An ‘Excess of stretched skin’

ABSTRACT

This article explores Wicomb's literary figurations of coloured women (warriors) in her novel, David's story (2000), in relation to the trope of skin. As an interface between psyche and body, skin serves as a symbolic trope to discuss the interchange between self and the world, or between self and other. Through the trope of skin, my project seeks innovative possibilities for literary (and other) conceptualizations of coloured women's identities, which have typically been confined to and silenced within South African history's margins. In this way, coloured women's identities are shown to be identities in transition, as new vocabularies are slowly being constructed to articulate past and present contributions and achievements of these characteristically marginalized figures. Similarly, I analyse how coloured women's bodies come to be marked by racial and sexual differences, focussing specifically on skin as the unstable border between the body and its others, and using it as a tool to discuss the way in which coloured women's identities are represented in language. Excessive inscriptions of the body are ultimately revealed to subvert and contest homogenizing representations of coloured women within colonial and medical discourses.

Because skin takes and retains marks, it signifies irreversibility. But, […] because it not only takes and retains marks but can also erase them, it can also signify the possibility that the past might be retrievable in literal fact, in the flesh. (Connor 2001:49)