Multiple Twilights: Narrating Transition in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

Abstract

This article explores the thematisation of contemporary socio-political transition in South Africa in Achmat Dangor’s award-winning novel, Bitter Fruit (2001). I argue that the novel can be read as a palimpsest of overlapping twilights and liminal states that simultaneously operate as tropes of the country’s transition. In this regard, I interrogate Dangor’s use of the in-between and/or fluid subject positions of characters – in terms of race, youthfulness and sexual orientation – to problematise post-TRC social affiliation in metonymic ways. I also demonstrate how Dangor’s portrayal of the figure of the family, its disintegration and the transformation of individual members (especially of the main protagonists – Michael, Silas and Lydia) can be read in allegorical ways for the changes and possibilities of South Africa’s post-1994 transition.

Keywords: South Africa post-TRC transition, palimpsest, Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit