Moving in “a forest of hieroglyphs”: Enigmatic and mutable signs of identity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Abstract

This article analyses Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, focusing on protagonist Marion’s process of coming to terms with her coloured identity as she puzzles over secrets and signs, struggling to endow them with meaning, but finding they only work as ghostly and elusive traces of the past. Wicomb’s engagement with colouredness is framed by a recognition of semiotic and hermeneutic processes of identity construction and material representation – rejecting fixed and essentialised conceptions of identity in her special focus on racial identity. She privileges, instead, visual materializations of identity characterised by metamorphosis, opacity and semantic elusiveness. In the context of post-apartheid concern with the recuperation of damaged, oppressed or hidden identities, Wicomb rejects a logic of empirical verification, referentiality and closure, presenting identity-making and representation as an ever-open performative process, dependent upon imaginative projection and reconstruction, and hence endowed with provisionality and indeterminacy