“Stop Acting Black!”: Black Conscious (Racial) Identities in Coconut

Whenever Ofilwe, a black character in the novel Coconut, and her family are told by white customers at restaurants, shopping malls, and other public spaces to stop acting black, Ofilwe in particular becomes perplexed by what it means to act black. She will rhetorically ask: are we not black? Concerning race, this kind of encounter is a reification of an existing difference in the conceptualization of race between the interlocutors. Ofilwe's obvious puzzlement is based on the fact that she identifies herself within the apartheid frame of racial categorization which placed people into categories of white, Asian, colored, and African (black) on the bases of reputation and "appearance" (Marx 105). For Ofilwe, at least in this context, one belongs to the race he/she "appears" to fit into. Racial identity is not determined by ways of behavior. Consequently, it is impossible for one to "act" race, to "act" black. To her white interlocutors however, race in the milieu of apartheid South Africa, does not necessarily concern the phenotype of a person. It shows a political and/or economic relationship among groups of people where the binaries of the superior and the subordinate could be acted. What this means is that one could become white on the basis of an admissible reputation and a behavior considered typical of that status. To be precise, a black person who is accepted into a white status is required to exhibit a behavior fully purged of the inferiority of his/her black origin.In his assessment of racial performativity, Ian Hacking observes that "human acts come into being hand in hand with our invention of the [racial] categories labeling them" (Qtd in Appiah 78). This includes the construction of racial identities based on a way of behavior presumed to mark out one's race. It is for this reason that "we expect people of a certain race to behave a certain way not simply because they are confirming to the script for that identity, performing that role, but because they have certain antecedent properties that are consequences of the label's properly applying to them4 (Appiah 79). The antecedent property in Ofilwe's encounter is her black racial inferiority and subservience assessed in relation to white superiority and hegemony. Apart from explaining the underlying power relations based on which racial classifications are constructed, the narrative from Coconut providing the context for my introductory comments here problematizes racial identity in South Africa. For example, what exactly does the Ofilwe's brother, Tshepo, mean when he says: "All I am saying is that my skin is black"? (Matlwa 5). In other words, does having a black-colored skin make one also racially black? Also, how are we to understand another black character like Fikile who declares her desire to be white? (Matlwa 135). Does her identity change from black to white on the basis of the disavowal of her black self?The task of this paper is to provide an analysis of racial identity formations in post apartheid South Africa through the medium of Coconut. Careful not to cause any undue mutilation of the work of fiction by insisting on it being both universal and race-free (Morrison 12), I propose to use the South African race philosophy, Black Consciousness (hereafter BC), to offer a reading of racial identity which is specific to the setting of the novel. As a current literary expression on the issue of race and racial relations in South Africa, I will be much concerned with looking at how BC offers a theoretical framework for understanding the idea of racial in the post-apartheid space fictionalized in the story. I will look at how BC's (re)classification of "race" into white, non-white, and blacks, offers an alternative method for rethinking race in Coconut.Coconut is the debut novel of the black female South African writer Kapano Matlwa. Published in the year 2007, the story revolves around a middle-class black family living in a white suburb in post apartheid South Africa. …