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The museum and the public:M Nelika Jayawardane aa Department of English , Sate University of New York-OswegoPublished online: 21 Apr 2008.

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61 ARTICLES

I Art in

America, David Galloway writes about

the current boom in museum building, a period

Galloway draws our attention, for example, to

museum has had the effect of drawing sudden

‘international attention to a city whose name

The museum and the public:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

memorial building and representing ‘unpronounceable’ history in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s story

M NEELIKA JAYAWARDANEDepartment of English

Sate University of New York-Oswego

e-mail: jayaward@oswego.edu

ABSTRACT

In a 2005 issue of Art in America, David Galloway draws our attention to the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach: architect Hans Hollein’s ‘postmodern extravaganza seemed more intent on showcasing the architecture than the art it contained’, he states (140). Zoë Wicomb’s novel, David’s story, similarly calls deliberate attention to its elaborate structures, creating anxiety about the issues surrounding memorialisation.David’s story, though I argue that it is a ‘site of conscience’, simultaneously presents iconic figures and questions their validity, though she refuses to work solely on the premises used by traditional memorial structures. Wicomb also comments on the ultimate unrepresentability of the memory of terror, and the ‘unpronounceability’ of certain portions of national history. David’s story could signal the genesis of a new era of literature in South Africa, but rather than severing the link between textual difficulty and exclusiveness – thereby allowing readers to arrive at the mutually constitutive relationship between the struggle to ‘read’ and the pleasure in comprehending the story – the ‘theatricality’ of the novel’s structure may create such an ‘insider’s story’, requiring so much knowledge of the ‘architectural idioms’, that it may prove to be inaccessible to many readers.

© Unisa Press pp. 61–74

scrutiny2 12(2) 2007: issues in english studies in southern Africa ISSN: Print 1812–5441/Online 1753–5409DOI: 10.1080/18125440701751976

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for contemporary art, designed by the Danish

architect Hans Hollein, began an unprecedented

But, says Galloway, Hollein’s ‘postmodern

extravaganza seemed more intent on showcasing

David’s story

hereafter DS), was published at a time when

museums, memorialisation and the representation

of public memory were being debated with new

in countries with far more resources to spend

on structures that house cultural memory, her

novel calls deliberate attention to its elaborate

mirrors the multiplicities of the narrative histories

David’s story’,

claims that ‘though genealogical history and

modernism are perhaps not obvious bedfellows’,

the novel is more ‘modernist’ than ‘postmodern’,

owing to the fact that ‘this is indeed the story of a

However, Wicomb’s writing could be described

as a homage to postmodern aesthetics for the

same list of reasons; she links the fragmented

design of the narrative to the impossibility of

narrating a political or historical ‘truth’, thereby

highlighting her desire to resist telling a singular,

with Stephen Meyer and Thomas Olver, Wicomb

Yes, it’s fractured, yes, and the fragments are not stories – they lack the classic lack-quest-resolution structure, and taken together, resist coherence. There isn’t a cen-tral authoritative voice. My conceit of David fathering the story from a distance tries to capture the interrelat-edness of the political and aesthetic concerns. (2002: 186)

She adds, within the same interview, that ‘the

inchoate story, which for political reasons can’t

be told, threatens to fall apart; only the reader

can hold together some sense of the events’

drawn into the labour of piecing together the

two ‘unfolding narratives, separated by three

Fleur and his dealings with the old South African

powers’ and that of David Dirkse’s dealings with

revolve around the centripetal force created by

Dulcie, the woman whom neither David nor the

narrator of this tale is able to represent, but whose

presence dominates David’s, the narrator’s and

Wicomb further complicates the design of

the narrative by combining the ‘troubling of

location[s]’ within her novel with ‘a troubling of

chronology’, wherein ‘the sections of the novel

move back and forth (or to and fro) between the

in an interview with Hein Willemse, that she ‘did

not choose’ this structure; rather, that ‘it was all

I could do, because the problem came once I

fact that this novel has a complicated structure

undermines the notion of an uncomplicated,

straightforward chronological tale often employed

That David’s story is a narrative that demands

substantial effort from its readers is obvious

Morrison’s Paradise, a novel that similarly

point, a gift just as desirable as whatever ends the

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work might have been thought to achieve’ (Aubry

Club plays with US readers and the material

they ‘consume’, argues that Morrison ‘rel[ies]

heavily on the inclinations of her massive

middlebrow readership’ in the US, to juggle two

The first is that her book, like the utopia its title prom-ises, can be at once difficult and accessible, requiring a kind of hard labor that will not thwart but attract her readers. The second is that Paradise’s power will not end on the last page, that the labor that Morrison initi-ates will persist, indefinitely, after readers have put the book down. (ibid: 351)

and ‘middlebrow’ readers of Oprah Winfrey’s

Book Club prefer reading choices that perform

a ‘therapeutic’ function, or ‘books that can

change their lives’, they hold a ‘reverence for the

sphere of high culture … and an earnest desire

to “get it” based on a veneration for that which

However, Aubry complicates this desire to ‘get it’,

claiming ‘it seems to entail a disturbing desire for

pretensions, as if the comprehension of literary

capable of procuring for the consumer higher

Whether South Africa, also, has cultivated a

similar readership desirous of ‘getting it’ in

Wicomb is interested in engaging her readership

take on the events in our troubled history’ (Meyer

becomes an alternative museum, one in which

the ‘material form’ given to ‘authorized versions

If ‘museums institutionalize certain forms of

vis-à-

vis a process of ‘remembering and forgetting …

inclusion and exclusion’ (ibid), Wicomb’s attempt

violent means that the state employs in order to

promote and privilege certain versions of history

The complex reading process necessary for

entering David’s story

labour’ necessary for being a citizen, part of a

nation, a history and a narrative; but while one

might hope that the public will be attracted to,

rather than thwarted by engaging with the project

ity’ of such a decentring project might turn away

Of the German architecture museum, Galloway

writes that

as Germany became what Stirling once described as the “flying circus of contemporary architects”, the sheer multiplicity of the “architectural idioms” presented to the German public throughout the two waves of museum constructions makes one wonder “whether the museum structure should compete with its contents”.

the structure of David’s story compete with the

‘story’ inaccessible? Does the novel become a

inaccessible, leaving a handful of academics to

force the complexity of the structure on resistant

students enrolled in university courses? Or,

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alternatively, could Wicomb’s writing, like that

of Morrison, gather a ‘massive middlebrow’

readership, who, despite the considerable labour

presented within David’s story?

not only for an elite reading public with access

to a sophisticated reading level, but also for the

language or design? Galloway, in his article,

became more savvy ‘readers’ of architectural

signals and architectural idioms, and that the

architecture museum ‘sensitised the society to

Transition, written at a time

that is contemporary with the events of David’s

story, Wicomb stated that in South Africa,

though the nation’s cultural institutions call

for the production of a new literary language,

‘apartheid conditions have militated against the

linguistic development of black people, both in

the imposition of European languages and the

years between the time when this article was

being written and the publication of her novel,

the conditions to which Wicomb refers would

miraculous appearance of a sophisticated reading

chengladbach is ‘unpronounceable’ and ‘out of the

towards cities (and names) that Europeans might

consider important and completely accessible;

his is the nonchalance that arises from being

situated in an audacious new empire (the US)

Similarly, one might argue that David’s story is,

One of the novel’s strengths lies in Wicomb’s

ability to present, for those situated in those

selves as ‘central’, an alternative, peripheral

with a much more complex and problematic

history than what the average person (whether

South African, or not) might want to digest

or ‘word’ into reality; as she implies in her

interview with Meyer and Olver, most people

are desirous of the bland utopia presented within

government, and the ultimate triumph of South

Africa’s liberation movement over an evil

literacy necessary for reading David’s story, and

for appreciating Wicomb’s ability to highlight

anxieties surrounding memory, narration and

‘origins’ as do the new monuments to memory;

draw the public’s attention to locations that were

heretofore ‘barely pronounceable’; ask readers

to travel towards distant geographies that their

psychic constructions of humanity once did

But six years after the novel’s publication, the

most likely readers of David’s story end up being

academics and foreign ‘visitors’ to her memorial,

drawn to this ‘postmodern extravaganza’ more

‘intent on showcasing the architecture than the

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art it contain[s]’; David’s story remains out of

reach of those whom Wicomb writes about, those

***

The project of the museum, historically, is

in that the spaces within a museum building

have traditionally displayed the accoutrements

unity, the symbolic right to ownership of land

and power, the spectacular moments that help

coalesce the mythic identity of the nation, and

acknowledged, symbolic gesture towards a

positivist and aggrandising, stressing the manner

the unjust system of rule, the government that

commemoration of the past ‘has generated a

spate of monuments, memorials, museums,

memory and history and to represent a nation’s

memorial construction must deal with how a

structure can ‘bear witness and ensure democratic

representation’ while it ‘represent[s] the past

and historicize[s] its reality’ (“Introduction”

In nations looking for icons and heritage sites to

fuel the construction of a new national identity,

‘sites of conscience’ are seen as spaces that

contribute to the development of reconciliation,

efforts in a variety of cultural contexts; historic

sites are touted as aids in social reconstruction

are thought to advance social rebuilding, and

museums are believed to be useful to nations

with painful pasts for cultivating discussion

These modern projects of memorialisation

have more to do with presenting the other face

the subsumed narratives that run counter to the

nationalist agenda; as such, museums associated

with sites of conscience create anxiety around

nationalist agendas by presenting the trauma

that damage and loss have caused to portions

of the population, and the resulting debilitating

effects on ‘the collective psyche of the people’

nation, these monuments attempt to represent

the unincorporated remainders of the nation;

but in doing so, they, too, attempt to represent

a collective effect through the representation of

As a work of literature, David’s story

contains a world where truth is unbearable

narratives that a nation, in its desire for unity, is

The novel deals with the ‘disalignments’

that appear in a nation that has undergone

a symbolic catharsis through an established

semisecular, semireligious exposition of ‘truth’,

in the aftermath of the South African Truth and

the failures of truth, the discrepancies between

the narratives that were revealed and those that

remained unbearable for the nation to hear; it

deals with the rifts and gaps that remain after

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throughout the novel by troubling the notion of

‘truth’ and by offering impossible juxtapositions

what appears on the page; for example, as the

narrator herself comments, ‘David’s narrative

Madame le Fleur with the Zoologist Georges

Cuvier and his prize exhibit Saartje Baartman

is avowedly impossible, since there is a century

attempts to construct a genealogy connecting

him to Le Fleur, and Le Fleur’s ‘ludicrous notion

of pureness’ are also destabilised; Wicomb states

that the desire to construct such genealogies

‘seems to me to resonate with some of the new

notions of “colouredness” and essentialism’

***

As with new structures conscious of

of memorials’ and ‘the enduring tropes of

victorious monuments’, Wicomb, too, presents

subjects’ lives through the fragmented structure

she nonetheless creates a ‘countermemorial’,

introducing and creating unstable icons of her

Susana Torre, in her chapter in Experiments with

truth, writes that Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Projekcja

Publiczna (Town Hall Tower Projection) in

Krakow, Poland, lights up ‘shameful intimacies’

in Krakow’s ‘proudest public space’, calling

attention to the state’s failure to protect women

walls of the tower, the artist projected images

of the hands of women, ‘one holding a candle,

another peeling potatoes with the same knife that

threatened her life … as each woman’s voice was

Similarly, David’s story, too, ‘lights up’ a

present, projecting the ambiguities of the hands

and weapons that feed, sustain and have the

power to extinguish life against the backdrop

images and narratives within the novel lead us

memories when it enters a moment when

ideals are monumentalised and presented as an

occupied the marginal spaces of South Africa’s

liberation struggle, and what happens to them

now, in a time of peace? Do those who were

marginalised then, have no place at all now, in the

the liberation struggle?

Of the interlinked strata that hold this novel

narrative of David Dirkse, which takes place

we Sizwe (the military wing of the ANC) who

had devoted his life to bringing about the end of

apartheid, has time to think about his ancestors,

liberation of the nation seems to be ensured;

David’s is a story that is a part of monumental

As Mahmood Mamdani maintains, violence and

the birth of democracy are indelibly connected

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French Revolution, moderns have come to

see violence as the midwife of history … the

French Revolution gave us terror and it gave

us a citizen’s army’; this ‘army was comprised

But while the ‘political function of collective

memory’ necessitates displaying only portions

types of collective and political violence’ (Sivan

David’s story reveals not only

fragmentations of the multidimensional world in

David himself, sure and disciplined in his

why he wants to record his story, and unsure

problematised in (and by) the world of heroics;

his narrative reveals the discomfort he feels

the unnamed amanuensis to record the story as

out the narrative’ she states, thereby already

undermining his centrality to the narrative (DS

David’s search for a genealogical link to the epic

le Fleur, and his attempt to transpose his own

le Fleur, is overtaken by the story surrounding

DS

kind of a scream somehow echoing though’ (DS

David’s attempts to address the unspeakable

that the amanuensis details in the exacting,

medical language that captures torture and

because no amount of rational language or

can capture the horrors of calculated bodily

comrades in the struggle, that the torture is not at

the hands of the ‘other’, but the self, presents the

Dulcie was a necessary icon to win a necessary

freedom, in the transition to peace such icons

must not only recede, but be silenced in a such

a terrifying manner that her existence will never

be spoken of

***

Any museum contains, in storage, an enormous

amount of archived material that only a curator

And in every nation there is the thing of which

one cannot speak, the thing for which we have

undoubtedly contain an array of stories that will

a sort of elimination dance, wherein the viewer

absorbs not a totality, but a construction of

the project of representation deeply troubling,

because living in this era of recorded memory

allows people to believe that ‘memory has become

though ‘truth as it is constructed through images

can only be an accumulation of points of view of

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When it comes to images of horror, I prefer to rely on the power of imagination. I do not share the idea of their clarifying and denunciatory power. We hear that to show a crime against humanity is already to start fighting it. This kind of euphoric cliché eludes the question of po-litical responsibility by substituting the show of horror for the thinking about horror. (Sivan 2001: 286)

While the TRC presented narratives of the

previously unheard, for many in South Africa

this ‘showing’ of crimes against humanity did not

atrocities; instead, this display became a method

Wicomb’s writing alludes to that which is

unspeakable, using silence as a means of

surrounding Dulcie is a representation of the

articulating Dulcie’s bodily form once she has

undergone torture, and his inability to translate

her into narrative and language, signal Wicomb’s

representation, the inaccessibility of truth, the

futility of any attempt to represent a singular

experience of truth, and most importantly, the

importance of charging the reader with the

attempts to write the actual word ‘truth’, he ends

up with an unmanageable list of letters that makes

into the palindrome of the Cape Flats speech

DS

David’s location

which tens of thousands of ‘coloured’ people of

him to speak a language that allows no access

Wicomb’s presentation of the memory of Dulcie

works against the ‘instrumentalisation of memory’

that is often integral to the political culture of

nations built around identities of dislocation,

dispossession and extermination, where the

memory of suffering is used ‘to justify not just

While museums constructed to commemorate

the nation’s heroic history can also be seen as

sites for perpetual grieving, memorials to victims

of atrocities can never ‘satisfy demands for truth

certain victims are given a privileged moral

about Dulcie, Dirkse says that even if one could

have a map into the territory of Dulcie’s story, ‘it

would be a story that cannot be told, that cannot

be translated into words, into language we use

for everyday matters’ (DS

Dulcie, David himself cannot give Dulcie form,

feats that solidify her legendary military prowess

politician who works tirelessly at uniting

powers’ is an icon, a myth, a story to be told in

than a secular museum to contain all that she

we hear that ‘[t]here is no progression in time,

inescapable present’ (DS

amanuensis states towards the end of the story,

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‘Dulcie and the events surrounding her cannot be

of David’s’ (DS

childhood, and no aged body (that is, no progress

moment to unite, but the truth of what the nation

David himself attempts to ‘write her’, he ends

up with a ‘mess of scribbles and scoring out and

amanuensis, ‘be represented here’ (DS

***

In the new minimalist designs of memorials it is

the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, according to

architect Susana Torre,

[t]he representation of loss is most obvious in the names of the dead soldiers carved into the monument’s stone … the design itself is a symbolic grave, cut into the earth and barely defined by the stone’s polished black surface, in which visitors see their own faces. (ibid: 353–4)

That which is left largely unsaid in Lin’s stunning

design is precisely what invites the viewer to

they see their own face and body superimposed

ly, Daniel Libeskind’s design for the Jewish

competition brief for the design of the building

‘challenged the designers “to acknowledge the

terrible void [in the city’s history and culture]

Libeskind’s design is a deconstructed Star of

David, with the arms of the star unravelling into

Torre ‘[t]he spatial continuity of the structure,

instead of allowing an uninterrupted display of

historical exhibits, is purposefully broken up by

several multistoried voids, marking the loss of

The ‘void’ spaces in Libeskind’s design create

like that caused by the Holocaust, involves that

Whenever David is asked to speak of Dulcie,

he writes, instead, pages of stories about Saartje

has remained a troubling conundrum for many

the amanuensis refuses to represent (except in

tries to link his narrative genealogy to that of

these ‘founding mothers’, the amanuensis writes,

David’s story started at the Cape with Krotoä-Eva, the first Khoi woman in the Dutch castle, the only section I have left out. He eventually agreed to that but was ada-mant about including a piece on Saartje Baartman, the Hottentot Venus placed on display in Europe. (DS: 1)

Scholars of the novel have remarked on this

phenomenon; Kai Easton has written that despite

the enormous publicity surrounding the return of

burial, revival as a national icon, and multiple

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coloured, Khoi, and even Afrikaner descent,

Wicomb’s novel only ‘makes gestures to the

with the unnamed narrator only making two

Why should the amanuensis in David’s story

like memorial architects Maya Lin and Daniel

experience the materiality of loss, and the voids

left by omitting references to the material bodies

purposefully breaking up the spatial continuity

of the narrative? And why would David be

bodies? He tells the amanuensis that one cannot

on Baartman; it would be like excluding history

itself’ (DS:

In order to know about one’s origins, one must

receding historical

Eva or Baartman for a point of origin, and the

amanuensis’s resistance to such attempts all

signal the impossibility of locating ‘origin’,

directing the reader towards the impossibility

David’s attempts at recovering ethnic origins,

and the desire to reclaim the objects won in a

Museums have their origins in the display of

Europe’s spate of museum construction coincides

If one considers that the imperial ventures of

Europe are intimately connected to the rise

of anthropology, the historical mission of the

unnamed mission of many of the museums from

this era is not simply the creation of memorials

a space for public spectacle and set the stage for

in the political and psychosocial world presented

anthropological museums such as the Musée de

l’Homme in which Baartman’s body was housed);

space of this structure, the other is brought home

present the frightening nature of otherness, and

presented with an unsettling juxtaposition of self

in itself should be too frightening a mission for

have to regard the second portion of a museum’s

her actual body and displayed in a glass case,

Baartman’s genitals no longer threaten like those

of the ‘Hottentot Venus’; her threat of difference

is removed in this decontextualised space; she

is a passive object behind glass, so her living,

threatening nature is removed

Further reasons behind the narrator’s resistance

Baartman may have to do with the static nature

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exists in a museum, that object remains forever

in the present; it has no history, and no way of

going forward from the moment at which it

genitals is, in fact, a preservation of what African

sexuality has represented for Europe in the past

are not only the ‘location’ of black female

sexuality and how ‘blackness’ is positioned, but as

preserved objects, within a space meant to house

the history of ‘l’Homme’, the manner in which

we regard black female sexuality also remained

Africans desirous of reclaiming these ancestral

icons, may wish to draw genealogical inferences

but the narrator, perhaps, hints that by drawing

such lineages we also intertwine ourselves with a

to commune and align himself with Baartman and

he then juxtaposes these views encompassing

black sexuality and subjectivity resulting from

people’s living, changing, cacophonous views

As a repository of ‘consciousness’ and memory,

Wicomb’s writing itself presents an interesting

uses the present tense for each of the three

intertwining stories within her novel, she creates

especially in memoirs (and Wicomb plays

reading, since the amanuensis’s narrative is

experience the event as it is being read; to feel

the same experiences, the same wonder and

at the same time a book at rest is a memorial, a

tombstone, a marker commemorating a life that

present tense means that the author has made a

present, much as an object in a museum has no

past and no future, living on and on, unchanged,

In the act of remembering we leave out the

details of a past event, and fashion changes in

the interpretation of the event in light of present

counteract the possibility of forgetting, because

The use of the present tense not only signals the

act of memorialisation, it also ensures that lives

are not

The trauma experienced by the lives within the

text lives on, sidestepping the claim that what

happened in the past can ‘be laid to rest’ through

use of the present tense, the narratives within are

simultaneously ‘museumed’, ensuring that their

state, much like Saartje Baartman’s preserved

choice allows neither the characters nor their lives

memorialising takes an event that occurs in the

past and presents it as an event that remains in the

object, then, memorialising is in itself a death,

because the act of creating a museum around an

Wicomb’s novel acts as an historic site that neither

aids in social reconstruction efforts nor cultivates

Instead of ‘advancing social rebuilding’, her

novel seems to be an antidote against the powerful

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novel, has been silenced through torture so severe

that she goes from being the uncompromising

wounds and scars the goggas (insects or bugs)

buzz; David, the sole keeper of Dulcie’s memory,

unable to be silent and silenced any longer,

Despite Walter Benjamin’s invective to resist

forgetting, we see, through Wicomb’s novel, that

in a time of new peace there is no space for the

warrior, nor the warrior’s memory of the price

The reason why her novel, David’s story, remains

in the eternal present as a memorial to memory

itself is precisely because the warriors and their

***

Does David’s story ‘remain alive’ for South

African readers? And does it live outside the

classroom, the academic conference, the journal

article? As Susana Torre writes in ‘Constructing

memorials’, while artworks, monuments

and memorials inspired by ‘international

mobilization of shame over state violence’ open

‘cultural memory to previously unacknowledged

violations of human rights’, they may, ‘like

the opposite … be doomed to fall into oblivion,

their original purpose forgotten and their intended

memorial in maintaining ‘enduring visibility’ is

in its ability to provoke and invite ‘reinscription’

by ‘designing commemorative ceremonies

g

their chosen site, their intended purpose, and

methods of representation create and recreate

the conditions that invite the reinscription of

Although I argue that David’s story is a modern

‘site of conscience’, memorialising and rejecting

Stephen Meyer and Thomas Olver, Wicomb was

asked if David’s story is not ‘perhaps a collective

Is it not fiction? And is it not the case that all fiction ultimately finds its source in the real world? And since novels have central characters and represent the pas-sage of time, they are also always histories, biographies and autobiographies. (184)

It is important here to note Wicomb’s irritation at

autobiography through the use of a constructed

what black women write, in a sense reclaiming

interesting that though she has explicitly made

clear that her writing is not autobiographical, to

identify her writing as such may, in fact, be a way

of positioning her into a prescribed artform for

making a statement about the forms available

The interviewer repetitively realigns his line of

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building structure that often serves a functional,

if repetitive and somewhat constraining role

structures must be moulded into a functional

building for reasons of play, for dazzling the

readers and critics have to realise that black

literary production has long moved beyond the

Wicomb’s story was published at a time of nation

strength of David’s story lies in its ability to

invite reinscription through the ambiguities and

multiplicities contained within, and its very lack

competing stories’, Wicomb offers instead an

overlapping construction consisting of ‘personal

narratives and collective memory … designed to

enlarge the cultural meaning of a place’ through

David’s story

could signal a new era of a similar genesis of

complex narratives in South Africa wherein ‘the

burdensome hermeneutical labour’ demanded

by certain texts impresses upon readers, as does

Toni Morrison’s Paradise, ‘the eternal, mutually

constitutive relationship between struggle and

pleasure, or between struggle and paradise’

about a ‘revolution’ or not, one still has to ask

international attention it draws to itself, whether

the novel’s structures detract from the ‘art it

contains’, whether it is such an ‘insider’s story’

inaccessible (or ‘unpronounceable’) to the casual

Aubry,

is precisely to sever the link between textual difficulty and exclusiveness, which has conditioned twentieth-century literature at least since the advent of modern-ism, and to realign difficulty with the task of furthering inclusiveness. (2005: 367)

But just as some sceptics regard the elegant,

whether the ‘theatricality’ of her novel’s structure

‘is truly of service to the works housed within’

Works cited

Attridge, Derek. 2005. Zoë Wicomb’s home truths: place, genealogy, and identity in David’s story. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41(2): 156–165.

Daymond, MJ. 2002. Bodies of writing: recovering the past in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s story and Elleke Boehmer’s Bloodlines. Kunapipi 24(1–2): 25–38.

Easton, Kai. 2002. Travelling through history, ‘new’ South African icons: the narratives of Saartje Baartman and Krotöa Eva in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s story. Kunapipi 24(1–2): 237–50.

Introduction. Documenta 11: Platform 2 (New Delhi, India). Experiments with truth: transitional justice and the process of truth and reconciliation. 2001. May: 13–17.

Galloway, David. 2005. Building for art. Art in America 6: 140–145, 200.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Making sense of political violence in South Africa. Documenta 11: Platform 2 (New Delhi, India). Experiments with truth: transitional justice and the process of truth and reconciliation.2001. May: 21–42.

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Meyer, Stephen and Thomas Olver. 2002. Zoë Wicomb interviewed on writing and nation. Journal of Literary Studies 18(2): 182–219.

Sivan, Eyal. Archive images: truth or memory? The case of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. Documenta 11: Platform 2 (New Delhi, India). Experiments with truth: transitional justice and the process of truth and reconciliation. 2001. May: 277–288.

Torre, Susana. Constructing memorials. Documenta11: Platform 2 (New Delhi, India). Experiments with truth: transitional justice and the process of truth and reconciliation. 2001. May: 343–360.

Wicomb, Zoë. 1998. Shame and identity: the case of

the coloured in South Africa. In: Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (eds). Writing South Africa: literature, apartheid, and democracy, 1970–1995.Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 91–107.

____. 2001. David’s story. New York: The Feminist Press.

____. 2002. Translation and Coetzee’s Disgrace. Journal of Literary Studies 18(3–4): 209–225.

____. Culture beyond color? A South African dilemma. Transition 60 (1993): 27–32.

Willemse, Hein. 2002. Zoë Wicomb in conversation with Hein Willemse. Interview. Research in African Literatures 33(1): 144–154.

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