Bodies of Writing: Recovering the Past in Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story and Elleke Boehmer’s Bloodlines

There are remarkable similarities between Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story and Elleke Boehmer’s Bloodlines which were published in 2000. Both present characters, classified as coloured under the race categories of apartheid, who are compelled to re-examine their past, and both texts set this endeavour in the South Africa of 1990-91 which they represent as a time of euphoria and fear-filled uncertainty. The resistance movements had just been unbanned and leaders released from prison, and an interim constitution was being drawn up so that a government of national unity could oversee the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. At the same time, as previously exiled revolutionary groupings re-established themselves in the country, rumours of counter-coups circulated and ordinary people were subjected to a decade of continuing terror as various factions either enforced or resisted change.