In 1996 Ingrid de Kok evocatively described the transitional moment as one of ‘standing in the doorway”. Arrested on this threshold, literature of the transition stood transfixed, ‘with a creased Janus face, vigilant of the past, watchful of the future”, she observed. Writing also in that swinging-door moment of 1996, Njabulo Ndebele addressed the need to restore national homes in the wake of the ‘loss of homes [and the] demise of intimacy” that occurred under apartheid’s wrenching displacements and estrangements.
Approaching the state of South African literary culture and criticism after the transition, I evoke De Kok’s image and Ndebele’s concerns to consider what it might mean to move beyond the liminal threshold moment of transition: to walk through that door and inhabit the house of a new national culture.
The question of who gets to inhabit the house remains an incredibly vexed one, continually testing the bounds of what we have become as, in the Western Cape in particular, debates around access to housing are increasingly articulated in, through and around the racial categories and divisions of the past. At the same time the surrounding shantytowns grow ever more gargantuan as the city and the new nation continue to house the aspirations of those from the hinterland and beyond the border that they do not in turn accommodate.
How does the metaphor of the national home resonate for those who live within corrugated iron, between cardboard or huddled under bridges or on doorsteps? These are concerns that texts such as Ways of Dying, Finding Mr Mandini and Thirteen Cents have engaged. Finally, thinking around the concept of ‘home” inevitably evokes the division of public and private spheres, the gendered social order it underpins and the ways in which women are cast as symbolic embodiments of home and all it signifies.
I argued in Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition that women’s bodies become the contested terrain over which new (national) homes are made. The making of the national home, I found, articulates itself through the domestication of women and the abjection of their speaking selves. This symbolic violence — or dismemberment, as I termed it — is matched often by physical brutality or the coercive power wielded increasingly by ‘big men”.
Narratives such as Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story and Mthuthuzeli Nyoka’s I Speak to the Silent suggest the torturous and generally still silenced intimacies women were made to enact in the war zone, while Wicomb explores also the re-domestication of women during the post-war aftermath as violence against women becomes a means by which a post-war ‘normalcy” and the rebuilding of home is produced and policed.
At the same time one of the striking features of the post-transitional moment in South African literary culture is the emergence of the bold new literary voices of young black women (for example, Angela Makolwa, Kopano Matlwa and Zukiswa Wanner), suggesting that new textual homes from which women can foray out into the public sphere are under construction. Yet even these homes are haunted by structures of anxiety or outright violence; Matlwa’s Coconut, for instance, foregrounds the damaging inscription of whiteness on the interior worlds of its characters.
The narratives penned by the late Phaswane Mpe and K Sello Duiker insist that we need ways of reading that open up, rather than reify, national culture and that we become attentive to the connected (literary) histories, flows of knowledge and idiom and the physical and psychic movements that transgress the bounds of what we might like to think of as a ‘South African literary culture” as we hone stances with which to straddle and inhabit our borderline realities.
Another set of narratives I have engaged present South African culture as cut across and comprised by oceanic passages, particularly those across the Indian Ocean.
A recent crop of family epics (including Accone’s All Under Heaven: The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa, Hassin’s The Lotus People, Ronnie Govender’s Song of the Atman and Imraan Coovadia’s The Wedding) suggest that it is in the ‘now” we inhabit that the inscription of home on South African soil becomes possible. Docking on the exclusionary shores of erstwhile white South Africa, these passages — oceanic and literary — hone analytic tools with which to meet a xenophobia articulated first in colonial and apartheid racisms (which cast black South Africans as strangers in their own land and Asians as foreigners to be repatriated) and now transmuted into hostility towards Africans from across the border and South Africans of Indian descent.
In this present, casting one’s gaze back across the ocean raises pertinent questions around home, belonging and Africanness that gesture towards ways of imagining the nation anew: no longer in terms of the ‘closed doors” that the metaphor of the national-home encapsulates, but rather as ship coming into port in a range of harbours. Such narratives open up new directions and plot alternative configurations in which South African literatures find fluid positions to inhabit between the national and the global. Notably, however, besides the odd coda or epilogue, none of the titles I’ve mentioned is able to imagine itself into the post-apartheid present, as the insistence on having made home in the past is instead left to whisper its tentative claim on the present.
Returning also into the ‘now” are narratives of the early Cape settlement (for instance, Rayda Jacob’s The Slave Book, Dan Sleigh’s Islands (Eilande) and Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed), reminding us of the heterdox, creolising and excruciatingly oppressive interiors of the slave-holding household and urging us to think of what issues from these historical homes into our present. After her representation of the imploding house of whiteness in Triomf, Marlene van Niekerk’s magnificent Agaat takes us into the interior intimacies of a domestic world whose origins lie in this past.
Straddling the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid eras, Agaat reveals the torturous relations of betrayal, dependency, care-taking and, dare we say it, ‘love” enacted therein, writing the home in which these intimate relations unfold as a space of both tenderness and terror. Many of the intimate, personal narratives emerging in the ‘now” remind us urgently that, far from being a comfort zone, being at home might entail the greatest risks.
The discomfiture of inhabiting the transitional margin is met by a desire to move on — but to what and from where? In our attempts to define what the editors of At Risk call the ‘second wave”– the literature that comes after the transition and moves beyond the confessional dynamics of trauma and recovery, reconciliation and redemption, expiation and exorcism — I’d like to suggest that we don’t too hastily abandon the question of what the transitional structures may yet contain and what unfinished business they have left us: what faded, cracked plaster can we still chip away at; what ghosts continue to lurk in the passages; what walls could we still open up into windows; what new rooms might these structures still throw up; what spaces of sociality may they come to enable; what textures of communication and contact could they still house; and what doors might they yet open?
In short, I admit to a sense of fatigue with our constant claims of newness in the face of the continuing imbrications of past and present; rather than wistfully imagining the tearing down of structures, I want to think in terms of the renovation and re-habitation of what we have inherited. Tacking back and forth between the ‘now”, that which we are just beginning to peek past and that which we believe we have decisively left behind, I want to keep thinking towards habitations that are unhomely and commitments that are not centred on a comforting sense of belonging that is in turn dependent on exclusions and repressions of difference; of homes with open doors and gaping windows; of homes that are risky but habitable.
Such conceptions of our national, literary and critical homes acknowledge that the structures providing our comfort and security and protecting our sense of ownership and belonging are fragile, even fictitious; they are explicitly aware of their provisional, precarious and sometimes downright dangerous status; they enable our past spectres to circulate, without allowing them to become too settled; as with Mpe they issue a ‘welcome” to those who stand outside, while to those entrapped inside they might promise various escape routes. My provocation, then, takes the form of a final question: ‘Walking through the door and inhabiting the house — but can we leave the door open?”
This is an edited extract from Meg Samuelson’s paper, Walking through the door and inhabiting the house: South African literary culture and criticism, given at South African Literary Studies: A Provocation on the State of the Field, hosted by Wiser this week