Through the Distant Glass: Ambiguities of Colored Identity In Zoe Wicombs Playing in the Light

ABSTRACT

Wicombs book provides another metafictional setting for its contemplation on ethnic and cultural identity, this time in the form of a dream. After finishing the novel, Marion Campbell, who is temporarily residing in an attic room in London, looks up from her reading to discover a rectangle of sunshine reflected out on to the wall opposite the skylight window, despite rain that is still dripping on the window-pane. The problematic dispersion of coloured individuals under apartheid who were pale enough as to masquerade for white, and who did so for clear reasons of social and material gain, is the topic of Wicombs novel playing in the Light. In discovering that her parents had turned their backs on their own coloured families and communities and crossed over, played white, Marion reflects on her own, until then unquestioned whiteness, as well as on race thinking in contemporary, non-racial South Africa. Marion is the greater advantage of a travel agency (but who, ironically, has a distaste to commute).

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