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Remembering Fanon: Shame and Racial Consciousness in ZoÎ Wicomb’s David’s Story

Yianna Liatsos, Department of English, University of Oklahoma
yianna@ou.edu

The paper I propose to present in your conference centers on the topic of the South African coloured identity—those South Africans designated already in the 19th century but officially established as a separate racial category by the Nationalist government’s Population Registration Act of 1950, as belonging to an ancestry that could be traced back to the native Khoi and San peoples, to slaves brought to South Africa from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Indonesia and Malaysia, and to people of mixed racial origin. Firmly grounded in the material specificity of the coloured South African historical experience, Wicomb’s writing exposes the limitations of Homi Bhabha’s theory regarding the emancipatory potential of the South African coloured “hybrid,” to depict a far more complex and confused people who both echo and exceed Frantz Fanon’s critique of the internalized inferiority complex of the black colonized in Black Skin/White Masks. I argue that Wicomb’s novel sheds a light of clarification onto the limitations of a politics of historical catharsis that the post-apartheid sought to instill in the new South African political consciousness through the institution of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, first by employing Fanon’s critical insights into the psychological and historical damage that a marginalized racial consciousness embodies, and then by critically reflecting on the implications of making the racialized body belonging to such a wounded consciousness that of a coloured woman.