The Problem with "Coconuttiness"

The Problem with "Coconuttiness" Natasha Distiller. Shakespeare and the Coconuts: On Post-apartheid South African Culture. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012.

As intimated by the conjunction in its title, this book is a multi-layered deliberation on a range of interconnected concerns and themes. Seemingly in dialogue, in part, with Kopano Matlwa's novel Coconut and Andile Mngxitama's short article for City Press newspaper - "Coconut Kids have Lost Touch with Their Roots" - Distiller takes on a range of socio-political, educational and cultural attitudes in post-apartheid South Africa concerning "the relationship between race, culture, privilege, and language" that she finds "ignorant", "flawed" and potentially "dangerous" (23). With Shakespeare serving as the constant icon, uber-text and thematic thread, the crux of her project is to interrogate the socio-political history and ideological significances of the different ways in which Shakespeare and his texts have been, amongst others, used, interpreted and appropriated "in South African history, politics and materiality ... and why this history matters" (3).

Shakespeare, Distiller insists, "has an African history which is as African as any other aspect of the region's cultural development. To say this is to take a political stand, one which refuses to see colonial history and its aftermath as containable by binaries: coloniser/colonised, oppressor/oppressed, European/African." (4) It would seem that, for Distiller, in the postapartheid period those who draw on and propagate pejorative senses of "coconuts" as conduct or individuals who are "'black' on the 'outside' and 'white' on the 'inside'" (7) are reliant on binary assumptions. As a result, views that are predicated on idealised and essentialist notions of purity and authenticity of culture or identity ("authentic blackness", 8) are consistently dismissed as "invested political and psychological fictions" (7). The same is true with regard to their ideological sparring partners, ideologues who equally rely "on colonial and apartheid binaries, including constructions of Europe, and Europe's relation to its construction of Africa and Africans" (9). The latter, with specific regard to Shakespeare, includes those who hail the supposed universality of Shakespeare but who operate, more often than not, under the ruse and spectres of Empire and nostalgia.

Distiller, by contrast, suggests an approach and perspective that is attuned to "the complexities and paradoxes of our national history" (5), particularly the "messy in-betweenness, the...