David's Story by Zoe Wicomb

You have turned it into a story of women; it's full of old women, for God's sake, David accuses.  Who would want to read a story like that?  It's not a proper history at all.

What else can I do?  If it's not really about you, if you won't give me any facts, if you will only give me the mumbo jumbo stuff, my task is to invent a structure, some kind of reed pondok in which your  voodoo shadow can thrash about with rhyme or reason, but at least with boundaries, so that we don't lose you altogether.  It's impossible, this writing of a story through someone else.  The whole thing's impossible.

David Dirkse is a member of the African National Congress, the once-underground organization that has only recently--it is 1991--been legalized upon the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.  It is a strange time to be a militant, caught between the new reality and old ways, still spinning your legs like Wile E. Coyote walking off a cliff.  The hitlist he discovers with his name on it seems like a relic from a time that no one has quite realized is past and gone.  Isn't all that history?

History, of course, is the present: the hitlist appears amid David's newfound interest in his own history, precipitated by, for reasons not quite clear to me, the new political horizon.  He is traveling through the Western Cape researching the history of the Griqua people and their charismatic but stubborn leader, Andrew Le Fleur.  Long sections of the novel are given over to accounts of the Griquas' wanderings and Le Fleur's agitation to the colonial government to provide them with a Griqua homeland.  Honestly, these sections might have been more easily penetrable for a South African.  What I gathered is this: the Griqua are/were a culture of mixed African and white heritage, and while they descend from African peoples distinct from the more dominant Bantu culture of South Africa, they became subsumed in the larger "coloured" category enshrined in South African law.  David's research is an attempt to recover what in his own heritage has been erased, and to write Le Fleur's story into his own.

But as the unnamed narrator writes, David is "using the Griqua material to displace that of which he could not speak."  What he cannot speak of is Dulcie, a fellow militant with whom he is in love.  The narrator's attempts to pry open that part of David's life are met with bitter rebukes.  In fact, even though David has enlisted the narrator to write the story of his life, he is frequently and increasingly combative, as if he is not sure how to reconcile the need to record his own history and the frightening burden of being known.  The narrator is right: the story of Le Fleur is a feint, an attempt to locate the story of his own life in the safety of historical record, and to align himself with legend rather than the messiness of the present.

With a novelist's skill, the narrator fills in the gaps.  Because he will not talk about Dulcie, the narrator imagines her in striking detail, just as she imagines all the women who haunt the edges of David's story: his wife, Sally, who has given up her own life of political action to rear David's children; his mother-in-law; Le Fleur's wife Rachel Susanna.  Is it fact or fiction that Dulcie is tortured by the same ANC operatives that put David on the hitlist?  What the narrator knows from David bleeds into what is her own supposition; the lines between what is true and false seem almost irrelevant, filtered as they are through David's finicky willingness to talk about himself.  Where David leaves spaces, the narrator fills them with the women that David refuses to see, the ones he pretends are not part of his story.  "You've turned it into a story of women," he says, but it's always been a story of women: the women who are pushed to the edges by the chauvinism of political action.

Wicomb's style is striking--vivid in detail, associative while being tightly controlled.  Despite that, David's Story was not an easy read.  It was not helped by my minimal grasp of South African history and politics.  The narrative jumps around in time and space, trying to piece together a narrative that is pulled between the present and the past.  Again and again the narrator expresses her difficulty; what she receives from David is never enough to make a coherent story, and so the novel remains peripatetic and disorderly.  It's not meant to satisfy, only baffle and frustrate, which is does very well.