No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
‘Does the Girl Think of Nothing but Food?’: Food as a Marker of Unhomeliness, Inauthenticity and Violence in Zoë Wicomb’s October
Abstract
The preparation and the consumption of food constitute integral parts of the idealized representations of domesticity and home. What we eat and how we eat it defines our sense of individuality, as well as our collective sense of cultural belonging. However, in this era of transcultural migration, the notion of "authentic" food is fraught with ambiguity. This paper examines the ways in which October, Zoe Wicomb's most recent novel, dismantles the concept of home and renders it dangerous through inscribing food as a site of cultural inauthenticity and violence. Returning to South Africa from Scotland at the behest of her ailing and alcoholic brother, Mercia Murray, the novel's protagonist, is forced to confront her family's history of violence, as well as her own complicity in it. Mercia, a colored university lecturer, has been living in Glasgow in Scotland since before South Africa's transition to democracy, and has been left for a younger woman by her long-time partner, Craig. The present-time of the novel details Mercia's interactions with her brother, Jake, and his wife, Sylvie. Food becomes the manner in which both women perform their identity. However, because food acts as a marker of both personal and cultural difference, Wicomb's depiction of it as unhomely undermines this performance at the same time. I will demonstrate how the representation of food as uncanny causes Mercia to re-examine her relation to the concept of home, and to restructure her understanding of her individual identity, as well as her alignment to a more general sense of cultural identity. Wicomb thus demonstrates the violence inherent in notions of cultural essentialism through the representation of food.
With a focus on Zoë Wicomb’s novel, October (2014) – the title signalling an ‘aesthetic’ elevation of the events of a journey home – I explore the trope of the ‘home visit’ as a catalytic moment of insight into the protagonist’s dislocated life. In October, the syntagmatic chain of events (the plot) yields a paradigmatic resonance: the transitional month of the year embodying the tenuousness of a temporary homecoming.
I draw on the concept of ‘home visit’ from the fields of mobility and destination studies, where it indicates a recently established research niche, variously referred to as “personal memory tourism” (Marschall 2017) or “visiting home and familiar places” (Pearce 2012). The object of such investigation concerns the temporary home visit by first-generation migrants, as triggered by both sensory experiences and cognitive processes of searching for personal redefinitions of what it means to be at home in a place. I draw also on Heidegger’s reflections on the concept of home beyond conventional understanding: home as conceptual “dwelling” and as a process of “home-making” (2001 [1954]).
During the final years of the apartheid era and the subsequent transition to democracy, South African literary writing caught the world's attention as never before. Writers responded to the changing political situation and its daily impact on the country's inhabitants with works that recorded or satirised state-enforced racism, explored the possibilities of resistance and rebuilding, and creatively addressed the vexed question of literature's relation to politics and ethics. Writing South Africa offers a window on the literary activity of this extraordinary period that conveys its range (going well beyond a handful of world-renowned names) and its significance for anyone interested in the impact of decolonisation and democratisation on the cultural sphere. It brings together for the first time discussions by some of the most distinguished South African novelists, poets, and dramatists, with those of leading commentators based in South Africa, Britain and North America.
In this memoir, the central of role of food in the life of migrants is recalled in the story of an Indian family's journey to Britain in the 1950s, a time when very few South Asian restaurants or shops had been established. The memoir seeks to redress the imbalance in much writing on
food and migration, where food is the primary focus, and migrants and their journeys tend to form a rather ghostly backdrop to the culinary action. The family's quest for the “food of home” highlights the centrality of culinary practices in their lives, and the relationship between
food and ideas of home and belonging. It provides an alternative window into an intimate world of food and migration, offering insights into both the inner space of the migrant psyche, and outer, mobile, food geographies and social histories. Food practices are explored as a grammar for a
politics of the migrant self.
South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb has, in two novels (David's Story [2000] and Playing in the Light [2006]), two collections of linked stories (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town [1987] and The One That Got Away [2008]), and a number of extraordinarily trenchant and insightful essays on South African literature and culture, established a reputation as one of the most far-sighted of contemporary postcolonial authors and critics. This essay introduces a special issue on Wicomb in relation to questions of locatedness and dislocation, home and exile, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, arising out of an international conference on Wicomb's work held at the University of Stellenbosch in April 2010. Engaging with the complicated modernity of late-century and contemporary South Africa, Wicomb has long been concerned with anxieties about the ethics of speaking for, speaking over, the many voices of South Africa's multiple communities, and of those who find a home in none of them. The various essays in this collection consider the issues at stake in considering Wicomb's work in relation not only to the place in which much of her work is set, the Cape, but in attending, too, to the transnational and the cosmopolitan energies—and paradoxes—at work in her writing.
In Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light, the main character's troubled sense of identity (brought about by her parents' shameful decision to ‘play white’) is viscerally symbolised by her discomfort in her own and others' homes. In her Cape Town apartment she has nightmares about other houses. Her visits to her family home, where her elderly father lives alone, are similarly burdened by presences and memories she finds unwelcoming. And, her extended vacation to the UK, once she has discovered her family's secret, is a choice of “a place in which to cry” (Wicomb 200614.
Wicomb , Zoë . 2006. Playing in the Light, Johannesburg: Umuzi. View all references: 191). In tracing this sense of being un-homed I interrogate Marion's troubled racial identity. While the rhetoric of apartheid racial classification renders being termed coloured an uh-homed state (since one is neither black nor white), what coloured identity itself does is to un-home the supposed stability of more determined racial categories (such as black and white). In this regard, I will discuss the novel's implicit critique of Homi K Bhabha's conception of coloured identity as hybridised, and un-homed. The way/s in which this ideal coloured hybrid identity essentialises the races that supposedly ‘produced’ the coloured race will be key. Conceptually, both ‘race’ and ‘home’ struggle with a displacement of the physical by imagined narratives about that physical embodiment. Marion's un-homed state, then, reflects this displacement of the body by racial narratives. In the case of so-called coloured people this displacement is rendered even more problematic because shame re-places this displacement, rendering it all but invisible.
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.
Research in African Literatures 33.1 (2002) 144-152
David's Story tells the story of the former guerilla fighter David Dirkse; Sally, his wife; the enigmatic and physically powerful Dulcie, David's comrade and suspected lover. All along, the struggle was his life and now, after the release of Nelson Mandela and the dawn of the freedom Dirkse fought for, the main character finds himself in a difficult situation. His name is circulated on a hit list of uncertain origin. With this imminent threat and in fulfilment of his need for historical representation he tells his story to an unnamed woman writer. Dirkse and his narrator explore his identity as a coloured person (a person of mixed heritage) and his roots in the Griqua community. The peculiar ideas of Andrew Le Fleur, the founder -- culture broker of Griqua identity, resonate in Dirkse's search for his place in the new, postapartheid South Africa. The novel has a fragmentary, postmodernist structure with a complexity of historical tales, imaginary relationships, and a mixture of historical and fictional characters who represent the ambiguities of racial identities and political and social life in South Africa.
I've found David's Story a most complex and multi-faceted book. I had to keep my wits about me to tie all your story lines together. I thought it was marvelous . . . .
Other people said to me that the book was complex and that worries me a bit . . . .
You probably remember the tradition of the Black Aesthetic -- writing black -- in America? I wondered whether this was a new attempt at "writing black" in South Africa?
Not consciously. I certainly didn't set out with a project like that in mind -- no, not consciously at all. I tell you it was all I could do. People ask me, "Why did you choose this structure?" I didn't choose it. It was all I could do, because the problem came once I decided to have a dual time frame. That's how I've negotiated it.
The fact that this novel has a complicated structure undermines the notion of an uncomplicated, straightforward chronological tale often employed by black South African novelists.
No, I don't think that is what I set out to do. I didn't set out to do it. In fact, I have to say that I do now wonder if I'm capable of writing a linear, chronological novel and perhaps it's because I'm not capable of doing it. Perhaps that was easier. Because the story is by nature an incomplete story, it can't be told.
Your material demanded an open-ended approach?
Yes, so it necessarily had to be fragmentary. It necessarily had to be open-ended. You're right: the structure is dictated by story.
I've found your re-invention of Andrew le Fleur, the Griqua leader, interesting. He's such a revered figure with his descendants, in his community. For them he is a messianic prophet, you made this man a bumbling, incoherent visionary.
But you see historically he is that!
No, I don't necessarily disagree. The Griqua descendants obviously invented key traits of their arch leader. They made him into a prophet, serving their communal ends.
Yes, and he certainly had illusions of grandeur. Apparently towards the end of his life he really did believe that he had been offered the governorship of Rhodesia, for instance. It is ludicrous. He did believe that, he certainly had illusions of grandeur. It simply is true -- he was bumbling. He did have a vision, but he didn't get anything right. This is why I had to invent a wife for him. There is no information about that wife to be found anywhere.
She is very critical of him . . . .
She is very critical of him. I used her a bit...
This essay traces images of the Indian and Atlantic oceans in South African literature and art for their evocation of the country's history of slavery. I argue that turning one's gaze to the sea recovers evidence of slave lives otherwise erased from folk memory, as well as the decisively modern character of slave practices subsumed behind picturesque portrayals of the Cape. The essay reveals an alternative modernity crafted by enslaved people in practices of language, religion, and food culture in South Africa. The approach taken in this article follows studies by Pumla Gqola and Cheryl Hendricks on discourses of slavery and sexuality, Noeleen Murray on the meanings of slave burial sites, and Martin Hall on colonial architecture in mapping the profound influence of slavery and slave resistance on South African culture. The theme of the two oceans in South African literature, art and the practices of Malay food constitute a subversive archive that testifies to the presence and subjectivity of enslaved people at the Cape, and takes its place among African memories of slavery.
In the syllabus that follows I outline a semester-long class that I taught at Pomona College in the fall of 2004. This course was cross-listed with the English Department and with the Program in Women's Studies, where I am jointly appointed. In the future it will also be listed as an American Studies course. I taught this class during my first semester at Pomona in response to the student interest in food studies that was shown during my job talk and campus visit the spring before. In fact the class was one of the first classes to be filled during pre-enrollment so interest was clearly very strong.
October. Cape Town: Umuzi
- Zoë Wicomb
Wicomb, Zoë. 2014. October. Cape Town: Umuzi.
David’s Story. Cape Town: Umuzi
- Zoë Wicomb
Wicomb, Zoë. 2000. David's Story. Cape Town: Umuzi.