Buy this book

Anna Goodall
posted 17 August 2006

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, Zoë Wicomb’s novel Playing in the Light focuses on Marion Campbell, a young woman of Afrikaner background, as she tries to uncover her family history and understand a childhood spent shrouded in an unexplained silence. Her attempt runs in parallel with, and is part of, a new South Africa struggling to emerge from decades of oppression, violence and wilful ignorance. The novel is about how apartheid has damaged relationships from a personal to a national level. And in Marion’s world, at least, the burden of history hangs so heavy that no one wants to talk about it. The novel portrays a nascent democracy neither reconciled to the past, nor certain of how to progress to the future.

Her personal look into her past is set against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in 1995 to investigate the hidden abuses of apartheid and the repressed history of a nation, to which more than 22,000 people testified. As the balance of power shifts, democracy proves to be a disorienting experience for the white, moneyed classes who are now subject to escalating crime rates in the freer society where the rich/poor divide is colossal.

This sense of disorientation extends to Marion’s own quest and it becomes apparent that her troubled family history has left her with no sense of identity. Her light hair, pale skin and relatively privileged upbringing have never led her to question her race, and her unaffectionate mother obsessed with ‘keeping oneself to oneself’ and a pleasantly evasive father, have left her few clues.

‘Playing in the light’ is a term used here to describe the actions of coloured people who were pale enough to be ‘generally accepted as a white person’ and so dared to traverse the rigid racial borders with hard-won paperwork to find a place in the privileged world of white South Africa. It becomes clear that such an all-encompassing goal for acceptance and ‘whiteness’ came to dominate her parents’, John and Helen’s, lives. Their decisions essentially estranged them from their own families and destroyed the potential of their relationship with each other and, ultimately, with their only child.

So although on the surface Marion seems to have done all right for herself – she is a beautiful woman with a successful travel business, a Mercedes and pristine modern apartment – all is not well. In an irritatingly oft-repeated metaphor for her interiority and fear, we learn that she hates to, and does not see the point of the travel and holidays that she sells to others. Virtually ‘trapped’ inside a 24-hour guarded, gated block of flats with Robben Island always in view twinkling disconcertingly in the picturesque bay, she is also prone to claustrophobic nightmares: ‘[S]he can see from the bed […] the cool Atlantic [lapping] at Robben Island. Then, for a moment, she seems to gag on metres of muslin, ensnared in the fabric that wraps itself round and round her into a shroud from which she struggles to escape.’ Lonely and unhappy, it becomes clear that Marion must face the past in order to free her future.

Wicomb also explores the problems that apartheid has created, and Marion’s awkward relationship to them, in a different context through the character of Brenda, the first black woman Marion has ever employed in her office. It reminds us how those who have lived privileged, sheltered lives want to distance themselves from the past and any part they may have played in it, and how different their lives still are from those just emerging from repression.

Only once in the novel is any sense of anger directly expressed. Brenda suddenly attacks Boetie, a staid but not unpleasant Afrikaner who works in Marion’s office, as he decries the newly widespread violence that dogs the city. She lashes out: ‘You don’t think that years of oppression and destitution and perversion of human beings, thanks to the policies that you voted in, have anything to do with you?’ Boetie is, of course, appalled to think that he should consider himself in anyway responsible for the past, but Brenda persists, ‘It’s impossible to find a person on this country who voted for the Nationalist Party. God knows how that phantom called apartheid came into being by itself’. It is a direct accusation of the kind we won’t encounter in the novel again, and is the subject at the heart of the narrative. But even Brenda herself is annoyed at herself for ‘taking the bait’. There seems no point in talking about it. This narrative technique effectively conveys the depth of misunderstanding and damage still existing between those looking at each other across the boundaries of race and class.

Unfortunately for the reader, the complexity of the relationships and socio-political climate is disturbed and diminished by the narrative style and novel’s form. The use of language is slightly ponderous, and the rather trite descriptions and jumpy narrative progressions only aggravate the reader. More importantly, or because of this, the novel suffers from a lack of successful characterization and, at times, Marion’s lack of identity threatens to be a personality void. We are very much ‘told’ her reactions and responses; one is distinctly aware that her actions and thoughts are imposed upon her for an authorial purpose. So we learn that ‘Marion is careful […] it is simply the case that she has never been effusive, that she gives little away.’ The narrative keeps her at an immense distance, or else abandons her to clichés: ‘The past is contained in endless dreary rows of parcelled days, wrapped in tissue paper, each with its drop of poison at the core. Marion abandons herself to self-pity: how would she know where to start, how to unwrap those parcels?’ As a result, it is hard to really engage with our main protagonist. Somewhat ironically, if the new South Africa/Marion metaphor is to be sustained, Wicomb fails to give her a significant voice.

This is a shame as the book deals with such interesting times, where, for example, Marion is drawn irresistibly – and against her will – to watch the Truth & Reconciliation Commission on TV where ‘ordinary men with neatly parted hair and dapper moustaches [confess] in the cosy diminutives of the language to acts that wrench a dry retching from the pit of her stomach.’ However this surreally prosaic and shocking portal of revelation is immediately reduced in its potential power by the use of hackneyed metaphor to describe Marion’s feelings in the following passage, describing her as: ‘a reluctant traveller who has landed in a foreign country without so much as a phrase book’. The cliché seems totally out of place, but the novel constantly falls into this weird trap, often just when it’s getting interesting. Wicomb herself seems afraid to really tap into the darkest elements of the situation. Or perhaps the fact we never get to the heart of the matter is her formal way of showing how these issues cannot just be ‘dealt’ with after years and years. Whatever, the clichés are unnecessary and annoying.

A particularly weak moment is Marion’s unconvincing decision to travel after all as a result of the family secrets she discovers, which leads to a near-laughable trip to a very 'quaint' Glasgow and rather irritating suggestions that as Marion reads fiction (which she only starts to do on this trip abroad, having previously thought it pointless) so she learns to empathise with her homeland, with others and to understand better her own situation. That literature gives clarity, escape and self-knowledge; that travel ‘broadens your horizons’. Yes, quite, but it is irritatingly plonked into the narrative as if Wicomb feels she has to say all the right things and that she does not trust the reader to infer anything from a more subtle narrative.

Significantly, the only time I really engaged with the novel was when Marion was not present. Then suddenly, despite describing more repressive times, the narrative suddenly seems freer. We dive, unannounced, into the past, where we learn something of the lives and struggles of grandparents and then parents. The section concerning Helen, Marion’s mother, is particularly good. We are brought face to face with the reality of the times and the reasons for her parents’ actions and suddenly it’s fascinating. But then we have to return to Marion and the narrative loses its impact.

The figure of John, Marion’s father, is consistently well drawn and Wicomb convincingly paints a portrait of an ordinary man, who has done nothing wrong, but who has tried to forget the painful results of his actions and their full implications. The repressed, uptight, ruined Helen is also beautifully portrayed when we join her in the past. But, again, with Marion’s return Wicomb resorts to tried and tested motifs that just negate the excellent writing that sometimes emerges. So Helen is described in some irritating mumblings about remakings, ‘[H]er mother has been bolted together and then undone […] The self-made woman, unmade and several times over reassembled.’ It doesn’t really tell us much and removes us from the narrative, to its detriment.

What the novel excels at is presenting the wider scope of a nation’s history through ordinary mundane lives and examining how individuals’ behaviour essentially assists a repressive regime. Boetie refusing to accept the potential part he has played in apartheid being just one of a million potential examples. Wicomb suggests that it is in these complicitous silences, lies and essentially fear that oppression gains its greatest stronghold. But it is never condemnatory. Wicomb shows understanding of human nature: for people trying to ignore things they cannot solve and to focus, instead, on bettering their lives; to try and keep a position in life, to get on with their affairs in safety and quietude, perhaps not realising the damage they are doing to themselves.

Wicomb makes clear, although with far less power than she might have done, that the legacy of apartheid will not just be healed in a moment; it’s damage goes too deep for that. Just one point Nelson Mandela underlined in his historic speech when released from prison in 1990, when he said, ‘The fabric of family life of millions of my people has been shattered.’ And it is clear by the novel’s close that despite the overtures to change that Marion and the nation makes, they are still struggling to understand and accept their new identities, and that there is still a long, long way to go for both. 

Anna Goodall is one of the editors of the free literary magazine Pen Pusher.