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 experiences. In self-consciously disruptive theoretical writing and political practice, however, hybridization becomes a response to fixed positions and binarisms.
Like Wicomb, Lewis warns against the dangerous assumption that social and cultural hybrid forms or declarations are as a given more subversive than discourses centred on ‘miscegenation’. The ‘case of the coloured’ testifies to the textures of these dangers.
Coloured identities are no more stable than other (racial) markers in South Africa in the current dispensation. This is evident in the shifting, sometimes confusing uses of b/Black and C/coloured, ‘coloured’ and so-called coloured. Many who under apartheid rejected the label of ‘coloured’ wholesale, now see possibility for its reclamation in freeing ways (Ruiters 2006, 2009). However, such acceptance and/or reclamation of ‘coloured’ as a form of self-identification is characterised by contestation. That subjects switch back and forth across time between the various labels complicates matters even further (Kadalie 1995: 17). Noting this flexibility, Wicomb (1998: 83–84) writes:
[s]uch adoption of different names at different historical junctures shows perhaps the difficulty which the term ‘coloured’ has in taking on fixed meaning, and as such exemplifies postmodernity in its shifting allegiances, its duplicitous play between the written capitalisation and speech that denies or at least does not reveal the act of renaming – once again the silent inscription of shame.
Here, Wicomb highlights the fluidity of self-identification as coloured ‘undermin[ing] the new narrative of national unity’ whilst showing how ‘different groups created by the old system do not participate equally in the category postcoloniality’ (Wicomb 1998: 94). Consequently, there are shifts in assertions of coloured identities, and mnemonic activity is a part of these turns among groups classified coloured under apartheid, just as there are for some white subjectivities, as demonstrated in the examples I examine in Chapter 3. However, the meanings and implications of shifting registers of self-identification as c/Coloured and/or Black and positioning in relation to slavery diverge.
Groups such as the Kleurling Weerstandsbeweging (KWB) call for self-determination in a separate state for the ‘pure third race’ of Coloureds. The KWB, whose name translates into English as the ‘Coloured Resistance Movement’, echoes the right-wing, white supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), but it also validates the discourses of biologist notions of natural races and the appropriate positions occupied along a clearly delineated hierarchy. For Wicomb, the naming of ‘black bodies that bear the marked pigmentation of miscegenation and the way that relates to culture [is linked to] attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame’ (1998: 92). This racial purity is named as ‘Brown’ within KWB discourse in ways that fix it as a ‘third pure race’. It is the stress on the purity of a separate category, here coloured/brown, which forms the central organising principle of this movement. As Michele Ruiters argues, the KWB ‘wish[es] to be involved in mainstream politics yet create[s] identities that partition their constituencies off from the rest of South African society’ (2006: 195). According to Wicomb, this ambiguity is an engagement with shame.
Notably, shame is intractably tied to articulations of coloured identities, but is not limited to them. Wicomb punctuates her discussion of shame with references to other articulations of it in postcolonial (con)texts, such as Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame. There are intersections between the shame she discusses in relation to ‘colouredness’ and its expressions elsewhere; there are also divergences.
In an interview with Wolfgang Binder (1997), David Dabydeen theorises shame through the colonised’s awareness of their rejection by the coloniser and colonising culture. In this context, markers of the colonised’s Otherness become constant reminders which emphasise this rejection. For Dabydeen, this is a condition of the colonised–coloniser relationship which can only be undone when the position of the Other changes. Such unravelling usually accompanies the altered status of the colonised when, for example, corporeal and cultural difference begins to signify differently in the shared society. In a society where the visibility of Otherness serves to confirm the marginality of Black bodies, one of the consequences is an internalisation of this valuation process: shame. Racist humiliation leads to a disavowal of these points of belonging and a pressure to assimilate into the values of the colonising culture. In anti-colonial movements, Otherness is often reclaimed and recast as a site of pride – the antithesis of colonial shame. Although Dabydeen is speaking specifically of the Caribbean and Black British contexts here, this conception is equally valid for other colonial contexts.
Dabydeen’s is a discursive meaning of shame which has clear similarities with Wicomb’s. But, like Rushdie’s, it also highlights variation. In Wicomb’s theorisation, shame permeates general South African society to express a variety of feelings which have nothing to do with shame. Thus, she points to the constant utterance and circulation of the word ‘shame’ in South African-speak which also foregrounds it without addressing or needing to acknowledge it.
Thiven Reddy (2001) argues that colouredness reveals much about the constitution of the racial categories white, Indian and black in South Africa under colonialism, slavery and apartheid. Tracing historic legal constructions of coloured people in the South African Native Affairs Commission Report of 1903–05, as well as the 1950 Population Registration Act, he uncovers how ‘coloured’ often works to contain the ‘residue’ from the other classifications: ‘[t]he enormous emphasis placed on “pure blood” pervades the dominant discourse as well as the all-important assumption that “pure bloodlines” actually did exist in certain “races” ’ (Reddy 2001: 71). Thus, the response of the KWB critiqued by Wicomb above is to distance itself from this debasement because of ‘miscegenation’ through
