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A striking pattern is emerging in fictional representations of rape published during the South African transition from apartheid to multi-racial democracy.¹ It is a configuration that relentlessly inserts race into the scene of rape by focussing almost exclusively on interracial rape.² The light shone on rape is refracted through the prism of race as the country once characterised by racial divisions refashions itself into the `rainbow nation'. Within this schema, the consequence of rape is measured in the birth of a `mixed race' child. So dominant is this plot that even a narrative of male rape, K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams, juxtaposes the rape of a black man by a coloured man with a black woman's conception of a child by a German father. The substitution of woman's body by body politic is highlighted in her name, Mmabatho (`mother of the people'). Compelling though this scenario may be to writers, it is one that fails to ring true in reality, where rape is overwhelmingly intraracial and the rate of conception comparatively low.³ The literary script of rape thus distorts the realities of sexual violence in order to direct attention away from the violated female body — or the male body gendered female — and focus it on a trail of `blood' weaving through the woman's womb.

Wary of adopting a prescriptive tone and insisting that literature should conform to a certain social vision, I am nonetheless concerned by the degree of disjuncture between literary plots and social reality, particularly when this disjuncture obscures a pressing reality. Central to my discomfit are the ways in which the metaphorical use of women's bodies eclipse and distort the social and political realities they inhabit. For rape is far from just a metaphor in South African society of the transition. It is an endemic — and proliferating — social disorder.⁴ Thus, the metaphorical slippage between body and body politic that is exploited in representations of rape conceals and submerges a far more urgent narrative of an ascendant violence against women, which, in a country wracked by HIV/AIDS, is often deadly.⁵

Critiquing the erasure of gendered violence within its very representation, I take my cue from Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver who, in their introduction to Rape and Representation, observe `an obsessive inscription — and an obsessive erasure — of sexual violence against women (and against those placed by society in the position "woman")' (2). They note a `conspicuous absence' in configurations such as those with which we are concerned here, `where sexual violence against women is an origin of social relations and narratives in which the event itself is subsequently elided' (2-3).

The Rainbow Womb: Rape and Race in South African Fiction of the Transition