“And you, Fikile, what do you want to be when you grow up?” “White, Teacher Zola. I want to be white.” (Coconut)
A new kind of woman, who occupies a distinctive subjective position, is emerging in South African literature. This is the young black female growing up between cultures, trying on different identities, evaluating new forms of affiliation. Kagiso Lesego Molope (The Mending Season) and Kopano Matlwa (Coconut) are representative of a generation of women writers who focus on issues of young black femininity in post-apartheid South Africa. Both The Mending Season and Coconut feature black teenage female protagonists in a newly emergent multiracial society who find themselves in an in-between space where they are either “too black to be white” or “too white to be black”. Theirs is a world of ambiguity and conflict in which they experience a tension between African and European values, between life in the black township and the cosmopolitanism of the city, between the traditions of family and community and the allure of self-invention, a world in which they struggle to resolve the problem of identity involving ethnicity, language and body image.
The paper will investigate the politics of representation in the texts in question, focusing on the ways in which these young, black female protagonists struggle, in post-apartheid South Africa, to construct an authentic identity out of contradictory demands and conflicting desires.