Living in ‘the blinding light’: The Limits of Whiteness and
Hospitality in Zoё Wicomb’s Playing in the Light.
Minesh Dass
Abstract
Given the plot of Playing in the Light, a novel that traces the character
development of the protagonist, Marion, who discovers that her parents are what is
known as play whites (that is, so-called coloureds who used the apartheid racial
classification system to have themselves re-classified as white so as to enjoy the
privileges afforded that group), there is little wonder that the text is obsessed with
whiteness. But, there is a paradox which characterises Zoё Wicomb’s depiction of
whiteness. On the one hand, Marion is inhospitable to others because of the way in
which her whiteness over-determines and limits her understanding of others. On
the other hand, the restrictive nature of the whiteness she inhabits functions
precisely by seeming limitless. That is, it presents itself as natural and therefore it
seems infinite in its scope and influence. When she excludes the other from her
home, she does so because her conception of herself and her home are overdetermined by a pervasive understanding of whiteness. The link the novel makes
between her inhospitality in her home and her lack of respect for the other will thus
be crucial to my paper. In order to think through these issues I intend to draw on
Jacques Derrida’s work on hospitality, which considers the limits of what he calls
‘infinite hospitality’, as well as the ethical imperative of it. In the paper, I also trace
the way in which Marion develops as a character: I focus on the way in which her
travels from her home lead to experiences with otherness which cannot be
understood simply through the grand narrative of whiteness. As she learns of limits
and boundaries to whiteness, she finds that the harmful way in which she
misunderstood others can be changed; she can respect their alterity rather than
reading them in terms of her whiteness. What Wicomb ultimately shows, then, is
that the respect for others in post-apartheid South Africa is not dependent on
forgetting race, but on recognising its inherent epistemological and practical limits.
Key Words: Zoё Wicomb, whiteness, hospitality, Jacques Derrida, race, home.
*****
In Zoё Wicomb’s thoughtful, intense novel, Playing in the Light, Marion
Campbell discovers that her parents are play-whites, so-called coloureds who
manipulated the apartheid system so as to be re-classified as white. Helen,
Marion’s mother, pursues whiteness with a single-minded intensity. She conceives
of it as a limitless and pure place of belonging and comfort – in short, an ideal
home. Her daughter is brought up knowing nothing of her family’s coloured
heritage, she should theoretically be able to take her whiteness for granted; but if
she has learnt one thing from her mother it is that whiteness is experienced only in
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anticipation, through constant vigil, and by keeping the world out. They both
render their homes inviolable precisely by reading all that exists outside of those
spaces in terms of their whiteness. In effect, whiteness defines their interactions
with the world by rendering their worldview limitless, beyond definition, like a
home whose walls encircle the entire earth.
In this paper, I would like to trace the inhospitality of the Campbell women and
relate it to their pursuit of whiteness. I would hope to show that whiteness is
inhospitable to difference (yet it is constructed through difference) and that though
it may seem natural, normative, proper, even domestic, it is not ever a privilege or
comfort that can be acquired.
The notion that whiteness functions as a normative standard, a kind of blank
clean slate against which the non-white is effectively measured is well established.
I will not repeat the argument at any length. To cite but one example, Peggy
McIntosh describes her white privilege ‘as an invisible package of unearned
assets’.1 She elaborates by saying that it is ‘like an invisible weightless knapsack of
special provisions, assurances [. . .] and blank checks’ among other things.2 While I
have no doubt of the earnest, ethical nature of her argument, I cannot help but feel
that there is an unresolved paradox which informs it. On the one hand, the
knapsack metaphor is useful because it implies that whiteness is external and
constructed by society rather than being innate or real. On the other hand, by
associating whiteness with a series of privileges (admittedly invisible ones), I
would argue that McIntosh inadvertently suggests that it is tangible: a series of
things which, if acquired, mean that one is white; that is to say, whiteness is
phenomenal – available for and as experience – in effect, real. She implies that
being white, as she describes herself, amounts to having certain privileges, but is
she not then saying that should one (somehow) accrue said privileges, one could
effectively become white? Might it not be more prudent to say that white privilege
is the impure experience of whiteness, or that it is never experienced except as
privileges which are always at some level unsatisfying, precisely because they lack
the metaphysical purity of whiteness.
Wicomb’s novel about a family who choose to play at being white is important
because it addresses this very issue: whether whiteness can ever be fully
experienced, or comfortably inhabited. Consider for instance Helen’s reasoning for
barring the visits of her sister-in-law, Elsie. She fears that Elsie’s manners are
indicative of what she construes as coloured vulgarity. Elsie’s lack of refinement is,
to use one of her more telling phrases, ‘beyond the pale’.3 Helen’s husband pleads
with her, asking (fairly enough):
[W]ho are these people who mind [Elsie’s] enthusiastic manners?
They [have] no friends, no visitors, [can] not have anyone come
to the house until they [have] acquired decent things, from
decent furniture to decent teaspoons, although, no sooner [will]
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they get a coveted object than it [will] be superseded by
something even more desirable, more decent.4
The narrator is led to conclude that ‘[d]ecency [. . . is] an endlessly deferred,
unachievable goal’.5 The objects that make up the Campbell household are
ephemeral and transient since they are always but a poor substitute for what they
ought to be. Helen has no place for the objects in her home, because what these
objects are meant to represent, namely decency and whiteness, is ‘endlessly
deferred’ to another time, another place. The ‘unachievable goal’ – to be white, not
simply to look white, act white or even generally be considered white, but to
inhabit whiteness effortlessly – cannot be experienced except as a form of nonbelonging, or un-homeliness. It is the form of un-home in which what Helen has
welcomed to the exclusion of all others is distinctly unwelcoming. Where will she
find whiteness? Like the objects of her house, it belongs in another time and
another place. But also, in a ghost-like, haunting way, whiteness is always there, in
her house. It will not leave, and (like every angry spirit) it is extremely protective
of its abode. It will therefore not abide an-other, any other, any guest to enter. The
spirit of whiteness obliges her to imagine every possible guest as an enemy,
someone sent to spy and do harm.
Luxury and privilege are indeed ‘invisible’ as McIntosh wisely informs us, but
they are so because what they signify is not real, tangible or within reach. White
privilege is but a poor substitute for the whiteness it nevertheless intimates. And
the cost of pursuing that which can never be actualised is awfully high. Helen reads
the world in terms of her whiteness. Her sister-in-law is ‘beyond the pale’, not
white enough, too coloured. Indeed, every stranger begins to look suspect. For
instance, she begins to suppose that all her neighbours might be coloured and she
decides that there is ‘nothing to be done but to hold her head high and refuse to
socialise’.6 What Wicomb is grappling with, then, and what holds Helen hostage,
are the limits of any hospitality which must always, necessarily, be offered from
within the confines of a certain history. In a crucial passage in the novel, Helen
determines that whiteness (more accurately, the pursuit thereof) is ‘in competition
with history’.7 When she makes this argument, she is attempting to overcome
precisely these historical limits. She does not welcome whiteness into her life in
the hope that it will make her uncomfortable in her home, or make her decidedly
inhospitable to the world around her. For her, it is history which ensures that she is
not privileged with the right to invite others into her home as she pleases.
Therefore, if history is overcome, the villain defeated by whiteness, then she will
be able comfortably to welcome others into her home without restrictions or a
sense of shame. History (which she associates with impurity and colouredness) has
seen to it that such hospitality is not possible – unless whiteness can re-place
history and win out in the end.
It is for this reason that whiteness must, by all means, be placeless – without
position or limit. Any position it might be given would, by definition, inscribe
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limits. They would ineluctably be the limits of history. When Helen refuses these
limits by refusing to accommodate her notion of whiteness within any historical
context, she (unwittingly) limits herself in the most terrible sense. She defines
herself in and through an all-encompassing notion of whiteness. That becomes her
home. And in so far as whiteness has no limits (or at least none that she will accede
to), her home too is boundless.
Whiteness has ensured that she will perpetually enact a form of violence
against all those who do not belong in her home. That violence is, ironically, that
she will read all those who do not belong within the limits and confines of her
home in terms of those very confines. She will eradicate any sense of their right to
be other than her home in favour of her more certain, and certainly more limited,
domestic conception of the world. When she begins to suspect her neighbours
might be coloured and refuses to socialise with them, she is doing little else than
imposing her home upon those guests who should, in a more hospitable world, be
free to choose not to be known in terms of (or in relation to) her home. By Helen’s
logic, her neighbours must be coloured because she is white. The term that
validates her home, which makes hers a white home, must entirely negate all those
who do not belong there. And it must do so through the imposition of a term
germane, belonging to and of, Helen’s world. Her neighbours must be inscribed
completely within what amounts to an equation or transaction. If they were to in
any way exceed such definition, they would exceed the limits by which notions of
whiteness can encapsulate them. Whiteness would have discovered its limits, met
its match, and consequently have lost its competition with history.
Despite her overt inhospitality, I would argue that all Helen attempts is a
conventional form of hospitality, one in which she has the right to determine who
may enter her home. But there is a paradox which defines and initiates
conventional or limited hospitality. Any conditions one places on one’s hospitality
ensure that it is always, in some sense, an exclusionary gesture (as it surely is for
Helen), and that one’s welcome is always premised on something quite
unwelcoming. Principally, this paradox is explained by the very nature of
community. For all the ways in which a group may attempt to open its borders and
invite others in, it cannot do so infinitely. Always, and precisely so as to be a
community in the first place, it must deny someone access.
In Jacques Derrida’s luminous work on the subject, he contemplates what kind
of hospitality it is which limits or assumes knowledge of the stranger or guest. He
posits that perhaps it is necessary, for ethical reasons, to extend hospitality beyond
convention. ‘Absolute or unconditional hospitality’, he writes, ‘presupposes a
break with hospitality in the ordinary sense, with conditional hospitality’. He
elaborates by contending that:
Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I
give not only to the foreigner [. . .] but to the absolute, unknown,
anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them
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come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer
them, without asking of them either reciprocity [. . .] or even
their names.8
Unconditional hospitality does not, in any way, assume knowledge of the guest
who might enter. It asks, instead, that s/he be allowed to remain utterly anonymous
(even his/her name is not demanded) and radically other to the one who acts as
host. It does not require that the guest resemble his/her host in any way. The host
must allow the guest to take place without any prior knowledge of him/her, without
any demand for reciprocity, and without imposing one’s language and culture. By
this logic, the many forms of conditional hospitality designate a kind of violence
by prescribing, knowing, and thereby limiting, the other. Unconditional hospitality,
which Derrida argues is the only one worthy of the name, by contrast, insists on the
impossible: that we respect the infinite unknowability of the other at the cost of any
sense of our home as comfortable, safe, or inviolate.
There is for this reason an aporetic interplay which mediates these two forms.
On the one hand, unconditional hospitality is impossible – any form it might take
in the world would have to be finite, limited and conditional. On the other hand,
those finite forms are never hospitable enough, and are therefore premised on the
unlimited form which is their condition of possibility. Any gesture of hospitality
which does not attempt to be absolutely, infinitely respectful of an-other’s alterity
fails to be hospitable. But, by the same token, that failure is inevitable and is
written into the nature of hospitality as a law.
As a consequence of this paradoxical law, inhospitality is a most difficult
concept to define: one excludes all that is other from one’s home on the basis that
all that is other is already in one’s home (within the confines of the limitless limits
of one’s home) – as if the other always belonged there, were part of the furniture so
to speak. It is like an equation or transaction without remainder of any kind. But,
crucially, we must realise that it is only possible to calculate (with) the remainder
(that which exceeds, and is therefore other) if one calculates the limits of this
equation. In Wicomb’s novel, this involves assigning whiteness a history.
It is through Marion’s journey of self-discovery that the reader is exposed to a
form of home and hospitality which is less over-determined by a pervasive, ahistorical whiteness. At first though, she is very much her mother’s child. Like
Helen, she has no friends, rarely has guests and treats the outside world with
suspicion. Marion would not associate these aspects of her life with an attempt to
inhabit whiteness, though the connection is made clear because she does value her
affluence and privileges so highly. Early on in the novel, she considers the luxury
of her home. Not coincidentally, as she does so she articulates a telling desire to
limit access to that home. I quote: ‘Security – you have to pay for it these days
[. . .]. No point in having a glorious outlook on the sea, with the classic view of
Table Mountain on the left and Robben Island on the right, if you are not secure.
Here, your property is inviolable’.9
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Clearly a view of Robben Island is a cultural marker of success and affluence
which is, and must be, accompanied by a sense that one’s ‘property is inviolable’.10
It is as if this former prison – a site that might for others signify a national wound,
or a place of suffering – is associated in her mind with the security it offered, most
probably by keeping seditious men behind bars. (Marion is, unsurprisingly, quite
conservative at the beginning of the novel.)
She is invested in dreaming of an island, within view, almost on her doorstep,
which promises eternal safety. That she chooses a prison island is sadly apposite
because this investment is indeed a form of incarceration. It will lead her to trap
herself within the limitless breadth of a vision. In the belief that comfort, affluence,
and safety are then hers (to own), she will incarcerate herself within notions of
home and security. As she stares out at Robben Island, she looks on the notion of
security taken to its logical, terrible extreme: take all that is other, and therefore
dangerous, all that calls for justice, and lock it up. Then, and only then, are you
truly safe. Then, and only then, are you at home (in the most conventional, but also
most violent sense).
So security does, as Marion is only too happy to admit, come at a price. That
price is a kind of freedom: the freedom (possibly) to experience the otherness of
the other by offering a form of hospitality that exceeds all forms of investment, or
economic exchange. Marion (particularly early in the novel) does not favour
relations which are not balanced. She concedes that ‘she is uncomfortable about
accepting a favour’ and that for her it is ‘far better if she believes the venture to be
reciprocal’.11 She cannot stand to be uncomfortable and would much rather exclude
from her life any encounter which necessitates discomfort. At another early stage
in the novel, we read that she ‘cannot put herself in a vulnerable position’. 12 It is as
if vulnerability were the opposite of comfort for her. But the desire for comfort and
safety has not made her invulnerable. It has made her inhospitable. She will need to
abandon safety to some extent and adopt a ‘vulnerable position’ if she is to escape
the prison of her own home. This ‘vulnerable position’ is one in which she accepts
that the other has entered her private space, and that, perhaps, there is no such thing
as safety (or ‘inviolable property’). When she feels safe and secure (not that these
are feelings that correlate with her actual experience of home but they do reflect
her ideal of home) she is, in fact, trapped, and imprisoned. The escape from such
imprisonment necessitates being ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘vulnerable’ by welcoming
an-other without knowing that s/he will reciprocate. It means that she must respect
the other who threatens the safety of her home in being radically strange to her
world. If Marion does not begin to accept this more violable yet possibly more
hospitable form of home, she will not need the expensive security guards at her
complex, for she will be so guarded (in her interactions with others) as to guard
herself.
The change in her (and it is a limited change: unconditional hospitality is, after
all, impossible) is precipitated by her discovery of her family’s secret. She delves
into her mother’s secretive and lonely life and is exposed to the terrible costs of
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uncritically pursuing affluence, privilege and security. She responds by slowly
letting down her guard: she begins a brief love affair, forms a tentative friendship
with Brenda (a woman who works for her), and she eventually takes an extended
vacation, travelling across the United Kingdom. None of these developments are
presented without a degree of irony and critique. Wicomb is too fine a writer to
write a simple Bildungsroman. Yet, what they share is a desire on Marion’s part to
experience other ways of life that are not wholly determined by her white
privilege. She has discovered that there are limits to such privilege.
I would like to end my discussion by considering one such limit. Marion is
driven to uncover her family’s history by a photograph in a newspaper of an ANC
cadre, Patricia Williams. Unnerved by her inexplicable identification with the
woman who she learns was tortured by security forces, she begins watching the
TRC hearings on television. Though she has ‘never wished to explore’ the world
revealed by the commission, she finds that, ‘[s]omehow, she bears the shame of the
perpetrators; somehow she, who has never had anything to do with politics, has
been branded by this business’.13
The revelation of the extent of the violence and repression of the apartheid state
does not lead to any sense of catharsis or comfort, though. Instead, the hearings
make her feel like a ‘reluctant traveller who has landed in a foreign country’.14 This
‘foreign country’, her home country, South Africa, impels in her two seemingly
contradictory forms of identification: on the one hand, she is bonded with the
‘brigadiers’ who ‘fire questions’ and maim bodies; on the other hand, she feels an
incomprehensible connection to the victim, Patricia Williams. Only for her, this
‘demanding stranger’, does Marion willingly endure these travels through the
unfamiliar.15 We may justifiably ask what kind of country this is, where she is
asked to empathise with both victim and torturer? Williams is indeed a ‘demanding
stranger’ if she demands that Marion bond with her while identifying with those
who have tortured her. How can she live with(in) the seemingly limitless
responsibility of such a world? Is such a place, where the foreign is necessarily
connected with the ‘old familiar world’, really to be her new abode? Can she abide
it?
What I think Wicomb implies through this double identification is that race has
made Marion both victim and perpetrator. Certainly, it has acted upon her, defined
her home and her interactions with others. She is the victim of race, of whiteness
(as is her mother). But also, obviously, she is an agent of whiteness. Her affluence
has come at the expense of others, and she has both overtly and unknowingly
perpetuated the violence of whiteness and race more generally. Every act of
exclusion on her part, and there have been many, has contributed to the limitless
power that whiteness has acquired in South Africa. What the narrator describes as
the ‘blinding light of whiteness’ has blinded her to the suffering of others.16 In
identifying with both victim and torturer though, there are signs that blindness is
not unavoidable. Like Marion, we can choose to see, though what we see may
implicate us in ways that make us deeply uncomfortable. The responsibility such a
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choice instantiates is interminable, without limits, yet we must be open to it.
Blindness left Helen a prisoner of her own home, wandering terrified through an
indefinite world she could not grasp. We cannot know what the world will be,
deprived of that blindness, or what we may find we are responsible for, but at least
there is then the promise of escape. That is to say, we might eventually find the
limits of whiteness, colouredness and race in general.
Notes
1
Peggy McIntosh, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ (1988) 9495.
2
Ibid., 95.
3
Zoё Wicomb, Playing in the Light (Johannesburg: Umuzi, 2006), 167.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., 131.
7
Ibid., 152.
8
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to
Respond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 25.
9
Wicomb, Playing, 2.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 79.
12
Ibid., 56.
13
Ibid., 74-5.
14
Ibid., 74.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 123.
Bibliography
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to
Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
McIntosh, Peggy. “White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.” Race,
class, and gender in the United States: An integrated study. 94-105. 1988.
Wicomb, Zoё. Playing in the Light. Johannesburg: Umuzi, 2006.
Minesh Dass is a lecturer at Rhodes University in South Africa. He is currently
completing a PhD on representations of home and hospitality in recent South
African fiction.