Zo Wicomb’s new novel will be launched this week. She spoke to Jane Rosenthal
David’s Story (Kwela), the new novel by South African-born Zo Wicomb her first fiction since her acclaimed story sequence You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) has been well worth waiting for. It began as a conventional novel on the Griquas, but over the eight years she worked on it (in Cape Town and Glasgow, where she now lives) evolved into a subtle, multi-layered and many-voiced tale, reaching back into Griqua history and up to 1994. Though she says, “I would prefer not to say anything at all about anything I have written,” she reluctantly agreed to an interview.
The narrator, addressing the Umkhonto weSizwe cadre protagonist of the novel, David, says her task has been “to invent a structure, some kind of reed pondok in which your voodoo shadow can thrash about”. Was the novel always going to have the form it now has?
The story of the Griquas was conceived as a conventional linear narrative, but once I decided on the dual time frame, on the parallels between [Griqua leader] Le Fleur’s time and David’s, the subject more or less dictated the structure.
Could you comment on David’s origins?
David is entirely fictional in the sense that I know of nobody like him. But he is on the other hand an amalgam perhaps an exaggeration? from various stories/hints/myths that circulate in Cape Town. Strangely, the narrative really took off in its present emphasis as a result of the British press on the IRA, the ludicrous liberal conception of violence as something that is embraced by unnatural demons as if it were not produced by colonisation, as if colonisation were not itself responsible for the excesses into which violence slips.
Could you comment on influences while writing? David’s Story made me think of Flaubert’s Parrot the interrogation of history, myth, memory.
I am not aware of conscious influences and technical choices while writing; I suspect that one absorbs the style of the times less consciously. I could mention so many writers that I wouldn’t know where to start. Interestingly, Flaubert’s Parrot was a work I admired at the time it was published; however, on re-reading it recently, I found it extremely irritating, and can see how my novel could equally put people’s backs up. Seamus Deane’s wonderful Reading in the Dark, with its simpler structure, ought to have been an influence, but I read it after finishing my own.
In some ways this novel could be seen as asserting the role of coloured and Griqua people in the struggle, charting political confusions and conflicts. What do you think of the position of coloured and Griqua people in South Africa today?
It seems to me to be one of the advantages of being coloured lower case being of Africa without allegiance to the dusty old traditions of either Europe or Africa, being eclectic without having to over-value eclecticism.
If the novel tells of the betrayal of coloured people within certain sectors of the movement, it equally tells of the ways in which the historical privileges of coloured people over black produced an inability on their part to think democracy. I think the novel tries to show how difficult it is for people to remain true to ideals, how power corrupts.
South Africans tend to go on about corruption in the new order as if it doesn’t happen elsewhere. Not a day goes by without newspapers here exposing some or other story of astounding corruption in the city I live in, in Britain, in Europe, in the so-called civilised West.
Would you comment on your experience of living and writing in exile?
Living and writing in exile that is not by choice. The consequences of leaving South Africa as a young woman are with me forever. Exile is not a state of being frozen in time so that when conditions change you return pristine and preserved. I produced a family here and find it too difficult to live away from them. I live and work here but I have no desire to be absorbed into English or Scottish culture; I cannot and will not write out of or about this culture. The South African brands of upfront racism and upbeat xenophobia are still the only varieties I feel comfortable with. I haven’t given up hope of living in the Cape again and before the end of this decade.
What are your views on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Would you agree that it is only the beginning of a very long process of telling stories of what people went through here? What of reconciliation?
If telling stories is necessary it is also naive to imagine that the youth who acquired their subjectivity through a legitimated violence will now convert that violence through storytelling. As for reconciliation, I fear the Christian discourse is as hopelessly inadequate [in this respect] as it is in every other respect. Why would the masses be interested in reconciliation without a change in their material conditions? Why should anyone expect reconciliation without giving up privileges? I ask these questions as a middle-class person enjoying many of the economic privileges of the First World.
JM Coetzee, in his puff on the back of the book, describes you as “politically beholden to no one”; at the same time your narrator is not excluded from scrutiny.
I believe that David is right in his contempt for the narrator’s sensibility, her political naivety. For all our declared commitment to freedom and democracy nothing would have changed in South Africa if some people had not dirtied their hands by taking up arms. I have admiration for that kind of action, even if the slippage from idealism into corruption is all too easy, inevitable. My narrator’s distaste for the sentimental discourse of liberation is only a vulgarity of another order.
I certainly saw it as a problem the question of how to represent corruption without denigrating an entire movement’s attempt at a better world and don’t claim that my lame resort to self-reflexivity solves the problem. But I absolutely refuse to believe that it is not permissible to write about it. In that sense I am beholden to no one.
David’s Story will be launched at the Time of the Writer festival, which runs from March 26 to 31 at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre at the University of Natal. Book at Computicket