I was hot-headed, impatient, I just wanted to leave the whole oppressiveness of my own culture far behind.

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Why she left South Africa as a student before Steve Biko's black consciousness movement flared up on the campuses. "Zoe Wicomb A Writer Of Rare Brilliance." Interview by David Robinson for The Scotsman, 2000; via Intermix.

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I have a ghost existence here: my whole intellectual and emotional life is in South Africa.

The newspapers were always full of stories about abandoned children found tied up or living under the bed because their families were ashamed of them on account of the colour of their skin.

On the other hand, when I was at school, I remember kids in my class boasting about the members of their family who had 'turned white'.

After several false starts, self-reflexivity offered a solution –– I decided to exploit my inability to write, to fictionalise the writer herself, and to make the actual writing of Pringle’s history the framework of the novel.

I imagined that when I retired from teaching, I would live mainly in South Africa, but in the meantime the promise of liberation has been hollowed out and I’m not attracted to the pathologies of historical colonialism that persist. Still, I do spend a couple of months every year in the Cape and return to the north with great reluctance.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Zoë Wicomb (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.

I was hot-headed, impatient, I just wanted to leave the whole oppressiveness of my own culture far behind.

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