Post-Apartheid Haptic

Tact and Tactility in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Abstract

Set against South Africa’s transition from white minority rule to democracy, Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006) evokes a world of metaphorical skins understandably thin, injured, and sensitive to scrutiny. Addressing questions of heritage and belonging, this article examines the novel’s nuanced representations of racial identity, reading modes of sociability along the skins that facilitate social interaction between the text’s fictional bodies. These domains of interpersonal engagement are analysed in three sections: “The Veiled Touch,” “Skinned,” and “The Light Touch.” The latter considers a light, transitional sociability that may foster intersubjective constitution of identity in relationships not conducive to unreserved intimacy. Ironically a remnant of colonial decorum, tact emerges as an intermediate, non-imperial mode of engagement, of expressing respect amid vast socio-economic inequality. Tact owes its haptic character to the association with tactility, a linguistic correlation that emphasises intercorporeality. The vulnerability of the self acquires a distinctly visceral quality in the novel, as bodies try to find their feet (rather literally) and forge relationships across former divides. Contributing to the burgeoning body of research on the haptic sense in literature, touch is identified as an inventive motif by which Wicomb destabilises racial classification and feels her way towards a language of tactile reciprocity. As a conceptual framework, the haptic—involving touch, kinaesthesis, and proprioception—has much to offer vocabularies of proximity and relationality, and reimaginings of social space after apartheid.