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 ou… - Zoë Wicomb

But, you can’t ever think of yourself as belonging in Europe. In terms then of an interior life, I remained South African, through teaching and writing about South Africa – both fiction and literary criticism. I returned for a few years and taught at UWC but then I couldn’t manage the family separation, and returned to Scotland.

If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank,
history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly,
threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas
that is their life.
For, having primed it, they do not know where to start,
how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new
island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps
they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people
like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence.

Nicholas Greene, a character from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (one of my favourite novels) is a more controversial choice, and really I don’t remember how he entered the story. But I was drawn to the fact that he is a time-traveller and to his fictionality as opposed to the other real historical figures. Thus he enabled me to address yet another level of the real within my fictional account. Given that the novel is about the writing of Pringle’s story, Greene also offered another version of the writer.