What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
slave foreparentage, since it appears to foreground the re-evaluation and rejection of the claim to racial purity which sustained slavery and apartheid. This chapter analyses such public creative reclamations alongside two television texts which also locate Khoi and/ or slave presences in Afrikaner families. Here I am interested in the effects of such invocation in as much as I analyse the language which emerges to describe, analyse and introduce such activity. I explore some of the ways in which claiming slave foreparents is used in contemporary South Africa; these are then examined in conjunction with the refashioning of some white identities, as well as the celebration of racial purity among communities previously classified coloured. What might the effects of this contested discursive terrain be for how we understand apparent shifts in the relationship of whiteness to purity and of colouredness to miscegenation?
This examination is followed in Chapter 4 by my attempt to take up the challenge thrown up by Zimitri Erasmus (2001a, 2001b, 2001c) and Muhammed Haron (2001) to envision the variety of self-identifications which attach to contemporary coloured assertions of diaspora and claims to Cape Malay identities. I read the various debates about the meanings of the Muslim/Malay diaspora and its relationships to South East Asia alongside an analysis of the meanings of Islam and Malay identities in articles published in Sechaba6 and Rayda Jacobs’s novel The Slave Book (1998). In this chapter I am also concerned with uncovering the opportunities offered by slave memory to deepen scholarly understandings of diasporas.
In the final chapter, I read scholarship on the meanings of Muslim food in Cape Town alongside exhibitions on memory by the award-winning artist Berni Searle. Analysing these articulations along a continuum is a strategy suggested by Carolyn Cooper (2000) as particularly valuable in making sense of the apparently simple and contradictory diasporic formations which follow from slavery. The juxtaposition of Searle’s work and the genre of Malay food permits a fruitful comparison of varied sites of creativity in the service of memory. It also makes sense given the assertion of Cape Malay food as diasporic artistic expression, a claim that is part of the ground I analyse in this chapter.
Conceptualisations of memory in terms of Morrison’s rememory, and Pennington’s helix-like attributes, permit the imagination of this process of representation in terms of the slipperiness with which the lives of the disremembered can be imaginatively rendered. Such frameworks on memory stress the ongoing entanglements: remembering and forgetting always side by side. This is part of the cost of rememorying, because helix-like it changes the present as well as conceptualisation of the past. In addition, any movement of a helix causes structural change, so that it opens up an infinite number of possibilities. In this manner, the helix structure is a precise representation of Morrison’s rememory and works in specifically the same way. The relationship between the past and present in/of/with the helix is unstable in exactly the same manner as the archaeological and imaginative work of rememory. Like the perpetual incompleteness of rememory, the helix constantly changes planes, re-interrogates and reshapes itself. Both are in need of re-minding as well as reminding and are generative in different ways. They generate a reading of the shifting instability of the creative representation of slave memory, whilst being involved with linking different lineages in various conglomerations of past, present and future.
CHAPTER 1
REMEMBERING DIFFERENTLY: REPOSITIONED COLOURED IDENTITIES IN A DEMOCRACY
Post-apartheid South Africa has witnessed notable shifts in the scholarly and identitiary treatment of coloured subjectivities. Such shifts challenge earlier hegemonic conceptions of coloured people without necessarily completely dislodging them. These changes in the scholarly and political understandings of what coloured identities mean make sense given the specific prominence that colouredness has taken on in a general revisiting of racial identification and its languaging in a democratic South Africa, and:
A number of scholars of coloured identity in South Africa have suggested that the onset of democracy has permitted the creative and affirmative re-articulation of colouredness as a social identity in ways that were impossible under white supremacist rule. (Strauss 2009: 30)
In this chapter, I argue that such ‘re-articulations’ both challenge and rhyme with postcolonial discursive phenomena from elsewhere. This is especially the case when such shifts are read as mnemonic activity related to slavery, as foregrounded in the theorisation of shame by Zoë Wicomb (1996, 1998), and creolisation by Zimitri Erasmus (2001). The interventions of both Wicomb and Erasmus, key figures in the post-apartheid shifts in understanding constitutions of coloured identities, are analysed below.
In her influential essay ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, Zoë Wicomb (1998) argues that shame is a constitutive part of coloured identities. This shame infuses historic inscriptions of coloured people with miscegenation, degeneracy and non-belonging. It is this shame which undergirds the absence of a slave memory among coloured people, many of whom are descended from slaves, according to Wicomb. This repression of memory:
presumably has its roots in shame: shame for our origins of slavery, shame for the miscegenation, and shame, as colonial racism became institutionalized, for being black, so that with the help of our European names we have lost all knowledge of our Xhosa, Indonesian, East African or Khoi origins. (Wicomb 1998: 100)
For Wicomb, shame is partly constituted by the historical connections of ‘colouredness’ with degeneracy through associations with ‘miscegenation’ and its internalisation by members of the communities described as such. The additional part is linked to the devaluation of Black bodies and subjectivities under white supremacist periods. Consequently, those who are seen to embody both aspects of ‘inferior’ histories in the form of African ancestry and who are defined through discourses of miscegenation cannot avoid contamination by shame. Because shame attaches to all conditions of humiliation, a past which foregrounds precisely the debasement of the ancestry of coloured people engenders shame. This shame is therefore a response to a series of degrading periods in the past. Shame, however, is a relationship to this historical consciousness. As Wicomb theorises it, it is a collective self-protection from the trauma of slavery and successful colonisation and dispossession. It is ‘easier’ than remembering the complex myriad of collective traumas which precede the present. Wicomb’s shame is a relationship with the past which forecloses on memory.
Coloured definitions are structured in ways that challenge postcolonial perceptions of cultural hybridity as freeing. In the case of the ‘coloured’, Wicomb observes, it is ‘precisely the celebration of inbetweenness that serves conservatism’ (1998: 102–103). This conservative impulse does not only appear in the noticeably problematic guise of ‘racial mixedness’, but is founded on cultural hybridity as well. In other words, when coloured South Africans are historically read as both biologically and culturally hybrid, such framing is conservative since such logic posits the cultural and biological as intertwined. It is in such light that Wicomb distances herself from Bhabha’s (1994) reading of coloured subjectivity as in-between and subversive in his analysis of a South African novel, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story. Wicomb (1998: 102) notes that:
Bhabha speaks of the halfway house of ‘racial and cultural origins that bridges the “inbetween” diasporic origins of the Coloured South African and turns it into the symbol of the disjunctive, displaced everyday life of the liberation struggle’. This link, assumed between colouredness and revolutionary struggle, seems to presuppose a theory of hybridity that relies, after all, on the biological, a notion denied in earlier accounts where Bhabha claims that colonial power with its inherent ambivalence itself produces hybridization.
While postcolonial proponents of hybridity as subversion in the terrain of race see it, after Bhabha, as being able to ‘provide greater scope for strategic manoeuvre’ (Bhabha 1994: 145), and therefore clearly problematise the deployment of hybridisation in the discourses which transcribe ‘miscegenation’, cultural hybridity is not always subjected to the same rigours. Desirée Lewis (2000: 23, emphasis added) suggests that:
[t]he fluidity suggested by hybridization is a feature of all discursively constructed subjects and cultural