After several false starts, self-reflexivity offered a solution –– I decided to exploit my inability to write, to fictionalise the writer herself, an… - Zoë Wicomb

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

There are periods of giving up on the project, then inexplicably I return to wrestle with my material until finally the first draft shapes itself through the process of writing. Then follows many more drafts, less torturous than the first, in which I straighten out events and try to refine the prose, but doubts about the value of what I’m doing persist ––I am after all not read by many; in fact, my readership is more or less limited to students of Postcolonial Writing.

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'.