Lisa FrancavillaProfessor Rita BarnardSouth African LiteratureApril 15, 2012

Getting Lost Amid The Signs: The Role of Travel and Text in Playing in the Light

Zoë Wicomb’s novel Playing in the Light acts as a travel guide for its readers on several

levels. It not only follows characters as they journey through South Africa and Europe, but it also

charts its protagonist’s moral trekkings and backpedaling as she searches for the answer to a

mystery. Moreover, the novel acts as a travel narrative for a burgeoning nation, jumping between

different narratives and historical periods to explore the possibilities for this new democracy. It

is through this marriage of travel tropes and language that the text constructs a potential version

of South African nationality based on multiplicity and diversity in the “New South Africa.”

However, the novel’eeming realism is undercut by a narrative style that seems to complicate this

picture. By analyzing Playing in the Light’s interplay of textuality and travel, this paper will

examine the possibilities that Wicomb imagines for the newly formed South African nation.

Wicomb’s text follows Marion, a seemingly white, middle-class, and Afrikaans-speaking

South African as she travels to discover the secret of her family’s racial colouredness and

explores apartheid’s dark past. Initially, Marion’s hatred of travel is associated with her stable

identity as a white, middle class South African. It also signifies the guilt that Marion represses as

a result of her complicity in apartheid.The travel industry is similar to her racial and class status--

a system that she is complicit with and benefits economically from, but without any admission of

personal responsibility. Instead, Marion persists in exhibiting a determined lack of curiosity

about her country and fellow South Africans. Wicomb links Marion’s insularity with her singular

1

subjectivity as a racially unmixed person. For example, as a white person of means, Marion lives

in an expensive area designed to keep out others with private security in defense of “inviolable”

property. This symbol of Marion’s simultaneous privilege and insularity is reflected in her

disparaging view of coloured South Africans. Wicomb records Marion’s dismissive thoughts as

she describes Marion leaving a dead bird for her cleaning maid to deal with, so that she thinks:

“One never knows what uses such people might have for a dead guinea fowl” (14). Marion’s use

of the term “such people” alienates her maid as one of many coloured South Africans who for

Marion are nameless placeholders for a pre-conceived racial stereotype. Marion’s racist thoughts

emerge when she thinks, “You can’t go anywhere nowadays without a flock of unsavory people

crowding around you, making demands, trying to make you feel guilty for being white and

hardworking” (28). By describing the people as “unsavory,” Marion equates them with negative

moral qualities, assuming that their lower economic position comes as a result of a lack of ethics

instead of as a result of apartheid’s racially discriminating policies. The description of the people

as a “flock” who are “crowding” around her dehumanizes them and implies a threat reminiscent

of mobs or protests. Meanwhile, the fact that they are “making demands” paints them as

unreasonably angry and infantile, and signifies Marion’s discomfort with the new political power

of coloureds. Significantly, Marion displaces her own feelings of racial guilt as a well-off

“white” person onto these bystanders, who she accuses of “trying to make” her feel this way.

Marion’s fixed identity as a white South African positions her as an economically powerful

citizen who is able to objectify and dehumanize others while avoiding the present problems

stemming from apartheid’s legacy.

In an interview, Wicomb emphasizes the importance of past political structures that

continue to endure in South Africa, despite their seeming disappearance after apartheid:

2

What the problem of identity indicates, however, is a position that undermines the

new narrative of national unity: the newly democratized South Africa remains

dependent on the old economic, social, and also epistemological structures of

apartheid, and thus it is axiomatic that different groups created by the old system

do not participate equally in the category of postcoloniality (Wicomb 94).

Here Wicomb identifies racial identity as a continuing problem because it is so contingent on the

racial categories left over from apartheid. Far from obsolete, these identities cripple the present

attempt at creating a more inclusive nationality that reflects the democratic government. She

links racial identities with South African institutions, showing the social, economic, and political

consequences of racial hierarchies and ideology. While the mode of government has changed to

one that is supposedly equally accessible to all groups, these structures have not become

democratic, and they continue to exert influence and to privilege one group over another. Thus,

as a supposedly white South African woman, Marion continues to be privileged under the same

system that rose out of the ashes of racist apartheid. Tied to her identity is the desire to benefit

from the new system in the same way that whites were advantaged in the past. Although Marion

ostensibly believes in South Africa’s new narrative of “national unity,” this is undermined by the

contempt that Marion’s thoughts reveal towards coloured people, as well as her ignorance of

their the actual condition in her country.

This attitude is showcased through Marion’s attitude towards travel, which represents her

desire, rooted in her identity as a white South African, to remain socially and racially isolated in

Cape Town. Despite owning a travel agency, Marion has an “aversion” to travel. Marion cannot

explain why “anyone would want to see the world from the discomfort of a suitcase,” and

concludes that even traveling in her own country “doesn’t seem at all desirable” (Wicomb 40).

3

This lack of curiosity about her own nation signifies the geographic and social detachment

inherent in her singular racial status. Instead of exploring her city, Marion clings to the

epistemological legacy of apartheid and is blind to the new national narrative that is blooming

around her. Marion’s discomfort with travel and racial difference is so extreme that it extends

even to ethnic food restaurants in Cape Town, such as the Italian restaurant that her date, Geoff,

takes her to. The link between her white racial identity and her dislike of experiencing other

cultures is exemplified by the name of the restaurant that she and Geoff dine in. Alibi, defined in

the Merriam Webster dictionary as “an excuse usually intended to avert blame or punishment,” is

both the name of the restaurant and indicative of Marion’s attitude of avoidance concerning her

country’s past history and present problems.

Thus, travel is linked to a recognition of the consequences of apartheid’s legacy, as well

as an ability to empathize with racialized others in the novel. In order to maintain her singular

identity as a privileged white, travel is something that Marion must avoid. Marion recognizes

that travel cannot offer an way to avoid South Africa’s political climate or history in the novel;

we see this when Marion forbids the discussion of politics in her business because political

debate is “not what their customers want to hear while they’re trying to fix up their holidays,

trying to get away from precisely this kind of tedious nonsense” (Wicomb 39). Significantly,

Marion consciously recognizes that travel does not allow for an escape from these issues, so that

she thinks, “She would like to say: kidding themselves that it is possible to get away” (39). This

thought foreshadows both the creative potentialities of travel and its inability to cover up the

political, social, and economic realities of a racially divided nation. Barbara Raiskin, in

analyzing Frieda, Wicomb’s protagonist in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, notes that Frieda

“appears conspicuously nonheroic and disconnected from South African political life” (227).

4

This observation could equally describe Marion’s status as a morally lackluster protagonist in the

beginning of the novel, especially in her fear of travel and her detachment from both her country

and its inhabitants. Instead of finding meaning in travel’s ability to connect her with the rest of

South Africa, it points out her failure to do so, so that it appropriately “makes her feel

inadequate” (Wicomb 80). Even when she must travel, the action is meaningless for Marion,

who is “not convinced of the notion of experiencing the land” but instead only “pass[es] over it,”

because she refuses to “buy into the transformative value of travel” (80-81). Thus, the text makes

clear that the potentialities of travel are only achieved if the traveller is open to its possibilities,

an attitude that Marion rejects and disdains.

Yet despite Marion’s self-imposed geographical and social limitations, she is increasingly

unable to escape the haunting of the past. Travel becomes a metaphor once more for the

inescapability of apartheid’s legacy as well as the political responsibility facing South Africans

as the creators or citizens of a new “rainbow nation.” As Marion watches the Truth and

Reconciliation Committee (TRC) on TV, the text describes her as “a reluctant traveller who has

landed in a foreign country without so much as a phrase book” (Wicomb 74). The recent history

of her own country is so unintelligible to Marion that she feels as if it is in an incomprehensible

language. Travel becomes a symbol of exploration that offers the chance to understand the

experience of other racial identities in her country and of South Africa’s troubling past. Yet

despite her dislike of travel, in this new, post-apartheid nation, Marion feels an undeniable urge

to confront the past, even if it is so unrecognizable that it feels like an alien place; Marion “does

not know why she ventures into a world she has never known, never wished to explore” (74).

Ultimately, it is the mysteriously familiar picture of a coloured woman’s face “whose eyes point

at the connectedness of this foreign country with her old familiar world” that forces Marion to

5

hunt for the secret that governed her childhood (74). The picture’s resemblance to Marion’s

childhood memory of a coloured woman she believed was a beloved servant inspires her to try to

bridge, for the first time, the distance between her personal life and the wider socio-economic

and historical reality that she has inherited. The metaphor of an “alien place” and a “foreign

country” is ironic considering that it refers to Marion’s own hometown, and once more points to

how isolated and limited her experience has been. In physically traveling to foreign parts of Cape

Town, Marion mentally leaves behind the comfort of the privileged white subjectivity that she

has always known.

The further that Marion travels, the more that she exits the sanitized, secure, and

constricting space that contains the fiction of her white identity. Distance in the novel often

implies social space as well as geographical lengths. Therefore the most foreign place in the

Cape Town area that Marion travels to is Bonteheuwel, the township in which her coloured

employee, Brenda, lives. Visiting Bonteheuwel, which she has only been to as a teenage

volunteer, opens up a part of Cape Town in a new context for Marion. It allows her to become a

guest of the people living in an area that was zoned for coloureds during apartheid, and forces

her to accept their charity of hospitality and information. Replacing Marion’s past memory of the

township’s “snot-nosed children” who “could not be relied on to learn their texts” is Brenda’s

nephew, whom Marion compliments as having “lovely, velvety black eyes” (Wicomb 67). These

vastly different characterizations of the township children act as a metaphor to illustrate the

changed mental state that Marion has achieved. Marion’s journey transforms her relationship, so

that her position changes from that of a teacher dispensing information to that of a student

seeking it. This reflects the reversal in power relations, and results in her acknowledgment of the

inhabitant’s humanity, instead of objectifying them as she had in the past. Thus, travel offers the

6

opportunity for Marion to embrace a mental transformation and to grasp a greater understanding

of others’ humanity.

Marion’s journey also interlaces her story with Brenda’s, leading to the narrative’s split

into two travel narratives that are sometimes parallel, other times diverging. Like Marion, Brenda

starts out similarly confined to restricted parts of the city; when she goes to dinner with Marion

she observes that “there are so many parts of this city that she does not know at all,” and in fact

Brenda is unable in the new restaurant even to identify the sauce that her food is served in

(Wicomb 78). Marion and Brenda’s friendship is founded upon Marion’s journey as she

confronts her family’s past. It forces them to cross their separate social and geographical zones to

differently racialized spaces in a city that is still heavily divided by color. Marion and Brenda’s

friendship has the potential to unify the divided city in the novel by opening up spaces to

members of different groups, symbolically destroying racial barriers physically and socially.

Travel’s ability to unify people belonging to different racial groups is especially apparent

in the transformative nature of Brenda and Marion’s journey to the Cederberg and Clanwillian.

Admittedly, the trip is fraught with awkward moments. For example, after travelling to the

Clanwilliam Hotel, which is significantly “redolent of colonial times,” Brenda and Marion spat

about race, so that Brenda thinks to herself that, “she ought to know that it is impossible to have

conversations that do not slide into awkwardness with people like this” (Wicomb 84). Yet the

very existence of the quarrels between the women hint at a deeper relationship beyond the

hierarchies of employer and employee, or white and coloured, as they indicate that the power

differential between the two women has lessened enough for open disagreement. Before the trip,

Brenda enthuses that “the soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty: to think, feel do just as one

pleases -- to leave ourselves behind,” and by beginning to break down the social barriers that

7

separated Marion and Brenda in Cape Town, this statement becomes true (81). The journey

becomes a “geleentheid,” an opportunity that has arisen (which is especially interesting because

previously Brenda expressed the desire to go to Clanwilliam but was denied the time off by

Marion).

The transformative power of a journey emerges in the character of Outa Blinkoog, a

travelling artist who carries a cart decorated with “outlandish shiny things and streamers of

coloured cloth” (Wicomb 86). Outa Blinkoog describes his love of travel, going where he pleases

and asserting his right to do so, in spite of the law enforcement officers who attempt to restrict

him. Significantly, he doesn’t “pass over” land in an enclosed vehicle as Marion does, but travels

instead by his bare feet, “getting to know one’s terrain through the soles of one’s own feet” (91).

We are meant to compare the two methods to see that this is the type of meaningful travel that

Marion until recently has avoided. Outa Blinkoog represents not only the transgressive potential

of travel in asserting an individual’s right to the land (regardless of private ownership), but also a

possible future for South Africa. He tells Brenda that “now people must make new Beautiful

Things” in this new nation (90). The present of the beautiful lamp that Outa Blinkoog gives to

Marion and Brenda as co-owners signifies the exciting potentialities of a fully integrated South

Africa. The lantern blends white candle light with colored glass that produces lovely colored

light to illuminate the darkness. The white light of the lantern is refracted through the colored

light, and both elements of the lamp act as a metaphor for the necessity of multiple kinds of

identity, both white and coloured, in the creation of a new South Africa. The lamp thus

emphasizes the possibility of an integrated country thatcontains many different strands of

nationality: “South Africa’s recent transition to majority rule, ending the reign of apartheid,

signals an opportunity to complicate the nationalist narrative with ethnic and religious difference,

8

gender-related issues, and gay and lesbian identities” (Constance Richards 75). Thus the lamp,

significantly, belongs to both women, acting as a metaphor of a unified country while

acknowledging the differences between Brenda and Marion’s identities. Moreover, their shared

ownership signifies their equal right to the new South Africa and erases the geographic divisions

of the city by necessitating travel between their separate neighborhoods to trade it back and forth.

The re-purposed nature of the recycled materials that form the lamp emphasizes the importance

of reforming the past into the future. Ultimately, the gift of the lantern lights the way for a new,

utopian possibility of a racially unified South Africa unburdened by the darkness of the past.

However, while Outa Blinkroog and his art embody this potentiality, Marion’s struggle to

cope with the revelation from her journey that her family is “play-white” demonstrates the

difficulty of achieving it. The realization that Tokkie, the woman once presented as an old family

servant, was actually Marion’s coloured grandmother, shatters Marion’s complacent identity as a

white South African. Brenda tells Marion that as a mixed-race person she is now “free of the

burdens of nation and tradition” and of the accompanying guilt that Marion has studiously

avoided (Wicomb 102). Yet Marion understands that the displacement of her racial identity

entails endless travel between ambiguous subjectivities metaphorized by other “places” in an

uncertain “era of unremitting crossings” (107). The conflation of metaphors of space with

categories of race emphasizes the importance of travel as not only a signifier but also a producer

of subjectivity, as Marion’s identity is no longer stable or singular. Thistravel between identities

is made possible by the “vague and tautological criteria of the so-called racial designations” of

apartheid’s racial laws (Raiskin 211). These cultural presuppositions are complicit with a

fragmentation of subjectivity.. Playing white for coloureds “left no space, no time for

9

interiority,” so that selfhood was either ignored or shattered unless it could be rebuilt into “a

mended structure” that combined elements of multiple categories (Wicomb 123). However,

Wicomb is careful to illustrate that this phenomenon does not have to ensue as a result of playing

white or passing in a different category, such as coloured the example of Vumi, a coloured

acquaintance of Marion’s whose family “passed” as coloured yet privately celebrated their

indigenous identity, throws into sharp relief Marion’s family’s experience of playing white,

which consumed them privately as well as publicly. Nevertheless, for Marion the repeated

crossings to amorphous identities that she must now perform is illustrated by her physically

permeation of national boundaries.

Appropriately, Marion’s decision to travel internationally comes as a result of bringing Outa

Blinkoog’s lantern to Brenda. The light inspires her to connect travel with the possibility of

embracing a new vision of herself in South Africa, so that in watching its colors, “she knows

precisely why she has come to see” Brenda and her family (Wicomb 185). Marion’s trip to

Europe accomplishes a number of things. It weakens her former identity as a white, European

colonial, so that “she is shocked to find herself a stranger” in England (189). But in exploring the

connections between South Africa and Europe, the novel also allows Marion to encounter a

humanist ideal. We see this when she sees her father reflected in the subject of a photograph at

an art exhibit in Berlin. This picture depicts a male farmer holding a wheel barrow in a black and

white photograph. The significance of the photograph being taken in both black and white is

reflected in Marion’s newfound acceptance of her father’s mixed racial heritage. Moreover, her

affective reaction to the picture represents her acknowledgment of the shared humanity of the

subject of the photo and her father, despite their geographical and perhaps even racial

differences. This humanism leads her to recognize the false ideological implications of race and

10

opens Marion up to the multiple nature of identity at the same time that it posits a universal

humanity. We see the application of Marion’s new openness to coloured or coloured South

African identity in her relationship with Vumi Mkhize. Vumi, an acquaintance of Marion’s, is a

coloured South African who “not so long ago, Marion would have resented...for being at the

receiving end of what’s known as fast-tracked coloured economic empowerment” (200). When

Marion admits this to Vumi in Scotland, he points out the liberating nature of travel, which

reveals the absurdity of Marion’s racial prejudices by exposing them in an unfamiliar place: “Of

course you would, he says, but only when you’re back home” (200). Meanwhile, Marion’s

international journey allows her to feel “washed clean with time,” which links the redemptive

qualities of travel to the symbolic potential of Outa Blinkoog’s lantern in creating something new

and inclusive out of a past riven with shame and violence (187-188). Thus, Marion’s trip to

Europe allows her to confront her country’s past, grieve for her lost identity, and embrace a more

humanist philosophy that befriends “the other,” and includes building a new identity for herself.

Marion’s trip also serves to de-center Europe in favor of South Africa in the novel. This

can be seen when the novel describes Marion’s sense of the “topsy-turviness of being in the

wrong hemisphere” when she is travelling in Britain (Wicomb 188). Similarly, when John,

Marion’s father, speaks of her itinerary, he remembers his ancestors as being from “somewhere

in Scotland--which, if he remembers correctly, is the northernmost tip of England” (186). This

observation positions Scotland as a foreign land whose location must be specified to both the

characters in the novel and the reader, whom the novel presumes is not familiar with England’s

geography. Marion also hears upon returning to South Africa that Patricia Williams, a political

hero under apartheid and an acquaintance of her Aunt Elsie,“was in the news last week; she has

been appointed as South African ambassador to some place like Finland” (214). The use of the

11

phrases “somewhere” for Scotland and “some place” for Finland echo the unlocated nature of

European space in the South African imagination. At one point, Brenda comments about the

naming of the South African town Wuppertal that it’s “nice to think of it as a reversal, a

European city being named after our humble settlement” (84). This othering of Europe from an

African point of view is a kind of “writing back” of colonialism that contrasts starkly with the

novel’s previous construction of Marion’s race-conscious and Euro-centric thoughts. The more

that Marion voyages to the far North, the more that travel ironically re-positions the reader

towards the post-colonial global South.

The novel seems to embrace the notion of travel’s lasting effects through the events that

occur immediately after Marion returns to Cape Town. The narrative describes Brenda and Geoff

as they meet Marion’s plane to welcome her home. The symbolism of a coloured woman and

white man sharing a car and a close friendship, to the extent that Marion is jealous of Brenda,

points to the possibility of bridging the fractured racial society of South Africa through personal

relationships. This is especially true since earlier in the novel Geoff warns Marion against going

to Bonteheuwel and treats Vumi with distrust based on his race, which he infers from Vumi’s

name. Even more striking a symbol of travel’s potential to unite people from different

backgrounds is the surprise party waiting for Marion at her father’s house. The party includes a

toast in praise of reconciliation and references Nelson Mandela. However, Wicomb’s writing

subverts this idealistic tableau; while Marion’s offer of moving in with her father suggests that

she has forgiven him for the past, the text does not allow us to assume that she has completely

changed. The last line of the chapter emphasizes the party’s inter-racial harmony and forgiveness

of the past as idealistic. When the guests assume that they will meet again to view Marion’s

travel photos, she refrains from revealing that she doesn’t have any because “this is a party,

12

where one does not disappoint with the truth” (Wicomb 214). Tellingly, after the party, the first

sentence in the next chapter is: “Brenda is disappointed” (215). Clearly, the utopian image of the

party covers up “the truth,” and it is the coloured character, Brenda, who must bear the burden of

this disappointing realization once the celebration ends. The events taking place after Marion

returns from her travels act as a metaphor for the existing problems in South Africa after

apartheid, especially for non-white South Africans. With the contrast between the optimistic

words of the toast and the reality of daily life in South Africa, Wicomb illustrates not only the

transitory nature of travel’s benefits, but also the struggle that uniting sign to signifer, or

language to action, presents. This struggle reflects the intense contestation between possibility

and present, represented by the potential of travel and textuality against the unchanging legacy of

apartheid.

The link between language and travel can be seen early in the narrative, in which

Marion’s social isolation is associated not only with her spatial immobility but also with her

inability to understand the multivalent possibilities inherent in language. Brenda argues this

when she tells Marion that Marion’s “failure to understand human relations can apparently be

traced to the fact that she doesn’t read good novels or poetry” (Wicomb 162). Marion, while

travelling, finds that she is intensely lonely partly because “here [in England] she doesn’t know

the signs” and cannot integrate into European society (199). By contrast, when Marion begins to

read South African fiction, “the hole in her chest seems to fill up with words. Is this what reading

is, or should be: absorbing words that take root, that mate with your own thoughts and multiply?”

(190). International travel mixed with South African texts allows Marion to break away from her

previously white, Euro-centric identity and begin to accept a more nuanced subjectivity. For the

first time, she finds “versions of herself” in the stories of her country, so that she begins to

13

identify with multiple characterizations of South African identities (191). Moreover, through the

multiple narratives that co-exist in Playing in the Light, the text constructs a nuanced version of

coloured identity that illustrates its complexity and recuperates it from history. Textuality is

crucial to the creation of aa racial and ultimately national identity: “literature has been an

important part of constructing the so-called nation of so-called ‘Coloureds,” and Wicomb’s work

is a profound response to the damning portrayal of ‘Coloureds’ throughout South African literary

history (Raiskin 207). The identity-creating relationship of travel and textuality is emphasized

repeatedly throughout the novel. For example, Marion is spurred on her journey to Clanwilliam

by Patricia William’s face printed on a newspaper, which looked so similar to Tokkie that

Marion is haunted by it, holding the “crumpled paper” that “hisses a command to remember”

(54). The importance of the newspaper in inspiring Marion’s travel to self-discovery can be

suggestively linked to Benedict Anderson’s work in Imagined Communities. Anderson posits the

essential quality of print language, especially newspapers and novels, in forming the imagined

community of the nation and of the “national pilgrimage” through unified arenas of

communication.This symbiotic relationship between travel and language theorizes a utopian

possibility for a future nation unriven by racial divides. In Wicomb’s novel, both language and

travel must coincide in order for a true “geleentheid” to be present. We see this in Marion’s

journey to Clanwilliam and her meeting with Outa Blinkoog; Marion feels with a sense of relief

that language can be remade in his presence, and describes how, “Words are fresh, newborn,

untainted by history” (90). Moreover, Outa Blinkoog’s story is written in different colored

embroidery on linen that he carries with him, representing a story that encompasses smaller

narratives inside of it. This story is itinerant geographically as well as textually, wandering

among multiple narrators. Outa Blinkoog’s story also mirrors Wicomb’s own novel, which

14

consists of a patchwork of different stories that make up a larger narrative. In Wicomb’s novel,

then, language about South Africa combined with travel heals the slippage between the signifier

and the signified that results from either one existing without the other.

While Marion ultimately fails to unite the potentialities of language and travel once she

returns to South Africa, nevertheless the novel points to the possibility of doing so. Wicomb

believes that even after apartheidthe legacy of apartheid lives on: “What Wicomb’s postapartheid

essays make clear is that, in her view, the end of apartheid has not yet been achieved” (Richards

101). In Playing in the Light this emerges in the last paragraph of the novel, which narrates

Marion’s anger with Brenda for writing her father’s story and results in a rift between Marion

and Brenda. The novel resists the teleological urge to present to the reader an enlightened

protagonist at the end; instead, it undermines Marion’s new-found ability to understand

language’s potential in opening up new subjectivities. This rejection of the transformative power

of language can be seen when Marion orders Brenda to “[g]et out” and tells her angrily that “I

know my father’s fucking story,” to which Brenda replies that “I suspect you don’t” (Wicomb

218). The last sentence of the novel describes Brenda keeping her eyes averted as she exits the

car, and her thumb that “flicks at the lock before she shuts the door with a quiet click” (218). By

ending with an onomatopoeia, the novel harnesses the affective power of language in describing

the rift between Brenda and Marion. It also seems to foreclose any possibility of reuniting

through language, since the “click” emphasizes the finality of their failed communication.

Brenda’s actions suggest that in locking the car door, she closes off Marion in a tightly sealed

world (or in this case a vehicle) once more. It predicts an end to their friendship and to the power

of the inclusive society made possible by travel’s marriage with language for Marion. This scene

is also interesting because it ends with Brenda executing the final action of the novel. Finally, it

15

differs from the beginning of the narrative, which describes a bird that invades Marion’s balcony,

falling dead at her feet. The contrast between the invasion of domestic space at the novel’s

commencement and retreat back into the vehicle at the end suggests Marion as an anti-hero who

fails to enact the social change that the novel imagines. However, the fact that the novel ends

with Brenda’s actions but begins with Marion as the central protagonist places Brenda in control

of the narrative at the conclusion. It points to the existence of a metanarrative and suggests that

Brenda might have accomplished what Marion could not.

In an article entitled “The Archive, the Spectral, and Narrative Responsibility,” Andrew

van der Vlies explores the question of whom the narrative belongs to in Playing in the Light. The

text constructs Brenda as a possible metatextual author of selected chapters, so that it is “in

retrospect, open to being read as having been constructed by Brenda after extensive discussions

with John Campbell and his sister, Elsie, all undertaken while Marion is abroad” (Van der Vlies

594). The possibility that Brenda may be the narrator is subtly hinted at by the text; at one point,

Marion has the uncanny feeling that Brenda knows more than she should about her: “The woman

has a knack of getting inside her most secret being; why does she have the irrational feeling that

Brenda knows things about her?” (Wicomb 78). There are also new meanings given to “allusions

to canonical texts” in the novel that “acquire new resonances” when considered in light of

Brenda’s honours degree (Van der Vlies 596). Brenda herself describes her novel-in-progress

featuring Marion’s father’s story as one that “should be written” (Wicomb 217). This evidence

leads to the conclusion that Brenda actually achieves her dream of becoming a writer by

completing the narrative of Playing in the Light. If so, then Brenda has found a way to harness

the powers of language and travel in order to embrace multiple subjectivities in completing the

novel. Her novel could not have come into being without the opportunities provided by travel,

16

including: travelling with Marion to Clanwilliam and learning the Campbell family secret; the

favorable circumstances provided by Marion’s international travel; and Brenda’s own trips to

visit Marion’s father in her absence. It is also significant that Brenda’s writing is enabled by

Outa Blinkoog’s lantern, which not only provides the light for her to work by but also inspires

her to write a story beyond her narrow circumstances. Brenda’s success is echoed in that of

Wicomb herself, who “accord[s] great political significance to the process whereby [her]

characters come to reconceptualize colonial history and their own positions within that history”

(Raiskin 226). By uniting the language of the metatext to the inspiration made possible by travel,

Brenda achieves the insight that evades Marion. In the process, she creates a work of art that

“instead of erasing a social history which reveals diversity and constructing nationalistic unities,”

successfully stages “South African ‘Coloured’ identity...as ‘multiple belongings’” (Richards

101). Brenda partly produces this multivalent identity through the book’s rhetorical style and her

manipulation of language.

Playing in the Light’s third-person narration relies on free indirect discourse to reveal

much of its ironic style. This style belies the seemingly realist novel, forcing the reader to

question who the narrator is and whose thoughts are recorded in the free indirect discourse. One

critic points out the “delightful irony to such moments” (Van der Vlies 594). For example, this

statement seems like it can be taken somewhat at face value on a first reading: “Even though she

voted for the Nationalists, she knew deep down that these policies were not viable. But what

could one do, short of joining the hypocritical English voters and betraying your own?”

(Wicomb 28). The origin of the sentence “But what could one do...” is ambiguous; it could be

Marion’s thought or it could be the narrator’s. Of course, the reader realizes upon returning to the

text that in voting for the Nationalists, Marion unknowingly betrayed “her own” by voting

17

against the interests of the coloured community. As can be seen in this example, the lack of

quotation marks here and throughout the novel naturalizes the free indirect discourse, making it

disappear among the reported speech. Yet with Brenda as the novel’s narrator, the free indirect

discourse changes from ambiguous to ironic and borders on sarcastic. Instead of assuming that

the question “But what could one do...” is Marion’s thought, or even her thought as reported by

an unbiased narrator, it could be a way for Brenda to mock Marion’s “white” identity and racist

mentality. Thus, the ambiguity of narration, and even the possibility of multiple narrators, is set

off by the stylistic techniques of free indirect discourse and irony. Added to this is the narrator’s

omniscience, as well as the narration’s ability to travel among characters both living and dead.

The result echoes Outa Blinkoog’s embroidered text, tracing many different stories into one.

This combines the benefits of travel with those of text as the narrative opens up new spaces of

possibility by jumping from Tokkie and Flip’s relationship to Helen and John’s, and later to

Marion and Geoff’s. The profound difference in the choices made by each couple, and the

unique struggles inherent in each time period, conveys a nuanced view of different historical

moments for race relations and individual choices in South Africa. The multiple narratives reflect

the manifold nature of Marion’s identity, and indeed that of many South Africans in the new

nation, that has been reformed by both the novel and by history.

The novel does not only feature travel as a theme, or focus solely on following Marion as

she crisscrosses the globe. The narrative is itself a travel novel, tracing paths throughout Cape

Town, South Africa, and Europe made by multiple narrations that make up a larger story. While

masquerading as a realist novel, the narrative actually ironizes itself as a travel novel in

metatextual moments. For example, Marion dreads the thought of her life story becoming a

material text for a tourist to appropriate: “Marion shudders at the thought of her life laid out in

18

lines, carved into a stone tablet for a tourist to bend over, bum in the air, and read” (Wicomb

204). Her fear of becoming the object of a tourist reader’s gaze develops from discomfort at a

hypothetical situation to fury at the real possibility of Brenda’s book “in the guise of a do-

gooder” detailing her experiences for the reader to consume (217). But from Brenda’s last words

of the novel (that she suspects that Marion does not know her father’s story) are we to

understand that Marion’s attitude towards the objectifying nature of travel novels is flawed?

Certainly the reader that Brenda imagines for her novel is not an international one, but rather an

audience resembling Brenda’s sister, a coloured South African woman living in a township who

will want to read “something beyond poverty and television and coloured people’s obsession

with food” (218). For this reader the story of Marion, raised in South Africa without the “burden

of history” or apartheid, could be as foreign as Marion’s travel to England and Scotland (152).

And for international readers, especially in the West, Wicomb’s strategy of de-centering Europe

in favor of South Africa allows the reader to become, like Marion, a tourist with a South African

perspective in European locations that many readers are familiar with (if not personally, then

through the canon of English literature). But as a travel novel, Wicomb’s narrative asks us to

push beyond the mere tourist gimmicks. Dougie, the native Scotsman who Marion meets in

Garnet Hill, shares his country’s political and cultural history with Marion and shows her how

the locals live, so that “there is no time [left] to do the tourist sights” (206). Significantly, the

Scottish man and South African woman find common ground in literature, sharing Robert Burns

and an Afrikaans poem inspired by his work. In the character of Dougie, Wicomb suggests that a

substantive travel novel requires a native tour guide and open-minded reader to collaborate on

finding meaning in travel. Accordingly, Marion acts as our guide as we follow her throughout

her exploration of her own past and that of South Africa. Over the course of the novel, Marion

19

transforms from a tourist in her own country to a native living in a country whose past and

inhabitants she can understand more fully; once Marion returns from Europe, she finds that

“[t]he history of the country, too, has slid from the textbook into the very streets of the city, so

that these landmarks that constitute her world-Robben Island, Table Mountain- are no longer the

bright images of the tourist brochures” (177). The reader’s journey mimics Marion’s in become a

“native,” as the places described, many of the events, and even the character of Outa Blinkoog (a

pseudonym for the artist Jan Schoeman, better known as Outa Lappies) are historical and real to

South Africa. One critic even recounts her trip inspired by Wicomb’s novel, as she re-visits Cape

Town, Clanwilliam, and Wuppertal in an homage to the book) (Kai Easton). The collaboration

that travel allows between Marion and Dougie, and between reader and text, in creating meaning

echoes the final achievement of Wicomb’s book.

In having Brenda narrate Marion, the book’s structure mimics Outa Blinkoog’s lantern of

two seemingly opposing elements that come together to create something new. Thus, the

marriage of literature and travel, and of Brenda’s narration and Marion’s experience, serves an

imaginative function that envisions new ways of being in the future. Raiskin quotes Njabulo

Ndebele in entreating “South African writers to turn from the ‘spectacular’ to a ‘rediscovery of

the ordinary’ in order to recognize ‘the unproclaimed heroism of the ordinary person’...This

understanding, he contends, is necessary ‘to free the entire social imagination of the oppressed

from the laws of perception that have characterized apartheid society’’ (223). By focusing on the

individual struggles of everyday life through various characters’ perspectives, this novel offers a

different and more complex way to understand the existing racial paradigm in South Africa.

Ultimately, it accomplishes Wicomb’s goal of creating “new discursive spaces in which

modalities of colouredness can wipe out shame” through the marriage of travel and text

20

(Wicomb, “The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” 106). Playing in the Light is a

collaborative, generative project between multiple groups that theorizes the multiplicity possible

in a new kind of South Africa nationalism.

Works Cited

Wicomb, Zoë. Playing in the Light: A Novel. New York: New Press, 2006.

21

Van der Vlies, Andrew. “The Archive, the Spectral, and Narrative Responsibility in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light.” Journal of Southern African Studies, 26:3 (2010): 583-598.

Richards, Constance S. “Nationalism and the development of identity in postcolonial fiction: Zoë Wicomb and Michelle Cliff.” Research in African Literatures, 36.1 (Spring 2005): 20+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 31 Mar. 2012.

Driver, Dorothy. “Transformation through art: writing, representation, and subjectivity in recent South African fiction.” World Literature Today, 70.1 (1996): 45+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 31 Mar. 2012.

Scully, Pamela. “Zoë Wicomb, Cosmopolitanism, and the Making and Unmaking of History.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 12:3-4 (Aug 2011), 299-311.

Attwell, David and Kai Easton. “Introduction - Zoë Wicomb: Texts and Histories.”Journal of Southern African Studies, 36:3 (Sep 2010), 519-521.

McCormick, Robert H. “Zoë Wicomb. Playing in the Light.” World Literature Today, 81.2 (March-April 2007): 67. Literature Resource Center. Web. 31 Mar. 2012.

Gaylard, Rob. “Zoë Wicomb.” South African Writers. Ed. Paul A. Scanlon. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 225. Literature Resource Center. Web. 31 Mar. 2012.

Magubane, Zine. “The Revolution Betrayed? Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Post-Apartheid State.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103:4 (Fall 2004), 657-671.

Charos, Caitlin. “States of Shame: South African Writing after Apartheid.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 10:3 (Jul 2009), 273-304.

Jacobs, J.U. “Playing in the dark/ Playing in the Light: coloured identity in the novels of Zoe Wicomb.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 20.1 (2008): 1+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 31 Mar. 2012.

Easton, Kai and Andrew van der Vlies. “Zoë Wicomb, the Cape and the Cosmopolitan: An Introduction.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 12: 3-4 (Aug 2011), 249-259.

22

Easton, Kai. “The Cape and the Cosmopolitan or Travels Around Wicomb on a Journey to the Cederberg.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 12:3-4 (Aug 2011), 285-297.

Robolin, Stephane. “Properties of Whiteness: (Post)Apartheid Geographies in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light.”Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies,12:3-4, (Aug 2011), 349-371.

Gurnah, Abdulrazak. “The Urge to Nowhere: Wicomb and Cosmopolitanism.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 12:3-4 (Aug 2011), 261-275.

Irlam, Shaun. “Unraveling the Rainbow: The Remission of Nation in Post-Apartheid Literature.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103:4 (Fall 2004), 695-718.

23