Zoë Wicomb, the South African-Scottish Writer Who Told Powerful Stories About Belonging

Zoë Wicomb, a celebrated South African-Scottish writer and scholar, has died.

All my memories of her crystallise around her voice: it brought a small piece of South Africa into whatever context she found herself in. Whether it was a public reading (always a source of terror for her) or an animated conversation in the Glasgow home in Scotland which she and her husband, the photographer Roger Palmer, had made into a beautiful dwelling.

The cadences of her speech, untouched by the Glaswegian accents around her, were those of her native Namaqualand in South Africa and the coloured community among which she grew up. Her vivid language, lively and unstinting in both praise and censure, gave a hint of the battles she needed to fight to reach the eminent place she finally occupied.

Nobody could be less suited to the role of famous author. She shied away from all marketing and declined the services of an agent. For her later novels she remained loyal to the same publisher, the small, non-profit public-service The New Press.

She found writing fiction an agonising process, and announced more than once that she had given it up – spurring her friends into remonstration and encouragement.

My interaction with Wicomb began in the 1990s with an invitation to her to contribute to a collection of essays on South African writing. I gave her essay the title Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa. It has been widely influential. Later, fellow literary scholar Kai Easton and I arranged a conference of her writing in South Africa. We would co-edit a volume of essays on Wicomb’s fiction, demonstrating its importance to an international audience.

In 2013 Wicomb was among the recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, a new set of international literary awards. Awarding her the fiction prize, the judges praised her “subtle, lively language and beautifully crafted narratives” that explore the complex entanglements of home, and the continuing challenges of being in the world.

Namaqualand

Namaqualand, where Wicomb was born in 1948, is a vast, semi-desert region stretching up the west coast of South Africa and Namibia and far inland. The South African portion is known as Little (Klein) Namaqualand. It was to this area that the Griqua, largely descended from the indigenous Khoikhoi, trekked in the 1700s under their leader Adam Kok I.

Some of the most vivid parts of Wicomb’s writing convey the landscape and the lives of the Griqua communities of Little Namaqualand. They were deemed “coloured” under the apartheid racial classification introduced by a white-minority government that came into power in the year of Wicomb’s birth.

Her own childhood was spent in the Vanrhynsdorp area, with few resources, material or intellectual. Her father was a teacher who, unusually, made the family speak English because it was more likely to make economic and social progress possible. He sent Zoë to a high school in Cape Town, almost 300 kilometres away.

European emigration to South Africa is reflected in the names of Wicomb’s Namaqualand characters. Many of them are Scottish: Campbell, Mackay, Murray. And the in-between status of the coloured community produced by apartheid racial classifications is reflected in many ways in her novels. A coloured family decides to “pass for white” in Playing in the Light; David receives a rebuke from his father for consorting with black Africans in David’s Story; the distaste expressed by many of the community for the very word “Griqua” with its lower-class connotations.

The many references to the straightening of the characteristic frizzy hair that pepper Wicomb’s work are usually light-hearted but still significant for what they reveal. In David’s Story, the protagonist’s wife opposes his investigation into his Griqua origins, and gives a spirited defence of their people’s lack of roots, likening them to a popular brand of plastic food containers:

Liberate yourself and face up to being a Tupperware boy, light, multipurpose, adaptable.

She defends the practice of hair-straightening, not, she claims, to ape white people but as a style in its own right.

Glasgow

Many of Wicomb’s fictions shuttle between Namaqualand and Glasgow, her home for three decades. She moved there in 1994 and took up a position as professor of postcolonial literature and creative writing.

Glasgow could hardly be more different, a disparity highlighted by many of her characters. A city of a million people; a climate notable for dark, wet winters and cool summers, almost as wet; an English dialect that foreigners often find hard to comprehend. These were some of the new features the visitor from Namaqualand (or the Karoo, another semi-desert that features in Wicomb’s work) has to deal with.

How this transition is experienced depends on the circumstances of the individual concerned: Wicomb charts a number of different responses, all complex.

These include Marion’s pleasure in exploring the streets and tenements of Garnethill in Glasgow in Playing in the Light; Jane’s recognition of the South African figures carved on a Glasgow fountain; and Elsie’s inability to separate the sound of the traffic on Glasgow’s Great Western Road from her memories of the wind in the Karoo, both in the short story collection The One that Got Away.

Mercia, in the novel October, is in a different situation, having lived in Glasgow for over 26 years. For her, the contrasts between Scotland and the Cape are unsettling in both directions: the former never seems completely like home, while her visit to the latter reveals she no longer belongs there either.

Belonging

As a writer, Wicomb inhabited both these locations. Her extraordinary ear for the particularities of language and her sharp eye for detail enabled her to give them both a vivid presence.

But they are never described in a neutral way: her writing is always engaging in an investigation of how individuals see their environments, and how those environments shape individuals.

A key theme, then, and one which is subject to much perceptive examination, is belonging: in what sense does a person belong to a place, or a place to a person? Does one carry belonging with one, or is it something one leaves behind when one moves? Should one delve into one’s people’s past as a way of strengthening one’s rootedness, or should one celebrate one’s freedom from the past – as a Tupperware person, to use Sally’s term?

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Wicomb’s ability to capture in free, indirect discourse the tones and idioms of men and women who, without questioning it, belong to their place – Ouma Sarie in David’s Story, John Campbell in Playing the Light, Sylvie in October, Vytje Windvogel in Still Life – establish a contrast with those who are uncertain of where they belong, or for whom belonging is a problematic concept.

And through these complexities of place and displacement, belonging and estrangement, are constantly glimpsed the long history of colonisation, emigration, trekking, political oppression and resistance of which they are the manifestation. Wicomb put it like this:

I can’t conceive of writing without also addressing social, cultural and national distinctions; my fictions try to show how these surface in everyday interactions, in spite of our cherished liberal-humanist beliefs.

She went on:

The challenge is to capture marginal voices, thus not only a matter of my voice but, rather, one of polyphony, the many different, even contradictory, voices that engage with each other … my project includes the recovery of minor, neglected or disparaged peoples and events.

Derek Attridge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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