Houses, memory and the nightmares of identity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the light

This article aims to map out the spatial strategies of Zoe Wicomb's Playing in the Light (2006) through the discursive construction of the house, understood in its multiple functions as location, setting, metaphor and affective trope. In particular, it highlights the way houses, often represented as haunted spaces of denial, act in the novel as spatial embodiments of the painful dialectics of collective amnesia, emplaced memory and restorative re-membering which was at the core of the healing agenda of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and still inspire the ongoing project of a reconciled national community re-networked through storytelling.