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‘The One That Got Away’: Zoë Wicomb in the Archives

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 36; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03057070.2010.507541

1465-3893

Carli Coetzee,

South African History and Culture

Abstract This article examines the role of reading and readers in the work of Zoë Wicomb. It discusses the uses made of printed material such as archives, newspapers and letters in the body of work, and argues that Wicomb uses these documents to interrogate notions of originality, origins and stability. In Wicomb's work, printed texts are often being cut, or lost, or changed. This lack of trust in the fixed, original version of a text is a recurring theme in Wicomb's work, and the issues raised in her fiction are of interest to all users of South African archives, as well as to those interested in archival theory and practice. Notes 1 Z. Wicomb, David's Story (New York, Feminist Press, 2001). *A version of this article was presented at the Zoë Wicomb: Texts & Histories Colloquium, which was held in Senate House, London, on 12 September 2008 and was jointly organised by SOAS and York University, with the Institute of English Studies. My thanks to Kai Easton for assistance beyond the call of duty. 2 Z. Wicomb, Playing in the Light: A Novel (New York, New Press, 2006), pp. 120–2. 3 Z. Wicomb, The One That Got Away (Roggebaai, Umuzi, 2008), pp. 37–50. 5 Harris, Exploring Archives, p. 82. 4 V. Harris, Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa (Pretoria, National Archives of South Africa, 2000, 2nd edn); V. Harris, 'The Archival Sliver: A Perspective on the Construction of Social Memory in Archives and the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy', in C. Hamilton, V. Harris, J. Taylor, M. Pickover, G. Reid and R. Saleh (eds), Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town, David Philip, 2002), pp. 135–60. 7 Harris, Exploring Archives, pp. 87–8. 6 Harris, Exploring Archives, p. 84. 9 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 83. 8 Harris, Exploring Archives, p. 46. 10 I wish to thank Dorothy Driver for the parallel case – to which she referred in her keynote address at the Zoë Wicomb: Texts & Histories Colloquium – of Wicomb's new edition of You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, which contains a number of changes that go beyond those normally found in a second edition. 11 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 87. 13 H. Willemse, 'Zoë Wicomb in Conversation with Hein Willemse', Research in African Literatures, 33, 1 (Spring 2002), p. 145. 12 Most discussions of Andrew Le Fleur's career mention Rachael, invariably in relation to her father, Adam Muis Kok, thus construing her role as a bridge between the two leaders. See for example R. Belcher, 'The Modern Griquas' Story: Andrew Abraham Le Fleur the First', available at http://www.tokencoins.com/lefleur/htm, retrieved on 12 December 2009. See also 'The Genealogy of the Kok Family', in R. Ross, Adam Kok's Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 139, which ends with Rachael's name. By contrast, the family tree included in the exhibition Familieverhalen uit Zuid-Afrika: Een Groepsportret, held at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam from 4 October 2002 until 21 September 2003, begins with Andrew Abraham Le Fleur and Rachel Susanna Kok: 'Stamboom van de familie Le Fleur', available at http://www.rumphius.nl/_sites/tentoonstellingen/zuidafrika/tentoonstelling/lefleur/stamboom.htm, retrieved on 12 December 2009. A photograph of the Le Fleur family and some members of the Kok family is available at http://www.tokencoins.com/griqua5.html, retrieved on 28 April 2010. It shows Rachel Susanna Le Fleur seated next to her daughter Charlotte Le Fleur, who is holding a baby identified as A.A.S. Le Fleur II. 14 Wicomb, David's Story, pp. 49, 61. 15 Many commentators on the notion of the archive go back to M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London, Tavistock, 1972). More recently, a highly influential text is J. Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996). On postcolonial responses to archives, see, for example, A. Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2005), and A.L. Stoler, 'Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form', in Hamilton et al. (eds), Refiguring the Archive, pp. 83–102. 16 The person who has most consistently articulated this position in a South African context is critic and novelist André Brink. See A. Brink, 'Interrogating Silence: New Possibilities Faced by South African Literature', in D. Attridge and R. Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 14–28; and A. Brink, 'Stories of History: Reimagining the Past in Post-Apartheid Narrative', in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 29–42. Harris, Exploring Archives, pp. 85–6, while sympathetic to much of what Brink has to say about memory and archiving, calls his ideas 'confused and confusing'. 17 The early period of recorded Cape history seems to hold a particular fascination for authors. Recent novels (some originally published in Afrikaans) set during this period include D. Sleigh, Islands (London, Secker & Warburg, 2004); D. Matthee, Pieternella: Daughter of Eva (Johannesburg, Penguin, 2008); T. Bloem, Krotoa-Eva: The Woman from Robben Island (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 1999); A. Brink, Imaginings of Sand (London, Secker & Warburg, 1996); and R. Brownlee, Garden of the Plagues (Cape Town, Human & Rousseau, 2005). For a discussion of some of this material see M. Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (Pietermaritzburg, University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2007). 18 M.J. Daymond, 'Bodies of Writing: Recovering the Past in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Elleke Boehmer's Bloodlines', Kunapipi, 24, 1&2 (2002), pp. 25–38; D. Attridge, 'Zoë Wicomb's Home Truths: Place, Genealogy, and Identity in David's Story', Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 41, 2 (2005), pp. 156–65; K. Bystrom, 'The DNA of the Democratic South Africa: Ancestral Maps, Family Trees, Genealogical Fictions', Journal of Southern African Studies, 35, 1 (March 2009), 223–35. 19 The image described here is based on Charles D. Bell's famous 1850 painting, 'Jan van Riebeeck Meets the Hottentots', sometimes (slightly less offensively) titled 'Landing of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652'. 20 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 99. 21 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 130. 22 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 153. 23 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 17. 24 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 28. 25 Wicomb, David's Story, pp. 8–9. 26 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 87. 27 For a discussion of a recent attempt at writing a history of the Griqua, and on the Griqua heritage industry in general, see 'Bitter Past, Uncertain Future' and 'Griquas Brought About Their Own Humiliation', Business Day, 23 September 2006. 28 Z. Wicomb, 'Setting, Intertextuality and the Resurrection of the Postcolonial Author', Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 41, 2 (November 2005), pp. 145–6. 29 R. Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in Image – Music – Text (London, Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–8. 31 K. Easton, 'Travelling Through History, "New" South African Icons: The Narratives of Saartje Baartman and Krotoä-Eva in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story', Kunapipi, 24, 1 & 2 (2002), pp. 245–6. 30 Wicomb, David's Story, pp. 1–3, 215–71. The edition's cover announces David's Story: A Novel, but this generic clue is not repeated on the title page. 32 Apart from the Preface and the Afterword, this edition of the novel also includes a glossary of some of the South African terms used in the book, further reinforcing the distance of the implied reader from the locus of the novel. 33 Intertextuality is a term that has been interpreted in several ways, and is illuminatingly discussed in G. Allen, Intertextuality (London, Routledge, 2000). 34 Attridge, 'Zoë Wicomb's Home Truths'. 35 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 188. 36 According to the rubric for the Zoë Wicomb: Texts & Histories colloquium, Wicomb's latest work 'shows the author once again on home ground: straddling the two sites of her native Cape and Glasgow, where she has spent much of her working life'. Available at www.soas.ac.uk/events/event46091, retrieved on 1 February 2010. Thus, Wicomb's 'home' becomes the in-between, the to-ing and fro-ing is her situation. Wicomb is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Strathclyde. 37 Cited by K. Tate, 'Zoë Wicomb and an Examination of Representation and Femininity in David's Story', available at http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sa/witcomb/tate.html, retrieved on 14 May 2010. 38 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 35. 39 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 103. 40 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 140. 41 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 25. 42 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 49. 43 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, pp. 86–7. 44 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, pp. 87–8. 45 Wicomb, The One That Got Away. In the Acknowledgements (p. 192), Wicomb thanks Roger Palmer whose artwork inspired the story. Palmer, who is a professor of fine art at the University of Leeds and sometimes uses stencils in his installations and artworks, lives with Wicomb in Glasgow. 46 Wicomb, The One That Got Away. In the Acknowledgements (p. 192), Wicomb thanks Roger Palmer whose artwork inspired the story. Palmer, who is a professor of fine art at the University of Leeds and sometimes uses stencils in his installations and artworks, lives with Wicomb in Glasgow, pp. 37–8, 41. 48 Wicomb, The One That Got Away. In the Acknowledgements (p. 192), Wicomb thanks Roger Palmer whose artwork inspired the story. Palmer, who is a professor of fine art at the University of Leeds and sometimes uses stencils in his installations and artworks, lives with Wicomb in Glasgow 47 Wicomb, The One That Got Away. In the Acknowledgements (p. 192), Wicomb thanks Roger Palmer whose artwork inspired the story. Palmer, who is a professor of fine art at the University of Leeds and sometimes uses stencils in his installations and artworks, lives with Wicomb in Glasgow, p. 38. 49 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 135. 50 Wicomb, The One That Got Away, p. 41. 51 Wicomb, The One That Got Away, p. 41 52 For example their series of work Insult to Injury of 2003, in which they altered a series of Francisco Goya etchings by adding funny faces. More recently, in 2008, they defaced some 20 watercolours and oil paintings by Adolf Hitler. See their White Cube page, available at http://www.whitecube.com/artists/chapman/, retrieved on 1 February 2010. 53 Wicomb, The One That Got Away, p. 44. 54 Wicomb, The One That Got Away, p. 44 55 Wicomb, David's Story, p. 35. 57 Wicomb, The One That Got Away, p. 46. 56 Wicomb, The One That Got Away, p. 45. 58 Wicomb, The One That Got Away, p. 48. 59 Wicomb, The One That Got Away, p. 49. 60 Wicomb, The One That Got Away, p. 50.