The Idea of “Englishness” and “Black Nothingness” as Colonial Bases in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut

Abstract

Coconut is Kopano Matlwa’s debut novel that has been widely analysed through postcolonial critique in race studies. Existing scholarship has not adequately connected the novel’s portrayal of characters’ “coconuttiness” to the decolonial concept of the coloniality of being. This article addresses this gap by examining the marginalisation of Matlwa’s black women characters and their sense of black nothingness. The article argues that the characters’ sense of black nothingness is produced by the idea of normative Englishness that should be understood not only as linguistic or cultural preferences but as a structure of the coloniality of being. In foregrounding the idea of black nothingness and Englishness as a disease or dis-ease in understanding women’s characterisation, the depiction of characters’ racialised emptiness and marginality stems from colonial ontologies that reduce black people to being socially and existentially diminished. The women characters’ existential experiences seem to question whether it is possible for black subjects not to be black even in black spaces in South Africa. Thus, in probing the idea of coconut identities, the article argues that Coconut exposes problematic ways embodied within the idea of blackness in South Africa and questions colonial existences that have normalised the framework of “coconuttiness” as one possible way of existence. The idea of blackness or black nothingness is indicative of characters who experience discrimination, rejection, abandonment and embody a sense of homelessness. Within the conceptual corpus of decolonial thinking, this article employs Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s concept of the coloniality of being to examine the representation of women in Coconut. From the decolonial lens, Englishness is read as the coloniality of being manifesting in the normalisation of violence against women and their existential experiences. In this way, the article reads Coconut as a black letter and explores its stylistic epistolary intentions that capture the everyday voices and struggles of black people.