Like Etienne van Heerden, Rayda Jacobs is an author from the Cape region of South Africa, and she too writes about that part of the world, past and present. As a young woman, Jacobs was obliged by circumstances to leave South Africa, travelling to Canada (via England), where she spent the next twenty-seven years. Her experience in Canada was similar to that of the character Zan in Van Heerden’s novel 30 Nights in Amsterdam, in that she became intensely homesick and remained homesick throughout her time there. Her writing reflects that longing for ‘home’ and the yearning for a sense of belonging. Nostalgic feelings often persist upon return to the longed-for place, and a prominent theme of Jacobs’s literary explorations is the ambivalence the migrant experiences in the current, former, and/or returned-to home. She explores the challenges that are inherent in the search for a sense of identity and belonging in South Africa’s multi-cultural society.
In her explorations, Jacobs looks to the past, reaching back to the last forty or fifty years of her own generation, and further back to the early history of the Cape. The two novels that I have chosen for this section of the project are concerned, respectively, with the history of slavery at the Cape and its subsequent repercussions on social relations approximately 150 years later. The slave narrative, originally an African-American form, is taken up in South African literature by authors such as Jacobs to “evince a unique South African strain of the slave narrative” (Wenzel 2004a:92), and is based on considerably fewer records than those available in other countries with a history of slavery (see Wenzel 2004a:94).47 The South African slave narrative illuminates the close linkage between the arrival of enslaved people in the then Dutch-colonial Cape and the introduction of Islam in South Africa. Islam, as religion and culture, is a topic that Jacobs often explores, focusing on its historical origins and its place in contemporary South Africa, and sometimes placing emphasis on the relationships between the Muslim and non-Muslim.
Jacobs’s explorations of history provide the contexts, backgrounds, and origins of the challenges and difficulties faced by her characters in both her historical and her contemporary novels. Characters in her novels are portrayed as being “part of a fragmented and hybrid society; one in which racial, cultural and religious diversity coexists warily” (Roos 2005:48). This cultural hybridity and wary coexistence includes attitudes to, and uses of, language. The development of the Afrikaans language was influenced by, amongst other things, the relationship between the Malay slave and the Dutch settler. We are reminded here of Van Heerden’s comment that not all Afrikaners are white or of Dutch heritage: “more than half of Afrikaans speakers are not white, but so-called Coloured South Africans,
47 David Johnson notes that “Cape slavery has been represented in South African literature during eras of colonialism, segregation, apartheid, and post-apartheid rule [and that] the contingent politics of each historical period mark the literature of Cape slavery. For example, literary works on slavery produced in the apartheid era typically end with the slave rebellions crushed by the white regime, whereas post-apartheid works end with individual slave characters achieving redemption” (2012:549).
descendants of slaves from the East and the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa” (Van Heerden 2012:4). As a ‘character’ in Jacobs’s autobiography, Masquerade, indignantly asks, “What Muslim doesn’t speak Afrikaans?” (2008:285). It is not surprising, then, that although Jacobs writes in English some of her novels feature Afrikaner and Afrikaans-speaking communities, nor that her novels in some ways appear to use conventions of the plaasroman-genre (albeit it in a radically revised form). In the previous chapter I discussed how Van Heerden’s plaasroman novels foreground characters who were previously denied agency in such novels. Jacobs writes about the same places and people featured in Van Heerden’s ‘new’ plaasromans, but she foregrounds different aspects of that world. It could perhaps be said that her novels, Eyes of the Sky and The Slave Book, run parallel to novels such as Ancestral Voices and other more traditional plaasromans. Her novels do not simply foreground the people who are ‘invisible’ in the traditional plaasroman, though. On the contrary, the stock plaasroman characters fade into the background as one-dimensional characters and ‘types’ in a form of role reversal. (So, if the Afrikaner is the ‘centre’ in the original plaasroman, then Jacobs’s novels do not simply ‘write back’ to the centre; rather, they take a fresh approach and write a new ‘centre’, pushing the formerly dominant white Afrikaner to the periphery.)
However, having commented on elements of the farm novel that relate to her work, it is important to note that her outlook is not confined to the farmlands of the Cape, for her writing has a broad temporal and geographic reach, as the following overview of her oeuvre illustrates.
Jacobs’s Oeuvre
Rayda Jacobs’s writing career spans twenty years (her first publication was in 1994) and includes short stories, novels, memoirs, autobiography, and film. Her first publication, The Middle Children (1994), is a collection of inter-connected short stories. Written and published while Jacobs was living in Canada, the stories have an autobiographical element. They chart the experiences of a young
‘Coloured’ girl’s life as an emigrant (or exile) and address themes of rejection, abandonment, and self- esteem, while the term ‘middle children’ is one that she uses “for South Africans of mixed descent”
(Jacobs 2008:174).
Jacobs’s first novel, Eyes of the Sky (1996), was published a year after her return to Cape Town. It is set in the Cape interior in the 1800s and features the relationship between the pioneering Kloot family (white Afrikaners), the region’s Sonqua inhabitants, and the land. Eyes of the Sky won the Herman Charles Bosman prize in 1997. Her next novel, The Slave Book (1998), picks up the story twenty years later. Jacobs familiarised herself with South Africa’s history by writing The Slave Book, and her own roots became a lot clearer to her. (I focus on this novel in the next section.) Sachs Street (2001) is Jacobs’s third novel and is the last in the trilogy tracing the history of the fictional Kloot family. Like The Middle Children, it has a strong autobiographical element. Sachs Street is set in Cape Town in the
2010s, looking back to the protagonist’s childhood in the 1950s. It foregrounds issues relating to the emotional lives and relationships of South African Muslim women such as interfaith relationships, marriage and divorce, and the forming of an identity within a diverse family and community.
Jacobs won the Herman Charles Bosman Prize again in 2004: this time, for the novel Confessions of a Gambler (2003), which also won the Sunday Times prize. The tensions that the contemporary Muslim woman experiences – tensions between a life of devotion to faith and an independent modern life – are addressed through the vehicle of a middle-aged woman who has the additional challenge of a gambling addiction. Returning to the short story genre, Postcards from South Africa (2004) is a collection described by the author as “vignettes of how life really is here in South Africa. Snippets.
Snapshots. Hit-and-run pieces” (Meyring 2004:1).
The Mecca Diaries (2005) is a memoir describing Jacobs’s experience of hajj, her pilgrimage to Mecca. Jacobs’s writing regularly crosses and blurs the lines between biographical writing and fiction and, following the publication of the Mecca memoir, she published another novel, My Father’s Orchid (2006). Although “entirely fictional”, it was written after she discovered that she had a Christian brother and it focusses on “themes of longing and abandonment” (Jacobs 2008:255). Returning to biographical writing, in 2008, Jacobs published her autobiography, Masquerade: The Story of my Life (2008), which recounts her move to Canada and her later return to South Africa.
For my investigation of nostalgia in Jacobs’s writing, I focus on her most recent novel, Joonie (2011), in tandem with the novel mentioned earlier, The Slave Book (1998). Joonie, in its setting, moves between Cape Town (South Africa) and New York (USA). The narrator is Joonie, a woman in her 50s, exploring her past by utilising the double perspective of time (then and now) and place (her view of/from both Cape Town and New York). Joonie’s characters are descendants of slaves and are, therefore, affected by the legacy of slavery as depicted in The Slave Book.
Literary Criticism
Jacobs’s various books have generated much interest and critics often discuss her work in comparison with that of other authors. Her writings examining South Africa’s slave history and early Cape society have generated particular comment, while her focus on the hybrid society that has developed from those earlier Cape inhabitants, as well as her novels’ postcolonial themes relating to the search for identity, have also been of interest to researchers.
In what Maria Guestyn calls Jacobs’s “historical fiction” (2013:ii), previously denied voices, according to Kathleen Green, “recuperate alternative pasts” (2004:4) that depict personal history
alongside social history.48 Unlike many historical records of slavery that, according to Pumla Gqola, present “slaves as a singular undifferentiated mass” (2001:46), Jacobs in her novels uses historical records as a starting point, adding imaginative personal stories that fill in the gaps left by history (in general) and by the inefficiency of that historical record-keeping (in particular). Jacobs is motivated, according to Marita Wenzel, “to recall the past in assertion of her heritage and identity as a woman and former exile” (2004a:95). In doing so, she presents “a juxtaposition of exterior and interior spaces both of which allow for a mediation of subjectivity” (Guestyn 2013:55). Jacobs attempts what Green refers to as a “recuperat[ion of a] past that has been distorted by white historiography” and, in a search for identity, “she informs her [South African] readers of their cultural heritage” (2004:35).
In rewriting the slave narrative from a “retrospective stance”, says Wenzel (2004a:97), Jacobs’s work takes on a “testimonial quality” (Wenzel 2004a:92). It explores identity formation and construction, which Shamiega Chaudhari (2013) feels have been further complicated by the practice of ‘name stripping and renaming’ that was common in slavery. This practice also stripped away a sense of history, place, and culture. “Name stripping and identity stripping cannot be seen as separate” [my translation], Chaudhari continues (2013:34), and the reverberations of such trauma are felt generations later. Jacobs’s ‘slave narrative’ novel, as David Johnson describes The Slave Book, depicts slave characters who “journey from suffering under slavery to […] redemption with emancipation”
(2012:558). By ending the novel with a hopeful outcome after emancipation, Jacobs adheres to the trend of “post-apartheid literary works about slavery [that] tend towards the kinds of happy endings associated with the genres of comedy or romance” (Johnson 2012:558).
In her novels with a more contemporary setting, Jacobs’s negotiations with identity mix the autobiographical with the historical and factual. The novel, Sachs Street, is not presented as an autobiography, although Loren Kruger regards it as an example of how, “[i]n recent years […]
autobiography […] has morphed into fictions that draw [on] autobiography, testimony and other modes of self-expression [and] which cannot be simply traced back to an original self” (2003:71). In keeping with the autobiographical tendencies of her writing there is Jacobs’s “recourse to a Muslim context” (2003:71). As Henriette Roos points out,
[a] recurring motif in [Jacobs’s] work is the life of the Muslim woman and (often single) mother – fully part of a modern (Westernised) South Africa in career and lifestyle, whilst simultaneously being intensely committed to Islam through family ties and religious beliefs. (2005:52-53)
Roos also draws attention to the way in which the characters in Sachs Street co-exist within the
“fragmented, hybrid society” (2005:48) of their South African context.
48 Guestyn (2013) examines The Slave Book in particular.
Whereas Roos focusses on ‘Islam and the Other’ (i.e., on the Muslim in greater society, as represented in Jacobs’s fiction), Jack Kearney instead foregrounds “Islamic belief and practice as represented within Muslim communities” (2006:142-43). He discusses Jacobs’s treatment of women’s rights in
‘Postcards from South Africa’ (2006:152-54) and he looks at her “effective yet simple” (2006:151) portrayal of the “Islamic belief in the precepts of justice and mercy” in contemporary South Africa as presented by Confessions of a Gambler.
Having acknowledged that much of Jacobs’s writing is partly autobiographical and often blurs the lines between biography and fiction, it is interesting to examine her choices of varying narrative voices to tell similar stories in works of different formats or genres. For example, Jacobs utilises more than one form of narration in her autobiography, Masquerade (and in some of her short stories) to address what Margaret Daymond refers to as the “balance in identity formation between reaching out and retreating inwards” (2011:162). Apart from first-person, past-tense narration she also, at intervals, uses third-person narration and the present tense. Using third-person with stories that have a
“universalising claim” and that hint at a “continuing and shared world” (Daymond 2011:162) has the effect of the author ‘reaching out’. But she also uses this third-person mode for stories that are “self- differentiating, [that signal her] membership of a racial and/or religious group […] which set her apart from her companions of the moment” (Daymond 2011:163). She uses this technique in Masquerade (which is biography) and in The Middle Children (which is fiction), telling the personal stories as fiction in both books. The effect is that she has “been able to stand aside and explore what might have remained unspeakable for her character and, at the same time, create contiguity for character and reader” (Daymond 2011:163).
The studies mentioned above indicate that Jacobs’s writing is anchored predominantly in the Cape region of South Africa. In Joonie, however, her latest novel to date, her protagonist ventures beyond the limits of Cape Town to New York (USA). Jacobs commented, in an interview with Daniel Lehman, that the novel is, “in a nutshell, about displacement” (2010:1). She explained that Joonie, the character, is a ‘Coloured’ girl and that the events that unfold in her life are a direct result of that heritage because “today can be a direct result of our past” (Lehman 2010:1). With Joonie, Jacobs continues to “open up ‘coloured’ bodies in literature for complex signification” just as she did, according to Gqola, in The Slave Book (2001:59). In another study concerned with the physical body, Jessica Murray (2011) refers to the entanglements between physical appearance (particularly of the oppressed) and gender, race, and class, this time in Jacobs’s novel, My Father’s Orchid.
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As discussed above, the existing critical literature on Jacobs’s writing explores the historical and religious/spiritual bent of her novels. It also pays attention to her focus on women, particularly Muslim
women, finding their place in society in South Africa in both a historical and a contemporary setting.
However, critics do not appear to have examined Jacobs’s compelling nostalgic longing to connect with the roots of her identity. Critics have yet to investigate the persistence of the memories (whether remembered or submerged) that urge her excavations. In other words, critics have not yet examined why she revisits those particular times and places or how she approaches them.
Jacobs has said that Joonie is about dislocation, a theme that I intend to examine in both Joonie and The Slave Book. I aim to determine whether the characters’ feelings of dislocation are rooted in a common cause; and I attempt to suggest an answer to the question of whether Jacobs’s nostalgic urges are prompted by a persistent nudging of subverted traumatic memories (of her own and of her community and heritage). I intend to show that subverted traumas, which manifest in Joonie’s themes of dislocation, are a continuation of the traumas suffered in the contexts of The Slave Book.
Ultimately, I seek to ascertain whether the utilisation of nostalgia assists in the resolution of those traumas.
Jacobs’s writing has been described, on the one hand, as “cloyingly sentimental” and as “suffering somewhat from [a] rosy haze” but also, on the other hand, as “movingly unsentimental” (Kruger 2003:72). These contradictory interpretations point towards the complexities of the nostalgic representations in Jacobs’s writing. Both novels have a bitter-sweet tone that could indicate that they are at a point where “the ego-comforts and protections of nostalgia are dissipated, at the point when nostalgia becomes less sweet, more troubling, more anxious [and, therefore, the novels’ nostalgia]
becomes useful to us” (Hook 2012:238). Bearing in mind Walder’s assertion that the “rosy glow” of nostalgia is only “part of the story” (2011:3), I explore the evocative nature of Jacobs’s writing to ascertain what this apparent nostalgia will uncover on closer inspection.
As mentioned before, my exploration extends to two of Jacobs’s novels: The Slave Book, published in 1998, and Joonie, published in 2011. Although publication dates are only thirteen years apart, the temporal reach and setting of the novels is much broader. The Slave Book is set in the 1830s, the final years of slavery at the Cape Colony, while Joonie is set in the 1980s, and told from the perspective of the 2000s. Together, the novels can be said to chart the development, complexity, and historical reach of a particular group of South Africans – the ‘Cape Coloured/Malay/Muslim’ – and the unique challenges that affect them. Jacobs contemplates current nostalgic longings for the recent and more distant past in order to foster a post-apartheid sense of identity. The novels seek to find an authentic self beyond (or before) the constraints of apartheid, “to penetrate that twilight zone, the uncertain zone between memory and history as a way of trying to understand [this] postcolonial nostalgia” (Walder 2011:2).
In the following two sections of this chapter I explore postcolonial nostalgia in The Slave Book, which examines a community displaced in the Cape against their will, and in Joonie, which looks at the possibility of choosing to call this same place home.
The Slave Book
The title of this novel – The Slave Book – refers to historical slave registers or ‘slave books’, which were listings of people bought and sold in the Cape Colony. Jacobs uses the title but immediately subverts it, because her book is much more than a list of transactions and sparse details. Her version is the slaves’ (own) book: a book that serves the purposes of the slaves, rather than the purposes of their
‘owners’. The novel depicts the lives of a few enslaved individuals who, in spite of the hardships of their existence, experience life as meaningful. Furthermore, the enslaved characters in The Slave Book represent a mass of individual lives that have been rendered faceless and nameless because of the distortions and omissions of historical record keeping. Jacobs’s postcolonial (re)telling of this story, therefore, imaginatively fills in historical ‘gaps’ in the ancestral stories of thousands of South Africans.
The Slave Book is Jacobs’s second novel and continues the story of the Kloot family (first introduced in Jacobs’s earlier novel Eyes of the Sky). Harman Kloot flees his family’s farm in the Cape Karoo (the interior beyond the boundaries of the Cape Colony) when he is branded a traitor to his people following his support of the local Sonqua in an ambush by a group of boers, in which he shoots and injures a man.49 He goes south to the Cape Colony, where his brother is a landdrost, to avoid further conflict and to allow time for tempers to calm. Here he begins work on a wine farm, Zoetewater, which is owned by the prosperous Andries de Villiers, and which relies on slave labour for its success.
The other major protagonist is Sangora Salamah, a slave with whom Harman develops a strong camaraderie. Their friendship is a pivotal theme of the novel, a theme that develops within the context of the close confines of the group of slaves on Zoetewater farm, which in turn is part of the wider community of the Colony. Sangora Salamah’s first-person narration opens and closes the narrative and frames his and Harman’s stories, establishing a decidedly male perspective. My focus in this section is on the search for identity, though, rather than on gender relations. Therefore, my focus on Sangora and Harman is, first, on characters who exemplify the search for identity under conditions of slavery but who, second, happen to be male. Although this male perspective does at times “provide a novel angle to the interpretation of female experience” (Wenzel 2004a:99), the emphasis will be counterbalanced by a focus on the female perspective in the section discussing Joonie.
49 In the ‘Acknowledgements’ preceding the text, Jacobs notes that “[t]he Khoi of today were called Hottentot by the Dutch. The San were called bosjesman, boesman, and boshiesman. Koi-na and Sonqua are how the Khoi and San referred to themselves” (2012:8).