# Zoë Wicomb

Zoë Wicomb (born 23 November 1948 in Rhynsdorp, Namaqualand) is a South African-Scottish author and academic who has lived in the UK since the 1970s. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for her fiction.

## Quotes

* If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank, history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly, threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas that is their life. For, having primed it, they do not know where to start, how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence.
** Playing in the Light (2006)
* The newspapers were always full of stories about abandoned children found tied up or living under the bed because their families were ashamed of them on account of the colour of their skin.
* On the other hand, when I was at school, I remember kids in my class boasting about the members of their family who had 'turned white'.
** Giving a glimpse of life as a mixed-race person under apartheid. "Zoe Wicomb A Writer Of Rare Brilliance." Interview by David Robinson for The Scotsman, 2000; via Intermix.
* I was hot-headed, impatient, I just wanted to leave the whole oppressiveness of my own culture far behind.
** Why she left South Africa as a student before Steve Biko's black consciousness movement flared up on the campuses. "Zoe Wicomb A Writer Of Rare Brilliance." Interview by David Robinson for The Scotsman, 2000; via Intermix.
* I have a ghost existence here: my whole intellectual and emotional life is in South Africa.
** Her unshakeable connection to her heritage. "Zoe Wicomb A Writer Of Rare Brilliance." Interview by David Robinson for The Scotsman, 2000; via Intermix.
* I'm very, very contrary. And I want to be in control, which is what informs my attitude to publishing, editing, being interviewed. I set high standards too: as a reader, I don't read any poor novels, so I'm always aware of how much my own work falls flat by comparison. And perhaps it's because I grew up in South Africa, and it was easy there for people like me to grow up with a consciousness of inferiority.
** On her writing style. "Zoe Wicomb A Writer Of Rare Brilliance." Interview by David Robinson for The Scotsman, 2000; via Intermix.
* After several false starts, self-reflexivity offered a solution –– I decided to exploit my inability to write, to fictionalise the writer herself, and to make the actual writing of Pringle’s history the framework of the novel.
** On how she tells her fascinating tale. Reluctant Author Zoë Wicomb Gets It Right Time After Time With A Story Of Its Time. 2020
* Hinza Marossi, Pringle’s adopted son, was of interest from the outset. Not only is his story recorded in a poem, but I wanted to explore the question of interracial adoption under colonial conditions as well as what that story looks like from Hinza’s point of view.
* The character Mary Prince was an obvious choice because her slave narrative was the first by a woman. It was published in London by Pringle in spite of opposition and litigation by British people who benefitted from slavery. He was also reviled by fellow Scottish settlers at the Cape, who persisted with the myth that slavery in South Africa was an altogether more benign affair.
* Nicholas Greene, a character from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (one of my favourite novels) is a more controversial choice, and really I don’t remember how he entered the story. But I was drawn to the fact that he is a time-traveller and to his fictionality as opposed to the other real historical figures. Thus he enabled me to address yet another level of the real within my fictional account. Given that the novel is about the writing of Pringle’s story, Greene also offered another version of the writer.
** Talking about the story concept and characters used to tell her story from the book, 'Still Life'. Reluctant Author Zoë Wicomb Gets It Right Time After Time With A Story Of Its Time. 2020
* I’m drawn to a subject, do the necessary research, and then the problem of how to represent that subject arises. A struggle of trying to write something that may or may not lead towards a solution, and really it’s a matter of faith, of believing that something will come out of the daily routine.
* There are periods of giving up on the project, then inexplicably I return to wrestle with my material until finally the first draft shapes itself through the process of writing. Then follows many more drafts, less torturous than the first, in which I straighten out events and try to refine the prose, but doubts about the value of what I’m doing persist ––I am after all not read by many; in fact, my readership is more or less limited to students of Postcolonial Writing.
** Her response to the question of how difficult she finds the writing process. Reluctant Author Zoë Wicomb Gets It Right Time After Time With A Story Of Its Time. 2020
* But, you can’t ever think of yourself as belonging in Europe. In terms then of an interior life, I remained South African, through teaching and writing about South Africa – both fiction and literary criticism. I returned for a few years and taught at UWC but then I couldn’t manage the family separation, and returned to Scotland.
* I imagined that when I retired from teaching, I would live mainly in South Africa, but in the meantime the promise of liberation has been hollowed out and I’m not attracted to the pathologies of historical colonialism that persist. Still, I do spend a couple of months every year in the Cape and return to the north with great reluctance.
** On leaving in the heyday of apartheid in South Africa and making a life for herself in Scotland. Reluctant Author Zoë Wicomb Gets It Right Time After Time With A Story Of Its Time. 2020

## External links

* They Never Wanted To Be Themselves (review), New York Times, May 24, 1987
* Random House-Umuzi