1. Lisa Francavilla
Professor Rita Barnard
South African Literature
April 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
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2. 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:
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3. 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).
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4. 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).
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5. 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
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6. 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
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7. 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
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8. 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,
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9. 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.
into a useful and aesthetically lovely object. 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
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10. 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
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11. 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
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12. 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,
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13. 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
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14. 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
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15. 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
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16. 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,
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17. 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
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18. 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
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19. 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
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20. 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
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21. (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
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22. Wicomb, Zoë. Playing in the Light: A Novel. New York: New Press, 2006.
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+.
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23. Easton, Kai. “The Cape and the Cosmopolitan or Travels Around Wicomb on a Journey to the
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Robolin, Stephane. “Properties of Whiteness: (Post)Apartheid Geographies in Zoë Wicomb’s
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