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A “place in which to cry”: The Place

for Race and a Home for Shame in Zoë
Wicomb's Playing in the Light
Minesh Dass
Published online: 07 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Minesh Dass (2011) A “place in which to cry”: The Place for Race and a Home
for Shame in Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light , Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern
Africa, 23:2, 137-146, DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2011.602910

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 Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
Vol. 23, No. 2, October 2011, 137 –146

A “place in which to cry”: The Place for Race and a Home for Shame in
Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light
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Minesh Dass

In Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, the main character’s troubled sense of identity (brought
about by her parents’ shameful decision to ‘play white’) is viscerally symbolised by her
discomfort in her own and others’ homes. In her Cape Town apartment she has nightmares
about other houses. Her visits to her family home, where her elderly father lives alone, are
similarly burdened by presences and memories she finds unwelcoming. And, her extended
vacation to the UK, once she has discovered her family’s secret, is a choice of “a place in
which to cry” (Wicomb 2006: 191). In tracing this sense of being un-homed I interrogate
Marion’s troubled racial identity. While the rhetoric of apartheid racial classification renders
being termed coloured an uh-homed state (since one is neither black nor white), what
coloured identity itself does is to un-home the supposed stability of more determined racial
categories (such as black and white). In this regard, I will discuss the novel’s implicit
critique of Homi K Bhabha’s conception of coloured identity as hybridised, and un-homed.
The way/s in which this ideal coloured hybrid identity essentialises the races that
supposedly ‘produced’ the coloured race will be key. Conceptually, both ‘race’ and ‘home’
struggle with a displacement of the physical by imagined narratives about that physical
embodiment. Marion’s un-homed state, then, reflects this displacement of the body by racial
narratives. In the case of so-called coloured people this displacement is rendered even more
problematic because shame re-places this displacement, rendering it all but invisible.
Keywords: race; (un)home; problem of coloured identity

Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006) tells the story of a woman Marion who, living in post-
apartheid Cape Town, discovers her parents are what is known as ‘play-whites’ – so-called col-
oureds who were able to use the apartheid racial classification system to re-classify themselves as
white so as to enjoy the social, economic and legal advantages afforded those ‘known to be
white’. But, the novel can also be read as the story of Marion’s many (failed) attempts to construct
a safe, comfortable home for herself. In her Cape Town apartment she is tormented by nightmares;
her visits to her family home, where her elderly father lives alone (her mother having died years
before) are similarly burdened by presences, memories and visions she finds unwelcoming. And,
her trip to England, once she has discovered her family’s secret, turns out to be a choice of “a place
in which to cry” (Wicomb 2006: 191). I intend to trace the connection between this focus on race
and one’s sense of home. The premise is that one cannot speak of place without also speaking of a
certain kind of dis-placement, and that one cannot conceive of home without also enacting a
certain notion of being ‘un-homed’. The displacement I would like to address is the positioning,
both historically and conceptually, of shame at the door of coloured identity. And in re-placing
shame more appropriately, the home that I believe is shaken to its foundations by Wicomb’s
novel – such that the doors fly open (strangely unwelcomingly) and we, the inhabitants of
this house, are forced to recognise that the outside is already inside – is race. Indeed, I will
attempt to argue precisely for a semantic slip between displacement and replacement.

ISSN 1013-929X print/ISSN 2159-9130 online

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 138 M. Dass

My sense is that race as narrative attempts to position itself as biological reality (a replacement of
sorts) but this is only accomplished through a series of displacements in which race obscures,
moves aside, displaces, but does not actually replace, its own textual and discursive nature.
Playing in the Light opens with Marion “on the balcony, the space both inside and out
where she spends much of her time at home” (1). A guinea fowl dies unexpectedly at her
feet and she wonders “will the others, the enemies, line up on her balcony” (1). Marion is
right to fear that “others, the enemies” outside her frame of reference will soon invade her
private space. What she has yet to comprehend is that her private space is already invaded,
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that the enemy she fears is unspeakably close, within her. It is only through a displacement,
where she conceives of the liminal space of the balcony as belonging to her only, as being
‘inside’ as it were, that Marion can conceive of others (like the bird) as enemies, trespassers
invading her space. To be “both inside and out” (1), as Marion is, means one must contend
with a certain sense of un-home, which renders one a trespasser, an enemy in one’s own
home. I would argue that this un-homed state is, figuratively, the condition in which race
places us all.
Marion and her parents are what is known as ‘play-whites’. Marion’s mother, Helen, is forced
by a white bureaucrat to exchange sex for this white identity. As Sue Kossew rightly asserts:
“[T]he border between whiteness and ‘non-whiteness’ and the cultural construction rather than
the essential nature of race, is clearly illustrated by this process of reclassification” (2006:
200). Implied by this scene is an allegorical resonance which we must be careful to hear in all
its nuances. Wicomb here, as she does in her non-fiction and in David’s Story, not only links
the coloured identity with a discourse that presents the female as sexually lascivious, but also
suggests the ways in which discourses on race seem to overshadow, dare one say displace, dis-
courses on gender (see Samuelson 2002: 2007). The white male councillor, whose advances
are wholly unwanted, reads Helen’s nervousness as evidence of desire: “Her right hand
plucked nervously at her throat, then at the plain gold wedding ring . . .. Which indicated to
Carter that she was not immune to his admiration” (Wicomb 2006: 139). Race-making and a
certain sexual violence are thus inextricably linked. The discourse of shame that leads Helen to
think of herself as an ‘unworthy coloured’ means, for Helen, that her racial identity as white
must come at the expense of her female identity and female pride – “the old [her has] to be oblit-
erated” she thinks (142). This violence is inconceivable, non-existent, non-justifiable to (and
within) ‘White Mythologies’1 when its source is (re-imagined and displaced) the sexually pro-
miscuous non-white female who desires, above all else, the white man. Helen is willing to
suffer sexual degradation for whiteness, but the exchange is doubly unfair: she must carry the
burden of wanting the purity of whiteness; and, she must (always) carry the burden of being
an impure, sexually predatory coloured female who turns the heads of ‘pure’ white men – in
church “Carter [keeps] his eyes decently averted” from her, as would any ‘good, Christian
white man’ (145).
Little wonder, then, that a pervasive sense of shame – felt acutely by Helen and indirectly by
Marion – will follow the family through the door to ‘whiteness’. Helen’s bartering of sex for
whiteness is telling in relation to this shame. Wicomb has herself written perceptively on the
link between miscegenation and shame. The mixed race(s) of South Africa are originally the
product of “the colonial encounter between colonists (Dutch and British), indigenous Khoi and
San people of the Cape, and slaves” (Kossew 2006: 198). This miscegenation would become con-
strued by colonial discourse as the ‘shameful’ fault of black women, who were thus constructed as
concupiscent – that concupiscence itself being the ‘source’ of shame for these women and their
progeny.2 Similarly, the coloured body, which “bear[s] the marked pigmentation of miscegena-
tion” (Wicomb 1998: 93), must also bear the shame of miscegenation (the origins of which I
will address in due course). This shame, argues Wicomb, is evident in “apartheid’s strategy of
 Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 139

the naming of a Coloured race, and recurring in . . . attempts by coloureds to establish brownness
as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame” (1998: 92).
Helen, though, is not interested in a pure coloured identity, but rather a pure white one. Yet her
passing is also obviously in some sense a “denial of [the] shame” attached to coloured identity, in
so far as it is a denial of that identity. Ironically, this disavowal is accomplished only through mis-
cegenation. Helen is, of course, ashamed of her sexual degradation at the hands of Carter
(however necessary); at the time she wants “nothing more than to hide under the rough grey
blanket of childhood and to sob” (Wicomb 2006: 140). Yet the childhood home is not ultimately
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her solace; rather she chooses the “image of a door: opportunity as a threshold over which you
stepped lightly, without fuss” (142). Miscegenation, for Helen and her family, will produce white-
ness and purity, not brownness and degeneracy. The door, she imagines, will open on a home both
safe and welcoming. Yet how different the reality of her home life is:

[Helen and John] did not exchange anecdotes about close shaves. If there were cold shivers when col-
leagues talked about hotnos or uppity coloureds they did not giggle about it in their bedroom, for that
space had lost its privacy too. (124)

Helen (reflects Marion) can never play in the light; instead she and John must hide in it,
forever feeling like “pale, vulnerable geckos whose skeletal systems show through transparent
flesh” (123). The light is meant to illuminate the ‘truth’ (it is meant to enlighten, and this
connection to colonial discourse and the Enlightenment is, we should not forget, always
just beneath the surface of the issues we are grappling with here) by bringing any small
slip by Helen and John out into the light of day. The light, then, demands the ‘truth’, will
abide only the ‘truth’. It demands, in a sense, a confession. The question of what exactly
Helen and John might confess to (that is, what constitutes their shameful behaviour) is in
itself worth considering. On the one hand, they must avoid confessing that they are
‘play-whites’, that they have broken the law and passed from one race to another. On the
other hand, they must also avoid ‘behaving like coloureds’, that is, behaviour which would
show that their true crime is in the first instance that of being coloured (that shameful
condition). If their crime is being coloured, and the action they take to obviate that crime,
their passing, is also a shameful offence – then, perhaps, already we are beginning to
sense how pervasive shame is, since, in effect, Helen is shamed by being coloured and by
being white. Thus, the home Helen dreamt of entering is deprived of privacy and she is
constantly on show (and here, surely, we cannot help but think of Saartjie Baartman whose
story so encapsulates notions of concupiscence, miscegenation and shame, and whose body
was put on show by Georges Cuvier). Helen does not simply live with shame, she lives in
it. It is, for her, no longer an emotion; it is an ontological state. Shame, which Helen
thought could be escaped through the purity of whiteness, is it seems a blinding light that
pierces the thin veneer of white respectability and allows Helen to be seen for ‘the coloured
she is’. This suggests, then, that Marion, as someone unaware of her parents’ passing who can
“take her whiteness, her privileges, for granted”, should be exempt from shame (125). Instead,
Marion too is un-homed.
In her Cape Town apartment, which seems to spring from the pages of Home and Garden
magazines, Marion has a terrifying, recurring nightmare:

In the dream, Marion wanders through the house. It is still; there is no one. But in the kitchen there is
the smell of coffee beans just roasted and the palpable absence of a woman who threatens to materi-
alise, first here and then there . . .. Marion keeps going out to the stoep to get away from the shape of
the woman, but cannot tell whether it is the back or the front of the house, and so must return indoors.
In the telling, it would seem that this is the key to the dream. (30)
 140 M. Dass

The woman who “threatens to materialise” is probably Tokkie, Marion’s grandmother, who she
was made to believe was a mere servant. It is in point of fact a picture in the newspaper (of
someone who, involved in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she at one point thinks
of as a ghost) which reminds Marion of Tokkie and leads her to investigate her family history,
discovering her parents’ shameful decision to ‘play-white’. This vision of Tokkie evokes the
unhomely as “unheimlich” in the Freudian sense. In his essay “The Uncanny” Freud elaborates
on the psychoanalytic meanings of the “unheimlich” and, amongst its many definitions, he
argues that it refers to an event from early childhood which has been repressed but then re-
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appears: it is “something which is secretly familiar [Heimlich-heimisch] which has undergone

repression and then returned from it, and . . . everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition”
(1973: 245). Marion was only five years old when Tokkie died but the connection she makes
between Patricia Williams (the woman in the newspaper) and Tokkie gives her an “uncanny cer-
tainty” that there is a “mystery about her own birth” (Wicomb 2006: 62). She assumes (wrongly,
as it turns out) that she is adopted and the old woman had a hand in the process. But it is not her
parentage that haunts Marion; rather it is the familiarity and affection she felt for Tokkie (who she
was made to believe was no more than a mere servant, certainly not a grandmother) which are the
repressed feelings that ‘uncannily’ determine Marion’s unhomed sense of self: “Tokkie’s death
and the oppressive silence, weeks of silence in that house where she crept under the bed to
snuggle into the old woman’s apron; the dry, white childhood . . . and now this terrible emptiness”
(102). These feelings of care and safety associated with Tokkie are entirely at odds with Marion’s
memory of her childhood home. These feelings she represses and they return as an uncanny sense
of unhome, a “terrible emptiness” (102). Therefore, though my focus on the un-homely is not,
strictly speaking, psychoanalytic in nature, there can be little doubt that Tokkie is indeed a
repressed memory that causes much of the anxiety experienced by Marion. And, further still,
this anxiety is most evident in her relation to home (her own and others).
The dream house from which Marion cannot escape, where she always “must return indoors”
is described later, tellingly, as “the long house of [her] dream that is stuffed inside the house where
[she] live[s]” (30). Marion’s dream (which holds a kernel of truth) is “stuffed inside” her reality,
yet it dis-places the real making her home ‘un-homely’. She cannot escape from the interiority of
the dream to the exteriority of reality because that reality has been internally invaded by what Jean
Baudrillard defines as the simulacrum. Baudrillard describes the simulacrum as a simulation
which is “never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit
without reference or circumference” (1994: 6). It therefore

. . . is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting
the signs of the real for the real, that is to say an operation of deterring every real process via its
operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the
signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. (Baudrillard 1994: 3)

This is precisely the nature of Marion’s dream. The dream or simulacrum of home is substituted
for her real house and in the process it overcomes and “short circuits all its vicissitudes”. The real
house is rendered un-homely, inaccessible, almost dream-like in nature.
And rightly so, for Marion’s conception of home is a narrative which, in some sense,
dis-places the physical house or dwelling. Allison Blunt and Robyn Dowling argue for “home
[as] a series of feelings and attachments, some of which, some of the time, and in some places,
become connected to a physical shelter”; “home”, therefore, “is not only experienced in a
house . . . home [can be] within and beyond the house” (2006: 10, original emphasis). Marion’s
dream, her narrative of an inescapable home, is stuffed within her house, but it also exceeds
her house: it is an endless inside which renders her actual house an endless outside to which
 Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 141

she can never return. If the interior of the dream is inescapable then the exterior reality is
unachievable.
Marion’s dream clearly relates to the race she both is and is not: the ‘unhomely’ coloured race.
Elaborating the Freudian ‘uncanny’ in the postcolonial context, Homi K Bhabha describes the
“unhomely” as

a bridge where ‘presencing’ begins because it captures something of the estranging sense of the relo-
cation of the home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and
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cross cultural initiations. To be unhomed is not to be homeless . . . (1994: 9)

Moreover, according to Bhabha, the “‘unhomely’ house marks a deeper historical displacement.
And that is the condition of being ‘coloured’ in South Africa, or as Will [in Nadine Gordimer’s My
Son’s Story] describes it ‘halfway between . . . being not defined – and it was this lack of definition
in itself that was never to be questioned, but observed like a taboo” (1994: 13). Bhabha, quoting
Gordimer, conceives of a lack of definition which cannot be questioned but must rather be
observed “like a taboo”. Bhabha is playing, possibly inadvertently, on at least two connotations
of the word taboo – that is, a thing both sacred and shameful. Is the “unhomely” coloured the
hybrid, positive and true character of cultural exchange (what Bhabha would surely view as
sacred to his postcolonial project), or its silent, shameful effect? Surely, the latter suggests that
Bhabha has re-situated, but not undone or deconstructed the violence of colonial discourse
within the framework of postcolonial discourse? Wicomb, in her non-fiction, has strongly cri-
tiqued Bhabha’s reading of coloured identity along similar lines. Within Playing in the Light, I
would argue, she (implicitly) further develops this polemic by linking it to the notion of travel
and to the trope of home.
Marion returns (travels, as it were) often to her childhood home to visit her ailing father. The
house in its present state she finds a shameful mess; for instance, her father – once so meticulous
in his care of his garden – now only has one dying pot plant and she takes this as evidence of age-
related dementia, “the slide into someone she doesn’t know” (Wicomb 2006: 10). But it is not
simply that the home she returns to is not the one she remembers; it is also that her ‘homecomings’
revive memories of how displaced and unwelcomed she felt in that home even as a child:

As a child she hated their street, the terraced houses so close to the pavement, where families distin-
guished themselves from their neighbours by painting their doors in violently clashing colours. As if,
returning from work in the evenings, tired and absentminded, they feared walking into the wrong
house . . .. Marion would have preferred to live above the Main Road . . .. Those verandahed
stoeps, edged with broekielace, were wrapped around at least two sides of the house, so that
people could spend all day outside in the ambiguous space between private house and public street
. . .. At Marion’s house, with the mean, verandahless strip of stoep that slipped without as much as
a path straight into the street, they kept indoors, even in summer. (8–9)

Marion, as a child, is put off by the garish use of colour which her neighbourhood uses to distinguish
one home from another. This seemingly heavy-handed metaphor obviously relates to her own
family which has used a white identity to distinguish itself from the coloured community. Thus,
Marion’s childish desire for a series of homes with uniformally coloured doors leads her to
imagine her father stumbling, foolishly, into the wrong home and “settl[ing] himself comfortably
at [the neighbours’] dinner table and plung[ing] into jokes and anecdotes” (9). The suggestion,
following the metaphor through to its logical conclusion, is that a utopian lack of differentiation
by (or through) colour would lead to a greater, more comfortable sense of community.
However, this dream of a race-less community only further illustrates the difference
of Marion’s home life and any notion that Wicomb is arguing for a simple de-racing and
 142 M. Dass

de-racialising of society is undercut by the actual vehicle of the metaphor itself. Namely, it is the
doors of the houses that Marion dreams of being monochrome. But a door, like the balcony of her
apartment, is a liminal space, both inside and out. She may imagine a uniform series of doors that
welcome all in, but the doors themselves enact and maintain a precarious link between safe,
utopian inside-the-home and the dangerous world beyond it.
Perhaps, then, we should be drawn to Marion’s other dream; she wants to live in Annie’s neigh-
bourhood which has large vernadahs attached to most houses. These verandahs form an “ambigu-
ous space between private house and public street”, allowing one to spend all day outside (9). This is
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another utopian vision, in this instance an acceptance of liminality, hybridity and comfort with the
world. But both visions involve a space which is safe (inside-the-house, or outside where one can
play on the verandah all day) and a space which is not. In other words, both visions require that one
conceive of the liminal space (the door, balcony or verandah) as a border, differentiating home (a
safe space in which one belongs) from an unwelcoming, threatening world on the other side. The
de-racialised, or non-racial vision of society (suggested by a community with monochrome doors)
and the hybrid community (symbolised by Annie’s verandah) are both necessarily dreams, ideal-
ised fictions. They both conceive of race (either as a white-washed purity where all who belong
to the community are the same, or as a celebration of coloured hybridity) as being able to enact
a safe space, and a sense of belonging. The vision of purity is therefore a variant of the impure,
hybrid vision of Annie’s world. In both, race is a space one can come home to. Race is, in this
sense, an endless narrative promise of belonging, of home which displaces (as it does for
Marion who was never comfortable in her childhood house) any sense of one’s own home. One
is always ‘coming home’ to the dream of what a home should be, and in the process one is
always trapped outside of reality (staring at the door, hoping it will open).
Interestingly, Marion’s father refers to his daughter as a creature of dreams, properly of
mythology – his “meermin, his little mermaid” The mermaid is hybrid, both human and fish
(22). Again, the metaphor could be seen as rather heavy-handed. But, lest we forget, in myth mer-
maids called hauntingly (much like sirens) to homesick sailors, offering an alluring comfort which
drew the sailors from their ships (arguably liminal vessels themselves, designed to move between
destinations) to their doom. The idea of race is like the mermaid’s song, I would suggest: as an
escape from it or as an acceptance of its validity, its purity, which can then be mixed to create
the impure hybrid, race beckons us with the promise of a mythic home. So mesmerising is the
song that we imagine it is the solid floor we stand on that is not real or safe; the rocks and the
water seem secure.
It is valuable also to consider Marion’s aversion to travel:

These holidays that she enthusiastically arranges for others seem like nothing more than hard work . . ..
Could such an experience, in the final analysis, be any more pleasurable than seeing the world on film
or television? She supposes that it’s all part of the contemporary fuss about authenticity. (4)

Marion does not share this desire for authenticity. She wryly argues to Geoff (her some-time
boyfriend) that eventually all ‘authentic experiences’ are replicated for tourists and put in a guide
book or brochure. Like her dream home, Marion is put off by the simulacrum which comes to
replace the real from within so that no authentic experience is possible. The tourist entering
the foreign world makes the world foreign since whatever might be considered indigenous or
authentic is made spectacle and therefore other to itself. Dare I state the obvious: one’s home
is rendered ‘unhomely’?
Here, then, I would argue, is Wicomb’s implicit critique of Bhabha’s “unhomely” coloured.
Even as such theory questions the idealised homing of race its tracing of movement from that
‘homeland’ essentialises its existence. Even as it travels out across culture and geography,
 Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 143

finding connections and similarities in far-flung communities, it might be construed as suggesting

a time when no discernible similarities were shared between any communities, were really Other,
were home. In other words, such theory runs the inevitable risk of trying to travel back, back to a
time before ‘the tourist’ had seen the spectacle of the world.
And into this prelapsarian world, Bhabha also, not coincidentally, introduces the purity of
race. According to Wicomb, in her influential article “Shame and Identity: The Case of the
Coloured in South Africa”, the relegation by Bhabha of coloured people to a hybrid or “unho-
mely” state “relies on an essentialist view which posits a ‘pure’ reality that is experienced in
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the space inhabited by the racially pure” (1998: 101-2). Miscegenation, which in Playing in
the Light produces whiteness for the Campbells, has always produced whiteness. It is only
with the creation of the impure, mixed race that a pure race becomes tenable. According to
Mike Marais (discussing Wicomb’s first novel, David’s Story) this discourse on race “legitimizes
the hermeneutic procedure through which the somatic traces of what is assumed to be tainted
[coloured, that is] blood constantly invoke the moment of original sin which brought with it a
lapse from racial purity” (2005: 26). But, how can one conceive of such purity without, at the
very least, entertaining the possibility of its being tainted, mixed? As with all thought that is
exposed to Derridean deconstructive analysis, race’s moment of “original sin”, and the mythic
notion of a pure version of itself that is thus created, is itself only achievable because of the
internal threat of that which will come after, that which is supplementary, created after,
“orginal sin”:

. . . the supplement, supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-
of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void . . .. As substitute, it is not simply added to the possibility of a
presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness.
Somewhere, something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing itself to
be filled through sign and proxy. (Derrida 1997: 145, original emphases)

Derrida speaks of the supplementary as that which “insinuates itself in-the-place-of”, in other
words, that which replaces. At the moment of miscegenation purity becomes possible because at
one and the same moment it is replaced by the tainted, impure mixed race. The tainted blood
replaces the pure blood; the mixed race replaces the pure one(s). But, as Derrida notes, before
this replacement there was a void, “the mark of an emptiness” (1997: 145). The replacement of
race by race, the void “filled up of itself” allows what was non-existent and empty (namely, the
notion of a pure race and empty) to come into existence within the void that is already filled by
its own supplement. To hide such a movement would require a veil, a covering which averts our
eyes or, more accurately. moves aside and displaces what we would otherwise see. It requires
shame.
Helen, John and Marion, who experience almost overwhelming guilt and shame as a conse-
quence of becoming white, suggest this shame – the shame of whiteness. The sexual encounter
between the colonist and the ‘other’ was marked by shame precisely because the colonist was
ashamed. His dis-placement of that shame onto his progeny allowed him a mythical purity, a
whiteness that could look with disgust upon what it had produced without ever admitting that
whiteness was itself a child of miscegenation.
Race, in effect, becomes possible through a series of dis-placements. The narrative or discur-
sive nature of race becomes obscured by a biological referent determined by a pervasive biologi-
sation of blood, in which the mixing of pure white blood with that of other races produces
coloured people as “conduit[s] of tainted blood”; which, in effect, identifies the pure through
the identification of the mixed or tainted blood of coloureds (Marais 2005: 25). Thus, racism
and racialism are also created by a dis-placement of biology itself from its proper place as
 144 M. Dass

discourse to a quasi-science. Says Stuart Hall: race “function[s] not through the truth of the ‘bio-
logical referent’ but as a discursive logic. That is to say, as a logic in which, of course, the bio-
logical trace still functions even when it’s silent, but now, not as the truth, but as the guarantor of
the truth” (1998: 290). Little wonder, then, that race is so all-encompassing a narrative of the
modern world; scarcely have we peeled away one layer of its fiction than we are presented
with another, all the layers functioning simultaneously to hide the fact that race too is a fiction.
Nowhere in Playing in the Light is exactly this series of displacements invoked more accu-
rately than when Marion goes to the public library. Her first piece of research is to check up
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the meaning of a section of Bible verse printed on a Sunday-school card kept, inexplicably, by
her mother. The verse refers to an Ethiopian eunuch converted by Philip. Marion suspects her
mother never knew that and “learned her texts by heart without questioning – which after all,
was the point of Sunday-school cards: that memorising texts would displace impious thoughts
and so cleanse the soul” (Wicomb 2006: 119). We have here a displacement by a text, or dis-
course, which leads to purity and a pure discourse (implied by the lack of impious thoughts).
Little wonder, then, that Marion next chooses to research apartheid classifications of race.
Marion attempts to look up play-white, finds nothing; she and the librarian suspect play-white
“must be a condition of whiteness, but whiteness itself, according to the library’s classification
system, is not a category for investigation” (120). Finally the librarian guesses they “will have
to look up coloureds” which they both seem to realise “doesn’t make sense, but what else can
they do?” (120). This too leads nowhere and all that they can ultimately do is look up the apartheid
regime’s various amendments to the term “white”. The confusing and patently contradictory defi-
nitions are both laughable and unhelpful and the librarian concludes that it “[m]ust have been a
hell of a confusing time . . . when whiteness was not yet properly defined . . . [and] whiteness
might be undermined if people go about speaking of their black blood” (121).
Marion is led into an inescapable cul-de-sac by this endless and circular ‘research’, where white-
ness is a “not a category for investigation”, where coloured cannot be defined, except by looking up
frankly baffling apartheid discourse on white – a white person is “a person who (a) in appearance is
a white person and who is not generally accepted as a coloured person” etc. (121). Her ‘research’
has produced no greater insight into what it might mean to be white, play-white or coloured, except
that all definitions seem to rely on each other and, more importantly, on a fundamental definition
that she cannot find. Certainly there is a biological element; hence whiteness might be undermined
if people go about “speaking of their black blood” (121). Yet, black blood, and the pseudo-science
of eugenics to which this notion belongs, can only undermine whiteness – it cannot define it. The
biological must now function not as a referent of the order of the real, but as a sign of the real; that is,
what is considered to be real, what has come to displace the real: race. In other words, biology has
become a signifier of itself. Race functions as an internal distance between the actual physical body
(which, I hasten to add, is in any case inaccessible in its pure form given this distance) and that
which the body has come to represent.
After abandoning the fruitless search for an accurate definition of any of these supposedly
obvious racial classifications, Marion takes out the photograph of her parents: “the country-shy
couple who betrayed their families, who obliterated their histories, who stripped themselves of
colour to be play-whites” (122). She muses that “[a]ccording to the National Library, they did
not exist” and wonders if “they thought of themselves as dissidents, daring to play in the
light? Or as people who could mess up the system, who could not be looked up in libraries,
who had escaped the documentation of identity” (122). It was, of course, never her parents
aim to escape “the documentation of identity” by race. Rather it is that race itself is a series of
documents, texts, and discourses without identity (without definition). Marion and the librarian
assume without a second’s hesitation that the definition must be there, in the library, somewhere.
The pervasiveness of texts about race suggests the texts, speak the ‘truth’ of race. What Marion’s
 Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 145

‘research’ actually reveals is that it is these texts, by virtue of their number, influence and hege-
mony, that act, not as the holder of ‘truth’ but rather as “the guarantor of the truth” (Hall 1998:
290). Marion stares at a photograph, a simulacrum, of her parents and realises that according
to the rules of the day “they did not exist” (Wicomb 2006: 122). The photograph intimates but
ultimately only displaces reality. So too with all definitions of people along racial lines: what
you ‘see’ is not there, does not exist, and what might be seen were the simulacra not so pervasive
is displaced and, thus, rendered invisible.
I would like to end by discussing one final vision of ‘un-home’ presented by Wicomb, which
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allows Marion to experience that which race had rendered invisible to her. Despite her reser-
vations about travel Marion decides to explore the UK near the end of the novel. In England
she rents a small one bedroom apartment and begins reading South African fiction, discovering
in the process “how many versions of her exist in the stories of her country” (190– 1). These
stories, coupled with the lack of sunlight, even in the British summer, make her cry constantly.
Marion is uncomfortable with her tearful identification with others but chooses to suffer it:
“there is something about being cocooned in a single room, about the bleakness of the days,
that must be endured, like sitting an examination”. Hauntingly, she therefore thinks of her new
abode as “a place in which to cry” (191).
So too I would suggest that Marion, in this literally foreign land, is able to discover in the stories
of her country new versions of herself. It is as if the foreignness, the state of being necessarily un-
homed, allows a certain sense of identity to become possible. This sense of self, or more properly
selves, is achieved through fiction and narrative. It is achieved by embracing the simulacrum which
dis-places or alters the state of the real (from within). But this embrace is not easy or joyful; rather it
is washed with tears. So too I would suggest with race: in tracing, through Wicomb’s novel, the
ways in which shame erroneously became the narrative of colouredness, simultaneously obscuring
the narrative which created whiteness, I have attempted to reveal the ways in which the novel cracks
open the door of the closed home that is race, exposing that home to a critical light. It is the inter-
iority of this home that must be explored; by this I mean that it is the narrative, the simulacrum that
must be more fully inhabited in order that race’s exterior, its violent social and political reality, may
begin to be undermined or displaced. I cannot help but be reminded of Toni Morrison’s description
of the world-as-home in which race does not matter:

[it is] the new space . . . formed by the inwardness of the outside, the interiority of the ‘othered,’ the
personal that is always embedded in the public. In this new space one can imagine safety without
walls, can iterate difference that is prized but unprivileged, and can conceive of a third . . . world
‘already made for me, both snug and wide open, with a doorway never needing to be closed.’
(1998: 12)

Wicomb, I think, would agree with much of this sentiment, though where Morrison envisions
safety and comfort Wicomb would add tears. The difference is a matter of perspective: Morrison’s
is the world once the race-house has been made a “race-specific yet nonracist home” (1998: 5),
whereas Wicomb is imagining what it is like to live in that home as it is being constructed. Marion
cries for the versions of herself she never knew, versions obscured by race and shame. These dis-
coveries are also, always, discoveries of loss; they are a mourning for the versions of her which
race would have hidden in the light. A dark room, “a place in which to cry” – this is the appro-
priate place for this work.
 146 M. Dass

Notes
1. See Robert J C Young’s book of the same name which discusses the manifold ways in which Western
History should be read as a series of ‘White Mythologies’ which systematically conceal the violence
done by Western culture to other cultures.
2. Wicomb, agreeing with Sander Gilman, points out that the “display of [Saartjie Baartman’s] spectacular
steatopygia and [Nineteenth Century Europe’s] generation of medical discourse on Khoi genitalia
established the iconographic link between the black woman and sexual lasciviousness” (1998: 91).
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