Enlightening Thirdspace in Richard Rive’s Novel District Six Buckingham Palace

University of Berne

English Department

MA Seminar: South African Literature

Prof. Dr. Therese Steffen

Autumn Semester 2013

Bajro Murić

12-104-253

bajro.muric@students.unibe.ch

Bienenstrasse 2

3018 Bern

1 February 2014

Contents

1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1

2 Theoretical Framework ................................................................................................................... 4

3 Soja’s First and Secondspace in Rive’s Novel District Six Buckingham Palace .............................. 10

4 Living in Thirdspace ....................................................................................................................... 13

4.1 Battling binary oppositions in District Six Buckingham Palace ........................................................ 13

4.2 District Six as a Battle Field against Oppression .............................................................................. 15

5. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 17

References ............................................................................................................................................... 0

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1 Introduction

Perhaps, only a few authors have managed to capture postmodern interests in space

and the awakening of spatial consciousness in literature as masterly as Richard Rive with his

novel Buckingham Palace, District Six. Literature, as other disciplines have come to regard

space as a “social construction” that vividly reflects different shades of human life.

Postmodernist notions of space offer “richer, more contextualized understanding of human

experience, social relations, and the production of culture” because “no social, or cultural

phenomenon can be torn from its spatial context” ( Warf, Arias:2009: 5).

Whether intentional or not, however, Rive’s imaginative depiction of District Six

delves into exploration of “postmodern space”, where our identity is forged and which has

profound implications on our lives. It is a terrain colored with human experience, emotions,

prejudices, irrational fears, and hopes and intertwined destinies. Space of postmodernism

surpasses stereotypes, common pre-conceptions and binary oppositions, offering an

alternative way of contemplating solutions to prevailing problems, unmanageable reality and

oppression.

Richard Rive sets his novel in the community that he once used to belong to, District

Six, the former melting pot community that was condemned for clearance by the Apartheid

government in order to confine each racial group to its own residential areas. He revisits

fragments of his life and becomes immersed in the vivid and fond memories of his past in

attempt to reconstruct the life in District Six before its destruction in 1960s. The novel is a

personal, historical story and a critique of the apartheid regime in South Africa, which

examines absurdities of oppression and discrimination.

However, Rive uses his vivid memory as the finest source of creativity to fabricate

fictionalized home community from components of his vulnerable personal history. Traumas

caused by the collapse of his home community were so severe that it influenced his life and

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his writing. With his he attempts novel to archive and chronicle the past of mythical and

dreamlike dimensions. In one of his interviews Rive recalls the feeling of hopelessness and

emptiness and despair that he experienced when District Six was destroyed. He stated: “No

white authority had ever asked me whether they could take my past away; they simply

brought in their bulldozers” (Gray: 1999: 161).

Although his prose is a sentimental account of District Six, Richard Rive proved

capable to overcome a common criticism that South African “protest” literature faced at that

time, as being overtly journalistic lacking stylistic qualities. Lewis Nkosi, among others, was

critical of what he called “journalistic fact paradigm” which found its place in most of South

African literature (Moyana: 1976:86). Despite the fact that Rive was a journalist himself, he

proved skillful to write literature of a rich and colorful language, which can be open to a

broad interpretation not only in the South African context, but rather in the various sites of

oppression and human rights violations. In his novel Rive writes about District Six, the space

that was a site of oppression and in that way enables us to interpret it the light of Edward

Soja’s trialactics of postmodern space.

Soja is one of the forerunners of spatial turn that started in 1980s. It was a shift in

thought among scholars in the social and human sciences which gave greater importance to

space, after a longstanding time bias in all sciences. They started interpreting space with the

same vigor, and gave new critical insights as they had done it with history, time, and society.

Soon they embraced the idea of space being important in providing a context for social

actions although it does not determine them. In other words, a human is as much spatial as

social, and in the interpretation of his actions need to be included both, a spatial and

temporal dimension. Edward Soja is not only important for recognizing the relevance of

space for the interpretation of human actions but because he described the trialactics of

spatiality. He argued that spatial imagination was confined to two approaches. Space was

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seen either as a material concrete form that can be mapped, analyzed and quantified or as a

mental space that is imagined, it is the mental representations of space, ideas that we have

about space. Soja aims to overcome this dualism by introducing an alternative way of looking

at spatiality that comprehends both material and mental thinking about space, and that goes

well beyond these approaches to spatiality. He draws on the work of Lefebvre, and his

concepts of social space as perceived, conceived and lived to illustrate this trialactics of space.

He termed this new concept, Thirdspace, which nowadays takes many forms. Soja

relies heavily on writings of bell hooks, Foucault, Gloria Anzaldua and others to illustrate his

concept of Thirdspace. It is a space of radical openness which rejects not only every

categorical or oppositional dichotomy, but all forms of categorical or binary logic. It is the

point where recombination of binary logic occurs. However, as Soja asserts, this radical

openness found in Thirdspace “requires a strategic and flexible way of thinking” (Soja:

1996:22). Soja found elements of Thirdspace found the writings of bell hooks, and her notions

of margins as spaces of radical openness, Foucault’s heterotopias “the place we live, which

draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time, and our history occurs”

(Foucault: 1986:23) , and Gloria Anzaldua’s borderlines as space “where two or more cultures

edge each other, where space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy”(1987: unpaged

preface).

This paper will propose the reading of Rive’s novel District Six Buckingham Palace

as Thirdspace of radical openness where binary logic in conceiving the world wanes. Through

a close reading of the novel I will show that District Six is a “marginal” and “artfully lived”

space that encompasses all alternative ways of thinking about space outlined by Soja. .I will

demonstrate that Rive’s imaginative account of his now nonexistent community, is a space

that is at the same time “metaphorical and material, real and imagined, contested and loving,

dangerous and playful, local and global, knowable and incomplete, necessary for survival, yet

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still up in the air” (Soja: 1996:131) In other words, as depicted by Rive, it is the space that

offers an alternative way of thinking about human spatiality.

However, we need to keep in mind that the term Thirdspace refers to any new way of

conceiving space, and this paper offers only one alternative to understanding District Six,

although many other ways are more than welcome in the interpretation of it. Nevertheless,

Rive’s novel offers an account of a multicultural community in South Africa that was a space

of radical openness, oppression, space that was central and marginal but at the same time the

terrain of resistance. Although it is the space filled with ambiguities, contradictions and perils

it offers new solutions to to prevailing problems in divided South African society. However,

as this analysis will reveal, whether simply a result of Rive’s imagination or not, District Six

was not only a “concrete physical space”, with dirty streets and poor houses, or “conceived”

space imagined by the Apartheid government, or by the people outside District Six, but it was

lived space as well, which encompassed so many details creating in the minds of its former

inhabitants almost a divine image of District Six.

2 Theoretical Framework

The twentieth century saw a great shift in spatial consciousness greatly due to the

work of Edward Soja who “elevated space and place to the center of thought in the humanities

and social sciences”( Warf, Arias:2009: unpaged preface). Drawing mostly on the ideas of the

French philosopher Lefebvre, Soja recognized that space is as important as time in shaping

human identity, and in the interpretation of different aspects of social life. Soja argued that

“social theory should rest on the triangular foundation of time, space and social structure,

each of which contingently structures and is structured by others.”(Barney Warf and Santa

Arias: 2009:4). He maintained that spatial was for a long time “subordinated” to time and the

social, and argued that the spatial turn that happened in 1980s “involved the end of

historicism, which privileged time over space, and the re-assertion of space in the social

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theory” (Barney Warf and Santa Arias: 2009: 4). The popularization of space in social theory,

was partly a result of a new way of understanding space as “a vital existential force shaping

our lives, an influential aspect of everything that ever was, is, or will be”( Soja: 1996: 11).

In literary and cultural studies this postmodern line of thought brought about destabilization

of time and narrative because “it is space that comes to be the arena in which meaning is

created” (Gilbert: 2009: 103). The meaning is partly created through human experience which

“is always mediated by human relations with the world, material and discursive, and this

materiality of the space is experienced through a number of beliefs and practices” (Gilbert:

2009:103).

As a consequence of a rapid progress and change that the contemporary world

inevitably faces, postmodern space is no longer conceived of only in terms of its materiality,

but also as a terrain filled with the opportunity to contemplate and interpret human reality in a

new way. Soja (1996) adopted the works of philosophers and cultural theorists such as

Lefebvre, Bhabha, Gloria Andalzua, bell hooks, and others, to forge his theory of space that

tries to capture the postmodern flows of ideas about human spatiality.

Thirdspace is a “flexible term” coined to describe a “space of radical openness” that

offers a surprising abundance of solutions to prevailing social, cultural, and political

challenges (Soja: 1996:2). Theory of Thirdspace is a critique of “all forms of categorical or

binary logic” that have for a long been present in human conception of the reality. Thirdspace

politics is “needed to resist the oppressions associated with binary oppositions” (Sibley: 2001:

239). It is, thus, space where deconstruction of binary logic occurs, and where boundaries

between dichotomies in which we contemplate the world blur.

Soja’s trialactics of space, inspired by Lefebvre’s triad spatial model- perceived,

conceived and lived spaces- proposed that there are three different kinds of space, Firstspace,

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Secondspace, and Thirdspace. First and second spaces correspond for the most part with

Lefebvre’s perceived and lived space.

According to Soja, Firstspace, is a material space “fixed mainly on the concrete materiality of

special forms, things that can be empirically mapped”, i.e. the physical structure of space,

something that exists, and can be touched, smelled, felt. Firstspace is the “real” space that can

be directly experienced, mapped and empirically measured (Soja: 1996:10). Soja argues that

Firstspace represents “concrete and mappable geographies of our life worlds, raging form the

emotional and behavioral space “bubbles”, which invisibly surround our bodies, to the

complex, that shape our “action spaces”, in households, buildings, neighborhoods, villages,

cities, regions, nation states, the world’s economy and global geopolitics”( Soja:1996:75) .

This space can thus be read, explained and described.

Secondspace is theorized in the sense that a sort of emotional attachment is added to a

specific analysis of Firstspace. In other words, Firstspace is no longer objectively analyzed,

read and explained, but rather subjectivity is present in the analysis, and representation of

space. Soja suggests that Secondspace is a “symbolic space” that is produced “through

discursively devised representations of space, through the spatial workings of the mind”

(Soja: 1996:79).

This dualism of space, Firstspace and Secondspace, is well represented by Richard

Rive in District Six Buckingham Palace. District Six was a “real space”, concrete , material

and fixed, whose representation rested on one’s the subjective experience of it. At the time it

existed, it was a real space with its physical, objective characteristics, and conceived by, both,

those at the center, authorities or apartheid government, who perceived it as a space filled

with filth, crimes, and poverty, and those who took a sentimental, subjective, romantic view

of District Six. The analysis of District Six in the novel will be highlighted in the following

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sections. However, Soja proposes the new mode of thinking about space that goes well

beyond this common “dualism” of “material” and “mental” spaces.

Thirdspace epistemologies try to “reconstitute the First-Second space duality”.

According to H. Ernste (2010) Thirdspace “is a space which is trying to get beyond

discourses, it’s a space where creativity takes place and it’s a space which is open to

othering.” Thirdspace is a “tampon zone” between centers and peripheries which offers an

endless source of possibility for change, new discoveries and resistance, and creative outlets.

Soja describes this “utopian” social space as follows:

Another world, a meta-space of radical openness where everything can be found, where the

possibilities for new discoveries and political strategies are endless, but where one must always

be restlessly and self-critically moving on to new sights and insights, never confined by past

journeys and accomplishments always searching for differences, or Otherness. (Soja:1996: 55)

Thirdspace according to Soja is a space of “collective resistance, a meeting place for

all peripheralized or marginalized subject wherever they may be located”. It is also “the place

where the struggles to demystify human consciousness erase alienation and achieve true

liberation must be located (Soja.1996: 41). In other words, Thirdspace is a terrain of struggle

against all sorts of oppression, where all marginalized and peripheralized find their comfort,

and where they all find inspiration and energy to battle uncertainties of their existence. This

space enables people to be true to themselves and be accepted in their true nature.

As outlined by Soja, Thirdspace “overlays physical space making symbolic use of its

objects” (Soja: 1996: 68), creating in a sense a limitless space, that condenses different

concepts which seem never to go together, but there they work perfectly fine.

Everything comes together in Thirdspace; subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and

concrete, the real and imagined, the knowable and unimaginable, the repetitive and differential,

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structure and agency, mind and body, the disciplined and trandisciplinary, everyday life and

unending history. (Soja: 1996: 57)

Soja maintains that Thirdspace belongs to writers, artists, and philosophers who “seek

only to describe rather than decipher and transform the world we live in, combining the real

and imagined things and thought on equal terms”( Soja: 1996:67). Thirdspace, is thus slightly

unrealistic and never fully attainable concept, but as Soja states, it “is dominated and

passively experienced space which imagination seeks to change and appropriate” and which

can serve as a terrain of “resistance to the dominant order” (Soja: 1996: 68).

Thirdspace has been conceptualized in the works of many contemporary writers who

are primarily interested in the new ways of resistance, and who in Thirdspace see the

opportunity to connect many “radical subjectivities” and facilitate “new meeting places and

real and imagined spaces for diverse oppositional practices” (Soja: 1996: 84)

In the writings of bell hooks, Homi Bhabha and others, Soja finds perfect examples to

illustrate what this space should represents. bell hooks for instance writes about “ a space of

radical openness, a context from which to build communities of resistance that cross the

boundaries and double cross the binaries of race, gender, class and all oppressing “othering”

categories”(hooks:1990 as cited by Soja: 1996: 85). This space offers thus a whole new

perspective to a mainstream understanding of a human subject and its place in the world, and

explores new ways of reacting against the deeply rooted dogmas that govern our reality. Soja

points out that “the space of radical openness” is the margin.

Communities of resistance to hegemonic power are placed on the peripheries.

Hegemonic powers, according to Soja, “produce and reproduce differences as a key strategy

to create and maintain modes of societal and spatial division” (Soja: 1996:87). Soja argues

that those who are being marginalized by the “workings of hegemonic powers have two

inherent choices either accept their imposed differentiation and division, making the best of it,

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or mobilize to resist, drawing upon their putative positioning, their assigned “otherness” to

struggle against power-filled imposition” (Soja: 1996:87). The centers of power shape the

space in which people live and it is well present in spatial practices of people.

According to bell hooks, Thirdspace, is the “margins”, It is the space that is

“simultaneously central and marginal, a difficult and risky place on the edge filled with

contradictions and ambiguities, with perils but also with new possibilities”( bell hooks: 1990

as cited by Soja:1996: 97) it is a place of political choice. She cites Parmar to argue that these

“spaces can be real and imagined, can tell stories and unfold histories, can be interrupted,

appropriated and transformed” ( Parmar: 1991:101 as cited by bell hooks: 1990). In her view,

it is marginality that one refuses to lose, but rather wants to keep.

Although bell hooks proposes this site of radical resistance, this is not in many cases

the site of fruitful resistance. Thirdworld of political choice ensures “the survival of the

oppressed, nurtures resistance, and provides openings on the edge in the chosen context of

marginality to build larger communities of survival and resistance” (Soja: 1996:100). This

marginality offer people the refuge form their harsh reality, and it offers space of creativity.

Thirdspace is filled with “multiple sexualities, eroticism and desires” ( Soja: 1996:

112). In order to illustrate his concept Soja uses the concepts of borderlines developed by

Gloria Anzaldua’s and heterotopias developed by Foucault. Anzaldua’s argues that

“Thirdspace” can be found “whenever two or more cultures edge each other, where the space

between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (1987: unpaged preface). It is “artfully lived

space, metaphorical and material, real and imagined, contested and loving, dangerous and

playful, local and global, knowable and incomplete, necessary for survival, yet still up in the

air”( Soja:1996:131). Foucault on the other hand proposes the concept of heterotopia that “is

the place we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time,

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and our history occurs, the space, those claws and gnaws at us, is also in itself a

heterogeneous space”( Foucault: 1986:22-27).

In hook’s view new theoretical frameworks concerning space are a result of “radical

postmodernism” that “calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries

of class, race, gender, etc. that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy-ties that

would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and

coalition”(hooks:1990:29-30)

This paper will try to put Rive’s novel District Six Buckingham Palace in the framework of

Thirdspace, as a space of radical openness and resistance. Rive himself actually lived in

Thirdspace, which enabled him to know such space, perhaps better than, those who had no

experience of it. The experience of living in Thirspace reflected in Rive’s novel so powerful

that it is worth exploring its elements in the novel.

3 Soja’s First and Secondspace in Rive’s Novel District Six Buckingham Palace

Our journey to District Six starts with Rive’s sentimental reconstruction of the area.

He gives us account of the space that he knew very well, and in that way illustrates the

Firstspace of Soja’s trialactics of space. At the beginning of the novel, Rive emphasizes the

bustle of District Six, and describes Buckingham palace as “a row of five moldy cottages”

that had specific names, and that were painted in specific colors. In the novel, Firstspace (it is

physical features of District Six) is presented to as very colorful, vibrant, poor, filled with

different scents. Each of these characteristics carries significance in Rive’s depiction of the

area. His intention is to demonstrate a multicultural nature of the space by the strategic use of

epithets and picturesque images in his description. An excellent example of this is his

reminiscing of the “dark Italian shop from the ceiling of which hung strings of garlic” that

“smelled of macaroni and olive oil”( Rive: 2006:8). By using strong images Rive suggests

that the physical area was of distorted beauty, and he has no intention of achieving any

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aesthetic purpose in his description. Rive seems aware that “aesthetic and cultural” practices

are as David Harvey suggested “susceptible to the changing experience of space and time

precisely because they entail the construction of spatial representations and artifacts out of

the flow of human experience”( Harvey:1989:327).The emphasis is rather on functionality of

the space. Rive conveys this in his novel by depicting the crowdedness of space during

bazaars, fish markets. Space is thus illustrated as hazardous, vibrant, and crammed with

people, and bustling, filled with cigarette smoke, party-colored, but at the same time gay and

dangerous. However, this picturesque account of District Six does not invoke the feeling of

sympathy or pity in readers. The use of language in his description reveals his own personal

and emotional connection with the space. We thus get immersed into Secondspace

conceptualized by Soja.

In the opening lines of the novel, Rive states that he can only “romanticize and regret”

about District Six. Although, District Six is depicted as a space of severe poverty and

dissolution in the novel, people are emotionally attached to it. It offers Eden for some of the

characters, in which their personality can flourish. The author’s personal attachment to the

space is best presented by his effort to show that this space accommodates all sorts of artistic

creativity and that normal way of life was possible as everywhere in the world. His intention

is to show that this was a part of the” normal” world, despite an ill reputation it had with the

Apartheid government, and those who lived outside District Six. Insistence on Zoot’s poetic

creativity, his talent for dance, symbolism in the names of cottages and camaraderie, and the

sense of belonging to the community, reveals that District Six was not only a physical,

concrete space, but in authors subjective view a space where the community was created,

Community filled the need of people for friendship, reliance, and camaraderie. The sense of

belonging to a community thus transformed space into place giving it an emotional, subjective

dimension.

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This strong experience that characters feel in the novel is a proper example of what

Relph (1976) terms existential insideness “a situation of deep unself-conscious immersion in

place and the experience most know when they are at home in their own community and

region ( Relph: 1976 as cited by Seamon and Sowers:2008: 45) . The emotional attachment

and subjective experience is best described at the moment when the inhabitants of District Six

are forced to leave the space after the Group Area Act had been passed. Mary in a discussion

with Mrs. Knight reveals what District Six means to people who live there:

Mary said “one place might be like another but one community is never like another. A

community is not just a place where you live. It is not just another locality like Hanover Park

or Bonteheuwel. It is much more than that. It is alive. A community is our home. It is the place

where many of us were born and spent most of our lives. It is a place before this wicked law

was passed, most of us also hoped to die. It is a place some of us come home to rest in after a

heavy day’s work, to be with friends and neighbors. It is a place of warmth, of friendship, of

love and of quarrels. Here you enjoy a feeling of togetherness”. (Rive: 2006: 144)

Rive suggests that District Six had a soul “everyone in the District died a little when it

was pulled down, many spiritually and emotionally.” He writes that when District Six was

demolished their past disappeared:

They had taken our past away and left the rabble. They had demolished our spirits and left

broken bricks. They destroyed our community and left dust and memories [….] and as I stood

there I was overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. And I asked aloud, “What men have the

moral or political right to take away a people’s past?” How will they answer on that day when

they have to account for this? For the past will not be forgotten. (Rive: 2006: 118-119)

This romantic view of space conveyed partly through the description of the characters

in the novel. The author does not make his judgments about the characters because they are

presumably inspired by real people. If we for instance consider Zoot or Mary, Jungle Boys or

Katzen, we see that there is a sort of affection towards them, their actions and their attitude to

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life and space in his writing. This leads us to look for the elements of Soja’s Thirdspace in

Rive’s novel District Six Buckingham Palace.

4 Living in Thirdspace

4.1 Battling Binary Oppositions in District Six Buckingham Palace

Thirdspace is a territory of radical openness in which all binary oppositions blur. The

argument that District Six is a space of radical openness, where oppression becomes

marvelously transformed into resistance, and the space of alternative to binary logics that

limits and blinds us, is supported in by Rive’s imaginative description of the people who

inhabit District Six. By the way they act and approach reality, all characters in the novel

overcome common stereotypes and binary oppositions between good and bad, beautiful and

ugly, religious and non-religions, god and evil. District Six itself annihilates the binary logic.

The author presents the characters in a sentimental way. They are not seen simply as

good or bad, their actions are almost always depicted as selfless acts for the well-being of the

community, and never against those who constitute their immediate circles. Mary is a perfect

example that District Six is Thirdspace in which binary logics fades away, because she is “the

spirit of District Six”. Although Mary is the owner of a brothel, her activity is not perceived as

something that would isolate her from the community. Such attitude towards Mary is formed

because of fine nuances of her personality. The author, thus, does not criticize, or judge Mary,

and her profession was not described as something “illegal” or “immoral”, we only get such

impression as a result of our own tendency to think in binary oppositions. The author states

that her profession is a result of her personal fall, and he seems never to judge her way of life.

Mary was described as someone who is at the core of the community. We seem not to

see her as good or bad, even when she helps her girls commit abortion, or when she regularly

pay church dues, and attends the mass each Sunday. Rive skillfully annihilates this binary

logic. However, he demonstrates that the outside world almost predominantly conceives of

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the world in such a way. Mary, who had a strict religious upbringing, however, is aware of

this binary logic. She was hesitant about her participation in the church bazaar. When she

asked Father Rowland about her participation, who “never openly disapproved of her

questionably profession” ( Rive: 59) he allowed her and her girls to have a stand on the

bazaar. This illustrates this “radical openness status” of the area suggested by Soja.

Mary, nevertheless, is aware of her “immorality” perceived by the outside world, but

she is always there to help those in need. She helped Moena Mois to “get rid of the baby”,

although she is very religious and never accepted herself as someone who was sinful. The

immorality seems not to be judged in the novel, because almost all characters seem to have

some fine drops of immorality running through their veins. As Zoot suggested in his

description of Mary, the sense of belonging to the community was more important than the

individual characteristics of the members of the community:

I want to speak about Mary, a woman who, although she had no children of her own, was

nevertheless the mother of the Casabah and of Winsor Park. When I came to Buckingham

Palace, it was Mary who gave me my first job as a bouncer and handyman in the house. When

I shifted into Winsor Park, it was Mary who helped me. Over the years, when I needed

assistance, there was always Mary. When I was depressed there was always Mary. When I was

happy and wanted someone to laugh with there was always Mary. She says she is leaving us to

look after her father, but I know that her heart will always be here. The Casabah will be empty

tomorrow but Mary will still be here. Buckingham Palace will be razed next week, but Mary

will still be here. And even when District Six is gone, there will still be Mary here, because

they can never destroy our Mary. Mary is District Six. (Rive: 2006: 170)

When we analyze other characters presented in the novel we get similar impression. It

is almost impossible to make a clear evaluation of their personality. Zoot, for instance is a

thief, but he is a gifted poet who uses his poetry as a weapon against those who he dislikes.

Zoot loathes institutions, which in a way depict mistrust that people have in the institutions of

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the system which executed oppression against people in District Six. Other characters follow

the similar pattern in their behavior. Jungle Boys, Pretty Boy, Moena Mois and others

illustrate that District Six is described as a space of radical openness where everything is

possible.

4.2 District Six as a Battle Field against Oppression

At the beginning of the novel, the author makes no reference to the situation in South

Africa during the apartheid era, probably as a result of ignorance that people have about the

situation in their country. This is the case because they seem not to leave District Six very

often, and they do not have any animosity against other races, because District Six itself is a

highly multicultural environment. They only get the impression of what takes place around

them when they leave District Six as Moena Lelik and Pretty Boy did. As outlined in the

novel, District Six offers protection against all sorts of oppression, and as an idea was against

principles of the apartheid government. As Zoot suggested:

You know, it’s a funny thing, but it’s only in District Six that I feel safe. District Six is like an

island, if you follow me, an island in a sea of apartheid. The whole of District Six is one big

apartheid, so we can’t see it. We see it only when the white man comes and forces it on us,

when he makes us see it-when the police come, and the council people and so on- or when we

leave the District, when we leave our island and go into Cape Town or to Sea Point or come

here to Kalk Bay. There we again see apartheid. I know the District Six is dirty and poor and a

slum, as the newspaper almost always remind us, but it’s our own and we have never put up

notices which say “Slegs blankes” or “Whites only”. They put up the notices. When the white

man comes into the District with his notices, he is a stranger, and when we come out of the

District he makes us realize that we are strangers. It’s funny but that’s the way I see it.(

Rive:2006: 88)

Zoot illustrates the nature of District Six as a space that beats any sort of racial

discrimination, and points out that they are unaware of the situation in their county. Although

presented as a space full of criminal and poverty, District Six offers a symbolic weapon to

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fight against apartheid. In the novel we see that it is not the space of radical resistance but it is

a space that offers alternative to a prevailing social division in the South African society. Zoot

reveals in the novel that his guardian angel is a “non-racial” angel, which implies that race

plays no role in his attitude towards people. District Six as presented to us seems capable to

deal with its problems, and ensure social justice without assistance from the centers of power.

Characters in the novel know that it is not their government, but rather the government

that treats them as “untermenschen” as Katzen termed them. The residents of District Six are

“untermenschen” who realized that they have to join together to fight oppression, and that it

was the only way to have a normal life in South Africa. The symbolic value of District Six as

presented in the novel is immense. As Zoot when asked by Mary what eight of them are

possible to do in order to prevent destruction of District Six, he replied: “We are not eight. We

are eight thousand, more than eight million. We are all those who suffer in this sad land”.

It is here that Rive shows us the characteristics of District Six as Thirdspace. It poses a

threat to already established foundations of the apartheid society and offers a new mindset,

and a way of thinking about society, and solutions to social divisions based on race and

religious background. It was depicted in the novel that such society could function reasonably

well. As described by Rive, District Six was a perfect example of Thirdspace outlined by Soja

because it undermined foundations of apartheid government, which resulted in its destruction.

However, this physical annihilation of space resulted in symbolic re-birth of District Six in

novels and poetry, and the creation of District Six diaspora.

Diaspora is a powerful word to mark all people who were forced to leave their

community. They are all termed diaspora because during the apartheid era, District Six was

their homeland, and the only county they had. All characters in the novel made up this

diaspora, and Rive himself was a part of it. These people have never stopped longing for it,

which makes District Six remain Thirdspace even after its demolition and disappearance.

17

5. Conclusion

This paper tried to interpret Richard Rive’s Novel District Six Buckingham palace in

the light of Soja’s trialactics of space. It is evident in the analysis of the novel that it has

characteristics of three spaces conceptualized by Soja. It is a concrete, physical space that

carries a certain emotional association. We analyzed the novel in the light of Soja’s

Thirdspace of radical openness. We have seen that District Six is a space where binary logics

fades away, and that it is a space of resistance to hegemonic power, and that even now as

presented in the novel, it has symbolic value. With the novels such as Rive’s, and other forms

of art that keep the memory of it, District Six was created a myth. It is the myth about a

unique place in which all oppressed and marginalized people can see a role model for their

struggle against different sort of discrimination and violation of human rights. Rive’s novel is

important in revealing different aspects of reality in District Six, and it’s a worth read for all

those interested in how multicultural spaces functioned in South Africa during the apartheid

era.

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