Shakespeare and the Coconuts. Natasha Distiller
in the discussions about Africanness. From commercial and tourist performances10 to nationalist constructions, to contestations over who qualifies as an African (after centuries of disavowal, many whites are now anxious to claim an African identity of sorts), personal identities with regard to Africa and Africanness are helping to form and formulate post-apartheid identity in general. ‘We’ can then be South Africans of any of the ‘races’ who have encountered Shakespeare via institutions which disseminate Eng Lit, with all the access, and subjection, to systemic power (gendered, social, economic, and, eventually, political) this implies.
‘We’ also exist in a time and space variously called post- or neo-colonial, and/or post- or neo-apartheid. These designations are not uncontested. It is true they are politically simplistic given, not least, the diversity of experiences of the past and present in this country that makes a definition of who ‘we’ are necessary in the first place. Different South Africans also have very different future possibilities from one another; if we are all post- anything, some of us are more post- than others, and many of us are differently post- from one another. Nevertheless, in the course of this book, I will use these terms because they are a convenient shorthand: I use post-colonial and post-apartheid mainly as historical markers, although post-colonial also refers to a body of work or an approach in the academy. Neo-colonial and neo-apartheid are used when I want to acknowledge that the inheritances of colonialism and apartheid are still with us, that these historical events have shaped the present in ways that make the moniker ‘post-’ optimistic. After all, the fact of this book, an engagement with Shakespeare in South Africa, is evidence of the neo-colonial reality in which we live as post-apartheid South Africans.
CHAPTER 1
Shakespeare in English, English in South Africa
In her 2007 European Union Literary Award-winning first novel, Kopana Matlwa presents an engaged critique of the primacy of English in the ‘new’ South Africa. Coconut is the story of two young women, Ofilwe and Fikile. The former is part of the emerging black middle class, and has ‘lost’ her culture for an Englished identity in a world of ‘white’ privilege that will never truly accept or know her. Eating with her family at an otherwise whites-only restaurant, she thinks,
We dare not eat with our naked fingertips, walk in generous groups, speak merrily in booming voices … They will scold us if we dare, not with their lips … because the laws prevent them from doing so, but with their eyes. They will shout, ‘Stop acting black!’ 1
The latter is desperate to acquire the glamour and power of whiteness in order to escape the poverty and deprivation she sees as intrinsically ‘black’:
‘And you, Fikile, what do you want to be when you grow up?’
‘White, teacher Zola. I want to be white.’ …
‘But Fikile dea r… why would you want to do that … ?’
‘Because it’s better.’
‘What makes you think that, Fikile?’
‘Everything.’ 2
Part of acquiring whiteness and the class advancement that goes with it is acquiring English, and with it an implictly Anglo-American culture which is relentlessly ‘white’. This is Ofilwe’s ironic ABC:
After-Sun. Bikini. Ballet. Barbie and Ken. Cruise. Disneyland. Disco. Diamonds and Pearls. Easter Egg. Fettucine. Frappe. Fork and Knife. Gymnastics. Horse Riding. Horticulture. House in the Hills. Indoor Cricket. Jungle Gym. Jacuzzi. Jumping Jacks and Flip Flacks. Khaki. Lock. Loiter. Looks like Trouble. Maid. Native. Nameless.
No, not me, Madam. Napoleon. Ocean. Overthrow. Occupy and Rule. Palace. Quantity. Quantify. Queen of England. Red. Sunscreen. Suntan. Sex on the Beach. Tinkerbell. Unicorn. Oopsy daisy. Unwrap them all at once! Video Games. World Wide Web. Wireless Connection. Xmas. Yo-yo Diet. You, You and You. Zero guilt. 3
Matlwa’s novel is an attack on ongoing systemic racism and its links to what the book sees as the power bloc that is whiteness and Englishness: the two are inseparable. Thinking of her cousins in the townships, whose parents did not advance economically and who did not have access to the education she was given, Ofilwe says:
I spoke the TV language; the one Daddy spoke at work, the one Mama never could get right, the one that spoke of sweet success.
How can I possibly listen to those who try to convince me otherwise? What has Sepedi ever done for them? Look at those sorrowful cousins of mine who think that a brick is a toy. Look at me. Even the old people know I am special…. They smile at me and say, ‘You, our child, must save all your strength for your books.’ Do you see, I always tell my cousins, that they must not despair, as soon as my schooling is over I will come back and teach them English and then they will be special too? 4
Shakespeare has a small but significant cameo role in the book, as the rhetorical trappings in the speech and subjectivity of an emasculated, abusive, poor, black man with a useless English education. Unlike Ofilwe’s English, which makes her special, Uncle’s Shakespearean English just makes him exploitable and, in Fikile’s words, pathetic.
This book takes Coconut’s understanding of the intertwining of whiteness, Englishness, and social and economic power as its starting point and its end point. Apposite to this discussion is the assumption embedded in the very idea of a coconut that culture and identity are and should be contained, controlled, pure, and raced. Immediately following the extract above, where Ofilwe naïvely celebrates how her English, linked to her class status, makes her ‘special’, Matlwa inserts the following vignette:
Katlego Matuana-George, dressed in a Vanguard Creation, sells the cover of this month’s Fresh magazine. Katlego, the former principal dancer of the renowned Von Holt School of Modern Dancing … shares that she tries to have as many equestrian weekends with her husband Tom at their farm in the north as possible. It helps to ground her and allows her the latitude to reflect on her life.5
‘Katlego Matuana-George’ is not a character in the book and does not recur. She is clearly a satire on a blackness saturated with class privilege and the veneer of whiteness that goes with it. Her clothes, her ‘modern’ dancing, her white husband and their ranch ‘in the north’ are all indicators of a blackness not just altered but ameliorated by its exposure to cultural colonisation.
The relationship between all these markers – identity, language, race, and, as Matlwa’s novel also painfully shows through Fikile’s association of personal advancement with whiteness, class – is exemplified in the history of how English came to South Africa, who spoke it, why, and how. Gender is also a factor in this history, not least because it is often missing. One of the many interesting contributions Coconut makes to this issue is the fact of its protagonists’ and its author’s gender – the first comment by a female insider since Noni Jabavu’s autobiographical The Ochre People (1963).6 Gendered experience features in aspects of the novel’s detail – in Ofilwe’s internalisation of ‘yo-yo dieting’, and in both girls’ obsessions with their hair and Fikile’s with her green contact lenses. It also features in the implication at the end of the novel that Fikile is headed towards sexual exploitation by an old white man: ‘Anything worth having in life comes at a price, a price that is not always easy to pay. Maybe Paul is right … He seems to really like me … What do I have to lose?’7 The obvious answer, everything she has left of her already battered sense of self, speaks in a gendered way to what the novel presents as the cost of exposure to a world by now saturated with commodification, economic, social, and linguistic power relations, and perverted racialised values. As I explained in the introduction and as I will go on to explore in more detail in this chapter, while it is imperative to remain cognisant of the very real violent histories behind this understanding of identity, race, and