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ABSTRACT

What are the potential ethical and creative limitations of seeking to represent, in one's work, the experience of the black subaltern class? This was a topic at the forefront of my mind as I embarked on my novel, Zebra Crossing, in January 2010, a work which I knew would place a Zimbabwean immigrant with albinism at its fore. As an apparently empowered white writer and academic, South African-born but Europe-educated, I was well aware of the taboos; traditional postcolonial theory makes them explicit.

This paper, however, seeks to argue that an alternative discourse is slowly emerging within contemporary South African creative writing, one that offers a very different position to the one frequently posited by traditional postcolonial sensibilities and by the majority of South African authors who, I would argue, remain sceptical about the writer's right and literary ability to imagine with authenticity and integrity what Edward Said terms the "forbidden" other (2009, 295).

Although I make reference to my own work in this paper, my main focus is on the writings of Antjie Krog, Marlene van Niekerk and Zukiswa Wanner, all of whom were interviewed via email for this article.

KEYWORDS:

Imagining 'the other', postcolonialism, taboo; creative writing, South Africa; ethics, Apartheid, prose, poetry

"One thing the writer is for is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions".

Salman Rushdie (qtd. in Trikha 64)

In her article, "Marginality as site of Resistance", the African-American critic and writer, bell hooks, states what she considers to be the problematic position of the white author when he or she attempts to speak for, or on behalf of 'others', whether they are marginalized in terms of sexuality, gender, class or race:

No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer; the speaking subject and you are now at the centre...

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