English in Africa, Atlantis and English Studies. At the moment she is leading the research project “Secrecy and Community in Contemporary Fiction in English”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, in which she is analysing Zoë Wicomb’s work.