Young, black and female in post-apartheid South Africa

A new kind of woman, one who occupies a distinctive subject position, is emerging in South African literature. This is the young black female growing up between cultures, trying on different identities, and evaluating new forms of affiliation. Kopano Matlwa, author of Coconut, is representative of a new generation of women writers who focus on issues of young black femininity in post-apartheid South Africa. Coconut features two black teenage female protagonists in a newly emergent multiracial society, who find themselves in an in-between space where they are either "too black to be white" or "too white to be black". Theirs is a world of ambiguity and conflict in which they experience a tension between various ethnic African ideals and global Western values of whiteness, between life in the township and the cosmopolitan promises of the city and between a traditional prioritizing of family and community and the allure of self-invention. In such a world, they struggle to resolve dilemmas of identity involving language, cultural rituals and the aesthetics of beauty. This paper will investigate the politics of representation in Coconut, focusing on the ways in which the two young protagonists featured in the novel struggle, in post-apartheid South Africa, to construct their identities out of contradictory demands and conflicting desires.