Identities in transition

The author Unity Dow sees her society's past in palimpsest beneath its present, having been born at the threshold of postcolonial Botswana and thus being witness to a significant moment of transition between an old and a new Botswana. But rather than present her society as a monolithic entity with a fixed identity based on an old Botswana, Unity Dow presents a new moment of transition in her fiction whereby it is very difficult to equate culture with place, particularly as transmogrified modernity and various related technologies continue to disseminate cultural signs, relegating tradition to second place. In this case, culture has to be seen in the practice of its enunciation, and cultural identity as something that will keep dissolving around those who stake their claim to it. This article examines Unity Dow's first two novels, Far and beyon' and The screaming of the innocent, and shows how Dow exposes the limits of any claim to a singular and fixed Botswana or African identity, one based on categories such as gender, place or nationality. For Dow, identity is something that is always in a state of transition.