October Zo Wicomb Dorothy Driver puts it well

October Zoë Wicomb

Dorothy Driver puts it well when she refers to a ‘mutuality of history and text’ in Wicomb’s writing, a mutuality which reveals that ‘you cannot do without the real in interpreting the fictional, and then again you cannot do without the fictional in interpreting the real’ (Attwell & Easton)

• Country South Africa • Province Western Cape • District West Coast • Municipality Matzikama • Area • • Total • Population • • Total 0. 96 km 2 (0. 37 sq mi) (2011) 205 • Racial makeup (2011) • • Black African 87. 8% • • Coloured 9. 3% • • White 2. 9% • First languages (2011) • • Afrikaans 97. 1% • • Sign language 2. 0% • • Other 1. 0%

Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys. The City of Johannesburg Unlocked A stoep in Good Hope Street. The deep-blue garden walls hold a precise measure of the twilight still. The smell of grass is quenching after a summer day, the dusk lays a cool hand on the back of your neck. We are talking, my friends and I, with our bare feet propped on the wall of the stoep, our cane chairs creaking. We have been talking and laughing for hours, putting our predicaments in their place, finding ways to keep our balance in a tide of change. We could fetch fresh beer glasses from the door of the fridge, but these warm ones, stickily finger-printed and smelling of yeast, suit this satiated conversation better. We speak the same language. This is our climate. We have grown up in this air, this light, and we grasp it on the skin, where it grasps us. We know this earth, this grass, this polished red stone with the soles of our feet. We will never be ourselves anywhere else. Happier, perhaps, healthier, less burdened, more secure. But we will never be closer to who we are than this.

October, p. 22 The mother is of another era. Her dress sports a bow at the throat, the skirt skims her ankles, and her hair is raked back severely into a bun. Good hair all the same. No hot iron, her husband would proudly offer apropos of nothing, has ever touched that head. If nowadays it is the look of a prude, it is worth remembering that then the severity signaled that she was a good woman. There is further, bucolic virtue in the hand that rests on the haft of a garden spade. There is nothing of the raciness one would expect to find in one called Antoinette.

It was shortly after her mother’s death that Mercia announced that she would no longer answer to the name of mercy. Jake complained. No man, Mercy man, it’s too late now. How would a person remember to call you by that mouthful of a name? Anyway what’s in a name? in that little add-on? October And once, in bygone days, Mercia was a place, an English region, the name for border people, which she supposes has its own resonance for certain South Africans like them, or for that matter her own liminal self. Nicholas and Nettie would not have known these meanings, on that dry Namaqua plain would not have known of the lush Trent Valley, the land of the Mercians. No, more likely they were guided by the word mercy, guided by a cry that must have issued from every soul who set foot in that godforsaken place. But Mercia cannot take her cue from mercy, since there is for her no deity who will or will not, according to his caprice, dispense the stuff. Given the Christian fondness for abstract nouns, the virtues as names, she supposes that she has come off lightly after all. Imagine being called Charity, Prudence, Sobriety, or Virtue itself. Names for girls. Names that boys happily escape.

(p. 34) Mercia explains that most likely there’d be no more rain, that seasons come and go as the earth spins around the sun, that now it is spring in the southern Hemisphere. miraculously a verse from her childhood returns, in pristine Afrikaans, and he recites after her: Dit is die maand Oktober, / die mooiste, mooiste maand! / Dan is die dag so helder, / so groen is elke aand, / so blou en sonder wolke / die hemel heerlik bo, / so blomtuin-vol van kleure / die asvaal ou Karoo. October The child declaims like a preacher, then once he has mastered the verse he stops at the fourth line, tickled by the poet’s claim that the nights are green. So wit is elke aand, he improvises, and laughs. Might as well call it white. He knows lots more colors – red, yellow, black – but purple would be best: yes, and starting again he folds in the color: so pers is elke aand…’ (p. 40) In spite of Mercia’s explanation about the seasons and her reassurances to the child the previous day, it rains. And that in October, the lovely, loveliest month’.

October, p. 35 Yes, it is wonderful, incredible, she agrees, that is why the Greeks called it bird’s milk. Ornithogalum, she sounds the word, syllable by syllable. mercia says that she likes to think of their South African name, tjienkerientjee, of which the English name is a transliteration, as a Khoe word for stars, but she doesn’t know. It is of course a lily, like kalkoentjies. Has his father shown him kalkoentjies in the veld? she asks. The child’s face clouds over, the fleshy mound of his chin twitches. My daddy, he says hesitantly, is sleeping; he’s too tired to go to the veld. Or that is what she thinks he says, since Afrikaans does not have the progressive to distinguish sleeps from is sleeping. Nicky adds, my daddy can get lots of turkeys from the shop. Big ones with tails that make so, and with outstretched arms he struts, drawing arcs above his head. She laughs. No, not the bird, kalkoen. Kalkoentjie is also the name of a red lily you find in the veld. In spring

Kalkoentjie

Chincherinchee

‘Together they pore over the laws and confusing racial definitions. The 1946 franchise laws allowed mixed blood in one parent or grandparent, but the new bill of 1950, designed to formalise and fix the categories of coloured and white, conflicted with the earlier one. Coloured could now elect European representatives to the House of Assembly, but many whites who until then had thought of themselves as European were in the fifties transferred to the newly established separate coloured voters’ roll. On the other hand, Act No. 30 of 1950 defined a “white person” as: Zoe Wicomb, Playing in the Light one who in appearance is, or who is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person. Marion cannot make sense of the Population Registration Amendment Act of 1962. The librarian reads aloud the amended definition: A “white person” is a person who (a) in appearance obviously is a white person and who is not generally accepted as a coloured person; or (b) is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously not a white person, but does not include any person who for the purposes of classification under this Act, freely and voluntarily admits that he is by descent a native or a coloured person unless it is proved that the admission is not based on fact. But is that any different, Marion asks, from the 1950 Act? She reads it again, more slowly; she looks at the woman’s puzzled expression, and then she hears shocking laughter pealing from her own throat. The librarian lifts an admonishing palm, purses her lips to silence Marion, but it is not long before she too succumbs to laughter. In vain they try to stifle the sound; they stagger drunkenly between the aisles before sliding with the heavy tomes onto the carpeted floor, where they rock with quiet laughter. Tears stream down their faces. There are decades of folly trapped in these pages’.

The Acts further specified (a) that the person’s habits, education and speech and deportment and demeanor in general shall be taken into account. (b) in the absence of proof that any person who was not a Black was generally accepted as a White person, it shall be assumed that he was generally accepted as a Coloured person. Sub-section (c) stated that: a person shall be deemed not to be generally accepted as a White person unless he is so accepted in the area in which or at any place where he is ordinarily resident, is employed or carries on business, mixes socially or takes part in other activities with other members of the public, and in his association with the members of his family and any other person with whom he lives.

Reclassifications In 1987, 918 people applied or were submitted for race reclassification. 722 of these (76. 65%) were duly reclassified. In 1988, 1, 142 people applied or were submitted. 867 (75. 92%) of these were duly reclassified. In 1989, 1, 229 people applied or were submitted. 1, 123 (91. 38%) of these were duly reclassified. The total number of applications submitted and ‘granted’ (or enforced) for 1988 was as follows: Applications made African to coloured African to Griqua African to Indian Chinese to coloured Chinese to white Coloured to African Coloured to Chinese Coloured to Indian Coloured to Malay Coloured to white Indian to coloured Indian to Malay Indian to white Malay to coloured Malay to Indian Malay to white Other Asian to coloured White to coloured Total 316 3 2 3 4 15 1 63 24 514 55 47 4 19 30 22 7 13 1142 Applications granted 240 3 2 3 3 13 1 63 24 347 52 47 1 19 25 11 0 13 867

October, p. 81 ‘It was true that Nicholas insisted that they were different, that living amongst the Namaquas did not make Namaquas of the Murrays. The people around them were not their kind, and thus Nicholas taught his children to speak English. Which means that they were not to play with others who spoke Afrikaans. Besides, the children had each other, and friendship was a dubious category that only led to evil. It would be friends who would persuade them to smoke or drink alchohol, lead them astray to do or think the countless bad things that young people were prone to do. It was, according to their father, important to remember that they did not belong there… For a moment Mercia feared that he would say: I am who I am. But he explained that Kliprand was inhabited by uncouth, uneducated people. Yes, their home was there, but the Murrays couldn’t possibly think of belonging there. As long as they could fit in anywhere with decent people, also city people, that was the important thing, that was where they would be at home. By which, of course, he meant English-speaking coloreds with straight hair, skin color being less important than hair, the crucial marker of blackness. Jake guffawed. Did Nicholas not know that all coloreds had European ancestors? If it were only those with visible genetic links that counted, he would happily grow his hair to accentuate the frizz. Which he did’.

October, p. 75 ‘Mercia drifts from the southern December to the lingering light of the Scottish summer. After all these years the slow inching of day to darkness still brings melancholia; for all its reliability still creeps upon her as a surprising ache of weltschmerz, until darkness finally engulfs the day. Now sitting in Sylvie’s yard, she thinks of that dusk-bound sadness as a longing for the African night, for blackness that like a screen is swiftly, securely drawn across the sky, obliterating the day in a quick, decisive death—obliterating guilt’.

October, pp. 75 -76 ‘Sundowners were for Europeans trying to adjust to the swift descent of the African night. Over forgetful drink, they flocked together to counter angst and fear, for otherwise the world would yawn with the descent of darkness, showing its inner space, and who could stand that? Certainly not those who had left home in search of a better life in the colonies. ’